Colonial Africa: Achebe, Oyono, Camara Laye

Abstract

One unforgettable image in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is of a bicycle tied to a sacred silk-cotton tree. Its owner was a white man, the first to intrude on the Ibo of the region; he has been killed because the Oracle warns that his kind will ‘spread destruction’ (Chapter 15). The bicycle is secured lest it ‘run away’ to tell what has happened. Animist interpretation, here, lags only a little behind technological invention, although a space-probe can communicate without moving. Bicycle mechanics are easily understood once initial surprise is overcome; they were new machines in the white world at the end of the nineteenth century as well as in Africa, and by inaugurating individual mechanised transport, they were a revolution which has affected almost everyone. Trust in such power as that of a sacred tree belongs to a different approach to things from that which results in bicycles, and neither has ever succeeded in ousting the other. Achebe is struck by the meeting of a culture mostly ruled by the sacred with a culture mostly devoted to the mechanical. The point of view is that of a mind to whom both are familiar, and historically placed.