The un-tribute: Achebe was an Igbophile, not the father of African literature

by Ibrahim Bello-Kano

 

Indeed, we cannot help wondering if the recent insensate massacre of Chinua’s people in Kano, only a few days ago, hastened the fatal undermining of that resilient will that had sustained him so many years after his crippling accident.

—Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark. “Chinua Achebe Death: We Have Lost a Brother”. The Guardian (UK), March 22, 2013.

There is no doubt that Chinua Achebe, who died last week in the United States after a long residence there probably because it was better for him to live there than in Nigeria, was, by many accounts, an outstanding writer. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), received wide critical acclaim soon after its publication, which came in the wake of the great wave of decolonization. A year before the publication of the novel, Ghana became the first independent African country, in 1957. Things Fall Apart was published at a time when non-Western but Western educated intellectuals and cultural nationalists were looking around for indigenous cultural documents that could vindicate pre-colonial African cultures, in what the British-Indian writer, Salman Rushdie once called, in memorable phrase, “writing back to the Centre” (the West).

It was arguably in that context, the urgent need, by the African literati, to produce an African narrative that would vindicate indigenous African cultures which were heavily denigrated by centuries of Western writers, priests, and colonial administrators, rather than the novel’s intrinsic literary merits, that brought Things Fall Apart to prominence, at least within the post-nationalistic African intelligentsia. The same may be said of Achebe’s other novels: their timing, 1960-1966, was fortunate because there was, then, a large literate international English-speaking reading public eager to get access to the new African writing, not to speak of publishers such as Heinemann which were looking to cash in on it all. Again, it was in that context that Achebe’s works were appropriated for all kinds of culture wars, especially within the ranks of militant post-colonial intellectuals.

Achebe’s collection of essays on literature, cultural politics, and colonial history, from the early Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) to the later Hopes and Impediments (1989) and Home and Exile (2000) sealed his reputation as an African or Black cultural critic, activist, and nationalist. His other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), Man of the People (1966), not to mention short stories and poems such as Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) and Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971) were widely admired by critics and literary historians for their “realistic” and, some would say, vivid, subtle, and complex portrait of the African, or, at least, “the Nigerian condition”, which, to this day, has persisted in more complicated forms.

Achebe was also the influential editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, between 1962 and 1972. Under his direction, the series published some of the most canonical of African writers such as Alex La Guma, Taha Hussein, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Doris Lessing, Ayi Kwei Armah, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head, Cheik Hamidou Kane, Okot p’Bitek, and nationalist intellectuals such as Amilcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah.

Chiefly because of his first novel, and his pioneering role as the editor of the African Writers Series, many have considered Achebe as the “father of African fiction” (or the founding father, even the grandfather, of modern African literature), a dubious claim that Achebe himself could not accept, since, as he knew in his lifetime, there were many African writers of fiction and non-fiction that wrote compelling accounts of African cultural and social life well before he was born. Claims for Achebe as being the “father of African fiction or literature” are based on a partial and reductive view of Africa’s literary history, or a diminution of African writing to a minor position within the Western literary tradition.

Yet there had been indigenous African writing in native languages. Consider, for example, the case of the Basotho (Lesotho) writer and novelist, Thomas Mopoku Mafolo (1876-1948), the celebrated author of Chaka the Zulu (1912-15?), which many literary historians have called a masterpiece, an epic tragedy, and, in the words of a reviewer, “the earliest major contribution of black Africa to the corpus of modern world literature”. One could cite the example of the celebrated Yoruba writer, D. O. Fagunwa, author of Odo Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1936), or the works of the Arab writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and countless other writers who wrote in Hausa, Tamashek, Amharic, Wolof, and so on. Indeed, no one author or person could have begun what we call today “African writing”. The African literary tradition is far older, more enduring, and more complex than the alleged effort of a single author, however gifted. In any case, the idea of Achebe being the “father of African fiction” is not a scholarly argument but a romantic and naïve one because it ignores the major contributions of pre-colonial African authors and a huge corpus of African writing in Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

