The culture of Imposition

 

Things Fall Apart offers a mostly unknown, ubiquitously misunderstood and ignored perspective of a culture that regardless of its evident technological delay or its superstitious way of thinking, it possesses a deep moral strength and wisdom underpinning a society that lived in harmony with its environment. A face of Africa that we do not quite know. 

Achebe shows us a village, with its positive and negative aspects, organized, complex, hard to understand, maybe (in some aspects like politics, justice systems, men and women roles, morality and philosophy); he goes strictly to the roots and he unsheathes his land as an Igbo would do it; an Africa out of any stereotypes. Hence, the reader faces a narration that tells how these people were before the irruption of colonialism and the respective consequences; for instance, the arriving of Europeans perceived as a cultural imposition which eliminates millenary customs and traditions of one single slam.

  

This outstanding African literature novel sets out a rural reality from Nigeria and throughout the three acts, explains the relation between religion, the white man and the colonization in the African continent. As a matter of fact, in Africa, Christian religion expanded through an evangelization process that not only pretended to spread the “Word of the Lord”, but also had controlling and colonizing intentions implied conducted by education and a government and in strong connection with a massive “churchification”.

Having said this, education not only possesses an emancipating component that helps forming and shaping a person’s character, but also can be used as an indoctrinating tool, for instance, when the biased and arbitrary selection of a syllabus furthers domination, furthers an intentional subjectivity (is this familiar to you?). At the same time, the religious imposition, which was introduced in all villages in a subtle, inoffensive but relentless way, can be also considered as a powerful way to enhance the supremacy of the white man over the black man, in a scenario where the latter adopts the religion brought by the colonizer and he/she is forced to adore and worship a white god. Consequently, this immersion was the one which facilitated the construction of a government and figures, such as District Commissioners, under white people command.

Now, indeed, ignorance often leads us not to have awareness, a consciousness of what we are referring to. In this case, to that primitive Africa, full of simple, unable human beings; those human beings that had to be taken out of this endless pit, of savageness; those human beings that had to be necessarily treated as inferiors to justify this colonization outrage, with the shameless appropriation of all their human and material resources. So, in that sense, thorough Mister Achebe’s implicit writing, I think that he thoroughly accomplished to shatter this Eurocentrism image in an incredible and accurate way; also, he claimed that Africa has to overcome this humiliation and underestimation:  

"I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them." 

(Essay: “Hopes and Impediments: The Novelist as Teacher”– Chinua Achebe)

 

And, as Achebe showed things falling apart for their population, are we really far away from that culture of imposition? have we really chosen the way in which we want to live? or do we live in a way that has been arbitrarily imposed? Maybe, Chinua Achebe not only wanted people to realize the problems in Africa, but also he anticipated, as the modernist writer, that this may be a common situation which the whole world is going through (some countries more than others, but still). Maybe, he also wanted us to strike a balance between that constant tension, crisis of the local and the global.