Colonial Power and Cultural Identity in Things Fall Apart: A Postcolonial Analysis

Abstract

Abstract

The following paper is a postcolonial reflection on Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958), in which the connections between colonial forces and the cultural identity of locals in the novel are discussed. With the backing of a qualitative textual analysis based on the postcolonial literature as illustrated through the prism of postcolonial theory, the author explores how Achebe forms a counter-narrative of Eurocentric images of Africa and specifically how these images appear within the context of the colonial literary tradition most memorably expressed by the Heart of Darkness of Joseph Conrad (1899). These six dimensions are linked in the analysis: Okonkwo as an ambivalent precolonial character whose doomed life trajectory reflects the tensions in the African culture both internal and external to it; the advanced political institutions and communal practices of precolonial Umuofia; the strategic position of the Christian missionaries in the disintegration of the African communities; the systematic deconstruction of the social fabric by colonial administrative imposition; the use of language as a means of both colonization and resistance; and Achebe literary techniques of recovering the African culture through the forms of narratives, proverbs, oral traditions and creative appropriation of English. The results show that the Things Fall Apart does not simply turn the colonial gaze backwards but provides an internally produced account that validates the entire humanity and civilizational multiplicity of the precolonial African community and reveals how colonialism was disabling the indigenous modes of being.

Keywords: post colonialism, things fall apart, chinua achebe, colonial power, cultural identity, Igbo society, counter-narrative, indigenous identity.