How does colonialism persist in the 21st century? What is Eurocentrism and how does it manifest? Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart may have been set in the past, but it offers up complex answers to these queries, which I’ll be exploring today in this book analysis!
Warning: major spoilers ahead! If you want a spoiler-free review of Things Fall Apart, then check out my book review.
Things Fall Apart may have taken place during the early days of European colonization in Nigeria, but it doesn’t just capture a relic of the past. It also captures our present reality. Achebe’s masterpiece exposes how European culture, ideas, and perspectives continue to dominate the world today, and how we as a society lose a lot by focusing our attention on just this one viewpoint.
Things Fall Apart exposes the Eurocentrism of our present reality, and this was communicated in the novel through its use of two drastically different tones.
FIRST TONE: OKONKWO'S POV
I want to draw your attention on the language of the novel; specifically, the two different tones used to embody two different perspectives.
The first tone concerns Okonkwo’s viewpoint. Things Fall Apart is pretty much told from this Igbo warrior’s perspective. The tone is lively and even somewhat transcendental, as Okonkwo and his people frequently use allegories and tales to talk to each other. For them, story is an important and valuable part of communication.
I noticed that when communicating an argument, the Igbo people use not evidence, not science, not case studies–but proverbs to really drive home their points.
There’s so much sound and movement in the word choice too, and this lively narration immerses the reader in Okonkwo’s village life, full of rituals and performance.
SECOND TONE: THE COMMISSIONER'S POV
But then, we get to the last paragraph of the entire novel, where the tone dramatically and jarringly shifts. This is after Okonkwo kills himself, and the English Commissioner finds his body hanging from a tree.
The entirety of Things Fall Apart unfolded from Okonkwo’s point of view, except for this single last paragraph. Here, we suddenly shift to the Commissioner’s point of view. And unlike the colorful language we’ve become familiar with, this last paragraph is cold and detached.
For instance, the following lines are so clinical and impersonal: “He had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree.” It’s such a huge departure from the lively tone used in the novel thus far. It’s chilling that a highly devastating event like a suicide was written in this cold, detached way. What struck me actually was that this whole paragraph mimics academic writing, whereby the norm is to write impersonally.
The line, “One could almost write a whole chapter on him,” for example, refers to the Commissioner as “one” instead of “he.” This is similar to how researchers refer to themselves in the third person in their research papers.
The phrase, “new material,” emphasizes this academic language as well. Okonkwo’s struggles, desires, and life are packaged as a neat case study to be inserted into the Commissioner’s new book, as mere evidence to prove whatever point the Commissioner is going to argue about Africa in his book.
This academic language is made explicitly clear with the last line, “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.” This book that the Commissioner plans to write sounds like an actual academic text. Some books written by early anthropologists, for example, were: The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (Malinowski), The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (Frazer), and Phenomena of the Higher Civilisation: Traceable to a Rudimental Origin among Savage Tribes (Tylor).
I think there’s a deliberate reason why the novel suddenly shifts to the Commissioner’s point of view in the very last paragraph. Why the tone shifts from a mystical quality to one that’s academic and scientific. And that’s to connect this history of colonization to the present Eurocentric moment.
DEFINING EUROCENTRISM
First of all, what is Eurocentrism? It’s a cultural phenomenon in which “Europe, more specifically Western Europe or ‘the West,’ functions as a universal signifier in that it assumes the superiority of European cultural values over those of non-European societies” (Pokhrel, 2011).
We see this constructed superiority in the last paragraph of the novel. Europeans have historically labelled Africans as “savages,” “tribes,” and “primitive.” And there’s inherent inferiority with those labels.
Take a look at the book titles themselves. These “savages” and “tribes” are the objects of the propositions. “Of the Primitive Tribes.” “Of savages.” “In Primitive Religion.” “Among Savage Tribes.” Similar to how Africans are the objects of these book titles, Europeans turned Africans into their objects of study. In this way, Europeans rid Africans of their autonomy, and in doing so they can justify the superiority of their cultural values over them.
Achebe also thinks that language has the ability to expose who’s claiming to be superior over another. In an interview, he said that he didn’t like the use of the word “tribe” because it’s always associated with the primitive. He said it’s very important that when we’re in a conversation with another, that we must treat each other as equals. Achebe said that dialogue between equals is what’s most useful in the end, and labelling the other party as “primitive” is only counter-productive.
