The political and social discourse surrounding colonialism tends to be characterized by overt violence, genocide, oppression and explicit undermining of the native peoples. In Things Fall Apart, however, Chinua Achebe offers an alternative narrative. One that depicts colonialism as a masquerade. A quiet imposition that introduces a subtle and insidious asphyxiation of the native culture through pseudo-heroism, racism, and a fundamental misunderstanding of culture, religion and science. Additionally, despite common perception and subverting the narrative of overt violence like we see in slavery in the Caribbean and native American conflict, there is solid ground on which to say that this silent imposition that steals the colonized voice, shrouds the colonized life, and disregards colonized desires is the primary medium through which colonialism has been perpetuated. As opposed to colonialism as a physical institution, this schema of colonialism is reliant on the deprivation of colonized voices and is the chief characteristic in what makes it so difficult to determine when or if colonialism ends.
Historical and epistemological theft is the primary actor in modern day colonialism as the voice of the colonized, the only source of power in an oppressed population, is stolen and kept away, not just by rewriting history, but by altering the cultural and ideological frameworks through which they are even allowed to have a ‘voice’ in the first place. In Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, she touches on this topic when she writes ““For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation.” “The object of the group’s investigation, in the case not even of the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern is a deviation from an ideal – the people or subaltern – which is itself defined as a difference from the elite.” The colonized cannot meaningfully represent themselves, as their identity is characterized by the power structures that oppress them; and while academics might try to represent the subaltern, their representation cannot be accurately articulated because it is mediated by these structures. Though her assertion that the subaltern cannot speak is an appeal to the female experience during British colonization and the illegalization of the practice of Sati, it holds true in any imperialist hierarchical structure that colonizes, not only the land, but the ideological structure of the society it’s imperializing. These westernized structures inhibit the present, past and future voices through historical manipulation and dogmatic institutionalization. The theft of the colonized voice is chronic and whole. Once a nation has undergone the metamorphosis of western ideological invasion, the past voices of the colonized have already been stolen, the present voices have been undermined through the hierarchical structure of western doctrines through which they are mandated to communicate, and future voices will be tainted by historical manipulation of western authorship.
The physical institution of colonialism is a trivial matter in the actuality of its realistic and intangible consequences. Colonialism cannot end, not because imperialists persist in the present day. In the discussion of the existence of colonialism, that fact, true or not, is irrelevant. Colonialism cannot end because its oppression is impossible to undermine. The voice is the only weapon the colonized have against oppression and it is stolen, raped, silenced and bastardized through ideological designs, intentional or not. Thus, allowing the colonizer to engage in a pernicious cultural theft that is invincible to meaningful attack or criticism. This is colonialism and it is a greater tragedy than the death of people: The death of what it means to be those people; and the inability to know.
Psuedothought 