Much has been said about the ideological impetus and motives behind the colonialist project in sub-Saharan Africa, but the specific psycho-historical processes, phases, and/or stages that help to explain why and how this enterprise thrived and became so culturally, politically, and economically successful merit further exploration. What this study proposes is a reading of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that inspires an analytical and conceptual framework for what I refer to as the “stages of colonialism,” that is, the various phases of colonial penetration, intrusion, and impact that allowed for the process of early and later colonization in sub-Saharan Africa to become not only an effective tool for, but also a successful tool of, sustained domination. This proposed framework comprises five major stages: an exploratory/discovery/evaluative phase (exploration), a territorial/conquest/administrative phase (expropriation), a transformative/assimilative/acculturative phase (appropriation), a materialistic/economic phase (exploitation), and an ideological/propagandist/rationalization phase (justification). These stages are not necessarily chronological and may happen simultaneously or in whatever sequence is commanded by the specific types of contacts and/or interactions that brought Africans and Europeans together.
To be clear, this analysis does not purport to use Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a conduit to an “authentic history” of sub-Saharan Africa. Rather, it seeks to extract from Achebe’s fictional universe some of the underlying principles of colonialism that help the reader to understand it, not as a series of specific historical events, spaces, and places, but rather as a process or a series of psycho–historical processes. These processes contain a number of inescapable features that enabled colonialism to become an effective tool of and for sustained political, cultural, and economic domination in sub-Saharan Africa. As such, this analysis looks at the way Achebe uses creative license to manufacture a fictional universe in which Igbo responses to colonial intrusion are depicted with such a high degree of poignancy that his narrative manages to lend itself a remarkable degree of epistemological plausibility; it also looks at how Achebe, through his own perspective and, perhaps also, his own ideological stance, manages to weave together the processes—both historical and political, but also psychological and procedural—that underpin the colonialist project. In this manner, he offers his readers a powerful glimpse not only into the true cataclysm that colonial intrusion came to embody in the context of sub-Saharan Africa’s encounter with Europeans, but also into what may be described as the “psychology of colonialism.” By “psychology of colonialism,” I mean an understanding of colonialism that, within the framework of Fredric Jameson’s “national allegory” (1986) and Abdul JanMohamed’s “Manichean aesthetics/Manichean allegory” (1983, 1986), bridges the gap between postcolonial theory and psychoanalytical theory, in a way that is congruent with Derek Hook’s articulations (2012). The ultimate goal is to apply such theoretical articulations to a decryption of the specific psycho-historical processes that underlie colonialism and its stages.
Chronologically, Achebe’s first three novels—Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964)—constitute what Ruth Patterson has called “Achebe’s trilogy” (1977:64). With No Longer at Ease, it seems, Achebe was already, as early as 1960, seeing the troubling signs of alienation that he feared would come to epitomize an independent Nigeria (Frank Reference Frank2011; Câmpu Reference Câmpu2014; Zarrinjooee & Khatar Reference Zarrinjooee and Khatar2016; Ndebele Reference Ndebele2016). Not only did his precocious intrusion into the themes of disillusionment give a prophetic stamp to No Longer at Ease, it also made it one of the earliest so-called “disillusionment novels” (Obi Reference Obi1990:402), a genre that, as early as the 1960s, began to offer a pessimistic view of Africa’s post-independence experience (Chevrier Reference Chevrier1990). But No Longer at Ease also stands as an interesting interlude and, perhaps, a rather paradoxical literary move, when it is considered in the context of Achebe’s apparent need to offer the reader, some four years after Nigeria’s independence, a more direct sequel to Things Fall Apart in the form of Arrow of God, which came to re-amplify the destructive and debilitating “clash of civilizations” themes that were heralded in his first novel. This return to the themes of the colonial encounter is a move that, perhaps, validates the theme of colonialism as one that holds a central place in Achebe’s early work. This is also what, ultimately, situates Things Fall Apart squarely among the primordial African novels that symbolize “African reactions to the curse of colonialism” (Cox Reference Cox1997:xxi–ii).
Chinua Achebe has been described as one of the “big three” of anglophone African literature alongside Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (Lindfors Reference Lindfors1992), and his Things Fall Apart was ranked in 2002 among the twelve best African books of the twentieth century (“Africa’s 100 Best” 2002:146–47). While other early stalwarts of African literature who wrote between 1950 and 1960, such as Ferdinand Oyono with his Une vie de boy (1956) or Ousmane Sembène in Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960), offer a depiction of colonialism that centers around the clash of civilizations in a context already polluted by colonialism’s transformative processes, it may well be that no other African writer has captured the process of early colonial penetration with the type of plausibility, poignancy, acuity, and comprehensiveness achieved in Things Fall Apart. Harry Garuba has written:
Despite the continual assertion that Arrow of God is the most accomplished of the two novels, the fascination with Things Fall Apart and its centrality to discussions of Chinua Achebe’s work and modern African literature in general remain unassailable. There is, it appears, no stopping the reputation of Things Fall Apart as the novel most closely associated with the emergence of modern African literature and the protocols of reading that have developed around it. (2009:321)
The novel’s importance is further echoed by Kevin Frank, who sees the novel as “a standard-bearer in postcolonial literature” and thus “one of the earliest African novels written from the perspective of the colonized to sound the alarm concerning the three phases and the treacherous practices of colonialism” (2011:1090). While Frank has proposed, as part of his analysis of the theme of alienation in Achebe’s trilogy, a possible framework for understanding the process of colonialism, the three phases—exploratory, conversion, and administrative—that he identifies in Things Fall Apart are necessarily limited in scope (2011:1090). Outside literary studies, Ali A. Mazrui has proposed five phases that, he argues, served as the basis for a gradual “external conceptualization of Africa” that did not just invent Africa as V. Y. Mudimbe has suggested, but, rather, re-invented the continent several times over throughout history (2005:70–71).
