Chinua Achebe, a Puzzling Pioneer

12 Pages·2014·0.25 MB·English

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Chinua Achebe, a Puzzling Pioneer
Bernth Lindfors
[email protected]

The first thing that comes to mind when I reflect on the
extraordinary career of Chinua Achebe is that he was a true
pioneer. I suppose that could be said of many other African
writers as well, not only those who preceded him but also those
of his own generation who, rather unexpectedly, helped to launch
vigorous literary movements throughout the continent in the
middle of the last century by expressing themselves creatively in
European and indigenous languages. All of them, individually and
collectively, were vital contributors to the modernization of
Africa, to the reconceptualization of the continent’s past, present,
and future, and perhaps most importantly, to the liberation of
Africa’s imaginative energies. And they did this not by waging
wars or struggling to win political or economic independence for
their people as some of their more famous contemporaries had,
but rather simply by manipulating words in new and surprising
ways. They were revolutionaries of another kind who changed
their world through invention, through powers not of muscle but
of mind. They worked from the inside out.
Chinua Achebe was one of the best of these—indeed, possibly
the very best among his immediate peers—at performing such
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marvels of enlightenment. He has been called the father of the
African novel, a title he modestly declined to accept. Perhaps the
real problem with such an appellation is that it is too restrictively
sexist, for it could also be cogently argued that he was the
midwife of the African novel, having brought into being by his
own exertions and example the healthy offspring of many other
pregnant scribblers. He must be credited with having achieved an
impressive birth-rate in his role as a supportive ancestral
hermaphrodite, being both father and surrogate mother of this
increasingly fertile brood. Through his ministrations a number of
spanking new national literatures were born. James Currey, who
edited Heinemann’s African Literature Series for many years, has
been quoted as saying that Achebe, by working for years as
Heinemann’s advisor, ‘more than anyone else reshaped the
literary map of Africa’ (quoted in Ezenwa-Ohaeto). For this reason
one could claim that Achebe deserves yet another honorific
title—Chief Cartographer of African Literature.
But certainly Achebe’s greatest claim to fame resides in the
fact that his first novel, Things Fall Apart, published two years
before Nigeria ceased to be a British colony, was clearly the best
of its kind ever produced in Anglophone areas of tropical Africa. It
was not just a compelling tale of a flawed individual in a traditional
society that was undergoing profound change. It was also a story
that offered a fresh perspective on Africa’s colonial history. In
much of the literature hitherto written about Africa by outsiders,
the coming of Europe to Africa was seen as a blessing, an
intervention that yielded enormous benefits for the local
population. A typical example of this kind of mythologizing can be
found in a book entitled In Defense of Colonies, written by Sir Alan
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Burns, a former Governor-General of the Gold Coast, and
published in 1957, the very year that the Gold Coast became
independent Ghana, and only a year before Achebe published
Things Fall Apart. According to Burns, in Africa
in the bad old days under tyrannical indigenous rulers the
unfortunate peasants had no chance to cultivate their land
properly and little opportunity to reap for their own benefit
what they had sown…. Free men also suffered from the
cruelty and rapacity of indigenous rulers. They were liable, at
the whim of a chief or through the instigation of a fetish-
priest, to indescribable tortures and brutal punishments.
Trade was hampered by bad communications and the
depredations of robbers and pirates who plundered and
murdered peaceful traders. Tribal warfare caused much loss
of life and destruction of property.
But into this dystopian jungle, Burns informs us, British rule was
introduced, and
We have put a stop to slavery and human sacrifice, we have
checked the cruelty and corruption of indigenous rulers, we
have stamped out certain diseases and reduced the incidence
of others, we have brought a measure of education to people
who were generally illiterate. We have developed backward
countries by the construction of roads and railways, we have
opened up mines and improved on the primitive culture of the
past. We have allowed trade to develop under the protection
of a firm administration.
This was the heroic narrative of Western imperialism, as told by
one of its knighted functionaries.
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Achebe told a very different story. His novel is set in a peaceful
rural village governed democratically by a group of prominent
citizens obedient to their gods and observant of traditions and
taboos handed down by their ancestors. Into this well-regulated
society foreign missionaries and colonial governing officials
intrude, winning over some villagers to a different system of
beliefs and practices antithetical to those of their neighbours. As
a consequence, the community is divided, things fall apart, and
chaos is loosed upon their world. British colonialism has not been
a blessing but a curse, causing havoc in what had once been a
pacific haven, intelligently governed and guided by the wisdom of
the past. Achebe’s novel was in essence a rebuttal of colonial
historiography, and it came at precisely that moment when young
Africans, on the eve of political independence, were beginning to
question what they had gained and lost from their contact with
an alien civilization that had attempted to rule them.
