2nd April, 2013
By Wale Okediran
Like many Nigerian students, who offered Literature in secondary school, I first met Achebe on the pages of his novels long before I met him in flesh. And when I first met him, it was during his 60th birthday celebration at the University of Nigeria Nsukka in 1990.
I had gone to Nsukka as a member of a two-busload delegation of ANA members that came to witness the celebration of Achebe’s 60th birthday. Tagged ‘Eagle on Iroko’, the five-day literary fiesta was a carnival of sorts, with revered literary intellectuals falling over each other to pay homage to the giant.
It was an interesting trip from Ibadan to Nsukka. A significant but sad event of that occasion was the auto accident, which Achebe had on his way to catch his flight back to the US. It was this accident that ensured his confinement to the wheelchair for the rest of his life.
My next literary encounter with the great man was between 12 and 26 April 2008, when ANA organised a series of events across the country to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart.
As the then National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, I was invited by the BBC to its London Studio for a discussion on the theme of Things Fall Apart. The interview, which was part of the BBC’s documentary to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the book, was well publicised in the international media.
Back home, I was also tasked with the onerous task of leading the celebrations from Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja, Awka and Ogidi, with a grand finale at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. As far back as 2007, ANA had put in place plans to celebrate the book and the author who, incidentally, is the founding President of our association. Our original plan was to situate the celebration at the University of Nigeria, being Achebe’s last working place in Nigeria.
However, due to demands from various sections of the country, which wanted to be involved in the activities, we decided to stagger the events across the country. Thus, Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, Awka, Ogidi and Nsukka were selected for the celebration. At the opening event on 12 April, we had a wonderful outing at the National Theatre, while on 17 April 2008, we had another beautiful celebration at the Abuja NTA Arena at a children’s carnival where we exposed school children to the rudiments of Things Fall Apart, TFA. This way, we hoped to encourage our young ones in the art of writing. Other activities included the poster competition as well as the playwright competition for the adaptation of TFA into a stage drama. All these were done in order to discover and encourage new talents in the areas of arts and literature. The father of the African novel was thrilled that ANA was able to take the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart to his family home and primary school in Ogidi, Anambra State.
Early this year at a literary event at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, I had cause to observe that Achebe’s three earlier texts locate their stories clearly within Nigerian cities, villages, and ethnic groups, the fourth novel inhabits imaginary cities and refuses specific ethnic or cultural identification. The political and social problems that regulate the plot–bribery, kickbacks, incompetence at high government levels, greed, and social apathy–represent not just Nigeria’s maladjustment to independence, but that of many African nations.
How different is A Man of the People from the Ghanaian novel, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, or the Senegalese novel, The Last of the Empire? In fact, all three serve to exemplify, or rather prove, Frantz Fanon’s theories of disastrous neo-colonialism when power falls into the hands of the greedy elite. Despite the similarity to actual historical events to Nigeria in 1963, the riots, turbulent election campaigns, the political corruption, Achebe refuses to limit his story only to Nigeria. Just as Armah named his working-class protagonist “the man,” Achebe makes use of the general to enlarge its representational possibilities. It becomes not the story of Nigeria but the story of any West African nation, an elaborate parable of the pitfalls of neo-colonialism.
Achebe is still very relevant as far as Nigerian literature and social criticisms are concerned. As I put it in a recent newspaper interview, “the political and social problems that regulate the plot in Achebe’s A Man Of The People are bribery, kickbacks, incompetence at high government levels, greed, and social apathy. Sadly, these are the same issues that dominate subsequent novels, with the same theme published several decades after A Man Of The People. They are also the same issues that drive the plot of my book, Tenants Of The House. What may be different between the two books are the style and language of politics, which have slightly changed since colonial times. It is therefore obvious that not much has changed since the publication of A Man of the People since the politics of rancour, violence, ineptitude, corruption and cluelessness has continued to bedevil the country. The only difference from our present time and Achebe’s time is that while politicians used cutlasses and charms to kill in Achebe’s time, they now use guns and bombs and dynamites in our time.
