2nd April, 2013
By Festus Ayayi
I knew Chinua Achebe in the early 80s when he was President of Association of Nigerian Authors and I was Assistant Secretary. Then we used to have meetings at his house at Ogidi and also in his house at Nsukka. I knew him fairly well until the accident happened and he relocated to the US. I didn’t see him after that. All I heard was that on one or two occasions he came to the country and went back. But we never met after that.
We met during the occasions when ANA had specific events.
Chinua Achebe was a humanist, he was interested in the human condition, the questions of justice and fairness. He was interested in the need for people to be rooted in their history, in their culture. He was also interested in the questions of governance. He was very pained that in spite of Nigeria having abundance of resources, the country has failed to utilise the resources for the betterment of Nigerians. He was a man of the people. And in his book, Anthills of the Savannah, he spoke eloquently of those concerns. He was a very sympathetic person; he wasn’t arrogant at all. As most gifted people are, he was a very simple person. I also think he was deeply loved by his family, just as he also loved them, because each time we went there in the early 1980s, his wife was there, his children were also there.
Achebe was one of the earliest writers on the continent. He set the stage and inspired generations of writers across Africa, to begin the process of expressing themselves creatively through fiction, whether as drama, whether as poetry, whether as prose. He was a great writer. Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece, everybody has acknowledged that. And the point Achebe was making is that people must not forget their history, they must not forget their historical experiences and their individual character. Practices of individual communities as defined by the context of the way they are born, the way they have experiences and share experiences, and that one culture is not necessarily superior to another. So what you find in the context of Igbo culture of the time he described was very valid for the people at that time and served to define them, and was not inferior to whatever the Europeans offered or showcased. He was encouraging us essentially to take pride in our history, in our culture and not to define ourselves by the other. We shouldn’t say because the Europeans are like this, we must also be like that. And I think that was very, very important in much the same way as James Brown in I’m Black and Proud also helped to define black consciousness in the US. I think Achebe tried to do that for African literature, and through him, Africans came to have respect because of that work that he did.
And his essays also, because he was not just a writer, he was also an essayist. The themes he explored, themes of governance, politics, ethnic relations, human condition showed deep appreciation of the fact that I am an African, ‘am authentic as an African, there’s a humanity to the African and that questions of justice, political relationship are things that can also be settled using African methods, using African science, using African traditions, using African experiences. Frankly speaking, we are going to miss him.
And one of the things that happened is that he died at a time when his book There Was a Country has generated quite some controversy with many voices speaking with hardly that of Achebe himself being heard. It is true that many people will carry on the conversation, the debate on his behalf, but it would have been much more compelling if he had to respond to the discordant voices that have been sounded in relation to what he provided in There Was a Country. But as I keep telling people, we all dream of immortality, but immortality is not attained by being there physically, by being present all the time. We achieve immortality through the validity of our ideas. And Achebe, for centuries, for millenniums to come, will be celebrated because of his ideas. So, he may not be there, but has acquired immortality, there’s no question about that.
I also believe that he deserved the Nobel Prize for literature. He didn’t get it perhaps because of the politics of the Nobel Prize. But even post-humuously, he can, and should be given the Nobel Prize. If they don’t give it to him, he has that Nobel in our hearts, he won it in our hearts, he was a great man.
Achebe’s death is like an Iroko falling in the forest. When an Iroko falls, it occupies a space in the forest. Maybe there are other Irokos, it is also possible that other Irokos will grow in the space where the other one fell from, but it will take time for the new Iroko tree to grow and fill the space that the old one had filled. Yes, he left a very big void in terms of his contributions to literature, in terms of what I will call the African conciousness and things of that sort. But the society is dynamic, his ideas will continue to find relevance and threrefore will continue to point the way forward in terms of solving the different kinds of problems that he encountered in his own lifetime.
That is the the inspiration that Shakespeare provided for the English and to the world. Shakespeare has died but many of the things he spoke about are still there, Shakespeare is still celebrated. Even in business, people use Shakespeare to find solution to problems that they have. So he will always be there. And after Shakespeare, of course there have been other writers in England, but nobody can be a Shakespeare, nobody can be an Achebe. There will be writers for different times, but there would be one Achebe for the time he lived.
Achebe in his There Was A Country, narrates the story of the civil war from his own perspective. He was a scholar, a creative writer, and from those vantage points, he commented on the politics of the society. We may disagree with some of the conclusions that he came to, we may also agree with him.
I have read the book up to a point. In it, Achebe talks about what happened during the civil war, who did what, the entire experience of the Igbos. Frankly speaking, we need to interrogate the other side. If I write a book and I say this is my account of history, those that are mentioned in the text need to be interrogated before we can come to some conclusion about whether or not what I am saying is true. To interrogate the book itself is not enough, you must speak to others who are mentioned: Gowon and others. Awolowo’s legacies are there that are mentioned in the book. The Yoruba, the different ethnic groups in the country, they also must give their own accounts on the basis of which you can then say this is the truth.
People have said it is a book that extols Igbo nationalism and all what nots, and talks about how the Igbos were betrayed. I think it is more than that. From what I’ve seen, even raising the ethnic question in Nigeria draws attention to the need to address that matter, because people have been talking about ethnic relations in Nigeria as a major impute into politics, into economy, into governance and point to the lopsidedness in terms of the way in which ethnic relations are defined, lopsidedness in terms of the way in which resources are allocated to the different ethnic groups as a major problem that informs the instability and crisis of governance in Nigeria. And so by drawing attention to that issue itself, he is saying let us deal with it. We must deal with it, we must confront it because at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, we are told there are 350 ethnic nationalities in Nigeria, but no two ethnic nationalities remain the same. No matter what we become, we need to relate to one another on the basis of justice, on the basis of fairness and on the basis of equity. That is important, whether or not we are Igbos, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, Esan or wherever. That is important, and I think this is what we should be asking: What does this There Was a Country mean? We must begin to address concerns about ethnic imbalances and injustice in this country. If there are, we address them. It is the same thing like racism in the US.
I was reading a statement yesterday by a writer who said that in Cuba, blacks are still being discriminated against in spite of so many years of Fidel Castro’s rule, but that as long as revolutionary fervour was in Cuba, and people were speaking in terms of revolution, nobody mentions racism. This is because it would appear as if revolutionary spirit and achievements were being undermined, but that as long as Raul is there, people are pointing up on the ethnic question and that it is good as people talk about it openly so that it could be resolved.
So this book challenges us to look at those issues. We should look for the best Nigerian who can lead. Where he comes from shouldn’t be the issue and that’s what that book challenges us to deal with. There’s no doubt that Achebe succeeded more as a creative writer, because writers are healers, they heal the soul, the wounds of the society by what they write, by what they provoke the society to think of, by the possibilities they challenge us to see. So writers are healers. He may not have done it in medicine, but he did it through literature, healing more souls than he could have done if he had practised medicine.He was one of the greatest African writers, one of the greatest Africans concerned with not just the human condition, but with African condition in terms of justice, in terms of fairness, in terms of being rooted in an authentic culture that enabled the African to have respect for himself to be what he could possibly be.
– Prof. Festus Iyayi, Head of Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Management Sciences, University of Benin and former Assistant Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors, is the author of Violence, The Contract, Heroes and Awaiting Court Martial.