2nd April, 2013
By Nduka Otiono
No one who met the venerable Chinua Achebe–in flesh and blood or in his writings–would ever forget him. I first encountered him in his writing as a child, on the pages of an often neglected little masterpiece called Chike and the River (1966). The book, recently republished abroad for the first time after over 45 years of its first publication, is part of the corpus of four books for children produced by the author whose bestselling novel, Things Fall Apart, unfortunately overshadowed the rest of his masterpieces. The other titles of children’s literature include: How the Leopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi) (1972); The Flute (1975); The Drum (1978). But so overpowering has been the success of Things Fall Apart that the author’s exceptional achievement as a writer of children stories, short stories, and an award-winning poet are hardly mentioned in discussions of his enviable stature as “Father of African Literature” – a title that he continued to reject with characteristic humility. Beyond his already documented protestations against the title, I witnessed Achebe “award” the title to an older contemporary. We were at a meeting at Brown University discussing the organisation of an event, Conversations in Africana, which featured Achebe himself, former poet laureate of Louisiana, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Gabriel Okara, octogenarian poet and arguably one of the oldest living writers in the world. Achebe, happy that his abiding desire to share the stage with Okara, whose work he admired greatly, was coming to fruition said to me between his trademark soft smiles: “People often call me the Father of African literature; the title should actually go to Dr. Gabriel Okara. He is our father.”
Yet, the evidence of literary history supports the ascription of the appellation Father of African Literature to Achebe: from Achebe’s own account in the chapter “The Empire Fights Back” in his collection of essays Home and Exile, to the submissions of eminent scholars of African literature such as Lyn Innes, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Douglas Killam, and Charles Larson, the author of Things Fall Apart and the first series editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series emerges as the first African writer who, to appropriate Appiah’s words in a recent tribute, “established, for those who wanted to write fiction in English about African life, the first great model of how it could be done” and “acted as midwife to scores of other writers”. Always lucid, Achebe, while cognisant of Africa’s great indigenous literary tradition–oral and written–that preceded him and from which he drew inspiration, acknowledges his pioneering role toward the emergence of modern African literature in the following revealing excerpt from Home and Exile: “The launching of Heinemann’s African Writers Series was like the umpire’s signal for which African writers had been waiting on the starting line. In one short generation, an immense library of new writing had sprung into being from all over the continent and for the first time in history, Africa’s future generations of readers and writers–youngsters in schools and colleges–began to read not only David Copperfield and other English classics that I and my generation had read, but also works by their won writers about their own people.”
But it was not until my initial career as a journalist with ThisDay newspaper that I had the opportunity to meet the writer of my dreams. It was in August 1999. He was visiting home after nine years in exile, following a life-changing auto crash on 22 March 1990. The eventful trip to see Achebe in his hometown of Ogidi, across the River Niger that he had celebrated in Chike and the River, evoked in me the title of James Baldwin’s 1965 psychological short story, Going to Meet the Man.
My initial anxiety on going to meet the man melted on my actual encounter with him. His simplicity and unassuming, accommodating nature ignited confidence in me and fired me on through my journalistic assignment. The support of members of his close-knit family made my mission easier. The report, “Homecoming of a Master Storyteller” was published afterwards in ThisDay the Sunday paper. How well-received the story turned out to be manifested in my first meeting with Ngozi Okonjo-Iwela, World Bank executive then, and now Nigeria’s Finance Minister; in search of photographs for Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light (2004), a biography of Chinua Achebe, which she co-authored with Tijan M. Salah, Gambian writer and economist, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala had sought me out. The ThisDay story, more importantly, opened a new chapter in life for me. For one year after its publication, the master storyteller and humanist sent me a surprise invitation to his 70th birthday at Bard College in the US. The visit cemented my relationship with him and the family. I was again invited to Frankfurt, when Achebe received the prestigious German Book Trade prize for literature, and had the opportunity for my first long interview with him. The interview was published in The Insider magazine.
