A reflection on Things Fall Apart

This is an Opinion column by Elizabeth Iwunwa, who has been living, studying and working on Prince Edward Island since 2014. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

It is impossible to discuss Black history without discussing African history, as Africa has the largest concentration of Black people in the world.

In describing the triumphs and turbulence of Africa, Nigeria — the most populous nation — is a prominent feature.

The history of Nigeria intersects with the exploits of the British Empire, which colonized Nigeria and other parts of Africa until independence movements began between 1945 and 1960.

African scholars, revolutionaries, and citizens who had received tutelage from colonial masters used the very tools of their suppression to liberate their consciousness and continent from imperial rule.

Literature was one such tool.

Chinua Achebe, revered as the father of modern African literature, is said to have taken the language of colonial masters and expanded it until it was fit for his own purposes. He vividly painted with words the texture of life of the Igbo people, an ethnic group in the country.

His seminal work of fiction, Things Fall Apart, chronicled from an African perspective the interruption of communal life in precolonial Nigeria by British colonialists.

The coming of the British to Africa caused the continent to tether on the precipice of traditional culture and modernity as understood, fashioned, and propagated by colonialists.

Achebe captured this turmoil and disorientation, showing Africans as a people who had a way and an understanding of the world before the crude interjection of colonial masters.

His novel detailed what was lost as two worlds collided.

The 22nd chapter of Things Fall Apart portrays this tension of a people trying to maintain the spiritual practices of their forebears while at once embracing the realities of a new world constructed without their consultation.

They were caught in the middle, now judging themselves by standards hitherto unknown; dwelling in their fatherland but feeling the ground beneath them shifting.

In this chapter, we encounter Mr. Smith whose approach to Christianization — one of the colonization tools of the British Empire — is unfeeling and condescending and abrasive; we see a man full of pride and lacking in the wisdom and charity he ought to embody.