Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

2151 Words5 Pages

The belief in African inferiority has existed since at least the 16th century. The 17th and 18th centuries saw European scientists going to great lengths to find scientific proof of the inferiority of Africans, even the theory that Africans were the descendants of apes who raped white women was accepted during the 17th century. Europeans used their belief that Africans were primitive, cultureless subhuman beings to justify the enslavement of what UNESCO estimates to be between 25 and 30 million Africans between the late 17th and early 19th centuries. With the exceptions of Brazil, Puerto Rico and Cuba, slavery in the Western world had been abolished by 1870, yet the belief in African inferiority continued throughout Europe and the United States. Europeans had previously been unable to penetrate the interior of the African continent because of the treacherous conditions and diseases, especially malaria, however by the 1870s, advances in European technology brought on by the Industrial Revolution allowed Europeans not only to progress further into Africa, but also gave them a hunger for Africa’s raw materials. To justify their conquest of Africa, Europeans advanced the theory that Africans were primitive in the key fields of behavior, social order, economic structure and religion. In 1958, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, in which he gives a fictional account of an Ibo man named Okonkwo and his life in the village of Umofia and the surrounding region. Achebe’s description of Ibo culture however is very real and challenges the beliefs Europeans have held about Africans and their culture.
The European powers entered Africa with the belief that Africans were naturally violent and bestial people, yet Things Fall ...

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...t Africans are un-cultured or un-intelligent. Even today, African culture does not get the same kind of respect given to cultures in other parts of the world; this may be due to the lack of understanding on the part of Westerners. The title of the District Commissioner’s book “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” sums up the lack of interest in truly understanding African culture. In a world in which Western culture dominates, Africa remains a place where many people refuse to part with their traditions, they may adopt certain characteristics from other culture, but they never part with who they are. Achebe shows that cultures in Africa are worth protecting and worth studying and worth understanding.

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