PRESENT-DAY EUROCENTRISM
This type of Eurocentrism is less in-your-face now, but it’s still there. According to the definition above, the West functions as a universal signifier under a Eurocentric society. This means that the West likes to represent its values and experiences as universal, when in fact they’re just representing the Western perspective.
For example, Things Fall Apart immerses the readers in an African perspective–of a worldview that centers on storytelling, community, and proverbs. So suddenly shifting in the end to a European perspective–of a worldview that centers on evidence, science, and impartiality–de-naturalizes this European perspective.
Instead of calling the European perspective as European, however, modern society continues to see it as universal, objective, and neutral. This is because we live in a Eurocentric world, where European culture is considered neutral. A blank slate. An objective culture. I mean, there’s a reason why we often say white people have no culture; white culture has become invisible because we take it for granted as the norm in which other cultures are benchmarked against.
For example, when it comes to taking care of the environment, most people would disregard indigenous knowledge and instead turn to scientific knowledge. This is despite the fact that indigenous peoples have been living closely with the environment for hundreds of years already. Why? Well, a big reason is that we consider the best knowledge as ones that are “impartial” and objective. And in a Eurocentric world, it’s science that’s regarded as impartial and objective, not indigenous knowledge.
This is one of the things we lose in a Eurocentric mode of thinking. We don’t think stories, proverbs, and generational wisdom are good enough for knowing certain things because our benchmark for good knowledge is always objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality–a worldview that’s so eerily similar to that represented by the Commissioner’s language from Things Fall Apart.
This is what Achebe does so brilliantly in the novel; he dismantles the Eurocentric worldview by immersing us in an alternative. Okonkwo and his people use stories and proverbs to convey knowledge and to form arguments. There’s imagination, emotion, and faith with this line of thinking. No one pretends to be impartial to anything, and people acknowledge how interconnected they are with each other.
Some academic disciplines have slowly been embracing this too. A lot of researchers, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, acknowledge the subjectivity of their experiences when they write papers. There’s a trend to write in the first person point of view instead of referring to themselves in the third person. When they research a community, they disclose their ties to the community, their background, and their experiences in the research process to inform the reader of inevitable biases. Some researchers have even embraced narrative storytelling itself as a way to communicate research findings, which is pretty incredible.
Of course, there’s a place for trying to be as objective as possible. What I argue is that 1) we have to be careful whose perspective it is we consider objective, and that 2) rationality shouldn’t be the only way to understand the world. Rationality is only part of our humanity, yet this mode of thinking is still considered superior because of Eurocentrism, a worldview that again, puts a premium on rationality and impartiality.
So you see, in Things Fall Apart, it wasn’t just a people that was colonized, not just a place–but also a perspective, a culture, and a way of looking at the world. And we’re still living through its consequences today. Paying attention to the differences between Okonkwo’s vibrant language and that of the Commissioner’s cold, detached language tells us as much.
CONCLUSION: AN IMBALANCE OF STORIES
This Eurocentrism of the world is what Achebe calls an “imbalance of stories,” and he states it’s a serious problem.
Achebe wants different perspectives to be treated equally, and Things Fall Apart does this by putting an African perspective front and center. When we knock European thought from being the superior way of understanding the world, then we can finally move away from colonialism. When we treat other ways of knowing as equally important, then we can have a more inclusive and richer understanding of the world.
To close, I want to leave you with some of Achebe’s most impactful words from an interview he did with Bill Moyers.
What are your thoughts on Things Fall Apart? Let me know in the comments! I can go on and on about this book because I just find so much value in it.
If you want to read other books that challenge your thinking, you might also like my article on where to start with feminism where I discuss the best 4 books to read for beginners.
Thanks so much for reading!
— Alyanna
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
African Views: Chinua Achebe & Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (The News Hour with Jim Lehrer)
After Empire (The New Yorker)
An African Voice (The Atlantic)
An Evening with Chinua Achebe (Library of Congress)
Bill Moyers with Chinua Achebe (A World of Ideas)
Eurocentrism (Encyclopedia of Global Justice)
Eurocentrism (Universität Bielefeld Center for InterAmerican Studies)
I like your discussion of the book, especially in which you have pointed out the change in POV esp. at the end of the novel. Also, I think that the title alone implies an outcome if a country (in this case, Africa) continued to be Eurocentric rather than focusing on its own culture.
By the way, have you read Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Country”? It’s a lesser known work compared to “Things Fall Apart”, but I am positive that you would love it.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I looked up “Cry the Beloved Country” just now and wow, people seem to love it so much. I’ll surely give it a read, thanks!