Death of a warrior

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist seen by millions as the father of African literature, has died at the age of 82. A novelist, poet and essayist, Achebe was perhaps best known for his first novel Things Fall Apart, which was published in 1958. The story of the Igbo warrior Okonkwo and the colonial era, it has sold more than 10m copies around the world and has been published in 50 languages. Achebe depicts an Igbo village as the white men arrive at the end of the 19th century, taking its title from the WB Yeats poem, which continues: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

Chinua Achebe

In February 1975, Chinua Achebe presented a famous lecture at Amherst college in the United States, entitled “An image of Africa: Racism of Conrad's Heart of Darkness”. In his lecture, Achebe attacks Conrad's Heart of Darkness and accuses him of being a “bloody racist”. Achebe also states that the novel de-humanized Africans, denied them from language and culture and reduced them to a metaphorical extension of the dark and dangerous jungle into which the Europeans venture, “Conrad refuses to bestow human expression on Africans, even depriving them of language”.

Africa is a continent which constantly gets the attention of postcolonial writers. The intense impacts of colonialism, natural disasters and strict cultural setting have created a rich breeding ground for powerful plots. Postcolonial studies has become a popular research area for emerging academics and many focus on Africa and it’s writers such as Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Post-colonial studies are based in the historical fact of European colonialism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise. It addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning to the end of colonial contact. Chinua Achebe’s novels deal with the experiences of Nigerian citizens after the end of British colonialism. His novels depict an archetypal post-colonial era African country. Post-colonial connotes a society in the process of recovery from catastrophe.

The issue of colonization does not just touch upon the struggle of native people to adjust to a new culture. A more serious obstacle that needs to be faced is the suppression, the annihilation of the native people’s former lives and culture that comes with the presence of another who believes that his culture is superior.

Obviously, problems of crossed identity, imposed inferiority and even a raging hatred for the colonizer surface in the consciousness of the colonized people. That is where the term post colonialism comes into play – what happens when two cultures clash and one assumes superiority over the other. Colonialism undeniably calls up a degree of suppression.

Most often this oppression takes the form of a mostly unconscious cultural assimilation – an unknowing indoctrination of the colonialists’ beliefs upon their colonized persons. A post colonial view of history is an entirely relevant undertaking. It enables us to understand what a people have become in the process of a particular form of political and cultural contact.

It tells of an important, even crucial, moment in a process of becoming. It acknowledges that colonialism was a fact of history and an inerasable one. It reminds us that the ex-colonial, in the post-colonial condition, can never be the ‘true’ native again.

Post-colonialism, in this sense, is an age after innocence. Post-colonial history thus becomes the story of the end of old history, of old identities, of nativism. It marks the period of hybridity of cultures and identities.