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Week 5 -Context Research for “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe

In order to understand the reading this week, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, allow me to widen your scope on Achebe’s life. Chinua Achebe was born November 15,  1930 in a place called Ogidi, Nigeria.  At this point in history, Nigeria had recently become British Protectorate only 30 years prior, and the constant reclassifying of different sections of the country by the British made it difficult for the Nigerian natives to unite and push the British out (historyworld.net). The British were using Nigeria as a source for raw materials and manufacturing British goods all while building railroads. As they did this, missionaries flooded the country in order to “civilize” people and evangelize to the natives. Unfortunately, this sometimes meant that the. Missionaries used their religion as a means of controlling the natives.  During World War two, when Chinua would have been a young adult by now the Nigerian economy was taken control of by the British because of “war time efforts”.  The country would suffer from this for years to come. 

Meanwhile, Chinua Achebe was growing up amidst an interesting time in Nigeria. Achebe’s mother and father, although natives of the Igbo Tribe, had left their tradition religion and had begun to follow Christianity which Achebe was brought up in. It was in Achebe’s youth that he would notice this and his curiosity for his native religions would spark. According to notablebiographies.com, “Achebe was unhappy with books about Africa written by British authors such as Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and John Buchan (1875–1940), because he felt the descriptions of African people were inaccurate and insulting.” This is a very good example of a topic we covered last week, Spivak’s question of “Can the subaltern speak?” In colonizing Nigeria and speaking and writing on their behalf, the British men effectively stole the voices of many Natives because the British men had already written their opinions and ideas of how the Nigerians behaved, and thus creating an environment where the Nigerian’s could barley speak for themselves. The Nigerians had almost become the subaltern of their own land because they were not treated the same as the white colonizers. In an article from the New York Times, Achebe said “In the end, I began to understand…There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.” This is very true of how the British would organize  stories about the natives to discredit them and isolate them from the world. 

Achebe wanted to combat this and while working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, he composed Things Fall Apart, which immediately took the world by interest. The novel went on to become a play that would even go as far as preforming in the United States where they were apart of the Kennedy’s Center African Odyssey Series. Achebe would go on to be a very accomplished writer and teacher of others. He worked in many notable universities such as Brown, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts and University of Nigeria. In the later portion of his life, he was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident while visiting Nigeria and afterward, he moved to the United States to teach at Bard. He was given honorary degrees from Universities around the world as well as many other prizes before his death in 2013. 

Works Cited

(n.d.). Retrieved from http://countrystudies.us/nigeria/53.htm. 

Chinua Achebe. (2020, June 17). Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.biography.com/writer/chinua-achebe 

Chinua Achebe Biography. (n.d.). Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.notablebiographies.com/A-An/Achebe-Chinua.html 

Kandell, J. (2013, March 22). Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://. www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/world/africa/chinua-achebe-nigerian-writer-dies-at-82.html