Best Books About Colonialism and Empire: Essential Reading
The best books about colonialism and empire — from Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart to A Passage to India and Half of a Yellow Sun. Essential postcolonial reading.
By Oliver Kane
Colonialism and its aftermath produced some of the most important literature of the twentieth century — both the canonical texts of European literary culture that documented the colonial enterprise (Conrad, Forster) and the responses from the colonised that challenged those texts and offered alternative perspectives (Achebe, Naipaul, Achebe). The novels below form the essential reading list for understanding both the colonial experience and the literature it generated.
The Canonical and Its Critique
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad (1899)
The founding literary text of European colonialism — Marlow’s journey up the Congo River to find the ivory trader Kurtz, who has ‘gone native’ with horrifying results. Conrad’s novella is the most influential account of the colonial enterprise in literature, and the most ambiguous: its critique of Belgian colonial violence in the Congo is genuine, but (as Achebe argued famously in 1975) its representation of Africa as a void, a dark backdrop against which European psychological dramas are played out, replicates the dehumanisation it nominally critiques. Essential as both literature and as a text to think with and against.
Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe (1958)
Achebe’s response to Conrad and to the entire tradition of European writing about Africa — a novel that places an African culture at its centre and treats it with the same complexity and moral seriousness that European literature reserves for European cultures. Okonkwo’s story (his personal tragedy, his community’s transformation, and his death) is told from the inside, with full knowledge of the culture’s own tensions and contradictions. The most important postcolonial novel and the most widely read African novel in the world.
India Under Empire
A Passage to India — E.M. Forster (1924)
Forster’s most serious novel — the impossibility of genuine connection between coloniser and colonised, even between people of goodwill, in the specific conditions of colonial India. Forster shows the ways that the colonial relationship poisons every encounter: the social separation, the mutual misunderstanding, the way that each side reads the other through the prism of the relationship rather than the individual. The most humanly precise account of what colonialism does to human relationships.
African Literature After Independence
Half of a Yellow Sun — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
Adichie’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) — the Biafran attempt at independence, its failure, and the famine that killed over a million people. The novel follows two sisters (one an academic’s wife, one a revolutionary’s companion) and their British lover, and it makes the case that the war was a direct consequence of the colonial carve-up of Africa (the British amalgamation of peoples who had not previously been a single political unit). The most emotionally powerful account of the Nigerian Civil War.
A Bend in the River — V.S. Naipaul (1979)
The most politically complex account of post-independence Africa — Salim’s experience in Mobutu’s Congo, watching the new African state reproduce the violence and oppression of the colonial period under different management. Naipaul’s vision is unsparing (he has been accused of Eurocentrism; his defenders argue that his critique is aimed at power wherever it is exercised, not at Africa specifically) and the novel is the most important account of what independence did not produce.
The Colonised’s Internal View
In a Free State — V.S. Naipaul (1971)
Naipaul’s Booker Prize-winning work — three stories about displacement and colonial aftermath, culminating in a novella set in an African country during a coup. The title is ironic: none of the characters is free; each is constrained by the colonial history that has made their identity, their opportunity, and their limitations.
The Mimic Men — V.S. Naipaul (1967)
Naipaul’s most autobiographical novel — Ralph Singh, a politician from a Caribbean island, writing his memoirs from exile in London and reflecting on the gap between the ‘real world’ of European history and culture and the ‘unreal’ peripheral world of the colonial outpost. The concept of ‘mimicry’ (colonised people who imitate the colonisers’ culture without ever fully inhabiting it, producing a copy that reveals its own inauthenticity) is Naipaul’s central contribution to postcolonial thought.
Reading Order
Essential: Things Fall Apart → Heart of Darkness → A Passage to India.
African independence: Things Fall Apart → Half of a Yellow Sun → A Bend in the River.
Complete: Heart of Darkness → Things Fall Apart → A Passage to India → The Mimic Men → A Bend in the River → Half of a Yellow Sun.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best novel about colonialism?
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe is the essential novel about colonialism — told from the perspective of the colonised rather than the colonisers, it follows Okonkwo in pre-colonial and colonial Igbo society, and makes visible the complexity of the culture that European colonialism destroyed. Achebe wrote it partly as a response to Heart of Darkness, which represents Africa only through European eyes. Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad is the most famous novel about the colonial enterprise itself — Marlow's journey up the Congo River and his encounter with Kurtz is the founding text of literary colonialism, though it has been criticised (by Achebe, among others) for representing Africa as backdrop rather than subject.
What is Things Fall Apart about?
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe follows Okonkwo, a strong and proud man in the Igbo community of Umuofia in what is now Nigeria, in the years before and during the arrival of European missionaries and colonial administrators. The novel is the first sustained literary account of an African culture from the inside — Achebe shows the complexity, the internal tensions, and the genuine achievements of Igbo society before its destruction, and then shows what the colonial encounter actually does (converting the society's outcasts, undermining traditional authority, installing a new legal system that does not recognise traditional rights). The most widely read African novel and the most important founding text of African literature in English.
What is A Passage to India about?
A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster follows Dr. Aziz, an Indian doctor, and Adela Quested, a young Englishwoman who has come to India to meet her fiancé, and the events around a trip to the Marabar Caves that leads to Aziz's arrest for assault. Forster's novel is about the impossibility of genuine connection between the colonisers and the colonised — the ways that the colonial relationship poisons every encounter between English and Indian, even between people of goodwill. Forster's liberal humanism (his belief that personal connection can transcend political barriers) is tested and found inadequate by the colonial reality he is examining.
What is A Bend in the River about?
A Bend in the River (1979) by V.S. Naipaul follows Salim, an East African Muslim of Indian descent, who moves to a town at a bend in the river in an unnamed Central African country (based on Mobutu's Congo) to run a shop. The novel is about the aftermath of colonialism — the violence, instability, and corruption that have succeeded the colonial administration, and the way that the 'new men' who have replaced the European colonisers are producing a new form of oppression. Naipaul's vision is unsparing and controversial; the novel is the most politically complex account of post-independence Africa in fiction.
