2nd April, 2013
Avuncular is the easiest word that comes to mind for me in describing Chinua Achebe, who has joined his ancestors. Ours was not an easy relationship, but it was based on great respect from my side and a sideways flance of possibility as far as he thought of me at all.
He was a pioneer in more than one area of thought and writing. He was a builder of institutions and founder of organisations. While a number of Africans North and South of the Sahara had published fiction in English before Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1957, it took Achebe’s novel to kick-start what today is known around the world as African literature. The book became the first title in what Heinemann started as the African Writers Series. Achebe became its founding editor.
My first two novels were published in the series and the second novel did not sit well with him. It is a mockery of the motives of those who fought the civil war. Finally, he gave his imprimatur, conceding that it was good write!
In 1980, he wrote to a few of us mooting the idea of an association for Nigerian writers. He was our host in Nsukka, where we discussed the modalities for such an association. The Association of Nigerian Authors was founded a year later, with him as the founding president, and myself as the founding general secretary.
It was easy to work with him as long as one was clear about one’s objective. Our objective in ANA was to set up institutions through which the association could realise its ambition of covering the nation and encouraging writing and reading.
Achebe was clever enough to set his goals as a writer with precision. He wanted to show Africans where the rain started to beat them, because without that knowledge, they would not know where to begin cleaning themselves. As for those outside of Africa, he wanted to let them know that Africa did not hear of culture for the first time with the arrival of white people on the continent. Things Fall Apart, his best known work, portrays a man too proud to fail, who yet had smaller and smaller space in which to express himself as the British colonial government took over his space. No Longer at Ease describes a man, who although studies the humanities, was devoid of humane feelings. He ended up in the colonial gaol, not for political reasons like the Nkrumahs and Kenyattas, but for taking a bribe as a member of scholarship board.
Arrow of God, Achebe’s greatest novel, even by his own admission, describes an arrogant man who abandons his people out of anger against a colonial officer. A Man of the People is light and lacks the seriousness of the others. Anthills of the Savannah was Achebe’s acceptance of the post-civil war Nigeria. It is a Nigeria that had gone out of skitters and would never recover. The collection of short stories are uneven in their achievements.
His poetry emanating from the civil war made a great case for the humanitarian disaster that the war could have caused at the end.
Achebe also wrote children’s books, with, as usual, impeccable reasons for doing so. He had sought suitable books for his children only to come across books in which the image of Africa is distorted to an extent that he could not expose his children to. The best of those books, How the Leopard Got Its Claws, in collaboration with John Iroaganachi, goes beyond its ethnic symbolism to be a powerful tale for young and old.
Posterity will decide if he achieved his literary ambitions. But he provoked enough people inside as well as outside of Africa to respond to him. His essays, initially written to back his literary ambitions, move further away from literature and ended up embroiled in ethnic politics.
One of his most dramatic actions was his refusal to take a national honour from two administrations in Nigeria. This is an action I fully supported, given his own disapproval of the performance of those governments. His other political action, joining Aminu Kano’s political party, was ill-advised, given the role of that potentate in the riots in Northern Nigeria in May 1967.
Achebe will be remembered as a pioneer and a tireless founder of institutions for the emergence and continuance of African literature specifically and African political and social affairs generally.