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Tag: Achebe

  • The Achebe I knew, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

    The Achebe I knew, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

    Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a creative writer and distinguished professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, pays tribute to the late Prof. Chinua Achebe. 

    I first met the late Chinua Achebe in 1961 at Makerere, Kampala. His novel, Things Fall Apart, had come out two years before. I was then a second year student, the author of just one story, “Mugumo”, published in Penpoint, the literary magazine of the English Department. At my request, he looked at the story and made some encouraging remarks.

    My next encounter was more dramatic, on my part at least, and would affect my life and literary career profoundly. It was at the now famous 1962 conference of writers of English expression.

    Achebe was among a long line of literary luminaries that included Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Eski’a Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane. The East African contingent consisted of Grace Ogot, Jonathan Kariara, John Nagenda and I.

    My invitation was on the strength of my short stories published in Penpoint and in Transition.

    But what most attracted me was not my being invited there as ‘writer’ but the fact that I would be able to show the late Achebe the manuscript of my second novel, what would later become Weep Not, Child. It was very generous of him to agree to look at it because, as I would learn later, he was working on his novel, Arrow of God. Because of that and his involvement in the conference, he could not read the whole manuscript, but he read enough to give some useful suggestions.

    More important, he talked about it to his publisher, William Heinemann, represented at the conference by June Milne, who expressed an interest in the work. Weep Not, Child would later be published by Heinemann and the paperback by Heinemann Education Publishers, the fourth in the now famous African Writers series of which Achebe was the Editorial Adviser.

    I was working with The Nation newspapers when Weep Not, Child came out. It was April 1964, and Kenya was proud to have its first modern novel in English by a Kenyan African.

    Or so I thought, for the novel was well published in the Kenyan newspapers, The Sunday Nation even carrying my interview by de Villiers, one of its senior features writers.

    I assumed that every educated Kenyan would have heard about the novel. I was woken to reality when I entered a club, the most frequented by the new African elite at the time, who all greeted me as their Kenyan author of Things Fall Apart.

    Years later, at the late Achebe’s 70th birthday celebrations at Bard College attended by Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka among others, I told this story of how the late Achebe’s name had haunted my life. When Soyinka’s turn to speak came, he said I had taken the story from his mouth: He had been similarly mistaken for the late Achebe.

    The fact is the late Achebe became synonymous with the Heinemann African Writers Series and African writing as a whole. There’s hardly any African writer of my generation who has not been mistaken for Achebe.

    I have had a few of such encounters. The last such was in 2010 at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport. Mukoma, the author of Nairobi Heat, and I had been invited for the Kwani festival whose theme was inter-generational dialogue.

    As he and I walked towards the immigration desk, a man came towards me. His hands were literally trembling as he identified himself as a professor of literature from Zambia.

    “Excuse me Mr Achebe, somebody pointed you out to me. I have long wanted to meet you.”

    “No, no I am not the one,” I said, “but here is Mr Achebe,” I added, pointing at my son.

    I thought the obvious youth of my son would tell him that I was being facetious. But no, our professor grabbed Mukoma’s hands grateful that he had at last shaken hands with his hero.

    The case of mistaken identity as late as 2010 shows how Achebe had become a mythical figure, and rightly so. He was the single most important figure in the development of modern African literature as writer, editor and quite simply a human being.

    His novel, Things Fall Apart, the most widely read novel in the history of African literature since its publication in 1958, became an inspiring model. As the general editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, he had a hand in the emergence of many other writers and their publication.

    As a person, he embodied wisdom that comes from a commitment to the middle way between extremes and, of course, courage in the face of personal tragedy!

    The late Achebe bestrides generations and geographies.

    Every country in Africa claims him as their own. Some sayings in his novels are quoted frequently as proverbs that contain universal wisdom. His passing marks the beginning of the end of an epoch.

     

    •Culled from The Nation of Kenya

     

  • Senate to stand still for Achebe today

    Senate to stand still for Achebe today

    •Reps want monument named after author

    The Senate will today hold a session in honour of the late Prof. Chinua Achebe, the literary icon who died on March 21 in the United States.

    The decision followed a motion on matters of urgent national importance raised on the floor of the Senate by Senator Chris Ngige (ACN-Anambra).

    Ngige, who described the late Achebe as “his constituent’’, acknowledged that torrents of tribute had been pouring in since the late author’s death.

