Dear Editor,
In recent months I have written about artificial intelligence as a quiet but transformative force in our lives. I now wish to deepen that argument by placing AI within a longer historical and literary frame, drawing on Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’, a novel that remains one of the most perceptive accounts of how domination actually works.
Achebe did not portray colonialism as an immediate apocalypse. There was no sudden collapse, no instant annihilation of African society. Instead, colonial power arrived slowly, through missionaries, schools, medicine, courts, and language. It arrived as help. It arrived as improvement. It arrived offering meaning, order, and explanation. As Achebe writes with devastating clarity, “The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion… Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one.”
The tragedy in ‘Things Fall Apart’ is not simply the fall of Okonkwo or the breakdown of Igbo society. It is the gradual relocation of trust. African institutions are not destroyed first; they are displaced. People begin to believe that the foreign system works better, judges better, heals better, explains better. By the time resistance becomes visible, the inner structure of the society has already been altered.
This is precisely the pattern we are witnessing today with artificial intelligence.
AI has not entered human life as a hostile force. It has arrived as a supplement, as an assistant, as a neutral aid. It writes our letters, corrects our grammar, summarizes our reading, performs our analysis, and increasingly makes recommendations that shape our decisions. We experience this not as dispossession, but as relief. Like Achebe’s villagers, we are grateful for what seems to work.
Yet the danger lies not in what AI does for us, but in what it teaches us to stop doing.
We are allowing artificial intelligence to perform tasks that once constituted the core of human intellectual life. Reasoning, interpretation, synthesis, judgment, and even imagination are increasingly externalized. The more fluent and confident these systems become, the more authority we grant them. Slowly, imperceptibly, trust shifts. Human thought begins to feel inefficient, unreliable, and unnecessary.
Achebe understood that colonialism was not merely a political event. It was an assault on becoming. It reshaped how people understood themselves in time, in memory, and in possibility. “The world has no end,” one elder says in ‘Things Fall Apart’, but colonialism introduces a world with an ending, a linear history in which African systems are rendered obsolete.
Artificial intelligence is performing a similar operation on humanity as a whole. It introduces a new standard of intelligence against which human thought increasingly appears deficient. The danger is not that AI will replace us violently, but that we will quietly internalize its logic and accept our own redundancy.
There is also a deeper, almost theological dimension to this shift. We often say that God works in mysterious ways. Divine authority has traditionally been accepted without transparency. We do not know how God decides whom to reward or punish. Artificial intelligence is beginning to occupy a similar position in our lives. Its inner workings are opaque. Even its creators cannot fully explain how it arrives at certain conclusions. Yet we accept its outputs with confidence, even reverence.
This is not merely technological trust. It is a transfer of faith.
Achebe showed how colonial religion succeeded not only by preaching a new God, but by teaching people to doubt their own spiritual systems. Today, we are being taught to doubt our own cognitive systems. We consult the machine not because we are incapable of thinking, but because we have been persuaded that machine reasoning is superior.
The colonisation unfolding today is therefore not territorial. It is cognitive, cultural, and existential. It is a colonisation of becoming. Like the world Achebe described, things do not fall apart through force. They fall apart through persuasion, through supplementation, through the gradual erosion of confidence in one’s own ways of knowing.
‘Things Fall Apart’ is not a novel of the past. It is a warning for the present. It reminds us that domination often arrives disguised as help, and that by the time we recognize what has been lost, our world may already be speaking a language we no longer fully understand.