Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy: Reconstructing African Identity

Literature has continued to play a remarkable role in reconstructing the way African socio-cultural, political, and religious identities are perceived in the global community. With such household names like Achebe, Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Sedar Senghor, African literature has been absolved with the energy and optimism to counter the representations of African life and practices akin to cannibalism, crudity, and a dark place. These misrepresentations were famously illustrated by major British literary writers, such as Greene, Conrad, and Kipling. African traditional religion, political institutions, language, and socio-cultural behaviors have been foregrounded stylistically to rescue her all-round identity from the rationalized colonial enterprise and denigrating Western narrative.In line with the foregoing, this article lends its voice to answering such critical questions as:* What is African literature?* What is African identity?* How have African literature and African literary writers attempted to reconstruct Western prejudiced narratives about African identity in a global community?The study purposively selects Chinua Achebe’s *Things Fall Apart* as primary data and subjects same to a content analysis with insights from Geoffery N. Leech’s (1969, p.62) linguistic deviation approach and Yu Xueyong’s three-dimensional model for achieving foregrounding to buttress how African literature has and can be of immense help in reconstructing African identity in a global community. Narrative processes within the African context as encapsulated in Achebe’s *Things Fall Apart* (henceforth TFA) are considered as processes through which meanings are conveyed in a discourse.

Narrative Processes and Meaning in *Things Fall Apart*

This study investigates aspects of narrative processes through a linguistic network in TFA by contending that those processes can be worked out within the semantic, referential, ideational, and contextual concepts. Shades of meanings, especially from the perspectives of African narrations, are addressed and situated in TFA. This is because narrative processes play significant roles in clarifying, exemplifying, underscoring, and influencing communication. Thus, they are easily situated within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), which focuses on power and ideological projections.It is relevant in its socio-political concern to reveal inequalities of power, while its standard approach to textual analysis is interested in the details of texts such as the socio-political and cultural functions of discourse capable of determining other layers of meaning. CDA therefore is a veritable linguistic tool for studying texts such as Achebe’s TFA, to reveal the inequalities expressed in the narrative processes as deployed in the novel.

Wodak's Discourse Historical Approach

Through the application of the Wodak’s Discourse Historical Approach to the study of CDA (DHA CDA), the study reveals that the stories imbedded in TFA assist in retelling the African story from a historical cum linguistic viewpoint.The study also substantiates our initial assumption that narrative processes within the African context as found in Achebe’s TFA are considered as processes through which meanings are conveyed in a discourse. The study also investigates aspects of narrative processes through a linguistic network and contends that shades of meanings, especially from the perspectives of African narrations, are addressed and situated in literary texts by using Achebe, TFA as a paradigm.

Table: Key Aspects of Narrative Processes in "Things Fall Apart"

Aspect of Narrative	Description	Example from TFA
Semantic Concepts	Meaning derived from language and symbols.	The significance of the kola nut in Igbo culture.
Referential Concepts	References to cultural and historical contexts.	Okonkwo's status within his clan.
Ideational Concepts	Representation of ideas and beliefs.	Clash between Igbo traditions and Christian missionaries.
Contextual Concepts	Understanding the socio-political environment.	Impact of colonialism on Igbo society.

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