He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This line appears in Chinua Achebe’s novel *Things Fall Apart* (1958), in the closing section where the narrative perspective shifts toward the British colonial administration. The “he” is the District Commissioner, who has overseen punitive interventions in Umuofia and is now thinking about how to frame these events in a book he plans to write. Achebe places the sentence at the end of the novel to expose how colonial officials converted complex, tragic human realities into tidy administrative narratives. The proposed title echoes the language of imperial reports that cast conquest as “pacification” and depict African societies as “primitive.”

Achebe uses the Commissioner’s self-satisfied book title as a sharp critique of colonial discourse. “Pacification” euphemizes coercion and violence, while “primitive tribes” reduces a sophisticated community to a stereotype, stripping individuals of names, motives, and moral weight. The irony is that the reader has just witnessed the full texture of Umuofia’s life and Okonkwo’s downfall, yet the colonial record will compress it into a chapter or a footnote. The line dramatizes how power controls history: the conqueror’s language becomes the archive, and lived experience is overwritten by bureaucratic summary.