In a myth told by the
Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chukwu, the
supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their
messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which had been
eavesdropping, reached Chukwu first. Wanting to punish man, the toad reversed
the request, and told Chukwu that after death men did not want to return to the
world. The god said that he would do as they wished, and when the dog arrived
with the true message he refused to change his mind. Thus, men may be born
again, but only in a different form.
The Nigerian novelist Chinua
Achebe recounts this myth, which exists in hundreds of versions throughout
Africa, in one of his essays. Sometimes, Achebe writes, the messenger is a
chameleon, a lizard, or another animal; sometimes the message is altered accidentally
rather than maliciously. But the structure remains the same: men ask for
immortality and the god is willing to grant it, but something goes wrong and
the gift is lost forever. “It is as though the ancestors who made language and
knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of
interfering with its purpose!” Achebe writes. “For when language is seriously
interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth . . . horrors can descend
again on mankind.”
The myth holds another lesson as
well—one that has been fundamental to the career of Achebe, who has been called
“the patriarch of the African novel.” There is danger in relying on someone
else to speak for you: you can trust that your message will be communicated
accurately only if you speak with your own voice. With his masterpiece, “Things
Fall Apart,” one of the first works of fiction to present African village life
from an African perspective, Achebe began the literary reclamation of his
country’s history from generations of colonial writers. Published fifty years
ago—a new edition has just appeared, from Anchor ($10.95)—it has been
translated into fifty languages and has sold more than ten million copies.
In the course of a writing life
that has included five novels, collections of short stories and poetry, and
numerous essays and lectures, Achebe has consistently argued for the right of
Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and has attacked the
representations of European writers. But he also did not reject European
influence entirely, choosing to write not in his native Igbo but in English, a
language that, as he once said, “history has forced down our throat.” In a
country with several major languages and more than five hundred smaller ones, establishing
a lingua franca was a practical and political necessity. For Achebe, it was
also an artistic necessity—a way to give expression to the clash of
civilizations that is his enduring theme.
Achebe was born Albert
Chinualumogu Achebe in 1930, in the region of southeastern Nigeria known as
Igboland. (He dropped his first name, a “tribute to Victorian England,” in
college.) Ezenwa-Ohaeto, the author of the first comprehensive biography of
Achebe, writes that the young Chinua was raised at a cultural “crossroads”: his
parents were converts to Christianity, but other relatives practiced the
traditional Igbo faith, in which people worship a panoply of gods, and are
believed to have their own personal guiding spirit, called a chi. Achebe was fascinated by the “heathen” religion of his
neighbors. “The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together, like
the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a
canvas steadily and fully,” he later observed.
At home, the family spoke Igbo
(sometimes also spelled Ibo), but Achebe began to learn English in school at
the age of about eight, and he soon won admission to a colonial-run boarding
school. Since the students came from different regions, they had to “put away
their different mother tongues and communicate in the language of their
colonizers,” Achebe writes. There he had his first exposure to colonialist
classics such as “Prester John,” John Buchan’s novel about a British adventurer
in South Africa, which contains the famous line “That is the difference between
white and black, the gift of responsibility.” Achebe, in an essay called “African
Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” has written, “I did not see myself
as an African to begin with. . . . The white man was good and reasonable and
intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and
stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts.”
At University College, Ibadan,
Achebe encountered the novel “Mister Johnson,” by the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce
Cary, who had spent time as a colonial officer in Nigeria. The book was lauded
by Time as “the best novel ever written
about Africa.” But Achebe, as he grew older, no longer identified with the
imperialists; he was appalled by Cary’s depiction of his homeland and its
people. In Cary’s portrait, the “jealous savages . . . live like mice or rats
in a palace floor”; dancers are “grinning, shrieking, scowling, or with faces
which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman, like twisted bags of
lard.” It was the image of blacks as “unhuman,” a standard trope of colonial
literature, that Achebe recognized as particularly dangerous. “It began to dawn
on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or
false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its
disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity,” he wrote later. This belief
in fiction’s moral power became integral to his vision for African literature.
Okonkwo was well
known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.” From the first line of “Things
Fall Apart”—Achebe’s first novel—we are in unfamiliar territory. Who is this
Okonkwo whom everybody knows? Where are these nine villages? Achebe began to
write “Things Fall Apart” during the mid-fifties, when he moved to Lagos to
join the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. In 1958, when he submitted the
manuscript to the publisher William Heinemann, no one knew what to make of it.
Alan Hill, a director of the firm, recalled the initial reaction: “Would anyone
possibly buy a novel by an African? There are no precedents.” That was not
entirely accurate—the Nigerian writers Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi had
published novels earlier in the decade. But the novel as an African form was
still very young, and “Things Fall Apart” represented a new approach, showing
the collision of old and new ways of life to devastating effect.
