Imperialism In Things Fall Apart

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Imperialists do not acknowledge any cultural differences between themselves and the imperialized because they disagree with the native religion. In the novel, when Kenny is telling Rukmani about his family and how his wife left him,and after he criticizes Rukmani for having limited views on the subject, Rukmani says “Limited, yes…yet not wholly without understanding. Our ways are not your ways”(Markandaya 106). Rukmani has to remind Kenny that their thinking is not alike. Even though her tone in this sentence is not very direct, we can see that she did not like being demeaned by Kenny. By saying the phrase ‘not wholly without understanding’, she obliquely points out to Kenny that for decades, the beliefs held by the Indians have been reliable. …show more content…
We can see a more extreme example of this in a passage from the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. In the novel, when the protagonist, Okonkwo, is describing how his hometown of Umuofia has changed in the 7 years that he was in exile, he tells us that the British had created a new government and prison. After telling us this, he says “Some of these prisoners had thrown away their twins and some had molested the Christians”(Achebe). The British created new laws without even considering the old laws that the Africans had always been used to. Twins had always been considered a bad omen in African religion, but the British failed to realize this and created laws which went completely against what the natives were accustomed to.By looking at the novel Nectar in the Sieve and the novel Things Fall Apart together, we can see that in both cases, the original religious practices of the land were ignored by the imperialists. In Nectar in a Sieve, Rukmani had to remind Kenny that they have different views, and in Things Fall Apart, the government completely ignored the old regulations of the natives and threw the lawbreakers in
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