    The House of Representatives urged the Federal Government to name the National Library under construction or any other monument in the country in the honour of late Achebe.

    The motion was moved by Rep.Charles Odedo (ACN -Anambra). The motion entitled: “Tribute to Professor Chinua Achebe’’ was adopted in Abuja when put to vote by Speaker Aminu Tambuwal.

    Odedo said the late Achebe brought honour to Nigeria with his literary works that included his novel, “Things Fall apart’’.

    He said the novel, which was written in 1958, had been translated into more than 50 languages, and had sold more than 12 million copies.

    Odedo said the late Achebe in 1992 was represented in Everyman’s Library Collection.

    Contributing to the debate, Hassan Saleh (PDP-Benue) said the late Achebe was one of the greatest human beings to have emerged from Nigeria.

    He said the late Achebe had done so much in his literary works for “past generation and other generations to come’’.

    The legislator urged members to support the motion so that future generations would draw lessons from the late literary icon.

    In his tribute to the late Achebe, Toby Ikechukwu (PDP-Enugu) said the writer was a poet and novelist, adding that his works represented various stages of Nigeria’s democracy.

    Ali Madaki (PDP-Kano) said Nigerians do not celebrate their heroes until their death.

    He said: “We should learn to identify our heroes when they are alive and not wait until they are dead.”

    The motion was not opposed and the Speaker, thereafter, referred it to the Committee on Governmental Affairs for further legislative inputs.

  • Achebe’s legacy and more African voices in U.S.-Africa policy dialogues

    Chinua Achebe, the literary giant from Nigeria, passed away last Thursday. In his various writings, Achebe challenged the then Eurocentric perspectives and instead brought an African perspective to the story of colonialism in Nigeria as expounded in his books, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. These books showed the clash between the Igbo and the British in Nigeria: first from the perspective of a Nigerian father, and in the second book from the perspective of his European-educated son.

    Before Achebe, Amos Tutuola, Camara Laye and other African literary titans, the narrative of the African region and colonialism was handled primarily by the likes of Joseph Conrad, John Locke and Joyce Cary. Of course, these European perspectives are not entirely invalid. However, they represent only one broad perspective of Africa. As the old saying goes “Until the lion learns to speak, the tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” Fortunately, Chinua Achebe’s stories strengthened the African narrative and inspired future writers to realise the possibilities for African literature, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her Ted Talk, “I realised that people who looked like me could live in books.” Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, takes Achebe as a lesson to avoid the “danger of a single story” or a single perspective. She also points out that in some cases the ability to voice a particular perspective sometimes boils down to how much dominance the story teller has, “How (stories) are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.”

    In the African policy dialogue in Washington, as in literature, there is a tendency for a single narrative or perspective to dominate otherwise complex and varied perspectives of the continent. For example, The Economist deemed Africa the “hopeless continent” in the early 2000s. This narrative was recently retracted by the magazine and revised as “A hopeful continent”. In policy discussions in Washington, it is not uncommon for think tanks and briefings on Capitol Hill to feature panel discussions on African policy issues with experts sourced entirely from Europe and the U.S. The perspectives advanced in such forums could be well informed, but like the pre-Achebe writings, the narrative ignores the African perspective. As we mourn the passing of this great literary hero, we see our mission at the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative to take Achebe’s message forward by incorporating African voices in the policy dialogue on Africa in Washington. By amplifying and raising African voices in the U.S.-Africa policy dialogue, AGI complements the U.S. or European perspectives to facilitate better decision-making and to avoid missing opportunities that could potentially benefit both the African region and the United States.

     

    •Culled from www.brookings.edu

     

     

     

     

  • Achebe: My complicated literary father

    Igbo culture is comprised of a cosmology, philosophy of self and the world, environmental awareness, symbiotic relationship to the earth and the natural and supernatural world, ritual, social contracts and conduct and so much more, all woven into a language of being that is only nominally transactional, but which instead performs a profound reach into the ineffable. Everything in Igbo is inferential and malleable and ever evolving. In Igbo we call this Omenala and it is transmitted in its entirety in the language. Achebe is easily the greatest novelist of that language and culture and one of his greatest achievements as a writer was in creating an English syntax in his novels that could not only imitate the tonal speech qualities of Igbo, but he also has been able to translate Omenala and give it a life outside its own immediate culture, reaching out to a larger wider world.

