Things Fall Apart: A Reaction to Colonial Accounts of Africa

Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958, was the first novel by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. It presented an account of the time when colonial powers started creeping into the native societies and started destroying their culture in order to gain power and dominance. Acknowledged as a classic in the modern African Literature, it is a kind of counter discourse where the novelist has made an impressive attempt to reassert the native identity in its actual naked form. Set in Eastern Nigeria, the novel challenges the misrepresentations of the native by the writers of the so-called civilized western society. The colonial accounts of the native, even the most sympathetic ones, asserted that the society here has no organised system or culture. As outsiders, they are not able to delve deep into the local systems to comprehend the complexity of their community life. The present paper is a humble attempt to study the novel Things Fall Apart as a counter discourse in reaction to the colonial accounts of Africa.