However, Mazrui’s chronology, while historiographically relevant, is more about how specific historical events shaped or reshaped the continent’s destiny, and less about the covert and overt psycho-historical processes that help to explain the “psychology of colonialism.” His chronology, therefore, calls for simplification. For this, I utilize my own “layer theory,” which sees Africa’s postcolonial identity as one that was subverted by the layers of foreign influence that came to destabilize the continent’s primordial core (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001b:289–91). This conceptualization posits that there are basically two major types of culturally confused societies in Africa today, that is:
1) The non-Islamized “bicultural societies” of sub-Saharan Africa, which feature an indigenous African layer (African infrastructure) and an exogenous European layer (European superstructure) that, as early as the fifteenth century, came to superimpose itself onto the indigenous layer;
2) The Islamized “tricultural societies” of Western, Sahelian, Eastern, and Northern Africa, which feature three layers: At the bottom, the African infrastructure; in the middle, the Muslim layer (Islamic mesostructure) which, owing to the Arab intrusions of the seventh century onward, came to superimpose itself onto the African layer; and, finally, on top, the European superstructure, which, in these tricultural settings, came last and, thus, subverted the two underlying layers (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001b:289–91);
3) A third type, that of “monocultural societies” consisting exclusively of values of civilization specific to the African world, is proposed, but this can only be a theoretical reconstruction, as it would be hard to find in Africa today a society that has not been subverted by either European culture or Islamic culture, or both (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001b:289). Such a conclusion is, indeed, congruent with Colin McEvedy’s contention that, by the seventeenth century, “most parts of Africa were now in some sort of contact with the outside world” (1995:80). In this context, judging the continent according to its current makeup basically means one is judging the nefarious result of centuries of rape of the African soul (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001b).
Indeed, Achebe, who wrote Things Fall Apart at a time when Igbo society in particular, and the overall “dark continent” in general, had already been subverted by European intrusions, engages in a veritable act of reverse engineering by using what he knows of his traditional universe to reconstruct an unlikely precolonial, still-untarnished “monocultural” Igbo society that he is able to position as an idealized antithesis to the destructiveness of colonialism. He accomplishes this symbolic peeling away of the foreign layers not only by subverting the very European language that he writes in—hence the deliberate inclusion of untranslated Igbo words in what Chantal Zabus (Reference Zabus1991) would call his “Europhone” text—but also by foregrounding elements of Igbo civilization that he proudly offers as a counterweight to European cultural arrogance. Achebe is thus able to subtly insert notions of cultural relativity and nationalism in his novel that question the self-proclaimed primacy of European civilization. This technique prompts the character of Uchendu to argue, “The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:141). In this regard, Achebe perfectly fits the mold of Bill Ashcroft’s (Reference Ashcroft1989) Empire “writing back” to subvert the very essence and premises of European dominance.
The very fact that Achebe chose to dedicate the first 135 pages of his novel (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:1–135) to a comprehensive depiction of still-untarnished Igbo cultural ethos is a testament to his desire to foreground African traditions and to position them as valid and coherent human experiences no more yet no less reprehensible than their European counterparts. This lengthy foregrounding of Igbo culture heavily contrasts with the mere 74 pages (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:136–209) that introduce the cataclysm of early colonial penetration. The brevity of the pages that cover colonial penetration in the novel is thus, one suspects, meant to symbolically convey the suddenness and rapidity with which, in the span of just about six or seven years—from Obierika’s first visit to still-exiled Okonkwo (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:136–42) to Okonkwo’s post-exile suicide—the cultural and political foundations of Igbo society are shaken to their core and, eventually, compromised. In this sense, Achebe is implicitly echoing Ivan Van Sertima (1983), who once opined that “No human disaster, with the exception of the flood (if the biblical legend is true) can equal in dimension of destructiveness the cataclysm that shook Africa . . . the threads of cultural and historical continuity were so savagely torn asunder that henceforward one would have to think of two Africas: the one before and the one after the Holocaust” (quoted in Ukadike Reference Ukadike1994:27). The direct result of this cataclysm, Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike argues, is that “The awakening of consciousness that would allow for a liberated popular voice was hampered by Africans’ loss of control over their own destiny. Africa’s natural development was dealt a catastrophic blow, and the architect of this destruction was imperialism” (1994:27–28).
But imperialism did not limit itself to the mere blunting of Africa’s natural path to a self-defined progress or modernity. Where African civilizational ethos could not be destroyed, it was re-imagined or reshaped. The real literary feat of Achebe in this context is, ultimately, that he was able to pack so many of the profound effects of colonial intrusion into so little paginal space. Whereas in Arrow of God, Achebe continues a much more deliberate and elaborate depiction of the transformations that befell Igbo society as a result of colonial intrusion, what makes Things Fall Apart more powerful is its juxtaposition of two diametrically opposed universes. One exists without the white man and is therefore presented not only as stable, but also as coherent and as valid as any other human experience, no more and no less characterized by its own internally consistent lot of flaws and absurdities. The other coexists with the white man and therefore is depicted as beginning to question the validity of its own humanity in the context of the transformative aggressions of colonialism.
Things Fall Apart is the fictional story of Okonkwo and his Igbo community of Umuofia in eastern Nigeria as they come to grips with the destabilizing arrival of the white man. Okonkwo is presented as an intractable man who, to escape the shame attached to the name of his father who died a title-less man, manages at a younger age to impose himself as one of the most influential “elders” of the nine clans that constitute the community of Umuofia. He is admired but, perhaps also, feared as “a man of war” who “could stand the look of blood” and who, in Umuofia’s last war, “was the first to bring home a human head . . . his fifth head” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:10). He is also a man who “ruled his household with a heavy hand” and whose “whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of weakness and of failure” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:13). But fate betrays Okonkwo when, during the funeral of Ogbuefi Ezeudu, his gun accidentally fires, killing the sixteen-year-old son of the deceased. Killing a clansman being a crime against the earth goddess, Okonkwo is banned from Umuofia for seven years. It is during his exile (see Harris Reference Harris2003) in his maternal uncles’ village of Mbanta that news of the white man’s arrival comes to Okonkwo and, from that moment on, it is a downward spiral for him as well as for the region’s Igbo communities.
To see how Achebe represents the processes behind this downward spiral in Things Fall Apart, in what follows we shall read the novel through the filter of the five stages of colonialism—exploration, expropriation, appropriation, exploitation, and justification—earlier identified as representative of the psycho-historical processes behind the colonialist project. Again, these stages should not be looked upon as necessarily chronological. They may happen simultaneously or in whatever sequence is commanded by the specific types of encounters at play. And much more than any other, the justification stage, because of its ideological constructs, can intervene before, during, or after any of the other four stages to justify, rationalize, and/or moralize the wholesale takeover and/or exploitation of a people.
Exploration
The exploration stage addresses the primordial colonial encounter. Here, the colonizer surveys and assesses the coveted land for signs of civilization and/or material achievements such as towns, castles, standing armies, monumental architecture, and/or land husbandry. In the absence of such civilizational traits, the land is arbitrarily designated as “unused” and, therefore, “empty.” The result, of course, is the construction of an “invisible African” who, as a consequence, is readily dispossessed, first of humanity, then, naturally, of land. This is done in a way that is congruent with such teleological pronouncements as those once expounded by Swiss antiquarian Johann Bachofen (1815–87), who saw progress “only in terms of an evolution away from common land ownership (accompanied inevitably, in this view, by sexual promiscuity, female power, and natural chaos) towards private ownership of land (accompanied by the ‘western virtues’ of good agricultural practice, monogamy, and patriarchy)” (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001a:8).