    Every writer hopes to write the definitive book of their career, but we all secretly hope that it is the last book we write before we pass on. For Chinua Achebe this remained true. For his true fans, those of us who read everything he wrote, “Arrow of God” and “Anthills of the Savannah” remain his best novels, as an essayist he excelled, and the last installment of his memoir was some of his best and most honest work. The unfortunate thing for Achebe is that “Things Fall Apart” eclipsed all his other work in terms of its reception and readership, and in many ways also eclipsed even its writer’s name. This is both a blessing and a drawback for the creative artist because it means that most readers will never explore the amazing evolution of Achebe’s work. But he remains beloved and deeply respected by every Nigerian because “Things Fall Apart” marked such a moment of cultural pride for us. Chinua Achebe changed the world’s perception of continental Africa and Africans and gave every African writer who came after him a compass heading to steer forward from.

    As a writer I have fought with Achebe. Railed against the anthropological bent of some of his work. Struggled with his complicated positioning of gender. Chaffed against his statements that were often presented as unassailable truths. Tried to push “Things Fall Apart” out of the sun a little so that other writers from Eddie Iroh, Festus Iyayi, Okphewo to the more recent ones can also grasp and command the world’s imagination (and I am grateful Adichie has succeeded in the ways she has in this regard) such that we do not remain a people caught in the beautiful yet anachronistic moment of “Things Fall Apart.” And yet in the end, I have to admit that I did not only admire him, at some level, as a literary son, I loved him. Everything that I have described is the complicated struggle between father and son. And in the same way as it is with fathers and sons, I realise only after his death just how much I loved him.

    In Omenala the ending of things is as important as their beginnings. Achebe ended his life like an elder, a man with dignity. In his books we have the collected wisdom of a life well lived, and his books will allow us to visit with him always, even in death.

    • Dr. Chris Abani, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, wrote this tribute for Wall Street Journal

     

  • Achebe: Africa’s best

    Achebe: Africa’s best

    Without doubt, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (November 16, 1930 to March 22, 2013) was one of the world’s greatest novelists and essayists and, for me, Africa’s greatest literary figure. When I said so in my review last October of his There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra – his controversial story of Nigeria’s civil war which has now turned out as his last literary output – one angry, presumably Yoruba, reader condemned me as “a Yoruba hater,” apparently for daring to think Achebe was a greater literary figure than the Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka.

    How this view made me a Yoruba hater I couldn’t understand because I thought Soyinka won his prize on his individual merit and not because he was Yoruba. Of course, his victory was bound to make not just every Yoruba proud. It was also bound to make every Nigerian, indeed every African, proud. I certainly felt proud that cold wet day in 1986 as part of the Nigerian official delegation that accompanied the man to the ceremony for the award. But then there was nothing contradictory between the pride I felt and my opinion of the relative merit of Nigeria’s two greatest contributions to the world of Literature.

    When Soyinka won the Nobel Literature prize in 1986, the first African to do so, not a few Literature buffs thought Achebe was the more deserving of that honour. As a layman, I thought so too. By the time Soyinka won the prize he had, of course, become a worldwide renowned playwright, poet, political activist, novelist and essayist. As a playwright he had produced over 13 plays, several of them classics – notably The Lion and the Jewel (of which I have fond memories as a play regularly staged by the drama club of my alma mater, Government College, Bida), Kongi’s Harvest and Death and the King’s Horseman. He had written two novels, The Interpreters and Season of Anomy, two autobiographies, the controversial The Man Died and Ake, and countless literary and political essays.

    None of Soyinka’s plays and novels had the impact of Achebe’s first, and by common consent, best novel, Things Fall Apart, which he wrote in 1958. By 1986, it had become Africa’s and one of the world’s best selling classics, translated into more than 30 other languages. By the same 1986, Achebe had written three other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966). Each of them was a classic, written with his inimitable readability, simplicity, eloquence, coherence, rigour and insightfulness.