Achebe’s generous spirit and deep sense of appreciation of little things were legendary. At the 70th birthday celebration at Bard College, I recall highlights from some of the tributes, which included the often quoted excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s– “the writer in whose company the prison walls collapsed”. Amongst other memorable testimonies was Nurrudin Farah’s recollection of a trip to Ogidi to visit Achebe at the latter’s invitation. According to the Somalian writer: “A day before they parted, they talked about the most mundane of matters: money.” In the course of their discussion, Achebe learnt that Farah had difficulties accessing money in his account at a bank in Jos, which accrued from Farah’s two years salary teaching at the University of Jos from 1981 to 1983. In response, revealed Farah, “Achebe went upstairs to his rooms and returned shortly with a cheque in sterling to be drawn at a bank of my choice.” Farah added: “It was thanks to this seed money that I was in the comfortable position of being able to set home in The Gambia to begin serious work on my second trilogy, Blood in the Sun, of which Maps is the first, Gifts the second, and Secrets the third.”
I got to know the master storyteller more closely and to benefit from his generosity when I joined him at the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University as a postdoctoral fellow and Senior Research Assistant to him. The negotiation of the terms of my fellowship gave me the opportunity to witness the compassionate consciousness that created that memorable character Unoka in Things Fall Apart and made Achebe to declare the flutist and Okonkwo’s “lazy” father, whom many would loathe and describe as a loafer, as his favourite character in the novel. For Achebe, despite Unoka’s flaws, his artistic integrity and unpretentious, child-like innocence set him aside from the other more calculating characters. From the moment Achebe suggested that he would like me to work with him, I was struck by his humbling humility. He had laid out reasons why he thought I was a perfect fit for the position and had, to my utter dismay, asked me to take my time to consider the proposition before reverting to him. There was no hint of self-importance in his voice. Nor was there any allusion to the fact that most people in my position as a doctoral candidate in Postcolonial Studies would jump at an offer to work with a writer who had contributed immensely to shaping the field and who earned the rare distinction of being the first living author included in Everyman’s Library.
As he addressed me in the presence of his son, Ike, his voice as soft and reassuring as ever, I tried to suppress my excitement and fulfilment of a childhood fantasy. But even then, I was mindful of the weight of his characteristically measured words, an acknowledgment that as a family man myself, relocating from Alberta, Canada, to Rhode Island, USA, where Brown was located, was not like going on an excursion. Throughout the process of negotiation for my relocation, Achebe placed the interest and well-being of my family on the front burner. Not for once did I get the impression that the work I would be doing for, and with, him mattered more than my own research and family’s wellbeing. He was particularly concerned about the challenging American health insurance policy, and suggested I didn’t take that lightly.
When I finally joined him at Brown, he made my settling-in relatively easy by ensuring that I got the resources to work at Churchill House on Angell Street, home of Africana Studies at Brown.
Although he had lived all of five decades of his life in the limelight–following the publication of Things Fall Apart while he was 28 years old only–Achebe never seemed comfortable with fame and attention. Indeed, as Charles Larson has noted, “Few writers live to observe the fiftieth anniversary of their novels–let alone with increasing readership.” But Achebe’s modesty forbade him from exhibiting any signs of greatness. He would stay quiet at most meetings, yielding space for younger colleagues to talk, and offering wise counsel only when extremely necessary. At the meetings we had to plan the annual Achebe Colloquium, a major initiative which he inaugurated at Brown in keeping with his life’s work to foster greater knowledge of Africa, he would resist any attempts to assign prominent roles to him. He would argue instead that the Colloquium was not about him and that he should not be made the focus. Not even the occasion of his 50th wedding anniversary in 2012 celebration, a modest family party, would make him embrace the spotlight and make a speech; he preferred, instead, quiet interaction with his guests and his grandchildren.
Ever willing to give so much of himself, official work for him was not limited to the office even in his twilight years and on a wheelchair. Working closely with him enabled me to better appreciate what Christie Achebe, his wonderful wife and scholar in her own right, had told me during our first meeting in 1999 as published in the ThisDay report. Describing the patriarch of the family as a very humane, caring, kind and loyal husband, Mrs. Achebe also revealed that even as a paraplegic, her husband did not isolate himself to write.
