The writer most associated with the British Empire is Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), whose poems, stories, and novels celebrate what he and his public regarded as essentially "English" virtues: military valor, moral responsibility, administrative skill, and the principle of "fair play" that had been instilled in the ruling classes by English public schools. In the Darwinian atmosphere of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these virtues seemed to be nature's and God's way of indicating their manifest destiny to rule. From this perspective, Kipling's focus fell inevitably on the English hero, with little or no attempt to perceive the empire from the vantage point of the colonized. The one partial exception is Kipling's novel Kim (1901), in which an orphan of a British soldier stationed in India grows up thinking of himself as an Indian. Kim travels through northern India guided by a Tibetan lama, who introduces him to Indian religious beliefs. But once Kim's English paternity is discovered, he is adopted by a British regiment and soon recruited as a young secret agent for the British. Kim struggles with the conflicting claims of colonizer/colonized even as he plunges into the "great game" of spying. The novel does provide a rich and largely sympathetic description of Indian life, but Kim's ultimate "whiteness" triumphs in his quest for identity.

Kipling's view of the empire did not survive the post-World War I period. A much more complex view of the relations between the governors and the governed in India emerges in E. M. Forster's (1897-1970) A Passage to India and Paul Scott's (1920-78) Raj Quartet. An early example of an attempt by an English writer to depict directly the native's dilemma is Joyce Cary's (1888-1957) Mister Johnson (1939). Mister Johnson, a government clerk in a remote village in Nigeria, has a rich, natural sense of the joy of life, but he also aspires to be an English gentleman. Alienated from his own culture, unable to enter the English world of his imagination, he is nevertheless not discouraged. His energy, enthusiasm, and unrelenting optimism result in the production of a road that changes the life of the village, with mixed results. Ultimately Johnson is fired for stealing, while in his mind he is merely imitating his superiors. In the novel's climactic conclusion, he meets his death at the hands of Rudbeck, the white man he most admires. In executing Johnson, who had been sentenced to death, Rudbeck attempts to acknowledge his own responsibility for Johnson's tragic situation. For the author, Johnson is a symbol of colonized Africa, torn from its roots by imperial rule, educated to be an efficient cog in the imperial machine, tossed aside and later destroyed when he proves troublesome. In the character of Rudbeck, we see the Englishman's recognition of responsibility for the violation of others that is endemic to imperial rule.

According to the critic Jeffrey Meyers, "The phoenix of the African novel has arisen from the ashes of the colonial novel." With the arrival of independence, African novelists have set out to revise the European view of African history and culture. Foremost of these novelists has been the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1930- ), who has argued that even anti-colonialist works, such as Joseph Conrad's (1857-1926) Heart of Darkness, and sympathetic portraits of natives such as Mister Johnson, exhibit the limitations and prejudices of an outsider. In his novels, he has set himself the task of charting the effects of imperialism from the perspective of one who knows the experience of the natives and the price they have paid for the British presence in Nigeria.

Starting with Things Fall Apart (1958), his celebrated account of the intrusion of colonial government into the tribal life of the Ibo community in the late 19th century, Achebe then moved into the 20th century in Arrow of God (1964). Arrow of God is set primarily in 1921 in the Nigerian Ibo village Umuaro, where the chief priest Ezeulu presides over a series of rituals and festivals that have created a cohesive community, strengthened by tradition. A short distance away is a British administrative post at Okperi, where a group of Englishmen, led by Captain Winterbottom, live their isolated, alienated lives. When Ezeulu is invited by Winterbottom to come to Okperi to receive an honor, he refuses at first because his priestly duties forbid leaving his village. But the Ibo tribesmen, fearful of offending the British, insist that he go to Okperi. When he arrives, the British, insulted by his earlier refusal, detain him for some months in the local guard room. Because of this detention, he fails to calculate the correct number of new moons for the harvest, a critical responsibility of the chief priest. When he returns to Umuaro, his miscalculation results in the threat of famine. As a result, the tribe shifts its allegiance to the British god, "the son." The people of the village realize that "these are not the times we used to know and we must meet them as they come or be rolled in the dust." Feeling betrayed, Ezeulu adopts the inflexible, rigid posture of a tragic hero with inevitably disastrous results for him.

Achebe recognizes the Ibo's need for adaptation, but he sees the greater loss in the destruction of the beautiful traditions and rituals, without which, "things fall apart." In his postindependence novels, he traces the continuing dissolution of the Ibo tradition, culminating in the disastrous Nigerian civil war.

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