Reclaiming the African Voice: Identity, Resistance, and Language in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Abstract

This study explores Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart through a postcolonial lens, with a focus on the interrelated themes of identity, resistance, and language. Grounded in the significance of Achebe's novel as a foundational African text that confronts colonial discourse, this study aims to examine how the novel reconstructs African identity, describes diverse forms of resistance, and how the writer employs linguistic hybridity to reclaim suppressed voices. The study fills a significant gap in the available literature and considers these fundamental dimensions as separate, rather than as fused strands of a postcolonial expression. Employing qualitative content analysis, the study involves a close reading of the novel in conjunction with a review of recent scholarly literature published between 2018 and 2024. The results indicate that Things Fall Apart composes, colludes with, or integrates the negotiation of identity, anti-colonial struggle, and the politics of language into a single decolonial narrative. Achebe's use of Igbo proverbs and oral traditions in English not only challenges colonial language control but also empowers disadvantaged groups, aligning with important postcolonial ideas. The study contributes to African literary and postcolonial studies by offering an integrated analytical framework. It recommends further interdisciplinary research, comparative literary analyses across postcolonial regions, and the adoption of this framework in academic curricula to promote critical engagement with colonial legacies and the politics of voice.