And so I’ve been jotting down on the notebook and flipping random book pages while occasionally scanning random .pdf titles as the Slovenian cultural theorist babbles in the background: all clear signs of my present state of retardation, stuck as I am in this present state of being unproductive. And indeed idleness, I remember my high school catechist sermoned, is the workshop of the devil: or perhaps this is just another signifier of how, as a friend always cautioned, the specter of the productive discourse continues to haunt the contemporary period.
So dismissing my friend’s (imaginary) advise to simply surrender to the endless play of meaningless signifiers, I attempt something more worthwhile upon which I can anchor my drifting attention. Yes, the other guy (the one who is not my friend) is still deploying black humor orally in his stilted Slavic English in the background but I’ve stopped attempting to decipher them. So I decide to blog (how productive): a brief comment should suffice.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a fine little novel about the dissolution of a traditional African tribal society in Nigeria with the coming of European colonizers. I loved Achebe’s rich descriptions of the political, economic, and cultural life of this society.
Achebe concretely showed how this society had the requisites for progressing into a more advanced social formation. But at the same time, he also laid bare the weaknesses and contradictions in the native structure that became instrumental in the colonizer’s gaining the upperhand. In fact my favorite passage from the novel comes from the last part, when much of this traditional society already fell apart:
The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such indignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (191)
Loved that last bit for the way it played on how the colonizers utilizes a seemingly impartial and thus more authoritative writing in the form of history to forward their hegemony. In this passage, Achebe exposes the colonialist and class interests at work behind the supposed neutrality of a colonialist prose that is classified as history. Achebe shows the complicity of such a discourse to counter-insurgency and the legitimization of the colonizers’ rule at a time when such texts are still considered as objective accounts of historical junctures. ■
I’ve been meaning to reread this. Thanks for the reminder!