In Things Fall Apart, it is through the story narrated to still-exiled Okonkwo by Obierika that the presence of the white man is reported for the first time (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:137–41). According to Obierika, the people of Abame one day saw the arrival of a white man riding “an iron horse” into their village, uninvited and unannounced. The reaction of the villagers was a mix of fear, curiosity, and defiance: “The elders consulted their Oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:138). In the end, “they killed the white man and tied his iron horse to their sacred tree because it looked as if it would run away to call the man’s friends” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:138). Obierika adds: “I forgot to tell you another thing which the Oracle said. It said that other white men were on their way. They were locusts, it said, and that first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:138–39). This “harbinger” who was sent “to explore the terrain” is thus, within the context of our theoretical framework, symptomatic of the exploration stage. He exemplifies the very assumptions that entitled the colonizer to arbitrarily construe any coveted African land as empty and its inhabitants as invisible. Cecil Rhodes in this regard is known to have said, “I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race . . . Africa is still lying ready for us—it is our duty to take it!” (Flint Reference Flint1974:248–50).
Obierika finishes his story with the account of how, after a while, three other white men came to Abame looking for the missing man. They saw the bicycle but went away. The very fact that these white men and their black companions did not speak to the villagers to ascertain the exact circumstances of the lone white man’s disappearance is symptomatic of the “invisibility” factor invoked earlier. They behaved as if the “natives” did not exist or did not matter. A few weeks later, on a day when the town’s market was packed with people, the three white men came back with an army and, without warning, began to shoot: “Everybody was killed, except the old and the sick who were at home and a handful of men and women whose chi were wide awake and brought them out of that market . . . Their clan is now completely empty,” Obierika concluded (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:140). Indeed, the second time the white man is heard of is in Mbanta itself while Okonkwo is still there in exile. But, this time, the white man comes in person as part of a group of missionaries. When asked about the whereabouts of his “iron horse,” the white man, here too, assumes the invisibility of the villagers. He declares rather matter-of-factly that, “I shall bring many iron horses when we have settled among them.” In his unilateral decision to “settle among them,” he asks no permission and presupposes an inalienable right of his to settle upon this land as he sees fit. This unsettling presumption is so shocking to the villagers that they begin “talking excitedly among themselves because the white man had said he was going to live among them” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:145). From that moment on, of course, the stage of “expropriation” was at play.
Expropriation
The notion of expropriation entails the complete or quasi-complete political and administrative takeover of the coveted land or territory by the colonizer. Such a takeover can take the form of military excursions, conquest, and overt and/or covert pressures meant to brutally or gradually transfer political authority over indigenous lands to the colonizer’s administrative apparatus. It could also take such insidious forms as those that allowed explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley to claim huge chunks of land in Africa (Belgian Congo for instance) for European monarchs, based on bogus treaties signed with African chiefs who could not even read and write (Pakenham Reference Pakenham1991:11–23). Notes gathered by René de Pont-Jest from Christian de Bonchamps’s Katanga expedition journal show, for example, that, as early as 1893, Marquis de Bonchamps was already sounding the alarm about such bogus treaties:
In reality the letters of submission signed with these little African tyrants, which comprise four long pages and of which they often understand not a single word, but that they approve by signing a cross in exchange for peace and some gifts, represent serious matters only for the European powers in the event of disputes over contested territories. At no time do they concern the black sovereign who signs them. (De Pont-Jest Reference De Pont-Jest1893:260; my translation)
France’s own colonial efforts show that
Very quickly, the politics of conquest were reinforced with a policy of treaties whose goal was to attribute to France “lands that belonged to no one” or that were inhabited “by barbarous tribes.” These episodes—wars and treaties, often signed by force of coercion—multiplied and became the building blocks of the emerging colonial empire: war against Samory Touré (Guinea, 1886–1898), military campaigns against king Béhanzin (Dahomey, 1892–1894) or Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba (Senegal, 1895), conquest of Madagascar ending with Queen Ranavalona III’s exile (1883–1895), French protectorate over Tunisia (1881–1883), “pacification” of Annam and Tonkin (1882–1896), creation of AOF [Afrique Occidentale Française] (1895) … Morocco, a protectorate that was conquered between 1906 and 1912, came to complete the North African edifice on the eve of the Great War. (Bancel, Blanchard & Vergès Reference Bancel, Blanchard and Vergès2007:16–17; my translation)
The General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which sanctioned the God-given right of the Europeans to occupy land in Africa as they saw fit (Pakenham Reference Pakenham1991:254; Bancel, Blanchard & Vergès Reference Bancel, Blanchard and Vergès2007:14–15) is, perhaps, in this context, the most powerful expression of a stage of expropriation which, in Things Fall Apart, is visible not only in the matter-of-fact way in which the missionaries decide to settle among the Mbanta and Umuofia people, but also in the wholesale establishment of the white man’s administrative authority over Igbo land. On his second visit to still-exiled Okonkwo, for instance, Obierika, who did not yet know the missionaries had also already settled in Mbanta, reports that “The missionaries had come to Umuofia. They had built their church there, won a handful of converts and were already sending evangelists to the surrounding towns and villages” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:143). Obierika does not give the impression that his community had a choice or any type of say in the matter. The white man simply came and built a church and a school; he also began to implement his own laws: “stories were already gaining ground that the white man had not only brought a religion, but also a government. It was said that they had built a place of judgment in Umuofia to protect the followers of their religion. It was even said that they had hanged one man who killed a missionary” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:155). But this was not all. The inevitability of expropriation, and therefore, defeat and overthrow of traditional Igbo authority is foreshadowed when Okonkwo, reacting to Obierika’s account of the happenings in Umuofia, inquires as to why the people did not rebel or resist. Obierika’s response is without ambiguity: “Have you not heard how the white man wiped out Abame?” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:175). And when Okonkwo retorts that “we must fight these men and drive them from the land” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:176), Obierika opines,
It is already too late . . . Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government. If we should try to drive out the white men in Umuofia we should find it easy. There are only two of them. But what of our own people who are following their way and have been given power? They would go to Umuru and bring the soldiers, and we would be like Abame. (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:176)
In a nutshell, thus, the Igbo of Achebe were now an expropriated people with very few viable options left for self-determination: They either could decide to fight back and risk extermination, or, as Obierika seems to be suggesting, they could decide to submit, and become subjects or slaves of the white man. Either way, they were on the losing end of the bargain, and their decision was really quite simply about determining what type of loss or defeat they were prepared to live with. In Things Fall Apart, the political overthrow of the elders is in fact nowhere more poignantly expressed than when Enoch, one of the young converts, commits the sacrilege of unmasking an egwugwu spirit during the annual earth deity festival:
