He entered the hall at Brown University without drama. Maybe there was drama, but the sort that jolted with its silences. Everywhere suddenly froze. Lips froze. Moving hands seized. Tongues retracted and retreated. Eyes stopped to stare except at a particular spot. Inanimate objects bowed to the petrified logic of the moment: pens, pads, doors. All wrapped in awe.
The man, the object of both affection and curiosity, did not seem to stir either. Chinua Achebe, who came in on a wheelchair, looked forward, as though contemplating. What was he contemplating: his next controversy? His next essay, next plot in a novel, or the prospect of an intellectual brouhaha in his colloquium organised yearly at one of the world’s top centres of learning: Brown University? Remember, he was a man of storms.
Throughout the two-day event, Achebe’s lips never creased into a word. His voice, known for its soft but arresting register, was a dramatic silence at his own event. It was an indicator that health was no longer at ease for the legend, a man who had written himself into literary grandeur, who had engrafted the African narrative on a cold and cocky Western world, who glided into controversies like a crocodile into a stormy water. He was lacking in the vim and fire of the author of A Man of The People.
Some of us at the colloquium on Africa last December wondered what would happen to the annual event once the man passed. He was all of 82, and he was wheeled around by one of his sons. He did not even stir much when Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), the governor of example, squared up to his then raging book, There Was A Country. The governor had pitched a battle against the effete logic of a book that preyed on the divisive struggles of Achebe’s generation. Fashola asserted that succeeding generations had transcended his book.
It turned out to be his last book, and his only stir at the colloquium was when he clapped at the performance of the willowy Nigerian artiste Nneka who thrilled everyone with the acoustic sweetness of her guitar and the didactic, if plaintive melody of her voice.
But as the news came last week of Achebe’s death, I thought to myself that the man had lived a full life, a life of the writer, the life of the warrior of the word, the life of exile. It is the concept of exile that seized me the most. If you read any of his works, whether it was Things Fall Apart, or No Longer At Ease, or his non- fiction The Education of British-Protected Child, he was preoccupied with the inability of the Nigerian self, especially Achebe, to locate home. His was a life of the perpetual search for a fitting shelter. Things Fall Apart was a novel as rejoinder, a piece in reaction to Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Both works denigrated the African past and cast a slur on a continent’s dignity, and Achebe fumed. He fumed with his counter-narrative.
The novel pits one of Africa’s most memorable characters, Okonkwo, against the crudities of a civilising Europe. Okonkwo dies a suicide, a loner in a place where he struts like a cock. Achebe felt such a sense of alienation when he fled Lagos in the tumult of the Nigerian crisis of the 1960’s. When he went to the East, which was home, he and his family lacked root, as bombs, bullets and the bloody chaos of war pulled them from place to place. He too became an ambassador, and moved around the continent, Europe and North America, a secular, nationalistic pilgrim evangelising the virtues of Biafra.
After the war, he still could not accommodate the idea of Nigeria, and he elucidated this point in The Guardian Lecture Series when he noted that he had a tough time reconciling his Igbo identity with the Nigerian after the disappointment of the 1960s. This lacerated his soul and, by his own admission, froze his creative faculties as he did not produce any novel for 20 years. So he also suffered literary alienation.
He left Nigeria for Europe and returned. He found out that he had to leave again, for the United States. How could he reconcile with a people who uprooted him from his beloved Lagos, killed his kinsmen in the North, bombed his home in Enugu, razed the East from city to hamlet. These were the same people his people pointed guns at, killed as well and harassed with the primitive ingenuity of the Ogbunigwe.
He was not going to return for a while, and when he did, he taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, but he had to leave again. He did not visit for a long time, and when he did, he almost lost his life in a motor accident. But for the rest of his life, the warrior launched his battles from within the confines of a wheelchair.
The alienation was probably complete: alienation from his Igbo home, from Nigeria, from the West, from his art, from a healthy body. It was possible that Achebe was perpetually angry with his country. A man who drew people from around the world to the dignity and magnificence of his culture did not savour the society he so doggedly and elegantly evangelised. He was a contrast to his leader, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu- Ojukwu, who rekindled an exemplary Nigerianness after the war without quenching his Biafran fire.
Even when he visited Igboland a few years back at the invitation of former Imo State Governor Ikedi Ohakim, he panned his people for their fealty to materialistic glory rather than the higher reaches of knowledge. He asserted that the progress of any society was not possible without those exalted ideals of knowledge and character. His fidelity to Igbo roots was sometimes so irredentist that he forgot that the acclaimed father of African literature had transcended insular claims of a public kind. He described Awolowo as a tribalist when the sage died. In his last book, he asserted the Igbo as the superior race. The irony is that he could not live even in Igboland. That was perhaps his most potent alienation.
When he wrote a book of nonfiction, it was aptly titled, The Trouble with Nigeria. His alienation with Nigeria took on another colour. He said the problem with Nigeria was leadership. That clarified a new righteous rage signposted by rejections of two national awards, one from Obasanjo and the second from Jonathan. He was not at peace with the Nigerian state.
In spite of this, he was a writer in whom many around the world were well pleased. His Things fall Apart sold at least 8 million copies around the world, won him the Booker Prize for his lifetime work, earned doctorates in many upscale schools, was sought after for speeches everywhere. For a man who was so loved, it must have been painful to be Chinua Achebe. He agonised over a world of disconnections. Yet, if you read Things Fall Apart, the character that critics see as embodying Achebe’s views was Obierika. That character, unlike Okonkwo, urges accommodation. But Achebe’s life reads more like Okonkwo in terms of an insistence of principle and absence of accommodation. His was a Joycean island.
His narrative style was also not audacious. He was a cagy genius, a follower of a path of familiar perfections. That is the contradiction in a man who urged change but abided tested tropes. Yet he was a literary pathfinder by introducing a subject that kindled a new generation of literature. He did not win the Nobel Prize, a thing of personal frustration to him. He demonstrated this in his attack on Wole Soyinka’s triumph. He said that he won the European prize did not make Soyinka the Asiwaju of African literature. Soyinka replied, with dramatic irony, that it was not his intention to be an Ogbuefi of African literature. The Nobel alienation was perhaps felt the most by those who felt he deserved it.
No one can deny that Achebe was a jewel in the African narrative. He brought African letters out of the shadows in the modern era. That alone places him, for all the imperfections of his poetics, as a genius for the ages.
