TRACING COLONIAL IDEOLOGY IN CHINUA ACHEBE?S THINGS FALL APART AND BUCHI EMECHETA?S THE BRIDE PRICE

Abstract

Inspired by the appetite to control world trade and naturally rich African and Asian countries, European powers started to dominate remote territories economically and politically in the fifteenth century. Although the main reason was to colonize other nations for their gains, European countries masked their colonial ideology claiming that they brought civilization to Africa, India for the first time. Europeans’ attitude to justify their colonization continued throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, thus creating new settlements where the slave and master discourse was created. In order to meet its demand for raw materials, Britain’s domination and hegemony over the third world countries reached its peak in the nineteenth century and it exploited other nations both economically and culturally. Nigeria-exposed to British hegemony- is one of the countries whose natural resources were usurped and indigenous culture was oppressed. The indigenous Nigerian people were enslaved and forced to serve the white man. In the context of colonial reading, Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta handle the colonial history of Igbo society suffering from the oppression of the colonizer. The paper in this context, aims to display the colonial acts and their impacts on the colonized people through Nigerian authors’ perspectives.