Enoch fell on him and tore off his mask. The other egwugwu immediately surrounded their desecrated companion, to shield him from the profane gaze of women and children, and led him away. Enoch had killed an ancestral spirit, and Umuofia was thrown into confusion. That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming—its own death. (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:186–87)
The unmasking of the egwugwu in the above excerpt is, of course, symbolic of the “death” of the ancestral system that, thus far, had ensured sociopolitical cohesion in the community of Umuofia. By symbolically “killing” an egwugwu, it is, in fact, indigenous political authority that Enoch is destroying and overthrowing. In its place, of course, settles the white man’s value system, of which religion represents the central pillar. But a second “overthrow” of the Igbo political system occurs when, later in the novel, Okonkwo and his peers—whom we suspect were hiding behind the vengeful fury of the egwugwu masks—are arrested and jailed for burning down the white man’s church in retaliation for Enoch’s transgression. The District Commissioner’s moralistic lecture to the jailed elders is, in this regard, very revealing:
“We shall not harm you,” said the District Commissioner to them later, “if only you agree to cooperate with us. We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy . . . We have a court of law where we judge cases and administer justice just as it is done in my own country under a great queen. I have brought you here because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their place of worship. That must not happen again in the dominion of our queen, the most powerful ruler in the world . . .” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:194)
The District Commissioner insists that “we judge cases and administer justice just as it is done in my country.” He also warns that things must no longer happen “in the dominion of our queen,” a queen who is also “the most powerful ruler in the world.” Such statements, which are assertive of the colonizer’s arbitrary powers, unequivocally confirm not only the Umuofians’ loss of suzerainty over their own lands, but also the irreversible collapse of the indigenous sociopolitical order. In this context, the “egwugwu sacrilege” as well as the humiliation of the elders in jail (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:195) partake in the “double murder” of traditional authority, signaling its ultimate defeat at the hands of the white man. Even though, following his purported killing of the sacred python, Okoli, the Christian convert suspected of accomplishing the sacrilegious act, inexplicably dies within twenty-four hours of the deed (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:159–61), giving the Mbantans reason to believe that their gods “were still able to fight their own battles” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:161), the very fact that the white man and his converts were able to survive the implantation of their church in the “evil forest” was an ominous sign (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:148–51). When combined with young converts now going into villages to boast that “all the gods are dead and impotent” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:154)—and the rumors coming out of Umuofia that the notoriously zealous Enoch had not only killed and eaten the sacred python, but also lived to boast about it (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:178)—such occurrences inevitably became forms of “deaths” of the African gods that foretold the overthrow of the old value system and, as a result, the wholesale negation of the Igbo communities’ capacity for self-determination on lands that were once their own.
Appropriation
Appropriation primarily concerns the transformative aggressions of colonialism. The stage of appropriation signals the moment when the colonizer, having now forcibly and forcefully laid claim to the coveted land and asserted his political, military, and administrative authority upon it, undertakes to transform it. Here, the indigenous world is “appropriated,” that is, rendered “proper” and, therefore, remolded into the white man’s image to reflect his cultural, political, and economic universe. The wholesale rejection and dismissal of Igbo religious ethos by the missionaries in Things Fall Apart is, in this sense, a most powerful expression of the appropriation stage. For instance, upon his arrival in Mbanta while Okonkwo is still exiled there, the white missionary tells the villagers that “they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone . . . He told them that the true God lived on high and that all men when they died went before Him for judgment. Evil men and all the heathen who in their blindness bowed to wood and stone were thrown into a fire that burned like palm-oil.” Thus, he adds, “good men who worshipped the true God lived forever in His happy kingdom.” Naturally, of course, he concludes, “We have been sent by this great God to ask you to leave your wicked ways and false gods and turn to Him so that you may be saved when you die . . .” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:145).
Adoption of Christian religion meant, thus, that the people of Mbanta had to abandon their own belief system and, by so doing, renounce who they were as a people. As Mohamadou Kane suggests,
Religion—and particularly animism—appears as the cement that ensures the group’s intellectual, moral and social cohesion and harmony. African novelists show, in addition, that it serves as the foundation to traditional institutions and beliefs. In many cases, it does not simply inspire tradition, it does not limit itself to simply anointing it with its particular mark: It is tradition. When [religion] dies, tradition can no longer find the needed energy to resist the assault of the innovation forces or contestations that subvert it from within. (1982:420–21; my translation)
While Olufemi Vaughan (Reference Vaughan2016) analyzes the formative role that religion—mostly Islam and Christianity—played in the making of modern Nigeria, there is no denying the impact of Christianity in the disarticulation of African traditional ethos. This process of disarticulation inevitably features the principles of appropriation that—in the sense of the assimilative and acculturative policies of colonial administration—paved the way for the repositioning and, ultimately, the displacement of the indigenous value systems. This is precisely what prompted Mazrui to assert that:
Of the three principal religious legacies of Africa (indigenous, Islamic, and Christian), the most tolerant on record must be the indigenous tradition. One might even argue that Africa did not have religious wars before Christianity and Islam arrived, for indigenous religions [therefore cultures] were neither universalistic (seeking to conquer the whole of the human race) nor competitive (in bitter rivalry against other [universalistic] creeds). Because they are not proselytizing religions, indigenous African creeds have not fought with each other. (1991:77)
Achebe subtly reinforces this Mazruian construct by highlighting the philosophical inadequacies of the missionaries’ proselytizing rationales. In one discussion, we see Mr. Brown at great pains to demonstrate to Akunna why the absurdities of the Christian religion should be considered more valid than those of the Igbo religion, and why Akunna and his people should abandon one set of absurdities for another just because the white man says so (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:179–81).
Okonkwo himself is hit closest to home when his own son, Nwoye, is seduced by the evangelical message of the intruders and eventually flees to go and live with the missionaries. Okonkwo naturally sees this abandonment of “the gods of one’s father” as “the very depth of abomination,” which to him was “like the prospect of annihilation” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:152–53). Worse still, upon his return from exile, Okonkwo notices that, in Umuofia, “Not only the low-born and the outcast but sometimes a worthy man had joined [the foreign religion]. Such a man was Ogbuefi Ugonna, who had taken two titles, and who like a madman had cut the anklet of his titles and cast it away to join the Christians” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:174). This is precisely what causes Obierika to lament that “We were amused at his foolishness and allowed [the stranger] to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:176).
