March 21 was here again recently. On this particular day in 2013, Professor Chinua Achebe, one of the world’s most distinguished writers and intellectuals took his last breath in Boston, Massachusetts, mourned and celebrated by his teeming readers, critics and divers people across the globe on whom his work and life had significantly impacted in various ways. I have decided to use this period to examine some of the important discussions that have continued to circulate around Achebe, his work and African literature which appear to have even gained considerable weight since his demise and have also distinguished themselves by the largely tantalizing distortions, half-truths and deliberate misinformation that have been carefully injected into them.
This service is for the benefit of students, younger professors and scholars who were yet to be admitted into the African literary household when some of the events stoking these discussions took place and who are innocently gobbling up the horribly deficient accounts being fed them by those who either do not have any better grasp of those aspects of the African literary history themselves or are on a deliberate mission to distribute misleading concoctions.
It seems so natural to commence with Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Literature Prize given that discussions on it have stubbornly refused to go away even after over a decade of Achebe’s passing.
*Achebe and the Nobel Politics
By 1986, it was very obvious that the Swedish Academy which annually selects the recipients of the Nobel Literature Prize had decided to bring it to Africa. But to actualize this, they did something that viciously affected the credibility of that year’s prize. They summoned African writers to Stockholm to discuss African Literature before them. While several African writers including the illustrious Wole Soyinka who won the prize that year trooped to Sweden to attend the conference which held from 11-17 April, 1986, Chinua Achebe thought that such an event was not worth his time.
In his message to the Nobel Committee rejecting their invitation, Achebe wrote:
“I regret I cannot accept your generous invitation for the simple reason that I do not consider it appropriate for African writers to assemble in European capitals in 1986 to discuss the future of their literature. In my humble opinion it smacks too much of those constitutional conferences arranged in London and Paris for our pre-independence political leaders.
“The fault, however is not with the organizers such as yourselves, but with us the writers of Africa who at this point in time should have outgrown the desire for the easy option of using external platforms instead of grappling with the problem of creating structures of their own at home.
“…I strongly believe that the time is overdue for Africans, especially African writers, to begin to take the initiative in deciding the things that belong to their peace…” (See “Ikejemba: He Had in Him the Elements So Mixed” by Professor Michael Thelwell, Usaafrica dialogue google groups).
One wonders what the astounded Nobel Committee members must have whispered to each other after receiving this letter.
In an interview a few years later with ThisWeek magazine (November 27, 1989), Achebe explained further why he chose to ignore the event: “In 1986, I rejected an invitation to Stockholm to discuss African literature. They thought it was the turn of Africa. I thought it was not right for African writers to troop to Europe to discuss the future of African literature. The relationship between me and them is well known; I am not battling for their recognition. Recognitions are good but I am not going to stop any work in order to court your attention. No matter how well meaning, no one else can tell your own story.” (p.19)
Now, why would the Nobel Committee take the very suspicious decision of inviting African writers to Stockholm to discuss African literature before it shortly before giving the prize to a black African writer – an action some of us found very patronizing? It would even be more disastrous to the reputation of the Nobel Committee and its distinguished literature prize to suggest that perhaps the committee might not have achieved sufficient acquaintance with African writers and their works and so considered it necessary to bring them to Sweden in order to make up for that deficiency. That would then amount to underlining the impression that their decision to bring their prize to Africa preceded their determination of the criteria for selecting the particular African writer they intended to give it to. But how would just a single conference be enough to help the committee make such an important decision when they had all the time to thoroughly examine the works of African writers since the announcement of the last winner the previous year? Or were there some extra-literary considerations they usually relied upon to choose the prize recipients? For instance, was a demonstration of adequate respect to the “Nobel masters” by honouring their summons to flock to Stockholm that year the key requirement designed for African writers to enable one of them “qualify” to receive the coveted prize?
The reason that makes more sense is that their decision was obviously a product of anxiety and fear. By this time, Africa’s best known and highly regarded writer, Chinua Achebe, whose novels, lectures and essays had formidably challenged the stereotypical portrayal of the continent and her people by Western writers and had largely influenced a significant review of how the rest of the world saw Africa and her people had earned for himself the status of a “suspect” within the Western literary establishment.
