Cultural Clash and the Manichean Translation of African Culture in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Colonial languages have caused a serious epistemological upheaval in the mind of Africa. Many aspects of African cultural identity are lost due to the failure of these languages to name concepts that do not exist in the semantic scope of the colonial linguistic structures. This article studies Chinua Achebe’s attempt to write back to the colonial discourse which has for a long translated African culture in Manichean ways that are informed by racist ideologies, most of which are used to maintain concepts and definitions rooted mainly in the anthropological imagination. Highlighting semantic gaps and ambiguities in the colonial representation of African culture, he commits himself, through his novel Things Fall Apart, to establish the ontological and epistemological perspectives of African cultural identity in an artistic manner. This novel becomes a narrative space that reflects the ideological struggle between the culture of the colonizer and the colonized for social and political dominance.