Angst and Anxieties: Historical and Psychological Parallels in Chinua Achebe’s Trilogy

Abstract

African Literatures in English begin with Chinua Achebe for his seminal handling of the historical and psychological realities of the Africans in his English writing. A genuine effort that Achebe has made for liberating Nigerian history and mind from all kinds of illusions and prejudices of the European colonizers has given him a permanent status among the world famous writers. He has discovered a new way of looking at the history and psychology of his people with an anthropological and ethnographic quest into the social, political, cultural, ideological, pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial realities of Nigeria and, above all, Africa. Achebe’s investigation demonstrates that all kinds of problems of the life of the Africans arose from the moment when they lost their initiative and identity to the colonizers. The co-existence of differing cultures and values was an inescapable reality in African societies. With the advent of the colonizers, this reality turned into angst and anxieties for the locals, because they became both unhappy for the colonial enslavement and interested in embracing the values of Western civilization in which they had been initiated. Angst and anxieties that emerge out of this ambivalent situation have become one of the major themes of African literatures. As a historically conscious writer, Achebe has used this theme in his trilogy with a view to portraying the realities of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. This work aims at probing into the angst and anxieties of the relationship between the natives and the colonizers from historical and psychological perspectives. It is a thematic assessment of mainly Achebe’s trilogy in theoretical backdrop. But, for the fortification of arguments, I have focused on two more of his novels, essays, interviews, short stories and poems.