What colonialism did, thus, was to reframe and reorganize the order of knowledge in a way that suppressed, displaced, and/or destabilized indigenous knowledge constructs while enshrining European ones (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001a:3–4). We learn, for instance, that apart from building churches, the white man also built a trading store that “for the first time [caused] palm-oil and kernel [to become] things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:178). He also built schools in which “more people came to learn” and “it was not long before the people began to say that the white man’s medicine was quick in working” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:181). Furthermore, “Mr. Brown’s school produced quick results. A few months in it were enough to make one a court messenger or even a court clerk. Those who stayed longer became teachers . . . From the beginning religion and education went hand in hand” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:181–82).
The concepts of “naming” and “re-naming” that go hand in hand with the stage of appropriation are also significant (Mengara Reference Mengara and Mengara2001a:3–4). Calling a lake “Lake Victoria” can only refer to, but also marks the beginning of, a European-inspired history of Africa, that is, the process by which, according to V. Y. Mudimbe, Europe “invented” Africa. However, calling the same lake by its African names of Nam Lolwe in Luo language, Nalubaale in Luganda, or Nyanza in Kinyarwanda (Kollmann Reference Kollmann1899) allows one to give precedence to the indigenous matrixes that organized the order of knowledge in the region prior to European intrusion. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, is said to have been given the Biblical name Isaac (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:182). Nwoye’s baptismal name is seen by his father as an abomination, because such an adoption breaks the principle of name recycling and, therefore, “nominal reincarnation” that constituted the basis of genealogical narratives in precolonial Africa. In most precolonial practices, a name, whether given to a thing, a place or a person, tended to carry with it a narrative or a history with individual and/or collective relevance (Mbiti Reference Mbiti2015:92–95). Michael Kirwen, in this respect, argues that “Africans do not die in a western sense; they merely transit into another community and then return in the persons of the newly born babies that carry their names” (2005:16). The naming ceremony thus becomes “both ritual and reality as it effectively makes a child a human being linked to ancestral blood through the person whose name it carries” (Kirwen Reference Kirwen2005:52). Nwoye actually breaks this ancestral link in the novel. When Obierika expresses his surprise to find him among the Christians in Umuofia, and asks what he was doing there, Nwoye responds that he is now “one of them.” And when asked about the whereabouts of his father, he answers, “I don’t know. He is not my father” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:144). Okonkwo himself reciprocates when he advises his remaining children against joining the Christians: “You have all seen the great abomination of your brother. Now he is no longer my son or your brother” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:172).
Exploitation
The stage of exploitation implies the free and coercive use of natural and human resources in a way that benefits the colonizing people, metropole, or nation in quasi-exclusive fashion. Colin McEvedy, for instance, reports that a Lisbon merchant named Feñao Gomes was already, as early as 1469, making a fortune on the Guinea coast which allowed him to pay an annual 500 crusados into the royal treasury (1995:68). He adds that, by 1481, King John II of Portugal had a fort at Elmina on the Guinea coast whose aim was to take full advantage of the gold being mined in the area. This port, he asserts, was “Europe’s first foothold in black Africa” (McEvedy Reference McEvedy1995:70). While chattel slavery became, as early as the fifteenth century, the earlier expression of an exploitative trend whereby tens of millions of African slaves were forcibly embarked on slave ships to go and manpower the plantations of the New World, the shift to colonialism during what Pakenham dubbed the “Scramble for Africa” (1991) in the nineteenth century signaled new forms of human and economic exploitation that relied on locally coerced labor. In the context of French colonialism, for instance, William Cohen shows how, between 1530 and 1880, state, church, and abolitionists conspired to offer the outright colonial takeover of Africa as an alternative to a commerce of humans that, toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, had become of dwindling as well as dubious profitability (2003:155). Edward Said (1978, 1993) and V. Y. Mudimbe (Reference Mudimbe1988), but also Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon1952, 1961), have, in this context, been of particular import in their ability to show how the ideological construction or reconstruction of the “other,” concepts of “otherness,” and the process of “othering” that were characteristic of the colonialist enterprise conspired not only to dehumanize the “dark continent,” but also to organize its political, cultural, and economic subjugation. As far as the so-called “Scramble for Africa” is concerned, Pakenham warns against believing that “[it] was Berlin that precipitated the Scramble.” In fact, he argues, “It was really the other way round. The Scramble had precipitated Berlin. The race to grab a slice of the African cake had started long before the first day of the conference” (Pakenham Reference Pakenham1991:254). But Pakenham also suggests that the Berlin Conference “marked a turning point in the history of Africa and Europe . . . For the first time great men like Bismarck had linked their names at an international conference to Livingstone’s lofty ideals: to introduce the ‘3 Cs’—commerce, Christianity, civilization—into the dark places of Africa” (1991:254).
And, of course, with the “three Cs”—which really ought to be renamed the “four Cs” (adding one for “conquest”)—came the need to implement what the French called the mise en valeur of the continent (Cohen Reference Cohen1971:113; Conklin Reference Conklin1997:38–54), that is, a policy meant to organize the economic exploitation of the continent using an indigenous labor that, henceforth, would be forced to work in a quasi-state of enslavement. Where the slave exported to the Americas had been the personal and private property of the slave owner, the African laborer now forcibly coerced to work on the African continent for the enrichment of the Empire became the public and collective property of the state, the King (as in the Belgian Congo) or, in the case of France, the Republic. French colonialism in Africa is, in this regard, rather notorious. The Code de l’indigénat that it implemented as early as 1881, in fact, formalized the principle of “forced labor” a whole four years before the General Act of the Berlin Conference (Aldrich Reference Aldrich1996:214). But forced labor was not the exclusive territory of the French colonial empire. As Roger G. Thomas (Reference Thomas1973) and Kwabena Akurang-Parry (Reference Akurang-Parry2000) report, the practice also existed in British West Africa even though the British, who were known for a colonizing method based on indirect rule, often used coerced local agents, African chiefs mostly, to recruit the manpower necessary for their mise en valeur policies (Thomas Reference Thomas1973:86–88). David Killingray (Reference Killingray1989) also describes how Africans were forced to work to support the British military campaigns between 1870 and 1945. In South Africa, the Native Administration Act of 1927, which was renamed as the Bantu Administration Act of 1927, clearly established a dual legal system, one for the Whites and one for the Blacks, with the effect of transforming “Bantu” areas into reservoirs of cheap and easily exploitable labor. And as early as 1857, the British administration in southern Africa was levying various punitive taxes, including the notorious 1884 “Hut Tax,” which subjected Africans to the taxation of their huts on lands that were their own. Payable by cash or, if impossible, grain or stock, this tax had the intended effect, of course, of forcing Africans to work for the colonial economy (Pakenham Reference Pakenham1991:497–98). In West Africa, the same hut tax sparked a war in 1898 in the newly annexed British Protectorate of Sierra Leone (Harris Reference Harris2012:40).