But whatever the artistic merit of Achebe’s work, which is considerable to say the least, it is in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1988), that his literary-story-telling skills began a terminal decline. Indeed the novel marks a notable decline in his liberal vision and creative acumen. The novel is, by any standard, a trivial thriller and is uneven in linguistic and literary quality. Arguably, large parts of Anthills read like pulp fiction, or a crudely crafted political thriller. The storyline is fragmented; the attempt at covert plotting is unsuccessful; the narrative exposition is slow and cumbrous; the style of representation is too thin and shallow; the plot is threadbare and thin, perhaps even superficial in many instances. The dialogue is unconvincing, heavy, and tedious, and the characterization is one-dimensional. For example, neither Ikem, Beatrice, Abdul on the one hand nor Professor Okon, Sam, and Osodi on the other has any emotional and psychological depth. Indeed no character in that novel has convincing uniqueness of character, and none is admirably individuated. Moreover, the characterization and dialogue are stagey, as can be seen in the first person account of the First Witness, Christopher Oriko (Chapter 1) and the dialogue in the opening section of Chapter 2. Anthills is also marred by obliquities of narration and an undisciplined, un-integrated multiplicity of viewpoints: the novel’s attempt at an epic-scale representation of a dystopian land and its failure to offer an intensely imagined, superbly coordinated narrative irony are telling. Yet all this may be accounted for by the novel’s melodramatic structure and the poor quality of its speech representation.

Frankly, Anthills of the Savannah is a disappointing work; little wonder it failed to win the 1987 Booker McConnell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. For example, the novel combines melodrama with a political roman á clef, as can be seen in the closing section of the narrative, the journey on the “Great North Road” (Chapter 17). Indeed, this chapter presents a veiled dystopian narrativization of northern Nigeria, which is variously called “the scrub-land”, “the scorched landscape”, “another country”, “full of dusty fields [and] bottomed baobab tree[s] so strange in appearance”, etc. In this novel, the rainforest (“the rain country”) of the South is favourably contrasted with the “parkland of grass and stunted trees… of mud walls and reddish earth”, the North. One conclusion, which, of course, may be problematic from a strictly literary-critical perspective, is that unlike the Exceptional Southerners, the Northerners don’t know how to make the North “prosperous” (the roads are full of pot holes) so that all the talented, intelligent, hardworking, economically gifted, and industrially-savvy Southerners could migrate to the North (perhaps in the mode of mission civilatrice), which is, as of now, wallowing in economic and social desperation (see the opening pages of Chapter 17).

The novel has other defects as well: the author’s heavily moralized, didactic view of life repeatedly intrudes in the narrative, and, in particular, in the facile and tired representation of the Military Ruler, the Head of Sate. Ikem and Beatrice’s romanticism, their romantic view of social relations, is clearly the real author’s because the entire drift of the narrative is towards a heavily moralized view of life (Light versus Darkness; Enlightenment versus Ignorance; Diligence versus Parasitism).

Yet it is in Achebe’s essay, The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), that his romanticism comes full circle. In that book, Achebe argues that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership… the unwillingness and inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example” (p. 1). This postulation of Achebe’s ignores the deep structural constraints on human action and psychology. It is pre-critical to ignore the complex ways in which social structures mediate, modify, condition, and constrain human choices. Leadership works within institutional, historical, cultural, and economic contexts which place limits on what human agents can and cannot do. This notion of the structural determination of leadership means that a leader has inevitably to work within, and exist in, a system and a political logic whose proper system, laws, and operation his or her “leadership” cannot, by definition, dominate absolutely. The leader, despite his having a certain measure of freedom, has inevitably to be governed by the system within which he or she exists. And although men and women make their own history, they clearly do not make it as an act of will, or in their own freely-chosen circumstances, but under the structural constraints of the accumulated past and inherited traditions. This is what The Trouble with Nigeria has missed: Nigerian leaders cannot be the miraculous changed men or women of their country but the changed men and women of their country’s changed circumstances. This is the truth of the time-honoured liberal credo that the educator herself needs educating and that if leaders are educators, who will educate the educators?

