The Winner and the Loser

In class Thursday an interesting topic was brought up in-group discussion: the winner and the loser. Talking in the terms of the colonized and the colonizer. The colonizer is curious and constantly wondering what the rest of the world is like and so they do what any able body person does and they travel far away from home in the direction that promises the most. Whether it be gold, silver, animals, more land, they travel for weeks and months and years until they reach somewhere new. Somewhere that they had never seen before. Only it is only new to them, not to the people, the tribes, and the families that were there before them, they only know that it is new to their eyes, hands, axes, guns, and ways of life.

Look, they might say, look at this place so fresh and right for the taking. I

And take is exactly what they do. They look at the people who are already there as savages because they do not dress that same, they call them savages because they do not speak the same. So they do what any good man would do, they teach them, and show them the right from wrong. However they look at the people who were they before them, surviving before them as wrong instead of different.

From there they impose their ideals, ideas, langue, religion, and way of life on the savages, until they are not so savage any more, until it becomes just a word again that is distant from the colonizers tongue, and those who cannot adapt can do what every other savage before them has done and will do, had the last lead meal.

The colonized might be wondering about the world and what lays beyond the vast body of water but does not ride out on large ships, or small, to find out, instead the new comes to them, and suddenly that are forced to change who they are as a people and continue to be persecuted for being who they have always been. When they fight back they are killed and forced to watch their family be killed.

Now the winner, the loser, and whose fault what is. Can we say that it is the fault of the colonizer for leaving their own shore and forcing their ideals on someone else? But what if that way of life was really better, what if it made the lives easer for whoever encountered it. Is it the fault of the colonizer for not being able to share their ideas in a more peaceful way, or.

Is it the fault of the colonized who isn’t able to accept the ideas that have been given them, and they rather stick to a way of life that is ignorant of its own issues, or.

Is it the fault of the colonizer to realize that the ways of the new people are not better or worse, just different; are the colonized people facing the same fault.

In the noel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe we are faced with all of these same questions. Then you are faced at the end with a difficult question. Is it really anybody’s fault?