Remembering Achebe, The Right Way

Opinion

Opinion

By Emmanuel Arodovwe

To many students and scholars of African literature and history, as well as peoples of African descent in general, the exit from this terrestrial plain recently of the quintessential literary icon Chinua Achebe, is obviously one of the most painful in recent times, outside personal losses that is. His popularity as we all know stems from the fact that through his novels particularly Things Fall Apart and  Arrow of God, he argued successfully and conclusively, in contrast to what the colonialist had believed, that Africa has had a past, religion, art, ethic, civilization, in a word, philosophy before the intrusion of the colonial interlopers. Achebe’s works successfully silenced the colonialist impression of a literal view of Africa as being a “dark continent” whose only history, whatever, was simply the history of the Whiteman in his interaction with the Negro Black of Africa.

Perhaps, Achebe’s popularity would have been restricted only to the African borders had the story of Things Fall Apart not found relevance in the experiences of other colonized peoples in different parts of the world. But it did, and this accounts for the reason the novel found translation into at least fifty languages, and Achebe’s fame and popularity became global. As is the case with stories of great men, many people had acquaintance with Achebe, as I also did, only through his books, and it is now certain that many generations yet unborn, across the world, would only have to meet Achebe through the stories he so much knew how to tell, in his books.

Given his worldwide fame, it is no surprise that his funeral attracted such a great number of visitors and callers than the modest St. Phillip’s Anglican Church, Ogidi, venue of the event could possibly contain. Eulogies poured out without restraint and the usually quiet village became a beehive of activities. With the presence of the politicians on ground, one wondered whether the funeral of the late icon was not being turned to another political gathering to churn out campaign promises or test the popularity of the politicians with 2015 around the corner. The onlookers and roll-callers ensured the late icon was as controversial in death as he was in the latter part of his life with the now well-documented and debated absence at the funeral rites, of two of Achebe’s supposed best friends and colleagues, even if only professionally, Professors Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark – who are now the only two still alive from the famous “pioneer quartet” originally having the poet Christopher Okigbo and Achebe as the other members. Wole Soyinka has quickly given it back in full dose to these supposed ‘roll callers’ at the event, dubbing them – The Village Mourners Association and asking them to “kindly absent themselves from his funeral when that event finally intrudes.”

My point in this piece is not to add my voice to the already multiple eulogies and commendations which the passing of the great icon has generated and would still continue to generate anyway, but to express a concern at the misinterpretations, deliberate distortions and somewhat outright misrepresentations of what Achebe stood, lived and died for, in some of the comments and eulogies that have followed his death. I suppose the greatest disservice we can do to a man as sincere and forthright as Chinua Achebe is to allow what is even a slight distortion of what he effectively lived his life representing go unchallenged.

So who was Achebe and what are those values he most highly revered and cherished? First, Achebe was an Igbo man and he never pretended or compromised on this position. Achebe in Things Fall Apart was interested fundamentally in telling the story of the experiences of his people, the Igbos with regards to colonialism and imperialism. How these events affected the Hausas, Yorubas, Urhobos, Isokos, Ijaws, Wolofs, Swahilis or any other group were, strictly speaking, not his immediate preoccupation. That the story itself found parallels in the experiences of other peoples and was therefore applicable to them is a different kettle of fish altogether. Agreed that Umuofia was illustrative, miniature, and representative of the African continent as a whole but that’s simply a matter of perception and interpretation. Professor Achebe was simply a true son of the soil, and an uncompromising patriot to the cause of his people, and on whose behalf he set out to project the Igbo world view and philosophy, not as African philosophy per se but as a variant of African philosophy, just as Bantu philosophy by Rev. Fr. Placid Tempels was expressive of the philosophy of the Bantus rather than representative of African philosophy in general. This point is crucial even for professional African philosophers and scholars.

