Rewriting the Colonial Past: The Role of Historical Trauma in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Decolonising the Mind

Abstract

This paper examines the treatment of historical trauma in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Decolonising the Mind. Achebe’s novel depicts the pre-colonial Igbo civilization, its destruction by the British imperialists, and the ensuing disorders, both psychological and societal, resulting from colonial rule. His character, Okonkwo, illustrates the fight for self-identity as he confronts cultural disintegration, and the novel becomes an act of literary defiance against colonial degradation. On the other hand, Ngũgĩ’s theoretical work examines the phenomenon of linguistic imperialism, claiming that the language does not only serve as a means of communication and culture, but as a tool of oppression when it was English that separated the Africans from their identity. He claims that there is a need to mentally decolonize and assert cultural sovereignty through the adoption of local tongues. This article identifies the intersection of identity recovery, the impact of colonialism on the psyche, and the use of language in resistant literature that is addressed with divergent strategies in the two texts. This study draws attention to the need to transform colonial narratives that incorporate and confront the trauma of history through literature to expose the reality behind how and why these narratives were created in the first place.