    A year after Soyinka won his Nobel prize, Achebe wrote his last novel, Anthills of the Savannah, which, like A Man of the People that presaged Nigeria’s first military coup, was a satirical dig at power drunk politicians, the difference being that whereas the first was about politicians in mufti, the second was about politicians in khaki. Anthills was a finalist in the prestigious Booker Prize but lost out to another novel by a British novelist. And just like A Man of the People presaged Nigeria’s first coup, Anthills, in a way, presaged the dubious but failed attempt by a leader, this time a soldier turned civilian, to sit tight in office. The Nobel Literature Prize, like all prestigious prizes, is, of course, not a popularity contest. It is also about intellectual depth and insight, among other qualities. But then Achebe, like Soyinka, never pandered to popular taste in his novels; all of them were profound narratives about the clash of cultures and the corruptive influence of power.

    Soyinka, no doubt, deserved his Nobel literature prize. Certainly he was a more eloquent speaker than Achebe. However, I had always thought Achebe was more eloquent, and certainly more readable, than Soyinka, with the written word. And the Nobel Literature prize was about the written word.

    Whatever anyone’s comparative rating of Soyinka and Achebe in the literary world, it was senseless, even mean, to begrudge Soyinka his good fortune of winning the ultimate prize in Literature because, as I just said, he deserved it. What never made sense to me, however, was the apparent belief of the Nobel judges that Achebe too never deserved the prize until he died, even though for many years he had become a perennial nominee for it.

    Since Soyinka in 1986, three other Africans – two South Africans, Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J. M. Coetze (2003) and an Egyptian, Naguib Mahfouz (2006) – have won the prize. It is not clear to me as a layman, and I suspect too, many Literature buffs, how any of the three deserved the prize more than Achebe. But then, Achebe would not be the first truly great writer to be refused admission into the very elite class – there have been only 109 members to date since 1901 when the first prize was awarded – of Nobel Literature Laureates. In this he was in the excellent company of George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984) and Graham Green (The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American), etc.

    But Nobel Literature prize or not, Achebe was undeniably the man who pioneered and popularised modern African English Literature. His greatness, however, went well beyond his novels. Just like he was a superlative novelist he was also a first class essayist. Probably his best was The Trouble with Nigeria, written after his bitter-sweet experience in 1983 as a leading member of the leftish Peoples Redemption Party led by the radical politician, the late Malam Aminu Kano.

    As the blurb of the little book said, the essay was “both a savage indictment of the current system and a message of hope for the future.”

    “The trouble with Nigeria,” he said in the opening sentence of the essay, “is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” There was, he said, nothing wrong with the Nigerian character, its land or climate or water or air or anything else. What was wrong, he said, was “the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

    His diagnosis of the Nigerian ailment was spot on – but only up to a limit. It’s hard to disagree with him that the ultimate responsibility for the virtual failure of the Nigerian state today is that of a leadership that preaches what it does not practise. But, as I have argued recently on these pages, the followership also has its own share of the blame. For, if leaders get away with saying one thing and doing the opposite, it is largely because followers do not regard their own roles in society, no matter how small or lowly, as positions of trust. In other words, if we all did our own bits we would never have found it so difficult to hold our leaders to their responsibilities.

    Like all human beings, Achebe as a writer and as an individual was, of course, not perfect. But of all his imperfections, I think the worst was that he seemed to share a by and large self-inflicted persecution complex of his Igbo kith and kin.

    No doubt the Igbo have suffered persecution in Nigeria, the worst manifestation of which was the 1966/67 pogrom against them mainly in the North, which eventually led to an even more devastating three-year civil war in the East.

    The cause of this Igbo persecution, the man said in Chapter 9 of The Trouble with Nigeria, a chapter he called “The Igbo Problem”, was envy by other Nigerians at their success in catching up and even surpassing the Yoruba that had had decades of head-start in the politics, bureaucracy and commerce of the country.

    This success, he said, carried a “deadly penalty: the danger of hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness which invites envy and hatred; or even worse, which can obsess with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness.”

    This character flaw apart, the real problem with the Igbo since Independence, he said, was “the absence of the kind of central leadership which their competitors presume for them.” This, he said, had left them to “self-seeking, opportunistic leaders who offered them no help at all in coping with a new Nigeria in which individual effort would no longer depend on the rules set by a fairly impartial colonial umpire.”

    After this diagnosis of what he called the Igbo problem, it was strange that he would proceed in his last autobiographical book, There was a Country, to accuse everyone else, including the “fairly impartial colonial umpire” of being united in their hatred of the Igbo without any reason, and go on to locate the Igbo problem squarely in this hatred.

