What else can be said about Chinua Achebe the late Nigerian literary colossus that has not been said? Ever since his demise, the praises and tributes to this great man of letters have been overwhelming. His funeral cortege reminds one of the passing of a great king, drenched in paens and panegyrics and in the national colours of a country he had virtually given up on. It reminds one of the funeral of Victor Hugo, the great French author, who also famously quarrelled with his country.
An African philosopher-king, the iconic Nelson Mandela, weighed in by noting that Achebe was the writer who broke down prison walls with his magical and immensely liberating story telling. It doesn’t get more royal and revolutionary at the same time. Chinua Achebe is on his way to being canonised and sanctified as the Nelson Mandela of modern African literature and cultural nationalism
Yet it needs to be said that unlike Nelson Mandela, the praise-singing has not been universal. There have also been murmurs and even loud grunts of disapproval and, with touching irony, from the home front, too. There are many who view the late master story teller as a tribal bigot, an Igbo hegemonist, and a divisive and polarising figure who should be quickly buried and not be praised.
There are those who claim that in addition to earlier infractions and indiscretions, his last book, There Was Another country, destroyed at once and forever, Achebe’s claims to a Nigerian nationalism. By the time he died, Achebe, they claim, had become a reluctant Nigerian and a Biafran revanchist to boot.
These are grievous charges indeed and grievously has Achebe paid for them in some scalding and scarifying dismissals. But now that what is mortal of the paradigmatic novelist has been committed to mother earth, now that the protocol of henchmen and hatchet men alike have retreated to their dens and denizenry, it is time to explore the crucially neglected aspect of Achebe’s literary career on which his claims to immortality rests. That is his literary politics. It is literary politics that determines literary production. Literary politics is in turn determined by an author’s worldview and ideological temperament.
As befitting of a master ironist, Chinua Achebe’s literary career is steeped in momentous historical, political and literary ironies. There is a sense in which Achebe himself recalls Okonkwo, his most famous fictional creation. Things Fall Apart has been described as an “Igbo national epic”. There is a glorious but illuminating contradiction about this very description.
Many scholars of radical and conservative persuasion have argued that the modern novel, precisely because it is an organic and generic outgrowth of the dissolution of the material, economic and political basis of the old order and ancient society, cannot aspire to the soaring heights, the ideological solidity and sheer “epic” nature of the old epic. Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist aesthetician, described the modern novel as an epic of diminution and futility. The old hero at one with his society has transformed into the new anti-hero at odds and variance with his society.
But this was the contradiction of a colonially induced transition from the old society to a new society that Achebe’s novel captures and works out within its slender format in a moment of historic inspiration. Okonkwo is both a hero and anti-hero in the same breath. The infiltration of an antagonistic logic had destroyed the material, spiritual, political and military basis of the old order.
At the beginning of the novel, we see the old Igbo society in its epic glory and grandeur. To be sure, there were internal murmurs of unease and approbation, but such dissenters and refuseniks, like Okonkwo’s father, Nnoka, were banished to the outer margins of society and eventually buried like paupers. Thus we see Okonkwo whose signal ascendancy was based on solid personal achievement. The hero is at one and on the same page with his society. He is the great historical personage who incarnates in his breasts the aspirations and core values of the society. Okonkwo is uber-man of Umuofia.
But at the end of the novel, the hero is at stiff odds with his society. The falcon could no longer hear the falconer. Having returned from exile which itself was a symbolic trope for inevitable terminal banishment, Okonkwo could no longer understand the people he left behind.
Mlungu, the white one, had arrived in his absence. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the Igbo world. It was an act of literary wizardry for Achebe to have zeroed in on Yeats memorable stanza as the organising principle of his novel. Yeats was also poetically engraving for posterity the dissolution of the old Irish order as it succumbed to the modernising terror of the English.
It is a great and interesting historical irony that Achebe was able to capture this radical rupture of the old African order by colonialism, despite the fact that his Igbo people lacked the central political authority and centralised army with which to confront the colonial invaders in formal battle.
The Benin empire, the Zulu empire, the military rumps of the old Oyo Empire, the caliphate army of Sokoto, all confronted the invading colonisers in pitched battles and epic bloodfest. But precisely because the Igbo people lacked this centralised resistance, Achebe was able to focus on the career and tragic downfall of an exceptional but solitary hero who then became a stirring universal symbol of African manliness and heroic resistance to evil. It was an epic achievement indeed. .
Like Okonkwo, his greatest fictional creation, Chinua Achebe was also in the end dogged by a transcendental homelessness in which permanent exile became a home. The home of the homeless is homelessness. The alienation from an alien nation is so severe that Achebe could not come to terms with the new realities of contemporary Nigeria. Yet if there was another country, it was a mythical paradise in the imagination of the author.
The comparison with Okonkwo is gripping and compelling. In the case of Okonkwo, it was the troubled transition from the old society to the new colonial order that proved fatal. The proud and narcissistic scion of old Umuofia society could not abide what he considered to be his people’s shabby accommodation with the new order and its debasing realities.