In Things Fall Apart, hints of exploitation in the form of slavery, forced labor, and taxation are all conveyed. Slavery is evoked during Obierika’s initial visit to his friend Okonkwo in Mbanta. When telling Okonkwo about the wiping out of Abame, Obierika mentions rumors of “white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:140–41). The novel also mentions that the white man’s court had introduced the practice of putting people in jail and then using these prisoners for labor. The prison, thus, was “full of men who had offended the white man’s law” and
. . . were beaten in the prison by the kotma and made to work every morning clearing the government compound and fetching wood for the white Commissioner and the court messengers. Some of these prisoners were men of title who should be above such mean occupation. They were grieved by the indignity and mourned for their neglected farms. As they cut grass in the morning the younger men sang in time with the strokes of their machetes . . . (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:174–75)
Other signs of exploitation are visible in the form of extortion. When the District Commissioner, for instance, imposes an enormous fine of two hundred bags of cowries as a condition for the release of the elders, it is not just the elders, but the community of Umuofia as a whole that is, in fact, impacted and taxed: “. . . the men of Umuofia met in the marketplace and decided to collect without delay two hundred and fifty bags of cowries to appease the white man” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:197). Such arbitrary fines, in turn, inspired the practice of corruption as the people of Umuofia were not aware of the fact that “fifty bags would go to the court messengers, who had increased the fine for that purpose” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:197). The torturous mistreatment of the prisoners did not go unnoticed either since, upon the elders’ return from prison, people “noticed the long stripes on Okonkwo’s back where the warder’s whip had cut into his flesh” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:199).
Justification
Of all the stages of colonialism discussed, the stage of justification is, perhaps, the most important. Not only is it a stage that can intervene at any moment of the colonial process to reinforce any activity pertaining to the other four stages, it is also the stage most concerned with the ideological rationalization of colonialism as a humanitarian endeavor organized for the sole benefit of the colonized. This stage not only seeks to make indigenous cultural practices illegal and unacceptable as human values—thus leading to the white man’s prisons becoming “full of men who had offended against the white man’s law” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:174)—it also seeks to present the whole battery of dehumanizing policies put in place in the colonies as morally acceptable. The consequence of these ideologies, of course, is “the deliberate and conscious domination of a people, and the elimination of possibilities for self-definition in relation to other people” (Ukadike Reference Ukadike1994:38). Africa, thus, “was suffused with the language and racist ideology of the colonizer, and it is not surprising then that racism ‘has historically been both an ally and product of the colonization process’” (Ukadike Reference Ukadike1994:38). The role of the missionaries in assigning to the Africans a primordial defect—which included using biblical mythologies to explain the “desolate” condition of the Africans as resulting from a primordial curse—was, in this regard, important (Cohen Reference Cohen2003:12–15). It was only a matter of time, then, before even the practice of slavery began to be justified as good for the Africans. William Cohen reports that:
The argument that Africans could be converted by being enslaved was one of the most common apologies made for the slavery that Frenchmen had begun to establish in the West Indies in the mid-seventeenth century. Louis XIII was frequently quoted as having permitted the enslavement of blacks because he had been told that it was the only way of saving their souls. (2003:19)
Father Labat was, alongside Father Loyer (Cohen Reference Cohen2003:17), a missionary whose ambivalent ideas about Africa were notoriously duplicitous. Thus, “Despite his warnings against wars of conquest, Labat, like Charpentier, whom he undoubtedly copied, thought that, once a fort was established in Bondu, the French would be justified in seizing the territory if the fort were attacked. The plan had the moral advantage of providing the excuse for a just, defensive war in subjugating the region” (Cohen Reference Cohen2003:172).
In Things Fall Apart, we do see signs of this right to conquer and settle expressed not only in the wiping out of Abame because people there had dared to defensively kill a white man who had arbitrarily and arrogantly appeared in their midst uninvited and unannounced, but also in the imprisonment of the elders of Umuofia after they had burned down a church whose activities had begun to prove socio-politically destabilizing in a land that the District Commissioner now felt entitled to call the “dominion of our queen” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:194).
It is worth underscoring that the “civilizing mission” that was so important for Europe’s imperialist ideologies had, by the early seventeenth century, become synonymous with the spread of Christianity. Cohen reports, for instance, that “Conquest for the purpose of converting Africans had been suggested as early as 1402 by Jean de Béthencourt, a Norman who had conquered the Canary Islands . . . The theorist Montchrétien declared that conquest would be welcomed by ‘the many barbarian peoples who stretch out their arms to us, who are ready to subject themselves to us, so that by holy teachings and good examples we can set them on the road to salvation’” (Cohen Reference Cohen2003:175). By the eighteenth century, justification of colonial expansion had become a moral obligation and “the spread of Christianity was perceived as part of a larger process of Europeanization” (Cohen Reference Cohen2003:176). Colonialism, thus, became a moral imperative that prompted such expansionists as Proudhon to argue that “Europe’s predestined role was teaching the non-European peoples the need for work; with regard to the Africans, whom he accused of being averse to labor, he announced, ‘it is our right to compel them to do so’” (Cohen Reference Cohen2003:271).
Achebe alludes to this self-proclaimed right not only to enlighten the Africans (as seen through the forceful dismissal of their gods), but also to “pacify” them by force if necessary. In a way that is very much reminiscent of the ethos articulated in Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” that became the hallmark of British imperialism around the world (Bancel, Blanchard & Vergès Reference Bancel, Blanchard and Vergès2003:68; Murphy Reference Murphy2010:45–46), we see a District Commissioner who, after discovering the dead body of Okonkwo dangling from a tree, launches into an introspective analysis of his role as a representative of a superior people:
In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:209)
It is very telling that the projected book’s title should also be the very last words of the novel. Adina Câmpu in this regard adroitly suggests that “The novel’s ending views history from the perspective of the District Commissioner” and that, “For the first time Igbo culture is now presented not from the inside as vital and autonomous, but from the outside as an object of anthropological curiosity” (2014:46). This relegation of the Igbo not only to the de facto, but also to the de jure and passive status of primitive “curiosities” enshrines an “invisibility principle” that automatically denies them the right to self-determination. From this point forward, indeed, the history of Africa symbolically becomes one that is seen, written, and, therefore, (re)manufactured, exclusively through a European lens with no direct input from the now objectified “tribes.” The word “pacification,” in this context, becomes heavily fraught. When used alongside such phrases as “primitive tribes,” it naturally portends the destructive forces that lead to the inevitable crumbling of the Igbo world that Achebe describes. Indeed, to avenge the death of one, for instance, the white man feels entitled to wipe out the whole of Abame in genocidal fashion. To assert his authority, he declares Igbo culture illegal and immoral and thus feels justified in disenfranchising the Igbo people. Within this framework, and under the new institutional order, any reactive or nationalistic impetus and every aspect of the Igbo world that conservatives such as Okonkwo seek to protect automatically becomes synonymous with criminal behavior that must be crushed or, to put it mildly, pacified. It is not surprising, therefore, that, to Okonkwo’s question as to whether the white man understood Igbo custom about land, Obierika can only offer, bluntly, that the white man “says that our customs are bad” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:176). A rather cursory justification which, ultimately, exposes the very arbitrariness of colonial intrusion that allowed it to defeat and, perhaps also, subdue the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa.