    The goal of an African writer, Achebe said in his last book, is to challenge stereo-types, myths and false images of ourselves and retell the continent’s stories in ways that can foster the progress of our society. By and large, he conquered those challenges in his novels and essays but failed to so in his attempt at writing History.

    In what may be considered one of those twists of irony, it can be said that the man whose first shot at serious writing was his best gave his worst shot in the twilight of his life after he had had all the experience and wisdom to produce the very best.

    However, in spite of his last poor shot, the man remains for me Africa’s greatest literary figure and certainly one of the world’s best ever.

     

     

     

  • Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013)

    Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013)

    • A literary icon departs

    Fiction was his first love, and placed him on a pedestal. But his swansong, a stormy memoir beyond the fictive realm, threatened to knock him off his perch in the estimation of antagonists who faulted him for alleged inventiveness. Thus, ironically, the very quality that brought him fame, his rich talent for story-telling, became an albatross. Critics of his final work, released late last year, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, regarded it as the product of an overactive imagination.

    The book was Chinua Achebe’s version of the three-year civil conflict (1967-1970) that nearly accomplished the dismemberment of Nigeria. His narrative romanticised the failed secession of his Igbo ethnic group, and painted the others on the side of unity as genocidal demons. This historical effort triggered an intense war of words across the country, showing remarkable divisions among Nigerians, 43 years after the fighting ceased. The thunder generated by the writing continued to rumble even till the author’s death on March 21, aged 82, in a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

    However, his literary celebrity undeniably outshines the controversy he created in his twilight with this historical bomb. There is a unified acknowledgement of his creative stardom, and he is generally described as “the father of modern African writing.” It is interesting that the beginning of his writing life also had an element of the controversial. His 1958 debut novel, Things Fall Apart, set out to explode Western myths on African culture, and was conceived as a counter narrative to a specific work by a European writer, Mr Johson by Joyce Cary, which Achebe considered racist in its treatment of Africans. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was another European “colonial novel” that influenced Achebe’s African perspective and inspired him to tell the story of Western conquest from the viewpoint of the conquered.

    Achebe’s then unprecedented plot of a pre-colonial African people, the Igbo, who lost their pristine condition to Westernisation, catapulted him into the limelight. The novel, which sold over 10 million copies and was translated into some 45 languages in the writer’s lifetime, ranks among the best written in English and, by itself, guarantees Achebe’s place in the pantheon of literary greats. It is probably a disservice to the novelist’s gift that he was apparently defined by the success of his early fiction. For, indeed, he went on to produce other worthy novels, which were overshadowed by Things Fall Apart.

    An advocate of “beneficent fiction,” which is the notion that art should not be an end in itself, his oeuvre also accommodated post-colonial themes such as official corruption and abuse of political power. In addition to the novels No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), he had short stories, poems and critical essays to his credit, and was a truly inspiring figure in the continent’s literary firmament. A good number of Africa’s distinguished literary voices emerged during his time as editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, and he encouraged the flowering of various talents that enriched African literature and made it visible globally. Although he was steeped in realism, his liberal aesthetics gave space even to the avant-garde.

    Achebe will be remembered for his political interventions, especially his pungent publication, The Trouble with Nigeria, in which he argued that the country, regrettably, “has been less than fortunate in its leadership.” He demonstrated his disenchantment with the country’s ruling class by rejecting national honours in 2004 and 2011, alleging lack of good governance.

    Laurels aplenty marked his eventful life, the most recent before his death being the 2007 Man Booker International Prize and 2010 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. It is a tribute to his spirit that though he spent the last 22 years of his life in a wheelchair following a car accident in Nigeria, he remained active intellectually and creatively. A native of Ogidi in present-day Anambra State, he studied English at the then University College, Ibadan, and was a professor at Brown University, USA, until his demise.

  • Achebe: a tsunami of crocodile tears; Wanted: Genius Grants in budgets, books in schools!

    Achebe: a tsunami of crocodile tears; Wanted: Genius Grants in budgets, books in schools!