Achebe’s choice of the villages Umuofia in Things Fall Apart, and No Longer at Ease and Ulu in Arrow of God were not mere coincidences. They were products of a well thought-out process. The use of indigenous Igbo names in virtually all of Achebe’s dramatis personae, except of course names of expatriates was not also accidental. He knew his mission and set out to achieve it. Achebe’s interest was the projection of the culture and philosophy of his Igbo people and nothing more or less. In his last book, There Was A Country, he captures this position succinctly when he writes: “As I write this I am aware that there are people, many friends of mine, who feel that there are too many cultures around. In fact, I heard someone say that they think some of these cultures should be put down, that there are just too many. We did not make the world, so there is no reason we should be quarrelling with the number of cultures there are. If any group decides on its own that its culture is not worth talking about, it can stop talking about it, but I don’t think anybody can suggest to another person, please drop your culture; let’s use mine. That’s the height of arrogance and the boast of imperialism. I think cultures know how to fight their battles; cultures know how to struggle. It is up to the owners of any particular culture to ensure it survives, or if they don’t want it to survive, they should act accordingly, but I am not going to recommend that.”

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Achebe was a pluralist who believed in multiculturalism. In fact, Achebe only fell short of writing in Igbo language because that would have defeated his basic purpose; to “write back” to the colonialists who had disdained and cast aspersions on his people’s history and culture in the first place. But while this intention meant he was forced to write in the colonizers’ language, he did this through an English language that was sufficiently corrupted, indigenized and domesticated through the incorporation of indigenous Igbo story telling techniques.

Second, Achebe was never a believer in the Nigerian project, whatever that is. We seem to forget in a hurry or deliberately ignore the crucial point that Achebe turned down a National award of the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic twice. This is significant. Professor Agwonorobo Enaeme Eruvbetine of the English Department, University of Lagos noted this crucial point at an event organized in honour of Chinua Achebe at the university recently. Achebe’s refusal to accept a national award was not out of humility or general resentment for the mundane and trivial, or even a disdain for undue publicity. This same man received honorary doctorates from more than thirty institutions worldwide including Massachusetts and Connecticut in the United States and Sterling, Southampton and Kent in the United Kingdom, to mention a few. Besides, he received Honorary Fellowships of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Man Booker International Prize, the Scottish Art Council’s Neil Gunn Fellowship and the Fellowship of the Modern Language Association of America. He had only accepted the Nigerian National Merit Award in 1987, supposedly because it was strictly academic. One wonders why the late icon accepted virtually every award and recognition that came his way except the only one that many would think to be the most significant– A national award from one’s country. The answer is simple. Achebe never believed in the Nigerian project and was not afraid or ashamed to say so. Reading through his last and most controversial book, There Was A Country, which in a sense is more of an autobiography only with emphasis on the Biafran War, one finds that Achebe’s contact with the Nigerian geo-political space outside his Igbo region was remarkably scant. Just only while he studied as an undergraduate at the University College Ibadan, and in Lagos while he worked with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, which itself was short-lived and abruptly terminated with the beginning of the civil war in 1967 did Achebe live outside the Igboland in Nigeria. If Achebe ever lived in Nigeria outside the Igbo region after 1967, then obviously, he did not count that experience worthy enough of deserving a space in a book that contained the history of his most important experiences in life.  The coordinated massacre of his people before and following the counter coup of July 1966 and the shocking inaction of the General Gowon government in the face of these sad events all leading to the Biafran war of 1967 effectively wiped out any atom of faith in the Nigerian project the late icon ever had in him up until that time and throughout the rest of his life. In There Was A Country, Achebe writes that “Nigerians will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbos.” Achebe saw through the pretences of the canvassers of the “One Nigeria Myth” a covert and unexplained deep-rooted hatred for his people, and throughout his life never hesitated to express his dissatisfaction in words or deeds at such a disposition, even if this made him unpopular.