However, Things Fall Apart was not entirely a one-sided story.
Achebe also depicted some of the problems in traditional African
society. He chose as his protagonist Okonkwo, an ambitious
individual whose achievements as an athlete, farmer, and warrior
had quickly earned him a prominent place in his community but
who also had a number of personal flaws—a hot temper, a
contempt for less successful men, a tendency to treat his wives
and children harshly. Above all, he relentlessly sought to prove
himself a manly man, not a weakling like his father. These
negative, antisocial traits put him on a collision course not only
with the new religion and the colonial governing authority but
also ultimately with his own community, a conflict that led
inexorably to his demise. His death symbolized both the damage
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Europe had inflicted on Africa and also the self-destruction caused
by Africa’s inherent vulnerability to social discombobulation. It
was a tragedy in which both Europe and Africa were at fault.
That this was a deliberate strategy on Achebe’s part we know
from his essay on ‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,’ in
which he argued that
The credibility of the world [the writer] is attempting to
recreate will be called to question and he will defeat his own
purpose if he is suspected of glossing over inconvenient facts.
We cannot pretend that our past was one long, technicolour
idyll. We have to admit that like other people’s past ours had
its good as well as its bad sides….I maintain that any serious
African writer who wants to plead the cause of the past must
not only be God’s advocate; he must also do duty for the devil.
This was the kind of heavenly and hellish objectivity that made
Achebe’s recreation of the African past not just honest and
credible but powerfully persuasive.
In addition to proving an important historical point in his
depiction of colonial Africa, Achebe made another signal
contribution by writing in a style that had never been seen before
in African fiction. He literally Africanized the English language by
having his characters speak in a simulation of native discourse in
an African language, replete with characteristic images,
metaphors, proverbs, and rhetorical strategies employed in daily
conversation. He employed the same devices in his own prose. He
explained his technique in another famous essay on ‘The English
Language and the African Writer,’ noting that
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is
submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer
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should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message
best without altering the language to the extent that its value
as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should
aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and
able to carry his peculiar experience…. It is largely a matter of
instinct, but judgment comes into it too.
Instinct and judgment. How did these qualities emerge in such
refinement in a young man still in his twenties who had had little
experience in writing fiction, no encouragement from teachers at
school or university to try his hand at storytelling on paper, no
models of indigenous creativity in print from which he could draw
inspiration, no mentors who could guide him toward representing
truthfully the sophisticated verbal culture of a traditional society,
no friends, colleagues, confidants or peers who had already set
out in the creative direction he was about to explore in such depth
and map with such profound understanding?
Where, given this void in his background, did his originality as
an artist come from? How did he happen to become a true, trend-
setting pioneer? How do we explain his sudden emergence as a
fully mature wordsmith who virtually single-handedly changed
the course of African literary history? How do we solve this riddle,
this enigma of his unexpected and unprecedented excellence?
Were instinct and judgment enough to shape his virtuosity and
vision as a deep-thinking creative artist?
True, he had been exposed at the University of Ibadan to a few
superb examples of bad writing about Africa, the classic cases
being the novels of Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. He apparently
also had become sufficiently acquainted with texts containing
tainted colonial historiography of the Alan Burns variety to reject
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their interpretations of Africa as well. To this register of negative
influences we could no doubt add Hollywood films set in the
jungles and goldmines of the Dark Continent, especially those
featuring Tarzan, Allan Quatermain, and other European
adventurers in interaction with stupid, superstitious, malevolent,
and unusually inarticulate savages. Western popular culture has
been for centuries full of derogatory depictions of Africans. These
racist narratives and images could have served as motivation for
a writer who wanted to tell a more truthful story of his people and
place in the world. But could countering such negativity
necessarily account for the kind of artistic triumph we see in
Things Fall Apart?
For that, I think we need to look more closely at the
environment in which Achebe was raised. He has often spoken of
growing up at the crossroads of culture, with one foot in the
modern Christianized ambience of his home, and the other in the
pagan traditional atmosphere in which some of his neighbours
lived. He was a child of two words but comfortable in both,
though the differences between these environments grew as he
progressed further in his formal education. Yet he never forgot
the lessons he learned when listening to his kinfolk on both sides
of the divide speak. When accepting one of the prestigious
international awards he won—the German Peace Prize awarded
by the German Book Trade in 2002—he said
The Africa I write about is not inhabited by people without
speech. I grew up hearing sometimes magnificent and always
efficient, language in my community. I did not hear the grunts
and the screeches that savages were supposed to use instead
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of speech. So I wrote what I did hear, in a translation that
accorded equal respect to the two languages I have.