In the case of Chinua Achebe, the transition from colonial to post-colonial order with its ructions and radical rupture of old certainties and verities and the ensuing collision of ethnic altars proved very traumatic indeed. The human sacrifice at the political shrine of the new nation has been prohibitive and on a Fordist scale of clinical and ruthless efficiency. Had the Igbo people been left to evolve into a nation of their own, the contradictions would have been less severe. But this same argument can be extended to each and every one of Nigeria’s major and minor nationalities.
A situation in which the hegemonic ethnic groups of Nigeria have been forced to recreate the colonial chaos according to the dictates of their unique and resilient political imaginary was bound to prove even messier and more chaotic than the original colonial confusion. It is an equal opportunity terror machine and coups, counter-coups, civil wars, religious uprisings, economic insurgencies, and ethnic insurrections have been the result. When a master ironist like Achebe obsesses that his people have been hardly done by in what is essentially a kill and go colonial abattoir, then irony has deserted its own master.
As we have said in an earlier tribute, the post-colonial condition is particularly hard and harsh on the great and gifted writers. It turns them into political hermits and mental recluses. In its worst manifestation, it turns them into psychological wreckages, leading to permanent exile or internal self-deportation without parole or the possibility of exit mercy visa. This is because as artists—and adult enfant terrible—- they are at the frontiers of the psychic unease and the great psycho-social dramas of their society. It is a situation that does not lend itself to equivocations or evasion of the truth as they see it. They do not come to praise Caesar but to bury him.
But this will not take anything away from Achebe’s signal achievement as a game-changing novelist and master story teller. Things Fall Apart was, and remains, at the forefront and cutting edge of the decolonising project. To be sure, there were other great aspirants before Achebe. There was Casely-Hayford, the great nineteenth century Gold Coast writer, whose book, Ethiopia Unbound, was an early cry in the wilderness against the subjugation and colonisation of Africa. But it was a thinly veiled autobiographical polemic lacking craft and intrinsic literary merits.
There was Thomas Mofolo, the great South African Sotho novelist, who was in every particular respect, Achebe’s forerunner and literary forebear. Mofolo’s four novels, particularly Chaka, a fictionalised biography of the great Zulu emperor, are a sublime and profoundly subversive critique of Boer imperialism that were quite sophisticated and enthralling for their time. This is not to discount the achievement of Camara Laye, the great Guinean novelist, whose lyrical rhapsodies about an idyllic African past remain classics of the genre. There was also D. O Fagunwa, the great Yoruba novelist, who should be justly celebrated as the father of African magical realism.
All of these great men of letters must however pale in significance when compared with the momentous achievement of Chinua Achebe as a novelist, essayist and polemicist. Without any doubt, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel consciously and militantly conceived on the platform of cultural nationalism and woven from the intellectual fabric of mental decolonisation. It was a paen to freedom and liberation. This is why the saga of the man from Umuofia has continued to resonate with Black people and all those who are engaged in the project of emancipation. It gives artistic and intellectual voice to their political and cultural aspirations, and with clinical clarity too.
It needs to be said that Achebe’s great novel was forged in artistic, political and ideological rebellion.. Politically and ideologically, it was a conscious and militantly radical rejection of the Conradian and Caryean depiction of the Black person as an irredeemable savage and primitive cannibal. Achebe’s thesis is simple but incontrovertible. Every human society has its own unique way of apprehending and coming to terms with the material and spiritual realities of its existence.
Artistically, had Achebe listened to his teacher who famously dismissed his youthful effort as lacking in “form”, he might have been driven to produce some of the unreadable wonders of the language. In retrospect, it is clear that Achebe’s teacher was sold on the virtues of literary modernism with its stylistic razzmatazz, its high wire and sometimes haywire virtuosity. By sticking to his guns and to the canons of traditional realism, Chinua Achebe rescued the African novel and posterity from a potential literary disaster.
There is always an element of militant self-belief that goes with all truly great writers. Achebe had this in fecund abundance. It was said that Cervantes, the Spaniard who is justly regarded as the first modern novelist, triumphed over his more technically gifted rivals simply because his staunch conservative nature prevented the outlandish experimentation which could have pushed the nascent genre in a perilous direction. So it is with Chinua Achebe.
Perhaps the greatest irony of Achebe’s literary politics is the fact that while remaining militantly and consciously anti-imperialist in all its wiles and guiles, Achebe often came across as a mild-mannered and diffident British professor. There was always something of the quintessential English gentleman about the urbane, courteous and infinitely polite Achebe. He was a man of quiet, understated charms not given to exuberant one-upmanship.
In the end, while Okonkwo, Achebe great fictional hero, fought with his cutlass and bare hands, his real life descendant fought with his pen. They were both proud rebels in the noblest sense of that word. Achebe fought a good fight and has gone home to rest. It is the novelist as an epic character in his own right. While all the indiscretions and undeniable bigotry would disappear with the passage of time, it is the great novels, particularly Things Fall Apart, that would remain as a cultural monument. This is Chinua Achebe’s portal to immortality.
Culled from the current edition of Africa Today