His 1975 Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” for instance, had not only influenced a major reassessment of Conrad and some other highly regarded Western writers as “objective witnesses” in several informed literary quarters, but had equally redefined and broadened the parameters with which fictional and even non-fictional works by Western writers on Africa and her people were evaluated. Indeed, that Achebe lecture is now widely considered as one of the most significant contributions to the criticism of literature written in English. It has received widespread reviews and known to have caused considerable upset within the Western literary establishment.
The extent of its far-reaching effect could be gleaned from Achebe’s revelation in his 1998 interview by the New York Writers Institute where he stated that after reading the essay on Conrad, an old, very highly respected Swedish critic and writer had this to say: “the white people would be in trouble when there are more people like [Achebe] who are talking this way.”
According to Achebe, after the essay had gained widespread attention, some people (obviously Western scholars, critics and writers) came to him to thank him for helping them to see Africa and Africans differently and purge themselves of the misleading impressions they had formed about the continent and her people due to their unbalanced portrayal by Western writers.
But to some others, the reaction was: how dare you?
It is also instructive that after a particularly brilliant outing in Canberra, Australia, in the summer of 1973, Professor Manning Clark, a distinguished Australian historian wrote to Achebe and pleaded: “I hope you come back and speak again here, because we need to lose the blinkers of our past. So come and help the young to grow up without the prejudices of their forefathers…”
This kind of sincerity is so touching, although, definitely, not everyone that heard Achebe in that audience would be able to suppress his entrenched prejudice to generate such a positive, edifying response.
But the more unfortunate aspect of the matter is that while the “authentic universal” people are realizing that they had long been mired in pitiable self-delusion, some African intellectuals are falling over themselves to announce to the world like the African American writer, Booker T. Washington, the author of Up From Slavery, that they are scared of losing their chains.
In January 1974, Achebe had declared to a gathering of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and language Studies at Makarere University, Uganda: “I hold, however, and have held from the very moment I began to write that earnestness is appropriate to my situation. Why? I suppose because I have deep-seated need to alter things within my situation, to find for myself a little more room than has been allowed me in the world. I realize how pompous or even frightening this must sound to delicate sensibilities, but I can’t help it”.
A reading of Achebe’s 1975 collection of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day, should be enough to help anyone appreciate the reasons that qualified him for the “special status” he enjoys in the Western literary world. He and a few African writers who share similar views have already earned for themselves the tag of “uppity Africans” who could not be trusted and who might want to “embarrass” the “owners of literature” by using a rejection of their “biggest prize,” the Nobel, to effectively drive home their clear repudiation of Europe’s hegemonic tendencies on African life and culture.
Achebe’s decision to spurn the invitation to the 1986 Stockholm conference and the tone and content of his rejection letter, therefore, was the timely red flag the Swedes eagerly awaited to confirm their fears that this was one of those Africans “who were beginning to reject their place in the world”.
But the next action of the Nobel Committee members betrayed their abject lack of sound judgement. Or, maybe, they really intended to underline for African writers the fact they required more than quality work to earn their prize. A wiser decision would have been to wait for another year or two before bringing the prize to Africa and many people would not have easily linked the two events (the summon to Stockholm and the award of the Nobel prize to an African shortly after) to achieve damaging conclusions.
Now, it is important to state here that the two leading figures on the African literary landscape whose names would necessarily feature prominently in this discussion, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, despite a couple of disagreements based clearly on principles, remained friends till the very end. So, those who would jump out of their small holes to inherit a non-existent quarrel between the two friends should better save their energy. This tribute by East Africa’s leading writer, Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, recalling what happened just thirteen years before Achebe’s death would help to underline this point:
“At Achebe’s 70th birthday celebrations at Bard College [New York] attended by Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka among others, I told this story of how Achebe’s name had haunted my life. When Soyinka’s turn to speak came, he said I had taken the story from his mouth: He had been similarly mistaken for Achebe. The fact is Achebe became synonymous with the Heinemann African Writers Series and African writing as a whole. There’s hardly any African writer of my generation who has not been mistaken for Achebe… He was the single most important figure in the development of modern African literature as a writer, editor and quite simply a human being. His novel, Things Fall Apart, the most widely read novel in the history of African literature since its publication in 1958 became an inspiring model. As the general editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, he had a hand in the emergence of many other writers and their publication. As a person, he embodied wisdom that comes from a commitment to the middle way between extremes and, of course, courage in the face of personal tragedy! Achebe bestrides generations and geographies. Every country in Africa claims him as their own. Some sayings in his novels are quoted frequently as proverbs that contain universal wisdom. His passing marks the beginning of the end of an epoch.”
