Dynamics of Forced Migration and The Politics of Language and Identity in
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Nduka David Utah, Catherine John Mamman, & Nwachinemere Okechukwu-Oji

Abstract

This paper examines Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a literary framework for understanding colonialism as a multifaceted form of forced migration in Igbo society. While migration is frequently linked to geographical mobility, colonial contexts engender layered displacements, physical, cultural, linguistic, and epistemological, that disrupt indigenous social structures and epistemologies. The novel uses Okonkwo’s ceremonial banishment to Mbanta, an internal exile that symbolises both physical displacement and symbolic marginalisation, as well as the larger cultural exodus brought about by missionaries and colonial administrators, whose foreign institutions and language policies undermine ancestral authority and communal cohesion. The study highlights the reciprocal, circulatory relationship between the literary text and the socio-cultural-political discourses of late British colonialism in Igboland (c. 1890– 1910) and the decolonising Nigeria of the 1950s by utilising New Historicism (Greenblatt). Achebe’s strategic use of proverbs, untranslated Igbo terms, and oral traditions functions as counter-discourse, resisting colonial erasure by circulating indigenous knowledge systems. Complementing this, Migration Theory (Castles, 2009) provides conceptual tools to analyse exile, dislocation, and cultural adaptation beyond mere physical movement. Adopting a qualitative literary-analytical approach, the paper conducts close textual analysis of narrative strategies, proverbs, and character trajectories in Things Fall Apart, supplemented by comparative references to Igbo oral traditions and historical accounts of colonial incursion. The method positions Achebe’s text as both literature and a socio-political document encoding vernacular responses to colonial pressures. By situating the novel within critical migration discourses, the study reveals how colonialism generated enduring forms of layered migration, physical, cultural, and linguistic that continue to inform contemporary debates on identity, decolonisation, and sustainable development.

Keywords: Forced migration; language policy; Achebe; Igbo society; Colonialism; Identity