    Chinua Achebe whose ‘Things fall apart…..the centre cannot hold’, has given Nigerians and others worldwide, in 50 languages, happy rehearsal times, exciting copycat wrestling scenes, many jokes, the fruition of a myriad love unions, many pre-examination sleepless nights and a legion of pleasant memories. Thank you, Sir. May you Rest in Perfect Peace. Amen! Note ‘Chinua Achebe’ does not flag red for ‘spell check’ on computers as the name is ‘recognised’-an accolade speaking louder than ‘GCON’ Awards. Achebe studied with a ‘wonderful school library’ and started medicine in the University College, Ibadan, only to change after a year –Nigerian medicine’s loss and world literature’s gain. So many in medicine write seriously – an old ‘disease’ needing a new name–mediliteratitis or mediliteratureitis. You choose! But contrast his literature book access in Umuahia 1944 to our 2013 bookless, libraryless and a nearly illiterate youth and readerless society. What price a book- Achebe’s death?

    Weep with those who will cry a ‘tsunami of crocodile tears’ in the corridors of power. Many of those crying loudest championed the truncating of education, practical science and book availability during 1983-2013 and some now actually sit in senate perpetuating mischief! Boko Haram started, surreptitiously, then as Boko Haram Phase 1, with falling standards, federal government anti-reading policies and withdrawal of annual grants for library books and sports. Phase 2 is the bombs, burning and executions. There were probably more literature books in Chinua Achebe’s primary and secondary schools and University College Ibadan in 1944-50 than now – 50 years and $600,000,000,000 later. He nearly died in a Nigerian pothole and moved to the USA where care of the physically challenged is a human right, not a human wrong and a First Lady ‘alanu’ Easter hand-out photo-op. No doubt some government organs and many people who could have, but did not, provide the needed 17million books, will pay a few millions for a ‘befitting burial’ – the one thing Nigerians are expert at- funeral extravagance and financial waste in the abuse of culture!

    Meanwhile the schools will remain bookless as we await another ‘irreplaceable icon’ to die. The Nigerian presidents, blessed with inexplicable longevity, who failed in every sphere including education, are mostly still alive. Is this their punishment- to witness a failed education system in a failing state with failed ‘simple science’ refineries? Do they have any conscience as they spew out ‘obituary sound bites’? If he, the great Chinua Achebe, could not influence Nigeria to buy books for children during 82 years of an illustrious literary life, what hope have we with our petty articles, like this, in an ignored and vilified press? Literature, culture and the arts are entrepreneurship strategies abroad, creating events and T-shirt and other memorabilia and also wealth. But do Nigerian banks and corporate Nigeria know that?

    Let us weep real rain forest tears for our children’s booklessness even as those with power achieve nothing and weep a tsunami of crocodile tears and advise on education. What stopped any one of six Presidents and over 100 state governors giving a N5m or N10m Annual Achebe Grant directly to Achebe for ‘anything artistic local or worldwide you like, Sir’ knowing that an economically beneficial work of literary genius would result. But they dish out billions for NASS and political office holders and open our vaults to pardonable thieving governors.

    The professional must take back recognition from politicians. Education does not require another billion naira Summit in Ladi Kwali Hall. It requires books, posters, sports and science equipment in Nigeria’s 70,000 schools and 1,500,000 classrooms. Even President Jonathan’s reading project needs many books, Nigeria cannot develop with just a narrow national reading book list. No nation will survive if all pupils read only the ‘famous four or five Nigerian authors’. Nigeria probably has over 5,000 books written by 1,500 Nigerian authors needing a readership. When did a minister, commissioner, principal, teacher, parent or student visit any good bookshop or publisher last? In spite of booklist corruption, the literature list can be broadened by simple mathematics like buying fewer copies of more books, just as we used the ‘The St Gregory’s book Way’ in St Gregory’s College in 1961. There the literature teacher came to class with six copies of five titles. Each of the five class rows had a different book to read and exchange every two weeks with another row. In 10 weeks every student had read five books and the exam was in week 13 for the price of one book per student. In a year 15 books are read, in three years 45 books were cheaply read by each and every all students between forms 1 and 3. A student who has read 45 books has a different take on life than most.

    Anyone seeking to immortalise an already immortalised Chinua Achebe, should allocate budgetary funds for ‘Genius Grants’ for other icons before everyone who is not a politician dies or emigrates. In Nigeria last week, NANS and other youth organisations shamelessly took 10 plus full page colour congratulatory adverts for a young former youth senate president. Where did that approximately N5m come from? What an insult to Nigerians and an abuse of Nigeria’s political learning process. Note that 100 ‘we have lost an icon’ obituary pages@N500,000, totalling N50m will not put books in schools – failing yet again a ‘dying wish’ of Chinua Achebe.

