Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Note: The following article was written by Malek Owera L6 (20oweram@students.watfordboys.org)
The colonial literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had a profound impact on Chinua Achebe’s future literary output. At his secondary school, Government College Umuahia, also known as the “Eton of the East”, he encountered the works of Rudyard Kipling (a “champion” of the British Empire) and Joseph Conrad (author of ‘Heart of Darkness’), among others. Decades later, he would write that during his education, he “did not see [himself] as an African”.
He also added that when reading stories such as Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, a novella with various critical responses regarding colonialist and racist attitudes, he “took sides with the white men against the savages”. Achebe’s 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ is considered one of the first* novels to be written from the perspective of colonised, rather than the coloniser.
By writing ‘Things Fall Apart’, Achebe intended to dismantle the stereotype of “savagery” which he had previously absorbed in colonial literature. Instead of viewing Africa through a romanticized or derogatory European lens (i.e. capitulating to the “single story”), the novel provides an insider's perspective on the Ibo society of Umuofia. Achebe details their complex social structures, judicial systems, religious beliefs, and artistic traditions, proving that Africa was not a spiritual void waiting to be enlightened by Europe, but a thriving civilization with its own history. The author does not desperately attempt to prove that Ibo civilisation was an analog to that of Europe (which likely would have resulted in a novel with little more insight than Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’) - rather Achebe writes a true depiction of life in pre-colonial Umuofia.
The protagonist of the novel, Okonkwo, is an exemplar of Chinua Achebe’s commitment to nuance for his debut novel. Rather than creating a flawless, idealized figure to perfectly counterbalance colonial stereotypes, Achebe presents a character who suffers from a mixture of internal anxieties (e.g. his disdain for his “weak” father, and his resulting abhorrence of weakness) and external colonial pressure (e.g. the societal change which occurs when the Church is set up in the Evil Forest, and traditional beliefs are contradicted). Okonkwo’s obsession with masculinity and fear of being perceived as weak - mirroring his disdain for his unaccomplished father - leads him to commit acts of extreme violence, such as taking part (and likely dealing the killing blow) in the killing of his adoptive son, Ikemefuna. It is easy to envision a Heart of Darkness-esque representation of this scene, focusing on the “savagery” of the action, and neglecting all of the deep internal conflict Okonkwo feels following the killing. Fortunately, one of Achebe’s main objectives with this novel was to circumvent the decontextualised and dehumanised portrayals of African characters, which is also a major element of other postcolonial stories of the time.
Frontispiece to the 1837 New York pamphlet, 'Narrative of the Capture. Sufferings and Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Eliza Fraser'
Achebe’s use of language is one of the most significant postcolonial elements of ‘Things Fall Apart’. The novel is of course written in the English language, but idioms and Ibo loanwords are abundant. By embedding untranslated words like “chi” and “obi”, he forces the Western reader to engage with the culture on its own terms. He uses a similar technique when presenting the language used by spirits and the gods:
Achebe was raised Protestant, but with the development of postcolonial theory he started to gain a more varied outlook on religion as a whole. In this extract from the novel (from Chapter Eleven) he opts to keep the speech of the priestess of ‘Agbala’ in its original esoteric form rather than translating it, as is done for normal day-to-day speech. In a literary landscape with emphasis on Christianity as the ‘default’, other religions and their practices were often nothing more than a target of derision for a European audience. Achebe’s defiance of this norm, by treating traditional Ibo spirituality with seriousness, is a clear marker of the movement away from accepted ideas of ‘savagery’ and towards a postcolonial stance.
In conclusion, ‘Things Fall Apart’ remains an essential postcolonial text in Nigerian and African literary history, reclaiming the African narrative from the distorting lens of Western colonialism. Achebe does not surrender to one-sided narratives about African “savagery” which plagued the colonial works of writing like Kipling and Conrad; rather he wrote a novel on the terms of the colonised party. The novel stands out especially for its refusal to translate essential Ibo terms; this signals that while written for a European audience, ‘Things Fall Apart’ was part of a new movement of novelists who wanted their works to transcend the established stereotypes of Africa and African characters.
* ‘Things Fall Apart’ was not the first European-audience novel to have an African protagonist - for example, Joyce Cary’s novel ‘Mister Johnson’ was published in 1939, and has a Nigerian protagonist. However, as with many novels written by British colonial administrators, ‘Mister Johnson’ does not render Ibo society quite as authentically as ‘Things Fall Apart’; Achebe himself called Cary’s novel “a most superficial picture” in a 1972 interview.
Sources and bibliography:
https://culture.pl/en/article/africans-in-joseph-conrads-books-what-do-they-really-say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_College_Umuahia
https://massolit.io/courses/chinua-achebe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Darkness
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_burden.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Johnson_(novel)
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