He was so at ease and at peace with himself, and cautious with criticism during conversations. He would quietly say O ko mada be (it’s the limit of their knowledge) in describing the short-sightedness of the political leaders during discussions of Nigerian politics, which we frequently engaged in. His humility and measured words generally made most visitors, including children, comfortable in his company. He would joke and banter with my 13-year-old daughter Kika, as if he was talking with a colleague. Not really surprising, seeing how at home he was with his grandchildren, and also given the kind of consciousness with which he wrote Chike and the River and other children’s books. Additionally, I could see in his carriage, the kind of cosmopolitan vision that enabled him to support his two daughters to marry non-Igbo men in an often ethnically-charged society. Yet, some of his worst critics following the publication of There was a Country have accused him of hating Yorubas because he criticised an icon of the Yorubas, Chief Obafemi Awolowo (something he had done multiple times in the past). Such critics are thus oblivious of the fact that Achebe’s grandchildren have Yoruba and Itsekiri blood, and therefore in “hating” the Yoruba, Achebe would have to hate his very family.
Very few writers have demonstrated the power of the written word as Achebe has done, and in fact, only a handful of writers are fortunate to generate the kind of stormy debate he has generated with his books and life. Amongst many other scholars, the critic, Charles Larson, and Lyn Innes, with whom Achebe edited an anthology of new writing that included Ben Okri respectively capture the significance of Achebe’s work. In Larson’s words, “Nigerians on the street are certainly proud of the novel [Things Fall Apart] and of their compatriot’s fame; it is the one novel they are most likely to have read or at least to know about.” For her part, Innes notes that “Achebe demonstrated that it is possible for a novelist to be creative, original, formally innovative, interrogating language and genre, and at the same time reach out to and involve a wide audience. In this sense Achebe’s novels are profoundly democratic because they respect the reader as an equal, calling on his or her involvement, interpretation and judgement.” Similarly, Farah acknowledged that Achebe is “enviably the most quotable of writers, every utterance of his proving to be a gem, every single thing he has penned containing vignettes cast in the currency of his wisdom. He is a man for all occasions, a writer, whom Queen Elizabeth II may quote with the same panache as a taxi driver in The Bronx, or a villager sinking a well in Onitsha.”
Achebe’s democratic credentials transcend his art and coalesce into his social commitment as a dissident citizen. Operating from an ideological standpoint that invests the artist with an activist vision, he had written in his novel Anthills of the Savannah: “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit–in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.” In the same vein he averred that “Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches!” Thus, beneath his telling quiet disposition was an insurrectionary temperament against the trouble with the postcolonial state in Africa symbolised by his native Nigeria which he described as “simply and squarely a failure of leadership”.
Although better known and celebrated as a distinguished novelist, Prof Achebe’s volume of poetry Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, written during the Biafran War, was jointly awarded the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. The volume grew out of an earlier collection, Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems, and both collections have also been merged in his Collected Poems. The poems are meditations on life and death, a collective testament to the Biafran war during which, together with his family, he narrowly escaped a bombing attack.
It is understandable, therefore, that Achebe’s personal history of Biafra articulated in There was a Country, was perhaps the most difficult book for him to write. As I learned, he clung onto the project like his final testament, and as a perfectionist working and reworking it up to the point of its publication. The book was a particularly important work for him, one that he may never have finished writing because the memories were sore, the recollections never exhaustive. Clearly, he had more to say. But being a man who preferred verbal economy to verbose pontificating, he knew he could never say all. It is a triumph of his resilient spirit and career that the book was published in his life-time. His sensitivity to the Biafran subject is reflected in the fact that one of the few creative works he wrote in Igbo language was his poem for his friend and marvellous poet, Christopher Okigbo. A major regret of Achebe’s passing, even at the age of 82, is his unfulfilled dream of having his poems and the iconic novel Things Fall Apart personally translated into Igbo.
– Dr. Nduka Otiono, a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada, was Senior Research Assistant to Professor Chinua Achebe at Brown University, USA.