Virender Pal
Department of English, University College Kurukshetra. ORCID: 0000-0003-3569-1289. Email: p2vicky@gmail.com
Volume 10, Number 2, 2018 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n2.15
Received January 11, 2017; Revised March 15, 2018; Accepted March 25, 2018; Published May 07, 2018.
Abstract
In the postcolonial world the literary writers and postcolonial theorists have made immense contributions to piercing through the veil of the policies of colonialism. While the theories of the theorists written by Colonialism remain and are read and understood by a privileged few, literature is read by people across all the cultures and nationalities. Chinua Achebe is one of the most important name among such writers who have contributed immensely to postcolonial studies. His novels show that colonialism was an enterprise to plunder the natural resources of the enslaved countries in the name of spreading the light of civilization. This spreading of light of civilization lead to the annihilation of local cultures as the local cultures were systematically obliterated and replaced with the alien white culture. His first novel Things Fall Apart was written as a reply to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel asserted that Africa was civilized before the arrival of the whites. In No Longer at Ease (1960) he studies the impact of sustained colonial rule on his people. The current paper is a study of Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease and Things Fall Apart. The novesl shows that the indigenous culture and religion was the best for the Africans. The imposition of an alien culture has created intractable problems for the Nigerians and the remedy lies only in going back to the roots, to the Ibo “commonsense.”
Keywords: colonialism, Christianity, Ibo, Africa, corruption.
