Sex and Empire Building in the Fiction of Chinua Achebe

In the post-Foucauldian era, the innocence of all discourse is suspect, especially patriarchal, racist, and colonial western discourse. Western discourse desires the feminization of space—pacification, domestication, and containment of both women and space within bounded male horizons. Ever since the Renaissance, colonies have been denoted as mappable entities—a colony is a woman, very definitely discovered. The colonial encounter can be portrayed in terms of a brutal rape metaphor—Africa as the docile and willing prey of the male colonist, the master rapist. Sexual and colonial relationships thus become analogous. Riches promised by the colony signify both joys of the female body and its status as a legitimate object of male possession. Africa-as-colony-as-woman thus provides both the pleasure and the comfort of feminized space. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's portrayal of tribal Igbo culture reflects the intrusiveness of the colonial gaze and its inability to comprehend what it seeks to codify; Achebe shows the colonial anthropologist-administrator's fantasized rape of tribal Igbo culture and his phallic inadequacy to do so.