Set in a fictional
group of Igbo villages called Umuofia sometime around the beginning of the
twentieth century, “Things Fall Apart” begins with an episodic, almost
dreamlike chronicle of village life through the family of Okonkwo. A boy named
Ikemefuna has just come from outside Umuofia to live with them, and soon
becomes like a brother to Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. (Ikemefuna’s father had killed a
woman from Umuofia, and the villagers agreed to accept a virgin and a young man
as compensation.) Over the next three years, the story follows Okonkwo’s family
through harvest seasons, religious festivals, and domestic disputes. The
language is rich with metaphors drawn from the villagers’ experience: Ikemefuna
“grew rapidly like a yam tendril in the rainy season, and was full of the sap
of life.” The dialogue, too, is aphoristic and allusive. “Among the Ibo the art
of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with
which words are eaten,” the narrator explains. (As the reader has already seen,
palm oil is used to flavor yams, the villagers’ staple food.)
Despite the pastoral
setting, there is nothing idyllic about this portrayal of village life. If the
yam harvest is bad, the villagers go hungry. Babies are not expected to live to
adulthood. (Only after the age of six is a child said to have “come to stay.”)
Some customs are cruel: newborn twins, thought to be inhabited by evil spirits,
are “thrown away” in the bush. The Igbo are not presented as a museum exhibit—if
their behavior is not always familiar, their emotions are. In a pivotal scene,
a group of men, including Okonkwo, lead Ikemefuna out of the village after the
local oracle determines that he must be killed. The boy thinks that he is at
last returning home, and he worries that his mother will not be there to greet
him. To calm himself, he resorts to a childhood game:
He sang [a song] in
his mind, and walked to its beat. If the song ended on his right foot, his
mother was alive. If it ended on his left, she was dead. No, not dead, but ill.
It ended on the right. She was alive and well. He sang the song again, and it
ended on the left. But the second time did not count. The first voice gets to
Chukwu, or God’s house. That was a favorite saying of children.
Tradition holds the
people together, but it also drives them apart. After Nwoye finds out that his
father killed Ikemefuna, “something seemed to give way inside him, like the
snapping of a tightened bow.” When the first missionaries arrive, those who
have suffered most under the village culture are the first to join the church.
To Okonkwo’s dismay, Nwoye is among them. The missionaries, though ignorant of
local customs, are not all bad: one in particular treats the villagers with
respect. But others show little interest in their way of life. “Does the white
man understand our custom about land?” Okonkwo asks a friend in puzzlement. “How
can he when he does not even speak our tongue?” the other man responds. In the
book’s final chapter, the colonizer’s voice takes over; the silence that
surrounds it speaks for itself.
Political imperatives
were not hypothetical in Nigeria, which, having achieved independence in 1960,
entered a prolonged period of upheaval. In 1967, following two coups that had
led to genocidal violence against the Igbo, Igboland declared independence as
the Republic of Biafra. Achebe himself became a target of the violence: his
novel “A Man of the People” (1966), a political satire, had forecast the coup
so accurately that some believed him to have been in on the plot. He devoted
himself fully to the Biafran cause. For a time, he stopped writing fiction,
taking up poetry—“something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood.”
Achebe travelled to London to promote awareness of the war, and in 1969 he
helped write the official declaration of the “Principles of the Biafran
Revolution.”
But the fledgling
nation starved, its roads and ports blockaded by the British-backed Nigerian
Army. By the time Biafra was finally forced to surrender, in 1970, the number
of Igbo dead was estimated at between one million and three million. At the
height of the famine, Conor Cruise O’Brien reported in The New York
Review of Books, five thousand to six thousand people—“mainly children”—died
each day. The sufferers could be recognized by the distinctive signs of protein
deficiency, known as kwashiorkor: bloated bellies, pale skin, and reddish hair.
Achebe’s poem “A Mother in a Refugee Camp” describes a woman’s efforts to care
for her child:
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.
The heartbreak of
Biafra shook the foundations of Nigerian society and led to decades of
political turmoil. Achebe took the opportunity to distance himself temporarily,
spending part of the early nineteen-seventies teaching in the United States.
During these years, as the independence era’s potential for brutality became
clear, he set out to correct the colonial record with even greater vigor. In
essays and lectures, he railed against what he called “colonialist criticism”—the
conscious or unconscious dehumanization of African characters, the vision of
the African writer as an “unfinished European who with patient guidance will
grow up one day,” the assumption that economic underdevelopment corresponds to
a lack of intellectual sophistication (“Show me a people’s plumbing, you say,
and I can tell you their art”). He was infuriated to find how widespread these
attitudes remained. One student, learning that Achebe taught African
literature, remarked casually that “he never had thought of Africa as having
that kind of stuff.”
