Post-Colonialism and "Things Fall Apart."
There are many ways one can view "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe through a Post-Colonial lens. The Articles states that, "Using its political and economic muscles, Great Britain...dominated her colonies, making them produce and then give up their countries' raw materials in exchange for what material goods the colonized desired or were made to believe they desired." This is parallel to the story and how the Natives were economically exploited and the entire nature of their community was changed with the arrival of the settlers. "The white man....had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price" (146). With the introduction of new materials, the culture was economically and religiously changed. Also in the article it is stated that, "Westerners subscribed to the colonialist ideology that all races other than white were inferior or subhuman. These subhumans or "savages" quickly became the inferior and equally evil "Others.." According to the settlers all other races were not as privileged as the whites and the whites were on a mission to change the way of the "less" civilized. This references Kipling's, "White Man's Burden" that the civilized Europeans have an obligation to civilize the "savages." In the novel it is clear that the natives are undermined and treated as the other race. "He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in moral conflict with the sons of darkness." Black, in this story, is portrayed as evil and has a negative connotation and white is portrayed as good and pure. This supports the philosophical concept of "alternity" where "the others are excluded from positions of power and viewed as different and inferior." Also, it is stated in the article that postcolonial critics point out, "to be colonized is to be removed from history." The original culture is wiped out and a new culture emerges. This is a dominant theme throughout the novel. With each passing event the natives lose more and more of their own identities until they are eventually assimilated with the whites and have lost sense of their own culture.