  • Reps want FG to immortalize Achebe

    Reps want FG to immortalize Achebe

    … Say, ‘Name National Library after literary giant’

    The House of Representatives on Tuesday asked the Federal Government to immortalize the late Prof. Chinua Achebe who died last Thursday in Boston, United States, by naming the headquarters of the National Library after him.

    This followed the adoption of a motion put forward by Hon. Charles Odedo (ACN Anambra).

    Odedo while presenting his motion after a minute silence was observed in honour of the literary icon said Prof. Achebe brought honour to Nigeria with his literary works that included the novel “Things Fall Apart.”

    He said,”The novel which was written in 1958, over 50 years ago has been translated into over 50 languages and has sold over 12 million copies worldwide.

    “Prof. Achebe has authored over 20 novels and has won many awards and prizes including the Nigerian National Merit Award, Man Booker International Prize 2007, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2010.

    “He has also received honourary degrees from more than 30 universities around the world. In 1992, he became the first living writer to be represented in the Everyman’s Library Collection.

    The lawmaker said that he was mindful of the fact that one of Achebe’s books “The trouble with Nigeria” identifies bad leadership and bad governance as the problem with Nigeria.

    “Prof. Chinua Achebe through his literary works has relentlessly fought against corruption, oppression, injustice and bad governance. A fight we are glad to continue in the 7th Assembly as outlined in our Legislative Agenda,” he said.

    Speaker Aminu Tambuwal, while making comments on the motion said he was given one of the books of late Achebe with the title: “Arrow of God’ as a gift when he came tops in the English Class while at Teacher’s Training College.

     

  • Chinua Achebe and the great African novel

    Chinua Achebe and the great African novel

    In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chuku, 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 Chuku first. Wanting to punish man, the toad reversed the request, and told Chuku 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 civilisations 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 practised 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 neighbours. “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 colonisers,” 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 recognised 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.

     

    •This article was first published on May 26, 2008 by The New Yorker

  • Achebe… The man the world adored

    Achebe… The man the world adored

    A journalist, Dare Oluwaseun, met the late Chinua Achebe during a programme to mark the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart at the Bard College, New York in 2008. In this piece, he recounts the encounter, which gives an insight into why the world will never forget this son of Ogidiland.

     

     

    His entrance that night was not without some excitement. He was given a standing ovation as he was wheeled into the hall. He was dressed in what had become his trademark uniform: a dark suit, white round neck shirt and a black beret that fit on his head like that of Boys’ Scout. He cut the picture of a compassionate grandfather.

    When he began to read an excerpt from Things Fall Apart (TFA), a pin drop silence descended on the room. The late Chinua Achebe’s voice was big and a clear contradiction of his outward appearance. He read slowly at first. As the audience began to enjoy the reading, the only sound that could be heard was that of the rustling of paper generated from people following from their own copies of the novel.

    At the time, he was a resident professor of Languages and Literature at the Bard College, New York. Before that event, he had attended over 40 interviews and reviews celebrating the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart (1958). The book is held in high esteem in many countries and has been translated into over 50 languages, sold over 20 million copies and is a standard reading book for high school and college students in the United States. It was, therefore, not surprising that the college, in addition to the several activities that had been organised to celebrate the novel’s anniversary, put together a panel discussion to analyse the great work. That was the occasion at which the late Achebe was reading.

    The President of the college, Leon Botstein, was lavish in his praise of the late Achebe. Of course, he was the biggest name in the college, a name that put it on the world map and drew the attention of the world media to a hitherto unknown college in a sleepy backwood area of New York State.

    “Professor Achebe has a deep concern for all human beings,” Botstein said in his introduction of the late Achebe. He said his college was proud to house the professor since 1990. He admitted the western world had not always warmed up to him, which made him “suffer oblivion and was not taken seriously”, but “now he is a great man.”

    The panel included three Africans (counting the late Achebe) and three Americans. While the other members offered some useful insights into why TFA had become a phenomenon, many in the audience really wanted to hear Achebe speak.

    “I had no idea about any other thing to write when I wrote TFA,” the late Achebe said when asked why he did that work. The timing was also crucial, he said. It was a time that African countries were demanding independence from British imperialism, a time when Europeans were busy painting Africans a little lower than animals as evident in Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which the late Achebe once described as one which “depersonalises a portion of the human race, reducing a great culture to a handful of threats and grunts”.