On the controversial issue of Politics of Language in Literature, it is Joana Sullivan’s opinion that for Nigerian literature, the issue of language represents perhaps the most salient and distressing impediment to the definition of a national literature. As Sullivan puts it: “Two sides emerge in the debate, the argument that a national literature comprises all the literary and oral traditions of the nation versus the belief that only texts written in English can represent a national sentiment that rises above ethnic partiality. The argument hinges on the disparate interpretations of the nation. For those who conceive of Nigeria as a haphazard conglomeration of distinct cultural units united by a federal government, the notion of a national literature must represent all culture groups and recognise their particular literary talents in their indigenous forms. Given that as yet no national culture exists in Nigeria, the national literature must be thought to embrace the various contributions from all nationally acknowledged languages”. Sullivan further argues that ironically, the widely spoken language of Pidgin, which has no ethnic affiliation and is arguably a natural Nigerian language, remains a pariah among Nigerian languages, receiving no government recognition or promotion.
However, for writers such as Achebe, the thrust for English aims at both the realised and potential audiences, assuming with great certainty that only English will actualise its role as the dominant. Three factors weigh heavily in the favour of English language texts winning the role of representing Nigeria’s national literature: publishing, prestige, and criticism.
Meanwhile, writing in English brings prestige to authors, whose mastery of the colonial language usually signifies social success. “In keeping with its colonial legacy,” writes F. N.
Achebe, however, perceives indigenous-language literatures as divisive. Rather than working toward national unity, they maintain and even exacerbate the antagonisms that pre-existed the artificial nations imposed by colonialism. To this end, Achebe prefers the use of a foreign national language, which he assumes will provide a common ground for the various ethnic groups.
In his statement, Achebe suggests that English claims this space exclusively in Nigeria, yet in reality the designated “official” language of English shares this space with the three national languages: Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, as well as the unofficial language of Pidgin, which ranks among the highest of spoken languages in Nigeria. If indeed language is the actual barrier, the issue of availability can be resolved through multiple translations.
Perhaps the most famous novel to emerge from Nigeria is Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Ironically, Emeka Okeke-Ezeigbo has said that Achebe’s novel is “technically an Igbo novel translated into English”. While Achebe’s insistence that he thinks and writes in English is not to be doubted, one wonders if the novel is not, in fact, an Igbo novel written in English. Or, to put it differently, it is a novel about the Igbo experience written in English. The major themes of the novel focus on the description of a complex and honourable pre-colonial culture existing within Nigeria, which was then transformed by the arrival of the British colonisers.
It is also important to note that Achebe was a medical student on government scholarship for one whole year at the University of Ibadan before he switched to the humanities. This background has further reinforced what scholars consider to be the organic linkage between Literature and Medicine, which goes back to ancient times when the ancient Greeks recognised and honoured the connection by placing both medicine and poetry under the dominion of Phoebus Apollo, their god of the sun. The list of men and women, who have combined Medicine and Literature is long and varied, depending on the inclination of the compiler. A writer like Achebe, who began, but perhaps wisely did not finish medical school is on this important list. By contrast, William Somerset Maughan finished his studies but never practised. Others like the poet John Keats eventually abandoned practice for full time writing while the greater number of doctors whose list is long continued and still continue to juggle both occupations throughout their lives.
Famous literary physicians include Oliver Goldsmith (Circa, 1730) John Keats (1795-1821) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) Tobias George Smollett (1721-71) Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) Somerset Maughan (1874-1965) William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)6. Nearer home, the likes of the late Professors Olatunde Odeku, Anezi Okoro and Adeloye as well as Ewa Henshaw, Tony Marinho, Femi Olugbile among others were able to combine literature with their medical practice.
Achebe is the recipient of over 30 honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States, including Dartmouth College, Harvard, and Brown University. He has been awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982), a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the Nigerian National Order of Merit (Nigeria’s highest honour for academic work), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The Man Booker International Prize 2007 and the 2010 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize are two of the more recent accolades Achebe received in his life time.
Now that the Eagle has finally returned home to rest, I wish to express my heartfelt condolences to his family, relatives and associates.
In view of his international standing and immense contribution to the global Literary scene, I strongly hope that the Federal Government will give him a befitting state burial. In addition, a befitting national establishment should be named after him.
May his gentle soul continue to rest in peace.