This is the end of Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo, the hero, has killed himself, and the English District Commissioner is there "tidying" things up. (Spoilers ahead!)

"The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a dead man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after some thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger." (Chapter 25)

Achebe's novel ends by pointing out just how the colonizers tell stories in ways that deliberately do no justice to the colonized. Take the District Commissioner. The title of his book is going to be Primitive Tribes. Uh oh. And he's only going to give the story of Okonkwo one paragraph in there? Didn't it just take Achebe a whole book to write the story of Okonkwo?

This can show us a couple of things. For one thing, we can see how colonizers tell stories in a way that silences and erases the colonized. But on top of that, it's obvious that the District Commissioner doesn't actually understand anything about Okonkwo. He doesn't even know how to begin understanding Okonkwo. He thinks he knows it all already.

The trouble here is that the District Commissioner thinks he knows everything there is to know about this guy. Now, that's a problem, and that's one thing that postcolonial literature tries to fix. Some colonizers are just plain nasty. Others maybe don't really understand what they're doing or with whom they're dealing. Postcolonial literature tries to overcome the colonial "metanarrative" by introducing colonizers (and everyone else) to other, competing narratives that can complicate the colonial worldview.

Things Fall Apart ends with the title of the District Commissioner's book, and that draws attention to the fact that as a colonizer, the District Commissioner is as a powerful storyteller. He has the final word.

But, thanks to Achebe, he also kind of doesn't. The District Commissioner's story (Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger) is, after all, challenged by Achebe's own story, Things Fall Apart.

So, by highlighting the way that stories are being told, and by putting one story (the District Commissioner's) against another (Okonkwo's story as told by Achebe himself), Achebe is calling our attention to how stories are never neutral, how there are always different versions of the same story. There are stories that serve the oppressor, and stories that serve the oppressed.