From this perspective, Achebe’s conception of leadership may properly be called “voluntarism”, even a form of messianic thinking: on Achebe’s flawed logic, all a leader need do is become, by the force of sheer will power, a morally good person, who has only to lead by example rather than by veritable political principles. Achebe’s is another way of saying that Nigeria needs a strong leader, one who has miraculously escaped all the cultural and historical pressures of his community or country; in effect, a messiah. This dubiously Christian view of leadership is a convenient way of avoiding the complex problem of institutional, cultural, and historical constitution of subjectivity and moral choice in a multi-ethic, multi-religious country, one with a large, primordialist, backward-looking civil society. Indeed one reason for the failure of Achebe’s little book to capture the scholarly or popular imagination was its threadbare romanticism and an un-modern (a feudal and mystical) vision of political leadership.

Perhaps Achebe’s most disappointing book, or to phrase matters differently, his most inferior work, is There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012). As a personal testament, the book vindicates the time-honored dictum that “the personal is political”. Perhaps we need not be critical of Achebe’s passionate defence of his ethnic group, or of the short-lived Biafra, and his role in it. Yet there is something distasteful about open myopia of blind ethnic solidarity or communal jingoism. What is striking about the book is its complete lack of a keen political insight, its petty romantic vision of Nigeria’s political history. For example, consider the book’s astonishing claims, namely that the Igbos wholly deserved their entrenched positions in the military, economic, and bureaucratic structures of pre-civil war Nigeria (“… the Igbos led the nation in virtually every sector— politics, education, commerce, and the arts”, pp. 66-67); that all non-Igbo Nigerians are united by their hatred for the Igbo ethnic group; and that British rule in Nigeria and elsewhere was not, as popularly assumed, an unmitigated disaster. According to Achebe in There was a Country, the British government ruled the Nigerian colony “with considerable care… and competently… British colonies were more or less expertly run” (p. 43). In the same book, however, Achebe accuses British colonial officials of rigging the election and the population census in favour of conservative elements such as Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto from the “Islamic territories” (p. 46; Achebe does not say that the Igbo were from the “Christian territories”), people who “had played no real part in the struggle for independence” (p. 52). In addition, for Achebe it was the behaviour of the British that sowed the seeds of Nigeria’s eventual descent into civil war. If indeed Achebe has this rosy view of colonial rule, then his entire corpus of anti-colonial polemic and cultural nationalism has been in vain, or, in a way, a hypocritical effort at self-publicity.

Worse, Achebe argues, in an astonishing moment of historical revisionism, that the originators of the very idea of one-Nigeria were “leaders and intellectuals from the Eastern Region” (p. 52). This may explain why he credits Nnamdi Azikiwe with the enviable position of being “father of African independence” (“There was no question at all about that”, (p. 41). In sum, then, there are many instances of sloppy argument and poor judgment in the book, as, for example, Achebe’s claim that Nigeria failed to develop because the Igbo, despite their “competitive individualism” and a unique “adventurous spirit”, were excluded from Nigerian economic, social, and political life. Examples of Achebe’s unsophisticated political perception of things are, first, his lack of political sensitivity concerning non-Igbo political leaders such as Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The first two are seen by Achebe as ruled by inordinate ambition (“resuscitated ethnic pride”) and conservative traditionalism respectively. The latter Achebe almost casts into the role of a lackey of the Western world, which, he claims, turned (“built up”) Balewa through flattery into a great statesman (p. 51).

It is thus fair to say that, in There was a Country at least, Achebe is an overwhelmingly “ethnic nationalist”, an “Igbo-phile” (or a philo-Igbonis, to coin a new term), and a Biafra apologist to boot. He is, in this book at least, a homo duplex, the Double Man, in effect, both Biafran and Nigerian; Igbophile and Nationalist; Anti-colonial Writer and a Post-colonial Apologist of Expert British Rule. This should explain why the book has a schizoid thematic orchestration and its claims pressed within a phlegmatic stylistic mode, which, again and again, has proved incapable of sustained irony. Surely, then, There was a Country is a patchwork of Achebe’s deep, even unconscious, prejudices. In one moment after another, the book fails to offer a finely integrated presentation of a realistic historical, geographical, economic, and culturally diverse, though troubled, country.