What an edifying tribute!
Now, let’s return to the April 1986 Conference of African Writers in Stockholm where interesting developments took place. Wole Soyinka’s paper at the conference entitled, “Ethics, Ideology and the Critic” was unsparing of those critics who accuse his work of being needlessly inaccessible and always seeking to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of foreigners. He maintained that “for writers… the greatest professional hazard is the critic,” especially, the Marxists among them, whom he claimed, “are deaf and blind to any shades and colourings between black and white. The very worst— and indeed the mere opportunists— of this kind often sound as if they have never read the work in question, only heard about it. They are the hacks of the trade, extremists posturing; their baggage is filled with nothing but clichés, substitutes for analytical vigour.” He feared that the “amount of criticism of African literature, which is now probably about a thousand fold of the actual material being put out, really constitutes a barrier, not only to the literature itself, but in fact to the very personalities of the producers of this literature.” It does seem that he came to the conference fully armed to wage war against critics!
Soyinka did not, of course, spare the “Neo-Tarzanists” whom he had already shredded in an earlier essay. He said they belonged to “the very bottom of this group” of critics. There is also another group whom he described as “a highly industrious,” although, to them, “African literature is simply an industry and, they want their slice of the action. They are usually not pretentious, make no large claims on the intellect and are well aware of their limitations in that respect.” He appeared to suggest that ideology could be hurtful to literary criticism and addressed the contentious issue of the place of the indigenous languages in African literature.
Chinweizu, a Nigerian scholar and writer, who had written extensively against some writers and critics of African origin whom he labelled, “Anglo-assimilationists”, “Euro-centrics” and “Euro-modernists” had stayed away from the Stockholm gathering. The paper he, however, sent to the conference entitled, “Literature and Nation Building in Africa” was not formally read out but was distributed to the participants. In its pages 19-20, Chinweizu stated:
“Africa does not need the cultural disorientation and subservience which western prizes promote. By its origins and operations, even the most globally prestigious of these prizes, the Nobel Prize, is a local European prize, and should go back to being just that. If it wishes to become an international prize it gives the impression of being, it should stop lending itself to hegemonic uses. Its terms of reference, its selection procedures, and its award committees should then all be internationalized…It is, of course, most unlikely that the West would agree to a genuine internationalization of the Nobel Prize. That would end their control of it, and end their ability to use it for hegemonic purposes … It is up to the rest of the world, in a bid to stimulate a long-overdue New International Cultural Order, to publicly withdraw allegiance from the Nobel Prize, and reduce it to its proper minitude as a local European prize.”
It is interesting to note that a very lively debate on the Nobel Prize and its relevance to African literature preceded its eventual arrival on the African soil in 1986. Earlier on November 3, 1985, Chinweizu had published an article in The Guardian (Lagos) entitled, “That Nobel Prize Brouhaha,” where he stated why he thought that our own Wole Soyinka deserved to be awarded the prize. He wrote: “In my view, the Nobel Prize and Soyinka’s works deserve one another. It would be an excellent case of the undesirable honouring the unreadable.”
Several other contributors joined this pre-Nobel award intellectual storm. The most prominent among them were the pop writer, Naiwu Osahon and Soyinka himself. Others include, Titi Adepitan, Epaphras Edward, Kunle Oreselu, Olu Hamz, Oladeji Popoola, U. Icheku, and several others. The Guardian newspaper was the veritable ground for these entertaining exchanges. As one recalls these discussions, one is deeply pained that the lively debates that used to sustain readers’ interest in our newspapers have since died and buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave.
