Things Fall Apart

Prehistory. History. Post history. It is evidence of the arrogance of Occidental culture and discourse that even the concept of history should be turned into a colony whose borders, validations, structures and configurations, even life tenure, are solely and entirely decided by the West. When the race for Africa had begun Africa ceased to exist for it was devastated and torn apart by the European arrival. Europe's need for territorial expansion and accumulation of wealth lead to the creation of the new World Wide Web, a creation that annihilated many cultures, one of these being Igboland presented in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in present day Nigeria.

Un-invaded Africa was a land that for most of the transition from the Old World Web to the New World Wide Web had remained relatively unscathed. Africa is particularly unique when it comes to geographic terms. The continent is almost entirely free of any major bays, inlets, peninsulas, and promontories, making it less lucrative for its inhabitants to develop advanced navigational skills like the neighbors found in the north. In the north, Africa is plagued with a nearly impenetrable desert, the Sahara. A lush thick forest and monumental rivers such as the Niger and the Nile cover the middle of the continent. The continent possessed vast quantities of gold, fertile land and usable people, all things that the power hungry Europeans countries wanted.

The Portuguese were the first to venture into the African continent in the 1400s, and what began as a friendly and equal trading partnership between the Portuguese and the Africans led to one of the world's cruelest developments, the exception and annihilation of pre-colonial Africa. Not long after the initial interactions between the Portuguese and the Africans, Gonsalves, a Portuguese explorer, captured a small group of Africans and turned them into slaves. Slave trade became a profitable business, and when the rest of the European countries, beginning with the Dutch and then finally the English, saw this "The Scramble for Africa" began.

After the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807, the British began to combine aggressive trading with aggressive imperialism. The tensions that consumed the European powers and their search for colonies lead to the partitioning of Africa in The Berlin Conference. The conference was held between delegates of fourteen European nations and the United States and it set the rules for the division of the continent. At the conference, there was no African present. In 1900, Igboland, an area that had been controlled by the Royal Niger Company became a protectorate in Southern Nigeria, and long before it had officially been conquered, Igboland was being treated as a British colony. The Igbo people were in fact resistant to the British colonial rule and with the help of the trading companies and Parliament the British subdued the resistance. Chinua Achebe once said, "One big message, of the many I try to put across, is that Africa wan not in a vacuum before the coming of Europe, that culture was not unknown in Africa, that culture was not brought to Africa by the white world. " Pre-colonial Africa possessed perhaps as many as 10,000 different states and polities characterized by different sorts of political organization and rule. Sooner than later imperialism began to take form in missionaries and with them came the disruption of the tribal way of life.

Chinua Achebe was born thirty years after the creation of Nigeria and thirty years before it obtained independence. He was raised in the village of Ogidi and experienced firsthand the British colonization of Nigeria and Igboland. He like many Africans