Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, has continued to offer—perhaps much more than his third novel, Arrow of God—the most vivid account of the process of early colonial penetration in Africa. This study examines Things Fall Apart through an analytical and conceptual framework that illuminates the five stages of colonialism in Africa. These five stages (exploration, expropriation, appropriation, exploitation, and justification) were necessary in order for colonialism to become both an effective tool for domination and a successful tool of domination; as such, they provide powerful glimpses into Achebe’s fictional representation of the cataclysm embodied by colonial intrusion, not only within the confines of the fictional Igbo universe that he depicts, but also throughout a sub-Saharan African world whose cultural and sociopolitical ethos were shaken to their core. An analysis of these stages, therefore, leads to an understanding of colonialism that defines it not as a series of specific historical events, spaces, and places, but rather as a process or a series of psycho-historical processes with a certain number of inescapable features that conspired to make it an effective tool of and for sustained political, cultural, and economic domination in sub-Saharan Africa. Achebe’s novel can be used as a tool that can help to decipher and foreground the psycho-historical processes inherent in what, ultimately, may be called “the psychology of colonialism.”

This essay places Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman in various comparative contexts. These include the comparison with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, literary tragedy, and world literature. Setting out the difficulties in teaching African and minority literatures in the Euro-American classroom, the essay details the means by which such problems are negotiated and the ways in which the text is brought alive as a dramatic text that speaks to various themes and ideas.