Things Fall Apart

I have chosen to analyze Things Fall Apart from a Postcolonial perspective.  I will therefore write about how Chinua Achebe conveys how the British colonizers think they are doing the African people a favor for Christianizing and “civilizing” them yet all they are doing is destroying their culture and infuriating them.  I will show how these people where actually not as savage as they where perceived to be by the British and how this misconception will end up being fatal for Okonkwo.  He could not handle the destruction of his culture and humiliation from the colonizers so he ended up taking his own life then having to live in this new one forced upon him by the British.

I believe the text will be useful much more in this essay than in previous ones because of how the prompt is entirely about the book and there are no other pieces of literature I must use in analyzing it.  By following the three phases in the book this will help me keep an organized and coherent essay.  The first phase is describing the culture of Okonkwo’s people.  Even though their culture might seem a little of to us but that is only because we are used to American culture and they are also used to there culture and that is what seems right to them.  The second is what happens when religion and evangelical Christians are introduced into his land.  At first it is not that bad and the natives are just being nice to the Christians at first yet the Christians constantly try to force their religion onto them.  The last is what happens when a form of the colonizer’s government is brought into the land and forced upon them.  This is what will completely annihilate Okonkwo’s culture and substitute the British culture for there own. 

I think this novel was incredibly eye-opening to me because I have never read a post colonial piece of literature like this.  Although I have always thought colonization was wrong this brought my dislike for it to a whole new level.  It is sad to think how many cultures have been completely whipped off the face of this earth through colonization.  I thought the most ironic part off the book was the title which the commissioner was going to give his book, The Pacification of the primitivetribes of the lower Niger.  This is ironic how they claim to pacify these people yet they are being more violent then the natives themselves to force their culture onto them.  I believe they could have approached colonization in a much less damaging way but the narrow mindness of that time period made it practically impossible.