Post-colonialism in Things Fall Apart

             I believe that Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe would be best analyzed through the post-colonial lens. In the beginning of the story, the author concentrates on the hegemony of Umuofia. We learn about Umuofia’s “dominant values, sense of right and wrong, and sense of personal self-worth” before the white colonists appear (234).

            When the colonizers appear, there is a clash between two hegemonies. Both hold strongly to their own beliefs while understanding each other’s cultures and way of life. In the end there can only be one dominant culture while the other is told to “conform and be quiet; deny yourself, and all will be well” (234). The dominant hegemony tries to make the lesser culture conform to their religion by telling them that their gods do not exist and that there is only one God. They take in the unwanted, such as twins and outcasts and make it seem as a kind religion with kind white men. But the religion is used as a front to justify “their cruel treatment of the colonized” that they deem as “heathens” that must be saved (236).  Their true objective is the power to control Umofia and take their natural resources while offering them products that the colonized “were made to believe they desired by the colonizers” (236). The colonizers had “built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia” (Achebe 146). This is used as a distraction, while the white colonists try to turn them into slaves with no power to make their own choices.

            While they had power and a well formed government, the colonizers only saw savages who abandoned twins and mauled dead children. They were seen as uncivilized humans who “quickly became the inferior and equally ‘evil’ Others” (236). This concept is called alternity, where the “others,” who were in power and had respect, are seen “as different and inferior” humans, or subhumans (236).

Sacrafice of Humanity forTechnopoly

Neil Postman states that for a long time humanity has lived in a technocracy but has gradually moved into technopoly. In technocracy, technology and tradition “coexisted in uneasy tension” with technology being the stronger of the two opposing forces, but tradition could not be ignored (48). In Brave New World the reservation in New Mexico serves as the traditional part of the world that still exists, remains functional, and is “still too much alive to ignore” (48). Unfortunately, in that society, they do not treat it as something meaningful or relevant but something to look at curiously because they had never seen anything like it within their own technologically advanced world. Their society is not a technocracy but a technopoly. Postman describes technopoly as a society without tradition, where everything is redefined to suit this “totalitarian technocracy” (48). Postman refers to Brave New World as to what technopoly does to tradition. In the new society family no longer exists, there is no God, and what is immoral is sharing love with one person and staying with him/her.

Postman also discusses Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management. In it, Taylor says that the primary goal of “human labor and thought is efficiency” and that workers would be relieved of ay thought process or responsibilities because “the system would do the thinking for them” (51). Brave New World shows just how far society would go for efficiency. The new society creates humans programed to do a certain job in a certain part of the world to keep production moving and to assure that no one will rebel. Every one of the humans is given enough intelligence to do their work, so in a sense the society is doing the thinking for them. In addition to humanity not having to think it would also be treated as machinery. Frederick Taylor surmises that “society is best served when human beings are placed at the disposal of their techniques and technology” and that “human beings are, in a sense, worth less than their machinery” (52). Society has to survive by using and, like in Brave New World, recycling humans. This makes humans no better than machines because both could be easily replaced after they stop working.