    The late Achebe told the mainly white audience: “It was a period of great fascination, excitement and hope; we knew all about colonialism, we were living it. We knew about the conversions of our people from the religions of our fathers to that of the visitors. Add all these up you get a society in ferment that was a wonderful time to be alive, it was a wonderful time to write TFA.

    “We had something before us; it was a sacred mission, a mandate to restore your name. Up till that time, Africa has received quite a bit of bashing, Africa was presented as one without a voice, but anyone who grew up in my village, for example, knew that the elders of this community were great orators, men who could use words to change a critical situation. Men like my father, I saw them too, who were not faithful to the African religion, so Africa was not without a voice like some people want us to believe, that was a mission we set out to achieve.”

    A Kenyan and Professor of English at Princeton University, Simon Gikandi, said the book spoke to African sensibility and in the years following its publication was considered “a foundational text for African identity”.

    It was difficult not to love this old African. Here was a man so revered by the world yet had his root in Africa, with its attendant stigmatisation and stereotypes. The evening wore on with appreciative glances from the audience.

    Talking to the late Achebe at the panel review was almost an impossible task, what with the throng of friends and well-wishers wanting to either congratulate him or discuss some salient points in his book; others came for autographs. I motioned to the security detail that I had come all the way from Nigeria with a very urgent message for the late Achebe. The message was communicated to him and for some fleeting seconds he looked down the podium and motioned me to come up.

    “You are from Lagos. What do you want?” he asked frankly.

    The impossible had become a reality. So much news had been made out of the fact that he declined the title of the Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) in protest of the state of affairs in Nigeria. With a new administration in place then, which pledged commitment to the rule of law, I asked if he would receive such honour?

    He thought for a while and said: “I cannot say if I will take it or not, at least not right now. I am still studying events back home and I cannot give you any definite answer now.”

    But would he consider it?

    “Yes, I will consider it,” he replied.

    On the evening of the panel discussion, the late author was treated to a sumptuous dinner. Watching all the attention being given to him, one could not but wonder if there was still any place in his heart for Nigeria.

    “Do you know why I am abroad?” he asked, his face full of sadness. Momentarily, he stopped picking from the plate containing some stick meat and pies, lowered his head and spoke almost in a whisper, barely distinguishable from the noise of the diners.

    He said: “My reason for staying abroad is medical; it is not because I fancy America; I am not here because of the reason other people come here (greener pastures). The fact is that I can’t be home now, but here I can work and live (with adequate facilities to aid his mobility). I will love to be home someday. I will.”

    Throughout the dinner, he was still discussing TFA, but his face lit up when you mentioned Arrow of God, a novel he wrote in 1964. “So you have read Arrow of God, thank you. Do you know that I wrote that book as an upgrade on Things Fall Apart? It is a very good book.”

    “And the language is elevated too,” I said. He agreed, nodding his head.

    He told me of the relevance of Okonkwo, the protagonist of TFA, to the present world. “I had just finished a lecture and was sitting in my office when a Caucasian (White) boy came in. He asked if he can talk to me and I said fine. He sat down and looked me in the eye before saying ‘That man Okonkwo is my father’ I was stunned. But he repeated it two times, ‘That man Okonkwo is my father’. That boy was not even an African but Okonkwo speaks to his situation with his own real father,” he said.

    He added: “My students are very emotional about this. We saw the masculine side of Okonkwo and we also saw him at a point displaying his softer side when he tried to look for his daughter who had been carried away. When he died, my students were very sad. They felt he was only trying to defend his culture from invaders which anyone could have done too.

    “Okonkwo was fighting to defend his culture, but he didn’t really know the culture. From all he did, there was a silent voice also telling him to remember compassion, mercy. Getting him out of this culture makes it possible for this culture to renegotiate its future.”

    On Okonkwo’s perceived masculinity and disdain for anything feminine, he said: “That is one aspect that has often troubled me. Some of my readers think I support Okonkwo’s outlook on females, some even almost accused me of beating my wife. Let me say that the book does not represent me in anyway.”

    Many scholars who came to the event that night were truly amazed at meeting the late Achebe. “There are so many people who want to talk to me. I think I have done enough for you. Now, I must try and eat my food before seeing others. I will not answer any question again,” he said and turned away to greet another fan, after which he was wheeled away into a corner where he could eat without distractions.