Achebe recounts this
anecdote in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ ”
(1977). Examining Conrad’s descriptions of the “savages,” Achebe shows that the
novel, far from subverting imperialist constructions, falls victim to them.
Marlow, the story’s narrator, describes the Africans as “not inhuman,” and
continues, “Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their
not being inhuman.” And yet the blacks in the novel are nameless and faceless,
their language barely more than grunts; they are assumed to be cannibals.The
only explanation for this, Achebe concludes, is “obvious racism.” Many have
responded that Achebe oversimplifies Conrad’s narrative: “Heart of Darkness” is
a story within a story, told in the highly unreliable voice of Marlow, and the
novel is, to say the least, ambivalent about imperialism. The writer Caryl
Phillips has asked, “Is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine
an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he
was living and the larger purpose of his novel?” But, even if Conrad’s methods
can be justified, the significance of Achebe’s essay was that justification now
became necessary: he made the ugliness latent in Conrad’s vision impossible to ignore.
In contrast to
European modernism, with its embrace of “art for art’s sake” (a concept that
Achebe, with characteristic bluntness, once called “just another piece of
deodorized dog shit”), Achebe has always advocated a socially and politically
motivated literature. Since literature was complicit in colonialism, he says,
let it also work to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. “Literature is not a
luxury for us. It is a life and death affair because we are fashioning a new
man,” he declared in a 1980 interview. His most recent novel, “Anthills of the
Savannah” (1987), functions clearly in this mold, following a group of friends
who serve in the government of the West African country of Kangan, obviously a
stand-in for Nigeria. Sam, who took power in a coup, is steering the nation
rapidly toward dictatorship. When Chris, the minister of information, refuses
to take Sam’s side against Ikem, the editor of the government-controlled
newspaper, the full wrath of the government turns against both of them. The book
does not match the artistic achievement of “Things Fall Apart” or “Arrow of
God,” but it gets to the heart of the corruption and the idealism of African
politics.
Achebe insists that
in its form and content the African novel must be an indigenous creation. This
stance has led him to criticize other writers whom he regards as insufficiently
politically committed, particularly Ayi Kwei Armah, whose novel “The Beautyful
Ones Are Not Yet Born” (1968) presents a dire vision of postcolonial Ghana. The
novel begins with the image of a man sleeping on a bus with his eyes open.
Streets and buildings are caked with garbage, phlegm, and excrement. Beneath
the filthy surfaces, structures are rotten to the core. Armah’s novel has been
acclaimed as a vivid rendering of disillusionment with the country’s new
politics under Kwame Nkrumah. But Achebe finds Armah’s “alienated stance” no
better than Joyce Cary’s, and particularly objects to Armah’s existentialism,
which he calls a “foreign metaphor” for the sickness of Ghana. Even worse,
Armah has said that he is “not an African writer but just a writer,” which
Achebe calls “a statement of defeat.”
Is it too utopian to imagine that
the African novel could exist simply as a novel, absolved of its social and
pedagogical mission? Achebe has been fiercely critical of those who search for “universality”
in African fiction, arguing that such a standard is never applied to Western
fiction. But there is something reductive about Achebe’s insistence on defining
writers by their ethnicity. To say that a work of literature transcends
national boundaries is not to deny its moral or political value.
In 1990, Achebe was paralyzed
after a serious car accident. Doctors advised him to come to the United States
for treatment, and he has taught at Bard College ever since. “Home and Exile,”
a short collection of essays, is the only book he has published during this
period, though he is said to be at work on a new novel. But, if Achebe is
largely retired, another generation of writers has taken up his call for a new
African literature, and the majority have followed his lead: they embrace the
English language despite its colonial connotations, but they also seek to
establish an African literary identity outside the colonial framework. And the
achievements of African writers are increasingly recognized: Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun,” an excruciating and remarkable novel about
the Biafran war, won Britain’s Orange Prize last year.
The “situation in the world,”
fifty years after “Things Fall Apart,” is not as altered as one might wish. As
Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani?, demonstrated in a satiric piece called “How to Write About
Africa,” racist stereotypes are still prevalent: “Never have a picture of a
well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African
has won the Nobel Prize. . . . Make sure you show how Africans have music and
rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat.” But the power
of Achebe’s legacy cannot be discounted. Adichie has recalled discovering his
work at the age of about ten. Until then, she said, “I didn’t think it was
possible for people like me to be in books.” ♦
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