Things Fall Apart

Prehistory. History. Post history. It is evidence of the arrogance of Occidental culture and discourse that even the concept of history should be turned into a colony whose borders, validations, structures and configurations, even life tenure, are solely and entirely decided by the West. When the race for Africa had begun Africa ceased to exist for it was devastated and torn apart by the European arrival. Europe's need for territorial expansion and accumulation of wealth lead to the creation of the new World Wide Web, a creation that annihilated many cultures, one of these being Igboland presented in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in present day Nigeria.

Un-invaded Africa was a land that for most of the transition from the Old World Web to the New World Wide Web had remained relatively unscathed. Africa is particularly unique when it comes to geographic terms. The continent is almost entirely free of any major bays, inlets, peninsulas, and promontories, making it less lucrative for its inhabitants to develop advanced navigational skills like the neighbors found in the north. In the north, Africa is plagued with a nearly impenetrable desert, the Sahara. A lush thick forest and monumental rivers such as the Niger and the Nile cover the middle of the continent. The continent possessed vast quantities of gold, fertile land and usable people, all things that the power hungry Europeans countries wanted.

The Portuguese were the first to venture into the African continent in the 1400s, and what began as a friendly and equal trading partnership between the Portuguese and the Africans led to one of the world's cruelest developments, the exception and annihilation of pre-colonial Africa. Not long after the initial interactions between the Portuguese and the Africans, Gonsalves, a Portuguese explorer, captured a small group of Africans and turned them into slaves. Slave trade became a profitable business, and when the rest of the European countries, beginning with the Dutch and then finally the English, saw this "The Scramble for Africa" began.

After the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807, the British began to combine aggressive trading with aggressive imperialism. The tensions that consumed the European powers and their search for colonies lead to the partitioning of Africa in The Berlin Conference. The conference was held between delegates of fourteen European nations and the United States and it set the rules for the division of the continent. At the conference, there was no African present. In 1900, Igboland, an area that had been controlled by the Royal Niger Company became a protectorate in Southern Nigeria, and long before it had officially been conquered, Igboland was being treated as a British colony. The Igbo people were in fact resistant to the British colonial rule and with the help of the trading companies and Parliament the British subdued the resistance. Chinua Achebe once said, "One big message, of the many I try to put across, is that Africa wan not in a vacuum before the coming of Europe, that culture was not unknown in Africa, that culture was not brought to Africa by the white world. " Pre-colonial Africa possessed perhaps as many as 10,000 different states and polities characterized by different sorts of political organization and rule. Sooner than later imperialism began to take form in missionaries and with them came the disruption of the tribal way of life.

Chinua Achebe was born thirty years after the creation of Nigeria and thirty years before it obtained independence. He was raised in the village of Ogidi and experienced firsthand the British colonization of Nigeria and Igboland. He like many Africans converted to Christianity and went under the name of Albert. He received his primary, secondary, and university education from a mission school run by the London University. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, was a result of his urgent response to the negative situation to the "appalling novels about Africa." He was disturbed by the Africa that was being portrayed and decided to write a novel that would correct the situation and get rid of the negative image of the continent created by foreign writers. Achebe's Things Fall Apart is set in the southern Nigeria, Igboland. The area is split by the Niger River into two unequal sections, the larger eastern region and the mid-western region. However, the river, such in the case of China, didn't act as a barrier to cultural unity; rather provided easy means of communication in the area where many settlements claim different origins. The Igbo's were also surrounded on all sides by other tribes (the Bini, Warri, Ijaw, Ogoni, Igala, Tiv, Yako and Ibibio).

The novel depicts the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a self-made man who lives in the village of Umofia. Okonkwo was a forced to be reckoned with in the village of Umofia, he embodied the soul and fierce spirit of akin to the ancient warriors of Igboland, and in a way, Africa itself. One day, at a village celebration Okonkwo fall victim to an accident and accidentally shoots a boy. The village's old rules force Okonkwo into exile and he goes to live in his motherland for seven years. The seven years spent in exile are miserable for him and aches with every passing moment spent away from his homeland, Umofia. Okonkwo is still in exile when the white men arrive and set up a mission. He, like many inherent nationalists, believes that the white men are nonsense and should be eliminated, but does nothing. When he is finally able to return home, Okonkwo returns to find his village almost unrecognizable. Okonkwo bluntly resists the intrusion of the "white men" and goes as far as taking action into his own hands and vandalizing a Christian church. He is arrested and forced to pay a fine. Okonkwo, realizing that his fellow kinsmen have lost the spirit they had possessed for centuries, kills himself.

Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart is worthy of close analysis not simply because it offers insight into the purely structural or syntactic dynamics of European colonialism, but also because of its visionary explorationÐ'...of the pre-colonial Igbo people. Achebe sheds light on the cultural roots of the Igbo people, their customs, beliefs, proverbs and historical past. Achebe demonstrated a sort of cognitive dissonance, many natives felt and loss of identity in the relationships, roles and beliefs brought upon the arrival of the "white man". To the end, the natives remained ambiguous, for example, they like the wealth and newfound value that white trade brings a strong reminder of the missionaries' role to find a substitute for slaves. Yet they, others who felt the same way Okonkwo did, can't reconcile themselves with white intrusion and indirect rule through a District Officer. Another problem was the