Tag: 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.