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Things Fall Apart

From 1600 to 1914, European colonialism in Africa resulted in an upsurge among the Africans and Europeans whereas many Africans became immersed into European culture without a proper consent. European ideas about race and their interest in profit affected the lives of Africans in many negative ways by devastating the lives and culture of the African people and creating an enduring scar ceaselessly whereas the Europeans profited from this expansion politically and economically. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe also embodies the distress and angst created by the Europeans when they first began to settle in parts of Africa, challenging local African traditions, customs, and religion.
The concept of race among Europeans first began with Christians thinking of “sin as the blackening of a white soul”. Reilly continues to claim how “they thought of God, virtue, purity, and redemption in terms of radiating light or whiteness. Angels and the holy were bathed in white light”. (Reilly, 49) These already predetermined notions about race and the skin color of human beings made the Europeans obviously feel superior to those with darker complexions. Race, as Kevin Reilly discusses, has nothing to do with the physical difference between men and women, but rather, it has something to do with skin color. The white man distinguished Africans by the color of their skin first and then as an individual. For the Europeans, despite their desire to expand, colonize, and profit from Africa’s goods, the skin color of the Africans would play a large primary factor in how the Europeans would eventually treat the Africans.
Reilly continues to point out that the identification of slavery with black Africans probably originated in the Middle East and North Africa. Black slaves continued to increase in the Islamic world and “slavery became increasingly identified with blackness”. By the 14th century, developments of sugar production and ocean navigation introduced more African slaveholding...