A mighty tree fell in Boston, Massachusetts, two weeks ago, and its fall was heard across the world.
That tree was Chinua Achebe, and the fall was heard by the tens of millions who had read his first and best known novel, “Things Fall Apart” in the major languages into which it has been translated, among them, his native Igbo, and Yoruba.
It was heard in the leading world academies, where his novels, essays, poems, lectures and other literary forms are studied. It was heard in every establishment involved in making or executing policy or otherwise transacting business in Nigeria and indeed Africa as a guide. It was heard by everyone across creed, colour or tongue he had charmed with his incomparable skills as a story-teller, the majestic simplicity of his prose, and a profound sociological imagination.
His writings burst upon the literary and political world at a time of ferment. The wind of change which gusting over Africa that British Prime Minister called the attention of the heedless apartheid regime in South Africa was gathering speed, sounding the death knell of colonialism and imperialism. In the United States, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum, putting Jim Crow and its clan on notice that all those “self-evident truths” must amount to much more than articles of faith in the Declaration of Independence.
To them, Achebe lent a voice, a stirring, eloquent voice – a voice that derived its power from the acuity of his insights no less than from being so understated. He rescued subject peoples from the mutilate versions of themselves and taught them to see themselves whole, to be at peace with their being and essence. This was the context in which he got to know and collaborate with the writer James Baldwin, one of the leading lights of the movement.
Africans and indeed black people everywhere can walk tall today in part because Achebe exploded the racist stereotypes Europe and America developed and assiduously propagated about them. He wrote back to the makers of empire. The civilising mission they prided themselves on was a rude disruption of long-established ways of life and was in some ways and actually a regression. It is a mark of his towering achievement that his obituary notice in the digital edition of The New York Times attracted some 150 comments from readers worldwide, all of them laudatory.
In a famous essay, Achebe wrote that writer has a duty to teach. And what a teacher he was! Many of the better-known young Africans writing today owe their success to his example, his inspiration, and encouragement. The genre that has come to be called African Literature owes its status in no small part to Achebe as publisher and editor and teacher. He at once embodied and brought before the world the wisdom of his people.
He was also an iconoclast. In another essay – or was it an interview? – he said the writer is the one who, when you beat your chest about the graceful architectural sweep of your city flyovers, calls to your attention to all the unsightly mess under it.
Though often remarked in his oeuvre, the iconoclastic streak that perfuses it as well as his political engagements rarely gets the emphasis it deserves. Everyone familiar with his writings knows how he took down Joseph Conrad and Joyce Carey from their pedestal. All that was in the line of literary duty.
Applied to Nigerian politics, which is still largely ethnic-based, and a blood sport of sorts, that kind of iconoclasm can have unintended consequences. As Obafemi Awolowo was being mourned in 1987, Achebe dismissed him as “a mediocre politician.” The Nobel was a European prize that did not and could not translate into the “Asiwaju” of Nigerian literature, contrary to the impression some “idle lackeys” of the Yoruba recipient Wole Soyinka were trying to create, he wrote.
In the tit-for-tat matrix in which identity politics is played in Nigeria, it seemed very likely that, at his death, Achebe would attract among some of Awolowo’s adoring kinsmen at least something close to Achebe’s embittered putdown of the chief and his petulant remarks about the Nobel, its 1986 recipient, and his band of admirers.
Achebe turned that likelihood into a certainty in his controversial last work, “There was a Country,” in which he offered it as his “firm impression” that Awo had, “for the benefit of his people,” devised or pursued policies that did incalculable harm to the Igbo when he was Federal Commissioner for Finance and Vice Chair of the Federal Executive Council during the civil war.
This charge in effect makes every Yoruba an accessory to whatever Awo was alleged to have done or left undone. Achebe was not the first to make this charge; lesser characters have been bandying it for decades. But he gave it a fresh infusion of oxygen, with consequences that no one who pays even the most casual attention to the misnamed “social media” can applaud. It was as if the civil war was being fought all over again, this time in cyberspace, but with undiminished ferocity.
Not a few Nigerians feel gravely offended by such charges and assertions strewn across the book with far less rigour than usually marks his work, and by significant omissions that would have provided a richer context. The Achebe they behold is not exactly the Achebe the rest of the world is celebrating — the literary titan, the voice of calm, reasoned discourse, the great teacher. They accuse him of setting out in his last work to glorify his people and vilify everyone else.
Achebe was proud of his Igbo identity. He proclaimed it, celebrated it, rejoiced in it. He was not in the least apologetic about it. Nor should he have been; no one should have to apologise for his or her ethnic identity. If avowing and affirming his ethnic identity somehow constricted his political vision, Achebe would have said: so be it, secure in the knowledge that his place in the world of letters is assured.
Not for him the sham pretence of being a “detribalised” Nigerian. Show me that “detribalised” person and I will show you a person who is practically unconscious. Some have succeeded more than others in sublimating or transcending their ethnic identities. Yet, it is by virtue of being Igbo or Hausa or Yoruba or Kanuri or Nupe or Tiv or Igala or Ijaw or Urhobo or Efik or Ibibio, or of belonging in some one of 300 ethnic groups that make up the national population that one can lay claim to being a Nigerian.
By word and deed, Achebe taught that we should speak forthrightly on these issues, without muzzling opposing viewpoints or denying others the right to do the same.
Would that we could do so with respect for one another, and without bitterness.
