Things Fall Apart Essay on Colonization

A historically common tactic excercised by flourishing nations is colonization. Colonization is the process in which one country attempts to gain control of the other by establishing settlements and enforcing their foreign culture without formally declaring war. Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart" focuses on the Caucasian colonization of a fictitious African tribe known as the Igbo. Although presented with the benevolent intention of "spreading their culture to the 'primitive' nonwhites," the tyrannical qualitites of the colonization did not positively affect the Ibo people; The colonization stripped the tribe of their traditions and resulted in the extermination of a thoroughly developed African culture.
The primary negative effect that the Caucasian colonization had upon the Igbo was their abomination to the Ibo faith: Christianity. Unlike the Ibo, the Caucasians were descendents of a monotheistic religion. Upon their arrival to the tribe, the Christian missionarries immediately commenced their plan to "depurate" the area of polytheistic practices by "ask[ing] [the Ibo] to leave their wicked ways and false gods and turn to [God]" (Achebe 145).   The religious monopolization continued as the Christians established churches and "built a place of judgement...to protect the followers of their religion" (Achebe 155). With time, the extremeties of the missionaries' attempts to rid the tribe of the Igbo faith "had..overstep[ped] the bounds. [They] had gone into the village and boasted openly that all the [Igbo's] gods were dead and impotent and that they were prepared to defy them by burning all their shrines," conveying their intent to annihilate all faith intertwined with Igbo customs (Achebe 154). The Caucasians had minute acceptance for the Igbo's holy traditions. They promptly deemed them to be incorrect and apocryphal, thus violating the tribe's freedom to practice their aboriginal culture. The Caucasians had engendered the unnecessary depletion of...