So while I pay tribute to this important novelist and essayist, I should remark, at the same time, that we should not, in our romantic rush to venerate our little (culture) heroes, forget earlier illustrious and master English-speaking storytellers such Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) and Cyprian Odiatu Ekwensi (1921-2007). Their books, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town (written 1946 and published in 1952) and People of the City (1954), are two outstanding pieces of literature and narrative self-assertion that blazed the trail in modern, English-speaking African fiction writing. In the same manner, while we pay tribute to Achebe and his literary legacy, let us not also forget great post-colonial African storytellers such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Sambene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiog’o, and, not least, the incomparable Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi, the author, in my opinion, of the finest African novel ever—Going Down River Road (1977).

As for Achebe, I say “goodbye”; for there was indeed a great novelist, but who, tragically, had to write the greatest anti-novel of his career—There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

 

joined his ancestors would probably be to mutter under his breath the Igbo saying: “Ana agwa ochi nti na agha esu” (No one needs tell even the deaf when matters come to a head). Goodnight, Chinua Achebe.

Nigerians have become so adept at graveyard orations that whenever any important personality dies, everybody would be scrambling to find the right adjectives with which to express their condolences. And it doesn’t matter that they may have spent their lifetime attacking the deceased or what such a person stood for.

But ever so often, their hypocrisy is obscured by its unintended truthfulness, especially in instances where the object of the post-humous affectation happens to merit the expressed lofty words. That, I suppose is the case with Prof. Chinua Achebe who passed away in the United States exactly a week ago today.

At 82, Achebe was no young man but he so much impacted millions of lives across several generations that many wished he had lived forever. But it is also part of the rituals of our existence that people die. So Achebe is no more. However, he left behind so much of himself that when Dr. Chidi Achebe told an online publication last Friday that the report about his father’s passage was an idle rumour, he actually sounded truer than he probably intended. Because as an accomplished man of letters, Chinua Achebe had already written himself into immortality before he departed our world last week.

Achebe’s death has, however, reopened the old debate about our country as I am now more inclined to believe he deliberately timed the release of his controversial memoir, “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra”, as a parting shot to Nigeria; perhaps as an expression of his frustration and anger at what we could have been as against what we have become.

Of course, there is no denying that he wrote the book for his Igbo kinsmen given its slant and the tone of the narrative; yet if we search deeper, we cannot but see that he also captured the internal contradictions of a nation that held so much promise at independence but has come to symbolise a giant on clay feet.

The problem most people have with Achebe’s memoir is that he made it appear as if the Igbo political and business elite are completely insulated from, and are mere victims of, the mess that our country has become. That is not correct although American philosopher, Donald Davison, offers us a better insight into such one-sided perspective when he argues that identity politics “is always the performance we craft for the audience we imagine, not the one that’s actually watching.”

While conceding that the events before, during and after the civil war were tragic and unfortunate; and that the scars may still run deep for the older generation of Igbo people who experienced its trauma, the fact remains that no ethnic group can be absolved from our collective failure as a nation.

Incidentally, the central message in most of Achebe’s works is that any society that constantly and consistently finds itself in the hands of “Ndi efulefu” (whether in the private or public sector) is almost doomed. However, as far as I am concerned, Achebe’s best interrogation of our country was a long interview he granted in May 1989 to Charles H. Rowell. That was about 24 years ago and a few months before he had the motor accident that left him paralysed from waist down–and necessitated his permanent relocation to the United States on medical grounds.

In the interview, Achebe told a story which I have also read in another work of his. Let’s hear Achebe: “…I have used it again and again because I think it is a marvellous little story. In my own words, it goes something like this: The snake was riding his horse, coiled up in his saddle. That’s the way the snake rode his horse. And he came down the road and met the toad walking by the roadside. And the toad said to him, ‘Excuse me, Sir, but that’s not how to ride a horse.’ And the snake said, ‘No? Can you show me then?’ And the toad said, ‘Yes, if you would step down, Sir.’ So the snake came down.

The toad jumped into the saddle and sat bolt upright and galloped most elegantly up and down the road. When he came back he said, ‘That’s how to ride a horse.’ And the snake said, ‘Excellent. Very good. Very good, indeed. Thank you. Come down, if you don’t mind.’ So the toad came down, and the snake went up and coiled himself in the saddle as he was used to doing and then said to the toad, ‘It is very good to know, but it is even better to have. What good does excellent horsemanship do to a man without a horse?’ And with that he rode away… As you can see, the snake in this story is an aristocrat, and the toad a commoner.

