Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua Achebe's TFA

Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua
Achebe's Things Fall Apart
Daniel M. Mengara
African Studies Review, Volume 62, Number 4, December 2019, pp. 31-56
(Article)
Published by Cambridge University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751196
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Colonial Intrusion and Stages of
Colonialism in Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
Daniel M. Mengara
Abstract: Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, has continued to offer—
perhaps much more than his third novel, Arrow of God—the most vivid account of
the process of early colonial penetration in Africa. This study examines Things
Fall Apart through an analytical and conceptual framework that illuminates the
five stages of colonialism in Africa. These five stages (exploration, expropriation,
appropriation, exploitation, and justification) were necessary in order for colonial-
ism to become both an effective tool for domination and a successful tool of domi-
nation; as such, they provide powerful glimpses into Achebe’s fictional represen-
tation of the cataclysm embodied by colonial intrusion, not only within the confines
of the fictional Igbo universe that he depicts, but also throughout a sub-Saharan
African world whose cultural and sociopolitical ethos were shaken to their core.
An analysis of these stages, therefore, leads to an understanding of colonialism
that defines it not as a series of specific historical events, spaces, and places, but
rather as a process or a series of psycho-historical processes with a certain number of
inescapable features that conspired to make it an effective tool of and for sustained
political, cultural, and economic domination in sub-Saharan Africa. Achebe’s
novel can be used as a tool that can help to decipher and foreground the psycho-
historical processes inherent in what, ultimately, may be called “the psychology of
colonialism.”
African Studies Review, Volume 62, Number 4 (December 2019), pp. 31–56
Daniel M. Mengara is a native of Gabon and has been a professor of French and
Francophone Studies at Montclair State University (New Jersey) since 1996. As a
scholar and novelist who has studied in Gabon, France, and in the United States,
Daniel Mengara is particularly interested in ancient, precolonial, and pre-Islamic
African political and thought systems. He has published four books, including
La Représentation des groupes sociaux chez les romanciers noirs sud-africains; Images of
Africa: Stereotypes and Realities; Mema (a novel in English currently being used in
Ugandan O-level curriculum); and Le Chant des chimpanzés (a novel in French).
E-mail: mengarad@montclair.edu
© African Studies Association, 2019

doi:10.1017/asr.2018.85
31
32 African Studies Review
Résumé: le Premier roman de Chinua Achebe Le monde s’effondre [Things Fall

Apart], continue d’offrir — peut-être beaucoup plus que son troisième roman,
La flèche de Dieu [Arrow of God] — le récit le plus vivace des débuts du processus
de pénétration coloniale en Afrique. Cette étude examine Le monde s’effondre au
travers d’un cadre analytique et conceptuel qui illumine les cinq étapes du coloni-
alisme en Afrique. Ces cinq étapes (exploration, expropriation, appropriation,
exploitation et justification) ont inévitablement fait du colonialisme un efficace
instrument pour la domination tout autant qu’un efficient outil de domination;
en tant que telles, elles fournissent un puissant aperçu de la représentation fictive
qu’Achebe fait du cataclysme que représenta l’intrusion coloniale, non seulement
dans les limites de l’univers fictif des Igbos qu’il représente, mais aussi un peu
partout dans un monde africain subsaharien dont les valeurs culturelles et socio-
politiques furent profondément ébranlées. Une analyse de ces différentes étapes,
par conséquent, conduit à une compréhension du colonialisme qui ne le définit
plus comme une simple série d’événements, d’espaces et de lieux historiques
spécifiques, mais plutôt comme un processus ou une série de processus psycho-historiques
avec un certain nombre de caractéristiques uniques qui ont conspiré pour en
faire un outil efficace de domination politique, culturelle et économique soutenue
en Afrique subsaharienne. Le roman d’Achebe peut ainsi être utilisé comme un
outil pouvant aider à éclaircir, puis à mettre en exergue les processus psycho-historiques
inhérents à ce qui, en fin de compte, peut être baptisé du nom de « psychologie
du colonialisme ».
Resumo: O primeiro romance de Chinua Achebe, Quando Tudo Se Desmorona,

