Things Fall Apart: Tracing the Tools and Means of Constructing Colonial Historiography

Abstract

History is a political tool. It is a tool of power either to the exploited or to the exploiters based on the narration of it. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart witnesses the pre-colonial, under-colonial and post-colonial phases of Igbo society, a territory that represents colonized Africa or to some extent, all the colonized societies. This paper aims at illustrating the tools and the means incorporated to strengthen the base of imperialist interests marginalizing the historical narratives of the local “other” people. Therefore, this study explores the tools, like religion, education and administration, and the means, like the church, missionary and administrative system which are used by the colonial rulers to prevail hegemony in the novel. To this end, Edward Said’s Orientalist Discourse and French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s article ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ in which he has discussed discourse of State Apparatuses like Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus which will constitute the cornerstone of this study. Thus, this paper will contribute and enrich the existing African, Caribbean and postcolonial literatures and come up with a new approach – Things Fall Apart: Tracing the Tools and Means of Constructing Colonial Historiography.