Later in October 1986, the Swedish Academy announced the selection of Wole Soyinka for the coveted prize. There were celebrations across Nigeria, including among those who were hearing about the existence of such a prize for the first time. Some academics took the stage to celebrate Soyinka’s spectacular accomplishment. These include, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, usually described as a Marxist-Feminist, Isidore Okpewho, the distinguished scholar, writer and English professor whose extensive work on oral literature has been widely acclaimed, Abiola Irele, a professor of French literature who was described on the blurb of one of his books as the “commanding intelligence of modern African literary criticism” and Biodun Jeiyifo, a brilliant Marxist literary scholar who was once dismissively listed as one of Wole Soyinka’s “leftocract” critics. (See Wole Soyinka’s October 1980 Inaugural Lecture delivered at the University of Ife, entitled, “The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies,” for a better understanding of the term). Indeed, big celebrations sure have ways of mellowing hitherto implacable revolutionaries and helping literary parallel lines find a convenient meeting point.
On his part, Chinua Achebe chose his Presidential Address later in November at the sixth annual convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), which he founded, to celebrate Wole Soyinka. He said:
“This is the year of Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize. We rejoice with him on his magnificent achievement. A lot has already been said or written about it and no doubt more will be said. For me what matters is that after the oriki and the celebrations we should say to ourselves: One of us has proved that we can beat the white man at his own game. That is wonderful for us and for the white man. But now we must turn away and play our own game.”
This statement which has been widely quoted and subjected to varied interpretations was described by the prolific American critic of African literature, Professor Bernth Lindfors, in his book, Comparative Approaches to African Literatures, as “one of the sanest reactions to the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature,” and I agree with him. Lindfors is of the view that by volunteering this submission, Achebe “may have succeeded in putting the Nobel Prize into proper perspective for creators and consumers of African literature.”
Two years after Soyinka received the Nobel Prize when the dance and noise of the celebrations had almost died down, Achebe was quoted as saying that the Nobel Prize “does not make anyone the Asiwaju of Nigerian Literature.” Although this statement is consistent with Achebe’s long-held position on the attitude that should define the relationship between the European cultural and literary institutions and African Literature (whose autonomous existence, as we would see later, the former had vehemently opposed), several self-anointed Soyinka defenders gave it diverse interpretations and launched ferocious attacks on Achebe.
In an interview, The African Guardian magazine (November 28, 1988) sought to know from Achebe if there was a quarrel between him and Soyinka as some of the people had labored to suggest. And Achebe responded:
“They should ask Soyinka, I’m not aware of any quarrel. There are lots of hangers-on everywhere who thrive on gossip, and who can’t understand somebody talking or behaving on principle. When I make comments like that, I make them on principle. I behave on principle. We created African literature because European literature wasn’t appropriate and adequate for us. That’s the reason for the creation of African literature. I played a role in that creation; and I’m not going to sit around to see us, after we’ve created this literature, come around to accept that the same Europeans have now become the real judge of our performance. And I don’t think any serious African writer will disagree with me on that. Some hangers-on may, because that’s the nature of hangers-on. But if such a person exists, let him speak out; let him tell us that a European prize can now determine the chieftaincy of African literature. I think that’s fairly a straight-forward issue and there’s no need for me to add to it or subtract from it” (p.26).
Interestingly, since Achebe threw this challenge, I am not aware that any respectable African writer or critic has come forward to state that European prizes could indeed be used to decide the status of African writers. One is also hoping that newspaper editors who occasionally come up with such uninspiring topics like, “Why Chinua Achebe Did Not Win the Nobel Prize” and go into town to interview either poorly informed “scholars” or mischievous ones and offer them their pages to advertise their ignorance or mischief will be better guided after reading this piece.
In the ThisWeek magazine of November 27, 1989 referred to earlier, when Achebe was asked about the Asiwaju issue, he replied: “That the European prize does not make any African the Asiwaju of Nigerian literature is a fact. One of my theories of racism is that it is a natural way of thinking. That is the way the world is. Margaret Thatcher does not see anything wrong with being a lone voice against imposing sanctions on the apartheid regime of South Africa among 49 heads of states. I am coming from these things from a very long period of thought.”