Thus at his death, the most one had expected from a Nigerian government and a wider Nigerian society, who a few months earlier had in one accord, with only a few exceptions, criticized, rained abuses and tongue lashed the same man for publishing a historical book, which to them, was nothing more than a reopening of ‘wounds’ that were already ‘fast healing’; was a simple passing remark at the death of a supposedly great intellectual, and a prayer for his Igbo people for God’s divine consolation. But no! Trust the Nigerians. They were not going to be beaten to their own game. Like the proverbial mourner who cries more than the bereaved, the Nigerian State representatives we learnt, were amongst the first delegations to arrive the United States to console with the family, and thereafter not only made plans for a full-fledged state burial but were also on ground at the funeral to shed crocodile tears.

Achebe would certainly not have asked for all these jamboree and fanfare from such people were he permitted to choose the guests to bid him final farewell. Never! Not when the General who oversaw the killings of innocent Igbos following the 1966 counter coup, of which Achebe himself was lucky to escape unhurt, is still parading around as a hero of one Nigeria; not when the so-called Generals who, failing to see the justice of the position of Achebe and Ojukwu et al, with respect to the orgy of blood and violence visited on their Igbo people at the time, fought “patriotically” to keep them in one Nigeria, a case of “forcing them to be free”, while they now freely feed fat on the spoils from the war in form of ill-gotten stupendous wealth, and parade around as veterans of war; Not when a General forced his people into a preventable war in which they were simply outmanned, outgunned, and out powered, simply because he (the General) refused to keep to the terms of an accord reached under a peaceful atmosphere far away in a neutral ground in Aburi. The more I watch the documentary of that peaceful meeting at the end of which the two major actors shook hands, embraced and ate from the same plate amidst laughter and friendly feeling, the more I feel very sorry for the hundreds of thousands of children either outrightly shot or allowed to die slowly and painfully through starvation, privation and diseases during the Biafran War, and the more my condemnation and disaffection for whoever encouraged that ugly incident including the brain behind the starvation and embarrassing post-war “twenty pounds to every Biafran pending investigation policy”, an investigation which is still awaited to date. Isn’t it surprising how a people would effectively cover up what obviously is a glaring evil and crying injustice begging for redress and then try to continue to pretend that all is well? Today, who except the leaders and looters themselves would readily accept that Nigeria is working!

The greatest memorial we can give to a most honourable man like Achebe is not the shedding of crocodile tears by the Village Mourners Association of Nigeria – apologies to Wole Soyinka, but to uphold the uncompromising positions he defended till death, the beginning of which should be a quick rethink about the continued existence of this failing union. A good take-off point should be the immediate dismantling of the present military-carried-over- structures and constitution and the convening of a Sovereign National Conference, with emphasis on the term “sovereign” to discuss each ethnic group’s terms of association with Nigeria just as the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) recently suggested. This is the best tribute to pay to a giant of Achebe’s calibre.

Furthermore, Achebe’s life and times should instruct scholars and students alike that writing and philosophizing can never be done in a vacuum. Every philosopher is from a place, a culture, an ethnic group, a society, in a word a nation in the strictest sense. Achebe has shown us the way, in the same way as the Belgian Placid Tempels had done earlier. No more should we discuss African philosophy, African Arts or Literature, African music, African civilization, etc. without effectively indigenizing them. Every African philosopher worth the name must do so in the context of his immediate culture. That’s how to remember Achebe the right way. Enough of the intellectual laziness we often display through our propensity to cut corners, to pick up some indigenous work of a man’s honest and ingenuous expression of the culture and philosophy of his people and shout to high heavens that we have finally stumbled upon the elusive African philosophy we have always talked about. There is no one African philosophy, just the same way as there is no one African culture. Significantly, we can go a step deeper than Achebe by expressing our philosophies, the stories of our peoples and cultures and our unique experiences and world views in our own indigenous languages and allow for the second order activity of translating them into whatever languages the readers desire. This is the way to remember Achebe, the right way!

•Arodovwe wrote from the University of Lagos.

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