é ainda hoje —talvez bem mais do que o seu terceiro romance, A Flecha de Deus—
o mais vívido relato do processo inicial de penetração colonial em África. O pre-
sente estudo analisa o livro Quando Tudo Se Desmorona, a partir de uma grelha
analítica e conceptual que evidencia os cinco estádios do colonialismo em África.
Estes cinco estádios (prospeção, expropriação, apropriação, exploração e justi-
ficação) foram necessários para que o colonialismo se tornasse simultaneamente
uma ferramenta eficaz para exercer a dominação e uma ferramenta bem-sucedida da
dominação; nesse sentido, estes estádios oferecem uma visão privilegiada
sobre a representação ficcional que Achebe faz do cataclismo materializado pela
intrusão colonial, não só dentro dos limites do universo ficcional dos Ibo por ele
retratado, mas também em todo um mundo da África subsariana, cujo ethos cul-
tural e sociopolítico foi abalado até ao âmago. Assim, a análise destes estádios
permite compreender o colonialismo de um ponto de vista que não se restringe
a acontecimentos, espaços e lugares históricos específicos, mas sobretudo como
um processo, ou uma série de processos psico-históricos, com um determinado con-
junto de características inescapáveis que conspiraram para fazer dele uma ferra-
menta eficaz de e para uma dominação política, cultural e económica sustentada
na África subsariana. O romance de Achebe pode ser usado como ferramenta
auxiliar para decifrar e trazer para primeiro plano os processos psico-históricos iner-
entes àquilo que, em última análise, pode ser designado como “psicologia do
colonialismo.”
Keywords: stages of colonialism; phases of colonization; Achebe; colonial intrusion;

exploration; expropriation; appropriation; exploitation; justification
(Received 01 February 2017 – Revised 16 May 2018 – Accepted 05 June 2018)

Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 33
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 enter-
prise thrived and became so culturally, politically, and economically suc-
cessful 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/accultura-
tive 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 manu-
facture 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 ideolog-
ical stance, manages to weave together the processes—both historical and
political, but also psychological and procedural—that underpin the colo-
nialist 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 colo-
nialism,” 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 con-
gruent 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 2011; Câmpu 2014; Zarrinjooee & Khatar 2016; Ndebele 2016). 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 1990:402), a genre that, as early as the
1960s, began to offer a pessimistic view of Africa’s post-independence expe-
rience (Chevrier 1990). But No Longer at Ease also stands as an interesting
interlude and, perhaps, a rather paradoxical literary move, when it is con-
sidered 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 1997:xxi–ii).
Chinua Achebe has been described as one of the “big three” of anglo-
phone African literature alongside Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o
(Lindfors 1992), 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 colo-
nial penetration with the type of plausibility, poignancy, acuity, and compre-
hensiveness 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 devel-
oped 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 conti-
nent’s destiny, and less about the covert and overt psycho-historical pro-
cesses 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 pri-
mordial core (Mengara 2001b: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 fea-

ture an indigenous African layer (African infrastructure) and an exogenous
European layer (European superstructure) that, as early as the fifteenth cen-
tury, 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 2001b: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 2001b: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 2001b).
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 recon-
struct 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
(1991) would call his “Europhone” text—but also by foregrounding ele-
ments 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 1994:141). In
this regard, Achebe perfectly fits the mold of Bill Ashcroft’s (1989) 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 1994:1–135) to a comprehensive depiction of still-untarnished
Igbo cultural ethos is a testament to his desire to foreground African tradi-
tions 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 1994:136–209) that introduce the cataclysm of early colo-
nial penetration. The brevity of the pages that cover colonial penetration in
the novel is thus, one suspects, meant to symbolically convey the sudden-
ness and rapidity with which, in the span of just about six or seven years—
from Obierika’s first visit to still-exiled Okonkwo (Achebe 1994:136–42) 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 cata-
clysm 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 1994:27). 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 con-
trol over their own destiny. Africa’s natural development was dealt a cata-
strophic 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 civiliza-
tional 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 there-
fore 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 commu-
nity of Umuofia in eastern Nigeria as they come to grips with the destabiliz-
ing 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 1994:10).
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 1994:13). 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 2003) 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, appro-
priation, 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, there-
fore, “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 own-
ership of land (accompanied by the ‘western virtues’ of good agricultural
practice, monogamy, and patriarchy)” (Mengara 2001a: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 1994:137–41). 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 1994:138). 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 1994:138). 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 1994:138–39).
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 1974:248–50).
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 circum-
stances of the lone white man’s disappearance is symptomatic of the “invis-
ibility” 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 com-
pletely empty,” Obierika concluded (Achebe 1994:140). 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 1994:145).
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 1991:11–23).
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 1893:260; 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 2007:16–17;
my translation)
The General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which sanc-