So the simple but subtle act of effectively translating traditional
eloquence gave him a distinctive voice that had never been heard
before in African literature. And it transformed the way African
speech was rendered by other authors in the years that followed.
This was first most noticeable in the works by fellow Igbo
novelists who also wrote in English—Flora Nwapa, John
Munonye, Chukwuemeka Ike, and especially Onuora Nzekwu.
Nzekwu’s first two novels published in the early 1960s had been
written in stiff, orthodox English, but by the time he composed his
third, Highlife for Lizards, published in 1965, he had abandoned
standard English and converted to Achebe’s manner of
representing African vernacular expression. Two of these
novelists—Ike and Munonye—had been Achebe’s classmates at
the University of Ibadan, and Nwapa graduated there a few years
after he had left. All of them were good friends of his and freely
acknowledged having been inspired by his writings.
Having had this powerful influence on his peers by writing four
path-breaking novels in eight short years, fictions set in present
times as well as in the past, each reflecting the dominant concerns
of his day, we are left to explain a subsequent enigma: the long
gap before the production of his fifth novel, Anthills of the
Savannah, which was not published until 1987, twenty-one years
after A Man of the People. What threw him off-track for a full
generation?
The standard answer was that it was the trauma and turmoil
of the Nigerian Civil War that made it impossible to him to
continue the pattern of life and work he had earlier set for himself.
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In 1969, while the war in its final stages was still raging in the Igbo
homeland of Biafra, he said,
I started a novel just before the war which seemed to me at
the time terribly important—I already had the idea for it as far
back as ’66—but I finally gave it up because it later seemed to
me completely unimportant.
I think there is a myth about creativity being something
apart from life, but this is only a half truth. I can create, but of
course not the kind of thing I created when I was at ease. I
can’t write a novel now; I wouldn’t want to. And even if I
wanted to, I couldn’t. So that particular artistic form is out for
me at the moment. I can write poetry—something short,
intense, more in keeping with my mood. I can write essays. I
can even lecture. All of this is creating in the context of our
struggle. At home I do a lot of writing, but not fiction,
something more concrete, more directly related to what’s
going on. What I’m saying is that there are forms of creativity
which suit different moments. I wouldn’t consider writing a
poem on daffodils particularly creative in my situation now. It
would be foolish; I couldn’t do it.
But these are not normal times, not for me. These are not
normal times at all.
Twenty-one years is a very long time. Did any sort of normality
ever really return for him? Yes, he created a number of other
works, and university duties as well as community commitments
absorbed much of his energy after the war, but were there other
matters too that left him feeling disinclined to resume writing
fiction? Of course, in 1990 he suffered a tragic paralyzing injury in
an auto accident, and being confined to a wheelchair thereafter
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limited the range of his activities still further. Yet it would be
interesting to know more about his state of mind and struggles
during all these difficult years, if only to gain a fuller appreciation
of what he was able to accomplish despite all these personal and
professional setbacks.
What I am suggesting is that we need to know Achebe better,
not just as a creative artist but also as a human being who lived
partly in perilous times and survived adversities with his spirit
largely intact and his pen still active. He continued to contribute
ideas frankly and forthrightly to causes he had long championed,
especially the task of re-educating his own people. His last book,
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra was yet another
bold attempt to reinterpret his nation’s past. It generated a great
deal of controversy in Nigeria, but Achebe was doing nothing
more than telling the story from his own experience of having
lived through the troubled times he describes. In Anthills of the
Savannah he had his chief character Beatrice ask, ‘What does one
do to appease an embittered history?’ His own answer to that
question in There Was a Country appears to have been to tell the
story truthfully and creatively, relying on your own perception of
what happened and offering your own opinion of why it
happened that way.
The controversy over Achebe’s final statement on Nigeria is
likely to continue until we have a more complete understanding
of the man who excited it. Ezenwa-Ohaeto has given us a fine
biography of Achebe that puts on record a good many of the
formative experiences of his career, placing them in chronological
order and relating them to the books he produced during that
span of time. But his account was published sixteen years before