Achebe: A non-romantic view (1)

Professor Albert Chinua Achebe

Indeed, we cannot help wondering if the recent insensate massacre of Chinua Achebe’s people in Kano, only a few days ago, hastened the fatal undermining of that resilient will that had sustained him so many years after his crippling accident.

—Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark. “Chinua Achebe Death: We Have Lost a Brother”. The Guardian (UK), March 22, 2013

There is no doubt that Prof. Chinua Achebe, who died recently in the United States after a long residence there probably because it was better for him to live there than in Nigeria, was, by many accounts, an outstanding writer. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), received wide critical acclaim soon after its publication, which came in the wake of the great wave of decolonisation. A year before the publication of the novel, Ghana became the first independent African country, in 1957. Things Fall Apart was published at a time when non-Western but Western educated intellectuals and cultural nationalists were looking around for indigenous cultural documents that could vindicate pre-colonial African cultures, in what the British-Indian writer, Salman Rushdie, once called, in a memorable phrase, “writing back to the Centre” (the West).

It was arguably in that context, the urgent need, by the African literati, to produce an African narrative that would vindicate indigenous African cultures which were heavily denigrated by centuries of Western writers, priests, and colonial administrators, rather than the novel’s intrinsic literary merits, that brought Things Fall Apart to prominence, at least within the post-nationalistic African intelligentsia. The same may be said of Achebe’s other novels: their timing, 1960-1966, was fortunate because there was, then, a large literate international English-speaking reading public eager to get access to the new African writing, not to speak of publishers such as Heinemann which were looking to cash in on it all. Again, it was in that context that Achebe’s works were appropriated for all kinds of culture wars, especially within the ranks of militant post-colonial intellectuals.

Achebe’s collection of essays on literature, cultural politics, and colonial history, from the early Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) to the later Hopes and Impediments (1989) and Home and Exile (2000) sealed his reputation as an African or Black cultural critic, activist, and nationalist. His other novels, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), Man of the People (1966), not to mention short stories and poems such as Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) and Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971) were widely admired by critics and literary historians for their “realistic” and, some would say, vivid, subtle, and complex portrait of the African, or, at least, “the Nigerian condition”, which, to this day, has persisted in more complicated forms.

Achebe was also the influential editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, between 1962 and 1972. Under his direction, the series published some of the most canonical of African writers such as Alex La Guma, Taha Hussein, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Doris Lessing, Ayi Kwei Armah, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head, Cheik Hamidou Kane, Okot p’Bitek, and nationalist intellectuals such as Amilcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah.

Chiefly because of his first novel, and his pioneering role as the editor of the African Writers Series, many have considered Achebe as the “father of African fiction” (or the founding father, even the grandfather, of modern African literature), a dubious claim that Achebe himself could not accept, since, as he knew in his lifetime, there were many African writers of fiction and non-fiction that wrote compelling accounts of African cultural and social life well before he was born. Claims for Achebe as being the “father of African fiction or literature” are based on a partial and reductive view of Africa’s literary history, or a diminution of African writing to a minor position within the Western literary tradition.

Yet, there had been indigenous African writing in native languages. Consider, for example, the case of the Basotho (Lesotho) writer and novelist, Thomas Mopoku Mafolo (1876-1948), the celebrated author of Chaka the Zulu (1912-15?), which many literary historians have called a masterpiece, an epic tragedy, and, in the words of a reviewer, “the earliest major contribution of black Africa to the corpus of modern world literature”. One could cite the example of the celebrated Yoruba writer, D. O. Fagunwa, author of Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole, or the works of the Arab writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and countless other writers who wrote in Hausa, Tamashek, Amharic, Wolof, and so on. Indeed, no one author or person could have begun what we call today “African writing”. The African literary tradition is far older, more enduring, and more complex than the alleged effort of a single author, however gifted. In any case, the idea of Achebe being the “father of African fiction” is not a scholarly argument but a romantic and naïve one because it ignores the major contributions of pre-colonial African authors and a huge corpus of African writing in Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

But whatever the artistic merit of Achebe’s work, which is considerable to say the least, it is in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1988), that his literary-story-telling skills began a terminal decline. Indeed the novel marks a notable decline in his liberal vision and creative acumen. The novel is, by any standard, a trivial thriller and is uneven in linguistic and literary quality. Arguably, large parts of Anthills read like pulp fiction, or a crudely crafted political thriller. The storyline is fragmented; the attempt at covert plotting is unsuccessful; the narrative exposition is slow and cumbrous; the style of representation is too thin and shallow; the plot is threadbare and thin, perhaps even superficial in many instances. The dialogue is unconvincing, heavy, and tedious, and the characterisation is one-dimensional. For example, neither Ikem, Beatrice, Abdul on the one hand nor Prof. Okon, Sam, and Osodi on the other has any emotional and psychological depth. Indeed, no character in that novel has convincing uniqueness of character, and none is admirably individuated. Moreover, the characterisation and dialogue are stagey, as can be seen in the first person account of the First Witness, Christopher Oriko (Chapter 1) and the dialogue in the opening section of Chapter 2. Anthill is also marred by obliquities of narration and an undisciplined, un-integrated multiplicity of viewpoints: the novel’s attempt at an epic-scale representation of a dystopian land and its failure to offer an intensely imagined, superbly coordinated narrative irony are telling. Yet all this may be accounted for by the novel’s melodramatic structure and the poor quality of its speech representation.

Frankly, Anthills of the Savannah is a disappointing work; little wonder it failed to win the 1987 Booker McConnell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. For example, the novel combines melodrama with a political roman á clef, as can be seen in the closing section of the narrative, the journey on the “Great North Road” (Chapter 17). Indeed, this chapter presents a veiled dystopian narrativisation of northern Nigeria, which is variously called “the scrub-land”, “the scorched landscape”, “another country”, “full of dusty fields [and] bottomed baobab tree[s] so strange in appearance”, etc. In this novel, the rainforest (“the rain country”) of the South is favourably contrasted with the “parkland of grass and stunted trees… of mud walls and reddish earth”, the North. One conclusion, which, of course, may be problematic from a strictly literary-critical perspective, is that unlike the Exceptional Southerners, the Northerners don’t know how to make the North “prosperous” (the roads are full of potholes) so that all the talented, intelligent, hard-working, economically gifted, and industrially-savvy Southerners could migrate to the North (perhaps in the mode of mission civilatrice), which is, as of now, wallowing in economic and social desperation (see the opening pages of Chapter 17).