tioned the God-given right of the Europeans to occupy land in Africa as they
saw fit (Pakenham 1991:254; Bancel, Blanchard & Vergès 2007:14–15) is, per-
haps, 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 adminis-
trative 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 1994:143). Obierika does not give the impression that his commu-
nity 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
1994:155). But this was not all. The inevitability of expropriation, and there-
fore, 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 1994:175). And when Okonkwo retorts that “we must fight these men
and drive them from the land” (Achebe 1994:176), 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 gov-
ernment. 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 1994:176)
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 sug-
gesting, 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 unmask-
ing 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 ances-
tral 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 1994:186–87)
The unmasking of the egwugwu in the above excerpt is, of course, sym-
bolic 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 admin-
istration 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 1994:194)
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 irrevers-
ible collapse of the indigenous sociopolitical order. In this context, the
“egwugwu sacrilege” as well as the humiliation of the elders in jail (Achebe
1994:195) 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 1994:159–61), giving the Mbantans
reason to believe that their gods “were still able to fight their own battles”
(Achebe 1994:161), 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 1994:148–51). When combined with young
converts now going into villages to boast that “all the gods are dead and
impotent” (Achebe 1994:154)—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 1994:178)—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 whole-
sale negation of the Igbo communities’ capacity for self-determination on
lands that were once their own.
Appropriation
Appropriation primarily concerns the transformative aggressions of colo-

nialism. 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 dis-
missal 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 mis-
sionary 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 1994:145).
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 (2016) 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 tradi-
tion. 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 philo-

sophical 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 1994:179–81).
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 1994:152–53). 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 1994:174). 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 1994:176).
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
2001a: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 1994:178). 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 1994:181).
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 1994:181–82).
The concepts of “naming” and “re-naming” that go hand in hand with

the stage of appropriation are also significant (Mengara 2001a: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 1899) 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
1994:182). 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 2015:92–95).
Michael Kirwen, in this respect, argues that “Africans do not die in a west-
ern 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 2005:52). Nwoye actually breaks this ances-
tral 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 where-
abouts of his father, he answers, “I don’t know. He is not my father” (Achebe
1994:144). Okonkwo himself reciprocates when he advises his remaining
children against joining the Christians: “You have all seen the great abomi-
nation of your brother. Now he is no longer my son or your brother”
(Achebe 1994:172).
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
1995:70). 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 abo-
litionists 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 (1988), but also
Frantz Fanon (1952, 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 dehu-
manize the “dark continent,” but also to organize its political, cultural, and
economic subjugation. As far as the so-called “Scramble for Africa” is con-
cerned, Pakenham warns against believing that “[it] was Berlin that precip-
itated 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
1991:254). 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 confer-
ence 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 1971:113;
Conklin 1997:38–54), 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 1996:214). But
forced labor was not the exclusive territory of the French colonial empire.
As Roger G. Thomas (1973) and Kwabena Akurang-Parry (2000) 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 man-
power necessary for their mise en valeur policies (Thomas 1973:86–88).
David Killingray (1989) 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 puni-
tive 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 1991:497–98).
In West Africa, the same hut tax sparked a war in 1898 in the newly annexed
British Protectorate of Sierra Leone (Harris 2012:40).
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 1994:140–41). 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 1994:174–75)
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 1994:197). 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 1994:197). The torturous mis-
treatment 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 1994:199).
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 ideolog-
ical rationalization of colonialism as a humanitarian endeavor organized
for the sole benefit of the colonized. This stage not only seeks to make indig-
enous 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 1994:174)—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 1994:38). 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 1994:38). 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 2003:12–15).
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 2003:17), 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 2003:172).
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 impris-
onment 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 1994:194).
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 2003:175). By the eighteenth century, justification of colonial expan-
sion had become a moral obligation and “the spread of Christianity was
perceived as part of a larger process of Europeanization” (Cohen 2003:176).
Colonialism, thus, became a moral imperative that prompted such expan-
sionists 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 2003:271).
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 2003:68; Murphy 2010:45–46), 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 represen-
tative 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 1994:209)
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 inevi-
table 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 1994:176). 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 peo-
ple were not going to go to war against the white man (Achebe 1994:205)
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 him-
self 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 father-
land.’ (Achebe 1994:203)
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 indig-
enous 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 psycho-

