Impact of British Imperialism on the Igbo
... The distant regions which they had political power over were known as colonies, and the policy of conquering and ruling other lands was known as imperialism. ... Throughout the 1800s, the British were granting their colonies such as those in Canada and Australia some freedom of self-government. At the same time, the British were also increasingly staking their claims in other territories in Africa and Asia. (Krieger, Neill and Jantzen 570) The result of this colonial expansion was the revitalization of the British economy, as other countries began to tax British goods to protect their own territories. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, other industrialized nations had begun to tax British imports, a necessary measure to spur production from their own factories and to curb reliance on British-manufactured goods. ... The British, as well as a host of other industrialized nations began to view colonies as essential to their nation’s economic prosperity, and these nations soon joined the race for colonies alongside Britain. This hectic colonial scramble became known as the age of New Imperialism. ... European control of Sub-Saharan Africa(the region south of the Sahara desert) began in the mid-1800s around trading posts such as the French port of Dakar in the west or the British port of Cape Town in the south. ... By the 1890s, the British were maintaining trading posts in the Niger River area of West Africa. They had long declared the area a British Protectorate, even though their control was limited to a few coastal settlements. ... One of the British colonies included Igboland, home of the Igbo people, which covers most of Southeast Nigeria. The British colonization of Igboland presents an accurate example of the Chaos Theory, which states that whenever a system(or Igbo culture in this instance) is disturbed or destroyed, eventually, a new system(culture) will emerge; however, the pattern of the new system(culture) is not usually predictable. “British imperialism brought economic expansion and new standards of official administration and public health to Igboland; however, the cost of modernization meant brutal exploitation and dehumanization. ... The destruction inflicted by British imperialism and the internal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa made it difficult to predict what new system would emerge. ... ”(Pilling 55) The impact of British Imperialism on the Igbo included various political, economic, social and cultural changes, ranging from sweeping changes in the Igbo economy to the vast spread of the Christian religion in the region. During the course of British colonization, of Igboland, many political changes came to be implemented. One of the earliest reforms instituted by the British colonists was the establishment of a new law code and a court system. Prior to the invasion of British forces in 1901, missionaries and British commissioners had already formed a government, along with a new law code intended to protect followers of the new Christian faith. In Chinua Achebe’s novel describing Igbo culture, Things Fall Apart, Achebe tells of the “white men who had bought a government…and had built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance. ... ” (Achebe 174) The British attempted to establish a new law code because they failed to understand Igbo culture and customs, especially in judicial matters. The Igbo belief in justice clashes with the European belief in property rights at one instance in the story, when several Igbo men burn down the church in Umuofia to punish a Christian that had killed an egwugwu, a masked judge impersonating an ancestral spirit of his village ”Mr. ... ”(Achebe 191) The British cannot comprehend the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth justice that is administered in Igbo society, which clashes with their belief in property rights. The Igbo reason that since a Christian had murdered an egwugwu, a symbol of holiness, it is just that the Christians lose their church. ... This clash of cultures results in strife and unrest within Igbo society, and the British, with their powerful weapons, are able to restrain the primitive Igbo tribes.