The five stages of colonialism proposed and explored in this article become, in this context, explicative of an inevitable defeat for the Igbo that is perceptible from the very moment of the colonial encounter in Abame to the moment of Okonkwo’s ominous suicide in Umuofia. The choice of Okonkwo to hang himself following his disgusted realization that his people were not going to go to war against the white man (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:205) does not, in this regard, foretell good things to come. Okika’s words during the last ominous village meeting—the very meeting that sees Okonkwo behead a court messenger and, as a result, prompts his decision to hang himself rather than submit to the indignities of the white man’s prison—are, in this context, irreducibly expressive of the demise of a vanquished people now reduced to wailing impotently about their crumbling world:
‘All our gods are weeping. Idemili is weeping. Ogwugwu is weeping. Agbala is weeping, and all the others. Our dead fathers are weeping because of the shameful sacrilege they are suffering and the abomination we have all seen with our eyes’ . . .
‘This is a great gathering. No clan can boast of greater numbers or greater valor. But are we all here? I ask you: Are all the sons of Umuofia with us all here?’ . . .
‘They are not,’ he said. ‘They have broken the clan and gone their several ways. We who are here this morning have remained true to our fathers, but our brothers have deserted us and joined a stranger to soil their fatherland.’ (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:203)
The defeat of Africa that is conveyed by Okika here lends credence to Frank’s notion of “ante-alienation,” that is, the pre-existing forms of indigenous alienation which, having preceded the moment of colonization, paved the way to already alienated individuals or groups offering themselves up as allies of the subversive forces of colonialism (2010:1089). But the psychological complexities of the colonial experience in Africa are such that the principles of ante-alienation that Frank highlights also amplify what Simon Gikandi sees as the “crisis of the modern” (2011:14), especially when explored through the lens of what Femi Kolapo and Kwabena Akurang-Parry call “African agency” (2007:1–2) in the materialization of Africa’s defeat. It is not clear, however, whether Achebe’s representation of this experience in Things Fall Apart was meant to be a nationalistic indictment of such African agency—as can be seen in Okika and Obierika’s laments about the brothers who had “broken the clan,” “gone their several ways,” and “joined a stranger to soil their fatherland” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:203)—or, rather, an equally nationalistic indictment of the white man’s colonialism—as expressed by Obierika when he suddenly turns to the District Commissioner to say, “ferociously: ‘That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself, and now he will be buried like a dog . . .’” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:208).
An argument could also be made that Okonkwo, in some way, no longer truly belonged to his community due to a triple form of estrangement. First, there is the string of pre-exile “crimes” that he commits that range from his beating his youngest wife, Ojiugo, during the Week of Peace to his ill-advised sacrificial killing of Ikemefuna. There is, secondly, his accidental shooting death of the late Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s son, a crime against the earth goddess that demanded that he be banned from Umuofia for seven years, after which Okonkwo upon his return basically now felt like a stranger in an Umuofia that “had undergone such profound change during his exile that it was barely recognizable” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:182). The third major estrangement is the result of his suicide. By hanging himself, Okonkwo commits a crime that is so odious that it posthumously makes him a pariah of his own community for the second time: His own people are unable to take down his body from the tree because it is “against our custom… It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offense against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen . . .” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:207).
What to do, then, with this triple estrangement, in light of Achebe’s own ambivalences about colonialism and the idea of Africa’s civilizational defeat? While one may indeed be justifiably tempted to conclude that the ending of Achebe’s novel falls squarely within a conceptual framework that is explicitly anti-colonial, especially when considering that “Achebe has made it clear that his principal purpose in the book was to provide African readers with a realistic depiction of their pre-colonial past, free of the distortions and stereotypes imposed upon that past in European accounts” (Câmpu Reference Câmpu2014:43), one should not lose sight of the fact that Achebe, over the years, has also never fully seen colonialism only in terms of its negative outcomes. He has, in fact, asserted that he is not “one of those who would say that Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period” (Câmpu Reference Câmpu2014:46).
Bruce Gilley (Reference Gilley2016) has even gone so far as to propose, quite controversially so, that There Was a Country, the memoir that Achebe published a year before his death, may have constituted a reversal of his previous anticolonial dispositions. Gilley’s apologetic, but also revisionist, views of colonialism (Gilley Reference Gilley2017) have now, of course, been established as utterly simplistic (Patel Reference Patel2017, Reference Patel2018; Klein Reference Klein2018) and even morally, epistemologically and historiographically objectionable (Roelofs & Gallien Reference Roelofs and Gallien2017; Robinson Reference Robinson2017). This objectionability is what, ultimately, turns Gilley’s awkward revisionism of Achebe into a bizarre and, perhaps even, rather infantile and dishonest intellectual exercise: He seems indeed to imply that because Achebe, in his attempt to contrast British rule with the chaos of post-colonial Nigeria, expressed nostalgic admiration for the orderliness that prevailed under the dictates of the colonial state, it automatically follows that Achebe would have happily welcomed the unabated continuation of British suzerainty over Nigeria. Clearly, a view of Achebe that would reduce his lifelong stance on the tragedy of colonialism to the simplistic idea that colonialism was good for Nigeria because mail to and from Nigeria was efficiently and reliably delivered in colonial times (Gilley Reference Gilley2016:653) is absurd and cannot be taken seriously. In fact, Gilley’s implicit, but also convoluted suggestion that Achebe may have reversed his anticolonial stance on the sole basis of his acknowledgement of colonialism’s positive impact on state formation in Nigeria is apparently confused about what colonialism actually has meant for Africans. Gilley seems unable to realize that Africans have not generally rejected colonialism on the basis of its material contributions (schools, hospitals, roads, etc.). Rather, as Robinson (Reference Robinson2017) has argued, Africans—and the world for that matter—have rejected colonialism not only because of its dubious morality, but also and above all because of its genocidal tendencies: While, for instance, professing the humanism of its “civilizing mission,” colonialist Europe with its slave labor demands nonetheless concomitantly contributed, directly and indirectly, to the formation, expansion, and/or consolidation of ruthless and despotic slave states in Africa (Acemoglu & Robinson Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2012:252–258, 273). In other words, the unspeakable human toll that these genocidal tendencies have wrought upon the continent since the colonial encounter some five hundred years ago was a true crime against humanity whose effects are still felt today all over Africa (Pakenham Reference Pakenham1991; Cohen Reference Cohen2003). There is technically, therefore, no objective way of rehabilitating the inhumanities and atrocities of colonialism in Africa into an acceptable or morally justifiable human endeavor, no matter the benefits (Robinson Reference Robinson2017).