logical 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 1994:203)—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 1994:208).
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 1994:182). The third major estrange-
ment 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 1994:207).
What to do, then, with this triple estrangement, in light of Achebe’s
own ambivalences about colonialism and the idea of Africa’s civiliza-
tional 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 2014:43), one should not lose sight
of the fact that Achebe, over the years, has also never fully seen colo-
nialism 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 2014:46).
Bruce Gilley (2016) has even gone so far as to propose, quite controver-
sially 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
2017) have now, of course, been established as utterly simplistic (Patel 2017,
2018; Klein 2018) and even morally, epistemologically and historiographically
objectionable (Roelofs & Gallien 2017; Robinson 2017). 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 auto-
matically follows that Achebe would have happily welcomed the unabated con-
tinuation 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 2016:653) 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 forma-
tion in Nigeria is apparently confused about what colonialism actually has
meant for Africans. Gilley seems unable to realize that Africans have not gener-
ally rejected colonialism on the basis of its material contributions (schools, hos-
pitals, roads, etc.). Rather, as Robinson (2017) 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,” colo-
nialist Europe with its slave labor demands nonetheless concomitantly contrib-
uted, directly and indirectly, to the formation, expansion, and/or consolidation
of ruthless and despotic slave states in Africa (Acemoglu & Robinson 2012:252–
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 1991; Cohen 2003). There is tech-
nically, 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 2017).
Gilley’s claims about Europe’s disinterested generosity are also dubious,
especially when it comes to the economic exploitation of Africa by the colo-
nial 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 1992:218–219). 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 associ-
ated 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 1992:178), 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 1992:164–177).
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 (2018) shows, was itself heavily
oppressive, arbitrary, and dictatorial. This is the very model that, according
to Davidson (1992:163, 175–178, 207–210) and Acemoglu and Robinson
(2012:410), 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 intellec-
tual 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 2016:647).
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 mod-
ernization (Câmpu 2014:46). 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 2001), 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 2009:56). 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 peo-
ple, 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 peo-
ple 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 1994:205),
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 2014:46). 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 2014:46). 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.
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Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua

Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Published by Cambridge University Press

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© African Studies Association, 2019

Résumé: le Premier roman de Chinua Achebe Le monde s’effondre [Things Fall

Resumo: O primeiro romance de Chinua Achebe, Quando Tudo Se Desmorona,

Keywords: stages of colonialism; phases of colonization; Achebe; colonial intrusion;

(Received 01 February 2017 – Revised 16 May 2018 – Accepted 05 June 2018)

Patterson has called “Achebe’s trilogy” (1977:64). With No Longer at Ease,

The novel’s importance is further echoed by Kevin Frank, who sees

understanding the process of colonialism, the three phases—exploratory,

1) The non-Islamized “bicultural societies” of sub-Saharan Africa, which fea-

The exploration stage addresses the primordial colonial encounter. Here,

pronouncements as those once expounded by Swiss antiquarian Johann

upon this land as he sees fit. This unsettling presumption is so shocking to

The notion of expropriation entails the complete or quasi-complete political

France’s own colonial efforts show that

The General Act of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which sanc-

In a nutshell, thus, the Igbo of Achebe were now an expropriated people

Appropriation primarily concerns the transformative aggressions of colo-

Religion—and particularly animism—appears as the cement that ensures

repositioning and, ultimately, the displacement of the indigenous value

Of the three principal religious legacies of Africa (indigenous, Islamic,

Achebe subtly reinforces this Mazruian construct by highlighting the philo-

The concepts of “naming” and “re-naming” that go hand in hand with

Other signs of exploitation are visible in the form of extortion. When

Of all the stages of colonialism discussed, the stage of justification is,

any moment of the colonial process to reinforce any activity pertaining to

The argument that Africans could be converted by being enslaved was

Father Labat was, alongside Father Loyer (Cohen 2003:17), a missionary

suggested as early as 1402 by Jean de Béthencourt, a Norman who had

In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different

(re)manufactured, exclusively through a European lens with no direct input

The defeat of Africa that is conveyed by Okika here lends credence to

allies of the subversive forces of colonialism (2010:1089). But the psycho-

Not only do canonical African novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things

Gilley, Bruce. 2016. “Chinua Achebe on the Positive Legacies of Colonialism.”

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Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua Achebe's TFA

Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua Achebe's TFA

1) The non-Islamized “bicultural societies” of sub-Saharan Africa, which fea-