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Disillusioned Expectations of Post-Independence Epoch in Chinua Achebe’s Selected Novels



Author(s)

Hossein Karamiamidabadi, Jalal Sokhanvar

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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2014.09.006

Islamic Azad University (Karaj Branch), Karaj, Iran
Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Islamic Azad University (Tehran Central Branch), Tehran, Iran

The phenomena that have penetrated deep into the flesh of Africa and shattered the dreams of glory in this dark land are colonialism and postcolonialism. According to these political and social upheavals caused by the arrival of the white men to the dark land, some questions flash into the conscious mind as to whether national consciousness, which was forged by the native intellectuals and even some literati, managed to achieve a cornucopia of delights pursued in the anticolonial period. The other controversial question that springs to mind is whether national bourgeoisie, who came to power by the annihilation of the colonial power, helped to establish social and political change for the betterment of society as a whole. By raising these fundamental questions, the researcher strives to shed light on the duplicitous role of national consciousness and native intellectuals in pre- and post-independent epochs based on Frantz Fanon’s “Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in his seminal book The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Interestingly enough, all these cataclysmic colonial and postcolonial events can be analyzed in Chinua Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart (1959), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In other words, the unbridgeable differences between the ideologies in anticolonial and postcolonial eras, which brought disillusionment in post-independent time among the indigenous people, lie in the lines of these novels.

colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, national consciousness, native intellectuals, national bourgeoisie