Gilley’s claims about Europe’s disinterested generosity are also dubious, especially when it comes to the economic exploitation of Africa by the colonial state: It has been reported, for instance, that in just six years between 1945 and 1951, the British invested 40 million pounds (mostly to their own manufacturers and experts), but, in return, extracted 140 million pounds from the continent (Davidson Reference Davidson1992:218–219). Worse still, Gilley seems to ignore several important factors that helped to pre-determine the post-colonial chaos he says Achebe laments. One of these is the fact that, due to the excessive and unshakable monopoly that the colonial powers exercised on the colonial state, African elites were never really fully associated with the governance of the colonies. This European monopoly on the implementation of the colonial state, which was evident in the hesitancies that saw recruitment into British colonial service increase by 59 percent between 1947 and 1957 at the very time when the debate on decolonization was raging (Davidson Reference Davidson1992:178), is what, precisely, fueled the revolutionary nationalisms that led to the precipitous and conflict-ridden independences that Africans were granted. These independences ended up abruptly thrusting the small number of African elites who had a voice into the unknown of having to quickly learn how to crash-run previously inexistent multiethnic states whose boundaries, moreover, were arbitrarily drawn by outsiders, with no regard to the pre-existing polities and realities (Davidson Reference Davidson1992:164–177). Another factor is that the very colonial order and colonial orderliness that Gilley suggests Achebe increasingly became nostalgic for was maintained through a governance model that, as Klein (Reference Klein2018) shows, was itself heavily oppressive, arbitrary, and dictatorial. This is the very model that, according to Davidson (Reference Davidson1992:163, 175–178, 207–210) and Acemoglu and Robinson (Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2012:410), was transferred virtually intact to the Africans at the time of independence, a model that, thus, served as the most immediate blueprint to the repressive regimes that emerged after independence. These are the same regimes that, in the post-colonial era, continued to be bolstered by another (Euro-American) evil: The Cold War into which neo-imperialist interests thrust the planet as they sought to consolidate their neocolonialist suzerainty over the entire world. To assert or even to suggest, therefore, that the postcolonial calamities that befell Africans are of the doing of African despots alone and that the West has had no hand in them since the time of independence is tantamount to having woken from a rather severe intellectual coma that has lasted, at least, five hundred years. Ultimately, therefore, the only meaningful take one can muster from Gilley of import is, perhaps, a confirmation of Achebe’s preoccupation with modernity (Gilley Reference Gilley2016:647).
In other words, Achebe’s nuanced approach to colonialism cannot be confused with a wholesale repudiation of the atrocities of colonialism. Rather, as Achebe himself has often opined, he preferred to look at the issues facing Africa—and Nigeria specifically—not so much as issues that have to do with development, but rather as issues that have to do with modernization (Câmpu Reference Câmpu2014:46). This view, it seems, would be congruent with Achebe’s portrayal not only of the types of alienations that, in a novel such as No Longer at Ease, have come to epitomize the defeat of African values within the context of the postcolony (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001), but also of the types of alienations that find validation in Gikandi’s “crisis of the modern” paradigm. Gikandi, to be clear, proposes that:
Not only do canonical African novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure Ambigue rehearse the crisis of the modern, they also assume its inevitability. Almost without exception, African novels, even those that are set in a premodern world (Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka or Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, for example), are intended to create a space of subjective identity that is easily recognized as new and, by implication, modern. (2011:14)
When all is said and done, thus, Things Fall Apart’s rather ambiguous ending seems to place the colonized and the colonizer at odds with their embattled encounter, albeit within JanMohamed’s conceptual framework, which sees the African novel as an inherently politicized “space of cultural contact between the Europeans and the Africans” (Coundouriotis Reference Coundouriotis and Desai2009:56). Alan Friesen, in this regard, faults the many critics who have interpreted Okonkwo’s suicide as “the end product of his inability to control his own fate” and, thus, “have understood the novel to be ‘the tragic story of Okonkwo’s rise and fall among the Igbo people, concluding with that least ambiguous of all endings, the death of the hero’ ... without fully examining the ramifications of Okonkwo’s suicide upon both the colonial and Igbo cultures” (2006:1). In Friesen’s view, “Rather than a tragic act, Okonkwo’s suicide can be seen as his last attempt to remind the Igbo people of their culture and values in the face of impending colonisation” (2006:1). In this sense, Friesen confers to Okonkwo an ending that is reminiscent of the prophetic death of king Chaka in Thomas Mofolo’s novel (1981). Somehow, however, Friesen seems to miss the fact that, unlike Chaka, Okonkwo at no time makes a clear ideological pronouncement after killing the court messenger. Rather, “He wiped his machete on the sand and went away” (Achebe Reference Achebe1994:205), silently, leaving his people in utter confusion as to what might happen next. The reader, by extension, must decide whether Okonkwo should be seen as a coward, a tragic hero, or a martyr of Africa’s liberation movement. Adina Câmpu, who concentrates on a targeted reading of Okonkwo’s suicide, identifies the elements of “ironic tragedy” that creep into the novel’s ending. Hence her argument that, “By ironically undermining the perspective of the District Commissioner, by exposing the latter’s personal ignorance (not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph) and political interests (the Pacification of the Lower Niger) Achebe seeks to confront and finally to discredit the entire discourse of colonialism . . .” (Câmpu Reference Câmpu2014:46). However, in the context of the uncertainties surrounding Things Fall Apart’s ending, Okonkwo’s suicide may equally be understood as the result of his inability to modernize, that is, his failure to recognize the inevitable realities of colonialism. Achebe’s insistence on the imperative and, therefore, the inevitability of modernization, seems to specifically reject any idea of giving up on oneself or using self-destruction/suicide as an escape; it is not about an idealized “going back” to the Africa that once was either (Câmpu Reference Câmpu2014:46). Rather, Achebe’s modernization stands as a nationalistic call that invites the new African to a reconciliation of his African-ness with the Manichean realities of being African and Black—that is, what Achille Mbembe calls an “object of [Western] experimentation” (2001:2)—in a postcolony shaped, mostly, by the white man throughout the various stages of colonialism that came to epitomize his intrusions into both the destiny and the psyche of the Africans.
