NEO-COLONIALISM: ACHEBE’S PERSPECTIVE

CONFERENCE NARRATIVE

Chinua Achebe’s classic novel, Things Fall Apart, is a transformative text that awakened and heightened African consciousness. The novel’s principal character, Okonkwo, is disheartened by the new beliefs, attitudes, and practices brought by European colonizers and adopted by some members of the clan he left to serve a seven-year exile. Upon his return to Umuofia, his dreams of achieving even more greatness are disrupted by the changes wrought in the clan by intruding colonialists. He notices significant changes in his clan’s philosophies, principles, and practices and is dismayed that the white invaders have converted some of his people, even his family members. The white man has built courts, prisons, and even begun to govern the people. As his friend, Obierika, reminds him, the white man’s government hanged one of the clansmen involved in a violent land dispute. Obierika, who is a deep thinker, realizes that the European intruders had decisively divided the clan. His words resonate powerfully: The white man “put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart.”