When the magazine asked him if he would accept the Nobel Prize if it was offered to him, his response was: “I won’t answer that.” Also, when the CNN correspondent, Lola Ogunnaike, asked Achebe a similar question on CNN’s African Voices several years later, he replied, “I won’t tell you.” So, Achebe had ample opportunities to reassure the Swedes but chose not to.
And just before the Swedes announced the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize, Dr. Ike Okonta, who lived in Oxford at that time, reported that his phone was bombarded with calls from major newspapers, magazines and television stations across the world, informing him about the very strong rumour that Chinua Achebe had been favoured to win the prize that year. So, they wanted to know if he thought Achebe would accept the prize and go to Stockholm to receive it. Okonta said that his immediate reaction was a huge laugh. The Nobel Committee, he said, would not “legitimize ‘heresy.’” According to him:
“The reading world, including, the Nobel Committee, know this fact: that Chinualumogu Achebe is not only the greatest writer to come out of Africa, he is also, perhaps, the one writer in the world today who, through his work, single-handedly changed the way in which one people, their history and culture are perceived by another. After the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, the myth of a dark Africa, peopled by savages without history and so without a story, a myth assiduously cultivated and peddled by European explorers and mercenary soldiers of the Frederick Lugard variety, was smashed forever. The guardians of the Western literary cannon in Oxford and Stockholm and Harvard have not forgiven Chinua Achebe for this ‘heresy’. He is widely seen as an ‘uppity nigger’ who does not know his place, who does not accord white ‘Massa’ sufficient respect. Above all, Achebe is considered the cultural equivalent of Kwameh Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Patrice Lumumba, great Africans who made it clear from the outset that their life’s mission was to rid the continent of the armed robbers and rapists that had held her down for five centuries. It is significant that all three were removed from power by the West, and in the case of Cabral and Lumumba, murdered in cold blood by agents of Western imperialism. Had Achebe’s terrain been politics, there is no doubt in my mind that he too would have gone the way of the others, felled by a bullet fired from London or Washington. ‘Heretics’, those that challenge the status quo, are meant to burn at the stakes, after all. Is it likely that the Nobel Committee, which in truth is merely the cultural arm of a rapine project intent on gobbling up all that is non-Western, will reward Chinua Achebe for insisting so powerfully and so brilliantly in his novels, essays, and poems that Africa was not one long night of savagery before Europe came calling in the fifteenth century?” (ThisDay, Lagos, Sunday, October 29, 2000:p7).
I would not conclude this section of our discussion without mentioning an incident that I found very unedifying. I have admitted publicly that I have great respect for Professor Femi Osofisan both as a writer and human being.
But I find his reaction to the announcement of V.S. Naipaul, the West Indian writer, as the year 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in very bad taste. Writing in The Comet, Lagos, (Sunday, October 28, 2001:p7), Professor Osofisan said that the fact of Naipaul winning the prize has served to further prove him right and re-enforce his belief that Chinua Achebe could still win the Swedish prize. This statement appears harmless, but Professor Osofisan knows full well that he was deliberately being mischievous.
I do not know the criteria on which Femi Osofisan based his comparison of Achebe and Naipaul (since he did not volunteer any) but my feeling is that he was only using that opportunity to embark upon the deliberate mischief of trying to subtly acquit the Nobel Committee of their long established act of employing less than literary criteria to give out their prizes.
Indeed, V.S. Naipaul’s prize was long overdue. He had all the credentials the European literary “masters” were asking for. Osofisan, no doubt, could not have missed his friend, Professor Kole Omotosho’s reaction to V.S. “Nightfall’s” prize in an unflattering article in The Guardian, Lagos, but I should think that one of the most perceptive views on Naipaul came from his fellow Caribbean, Ivan Van Sertima in his book, Caribbean Writers (1968, Forward).
Says Sertima of Naipaul: “His brilliancy of wit I do not deny but, in my opinion, he has been overrated by English critics whose sensibilities he insidiously flatters by his stock-in-trade: self- contempt.”