The statement, even the rebuke, which the snake issues is, in fact, saying: ‘Keep where you belong. You see, people like me are entitled to horses, and we don’t have to know how to ride. There’s no point in being an expert. That’s not going to help you.’ Now that’s very nice in that kind of political situation. But also if you think deeply about this story, it’s a two-edged sword. To put this other edge to it, which is not noticed at first… this other side is that the snake is incompetent, the snake is complacent, the snake is even unattractive. It’s all there in the story, and the time will come in this political system when all this will be questioned. Why is it that a snake is entitled to a horse? Why is it that the man who knows how to ride does not have a horse to ride? This questioning will come in a revolutionary time, and when it comes you don’t need another story…”

In Achebe’s story, we can see the tragedy of a nation that has been held down for decades because of the celebration of mediocrity at practically all levels and the promotion of a culture that advertises wealth without work. It is indeed most fitting that as I write this piece, I just got a news alert on my handset that Nigeria spends about N42 billion annually on imported champagne. The report published by Euromonitor International indicates that Nigeria is the second fastest growing market in the world with total consumption of premium champagne reaching 752,879 bottles in 2011, higher than the figures for Russia and Mexico. “Many of the global luxury brands have entered the Nigerian market,” Su Birch, CEO of WOSA, tells Euromonitor International, “and these include several famous-name spirits, as well as champagne brands whose products are being welcomed by the country’s affluent consumers.”

With our national economy sustained purely by rent as we continue to deceive ourselves that we are a rich country when we are actually poor, a few who come into stupendous (but largely unexplained) wealth now live large at the expense of the suffering majority.

Not surprisingly, we now have a pervasive social tension that is now tearing us apart. When a society is weak in both empowerment and equality, when majority of the youth seem uncertain about tomorrow, people look for solutions where they do not exist. That explains why ethnicity and religion are today gaining currency. Yet whatever the story being peddled by those who profit from our failings, ethnicity is not our problem in Nigeria neither is religion: the real problem is the manipulation of those differences by a political and business elite whose vision of our society does not consist beyond the self.

If we extrapolate from Achebe’s story, it is easy to see that our nation is in a bind today because we have too many “snakes” in critical places and they are the ones to whom we have unwittingly handed the proverbial horses. Perhaps because we speak the same language with the “snakes” or profess the same faith with them or maybe we eat from the crumbs from their tables, we close our eyes to their inability (or contemptuous refusal) to properly ride the horses they actually hold in trust for us such that they now feel a sense of entitlement that the horses do in fact belong to them. The point often ignored, however, is that these “snakes” are not the exclusive preserve of any ethnic group. In Nigeria, these “snakes” abound everywhere: in the banking halls, in the newsrooms, in churches and mosques, on our campuses, in Abuja and states government houses, in the ruling and opposition parties as well as in the North and South of our geo-political divides.

If we must face the facts, these ubiquitous “snakes” thrive in our country and will continue to do so because the underpinning philosophy for our public sector has always been about “sharing the national cake”, rather than about baking the cake and what each would contribute to doing that. The private sector is also no better since it is tied to the patronage system that places little premium on hard work, creativity and integrity. In that kind of environment that is founded not on what each can contribute to the common pool but rather on the distribution of spoils, ethnicity and religion merely provide the leverage and the perverse incentive for people at the helm of affairs.

The question therefore is whether this society, or any society for that matter, can advance when it is almost taken as an article of faith that what you know should not determine your level of responsibility but where you come from; when the leadership elite seems clueless about what constitutes a good society and how to bring such about. And we are talking about an elite class that cannot rise “to the challenge of personal example”, to borrow Achebe’s words. But with so many things unravelling before our very eyes, it is evident, as Achebe pointed out in the above story, that at the fullness of time, that same narrative which provides entertainment for the haves would be a potent weapon in the hands of the have-nots who today seem helpless, hopeless and defeated. However implausible it may seem, that day of reckoning will come. Suddenly and without warning.

The vintage reaction to such an eventuality by a certain literary icon who has now joined his ancestors would probably be to mutter under his breath the Igbo saying: “Ana agwa ochi nti na agha esu” (No one needs tell even the deaf when matters come to a head). Goodnight, Chinua Achebe.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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