Westerners, through their Literatures have always
seen Africans as uncivilized, savage and primitive beings. Several times,
Africans are been referred to as 'black monkeys' by the whites and thus,
suffered oppression, humiliation and other forms of ill treatment. An indepth
study of Fugard Authol's Sizwe
Bansi is Dead, Richard
Wright's Black Boy and Native Son, will no doubt
expose you to the pitiable fate of Africans due to the ill treatment they got
from their white counterparts as a result of their skin colour.
Further exposing such menace, this article
examines the stereotypical representation (single story) of Africans by
Westerners through their literatures and how Chinue Achebe, an African writer,
reacts to such stereotype through his first novel, Things Fall Apart. To adequately explain this,
reference will be made to Adichie's talk on the dangers of a single story.
During a talk in TED TALKS, Adichie highlights
the dangers of a single story. According to Adichie, a single story shows a people as one thing; as
only thing over and over again and that thing is what they become. The single
story creates a stereotype and the problem with stereotypes is not that they
are untrue but they are incomplete. They make one story becomes the only story.
Prior to this fact, westerners had a single story
about Africans. This single story about Africans ultimately comes from western
literatures and in these literatures, they portray Africans as savage who
needed to be enlightened by Europeans. For example, here is a quote from the
writing of a merchant called John Locke who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and
kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans
as beasts who have no houses, he writes, “they are also people without head
having their mouth and eyes in their breast.” European writers battered the
African identity.
Another western literature that has a single
story about Africa is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This classic tale
presents Africa as a wild ‘dark’ and ‘uncivilized’ continent. It is a story on
how Europeans oppressed Africans in Africa during colonialism. The story
centers around Marlow, an introspective sailor and his journey up to Congo
river to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities. Marlow
takes a job as a riverboat captain with the company, a Belgian company organized
to trade in the Congo. Marlow encounters widespread inefficiency and brutality
in the company’s station. The native inhabitants(Africans) of the region have
been forced into the company’s service and they suffer terribly from overwork
and ill-treatment at the heads of the company’s agents. Joseph Conrad, in his
novella, portrays Africans as slaves in their own country.
In other to react to this stereotypical
representation on the African identity, African writers began to write to
counter it. Prominent among them was Chinua Achebe and he used his first novel, Things fall Apart to counter Joseph Conrad’s single
story about Africa in his novella, Heart
of Darkness. Through his
emphasis on the harmony and complexity of the Igbo, Achebe contradicts the stereotypical
European representation of Africans as savage. Throughout Achebe’s novel, there
is a practice of sharing kola nuts to emphasize the peacefulness of the Igbos.
Another important way in which Achebe challenges
such stereotypical representation is through his use of language. As Achebe
writes in his essay on Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness: colonialist
Europe tended to perceive Africa as a foil or negation of western cultures and
values, imagining Africa to be a primordial land of silence. But the people of
Umuofia speak a complex language full of proverbs and literary and rhetorical
devices. Achebe’s translation of the Igbo language into English retains the
credence, rhythmic and speech patterns of the language without making them sound
as Conrad did, primitive.
In chapter 4-6, Achebe puts out another aspect of
the Igbo culture that colonialist Europe tended to ignore- the existence of
subcultures within a given African population. Each clan has its own stories
and Ikemefuna is an existing addition to the Umuofia people because he brings
with him new and unfamiliar folktales. All the stories Ikemefuna tells
Okonkwo’s children are unfamiliar to them. Achebe is able to remind us that the
story we are reading is not about Africa but rather about one specific culture
within Africa. He thus combats the European tendency to see all Africans as one
and the same.
Again, Achebe uses the incident that happens at
the end of the novel to tell Conrad that he knows nothing about Africa. When
the district commissioner comes to arrest Okonkwo for killing his messenger, he
finds out that Okonkwo has committed suicide and in the culture of the Igbo
people, suicide is an abomination. The body of one who commits suicide is not
touched by his villagers; only persons from another village can take this body
to the evil forest and drop it there. However, the District commissioner is not
aware of this tradition so on his arrival, he orders Oberika and other
villagers to bring down Okonkwo’s lifeless body. He only becomes aware of this
tradition when Oberika tells him about it. So Achebe tries to tell Conrad that
he knows nothing about Africa and even if he does, he is been told by an
African.
In sum, a single story about a particular people
robs them of their identity. It makes their recognition of equal humanity
difficult and emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar
and until we reject the single story, we cannot regain paradise.