Even in the same essay, Osofisan boldly agrees that Naipaul is “so self-hating” and possesses a wit that panders only “to the tastes of his colonial master,” so, how does this characteristics qualify him for such a comparison with Chinua Achebe?
Shouldn’t Osofisan be comparing Naipaul with the likes of Yambo Ouologuem, the author of Bound to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah (especially, because of his novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)? For a writer of his status and accomplishment, who has risen to command the respect of many, this statement coming from Osofisan is most unfortunate.
Finally, there are some writers, journalists and even critics who either out of ignorance or deliberate mischief distort the historical sequence of some developments on the Africa literary scene to achieve some uninspiring and damaging conclusions. In a column he published in the late 1990s entitled, “The Asiwaju Controversy,” a journalist who flaunts a doctoral degree in Performing Arts brazenly stated that as soon as Soyinka’s Nobel Prize was announced and Nigerians had trooped out to celebrate him, Chinua Achebe came out with the declaration that the prize does not make anybody the Asiwaju of Nigerian Literature, after which Chinweizu followed with his own assertion that the prize was akin to the undesirable honouring the unreadable. He must have been applauded for another “brilliant” piece.
But anybody who has followed this discussion so far will easily see that Chinweizu’s statement was made in The Guardian newspaper of November 3, 1985, about a year before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Professor Wole Soyinka in late 1986. Then Achebe’s Asiwaju pronouncement happened two years after the prize was awarded. Also, when Achebe made the statement he never mentioned anybody’s name; I have of late seen subtle attempts to distort the statement by inserting somebody’s name into it.
So, enough of all the watery analyses about Achebe and the Nobel Prize being thrown on our faces from time to time. Moreover, the man has quit life’s stage and the prize is not awarded posthumously. Let the critics and analysts direct their minds to more edifying topics.
*Achebe And African Literature
In 1987, Chinua Achebe was invited to a Writers’ Symposium in Dublin put together by the Irish Arts Council to mark the millennial anniversary of the founding of the City of Dublin. In a prominent story by an Irish Times columnist published on the day Achebe was to make his presentation at the gathering, the author of Things Fall Apart was described as “the man who invented African literature.” Achebe was not comfortable with that. And so, when he stepped forward to present his paper, he dissociated himself from that characterization, which he, however, observed was “well-meaning” (Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, No 30, p. 9).
Despite Achebe’s strong, consistent objections, this description stubbornly clung to him and continued to echo and reecho in several discussions and writings on African literature across the world. It was to sound even louder in 2007 when the eminent South African writer and Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, unambiguously referred to him as the “father of modern African literature,” an appellation that had already attained considerable prominence among many Achebe readers, scholars and the media.
But, once again, Achebe came out to firmly reject the title. In an interview with Brown Daily Herald, he explained why: “I resisted that very, very strongly. It’s really a serious belief (of mine) that it’s risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature … the contribution made down the ages. I don’t want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us — many, many of us.”
When he was interviewed on CNN’s African Voices in the late nineties, the issue was raised again. Achebe’s answer was unambiguous:
“I was never consulted before that title was given to me; so I have been resistant…I don’t think anybody owns the art, especially, the art of a people… it is not mine, it is ours.”
Achebe’s death on March 21, 2013, offered yet another opportunity for the global media, public and private institutions, scholars and commentators to take up the title again and place it squarely on his head. But by this time, the legendary writer had lost forever the ability to underline his usual vehement opposition, as newspapers, magazines and bloggers across the world announced in bold, screaming headlines and television and radio presenters loudly proclaimed that the “father of modern African literature” had passed on.
To mourn their colleague and friend, Soyinka and J.P. Clark issued a joint statement entitled, “We Lost a Brother”. In it, the duo described themselves, Achebe and Christopher Okigbo as the “pioneer quartet” of contemporary Nigerian literature. Although this received considerable reportage, the global media still continued to underline their preference for describing Achebe as the “father of modern African literature.” Now, is there any likelihood that Soyinka and Clark had mentioned this other title to Achebe before his death and secured his consent to have his name associated with it? What is the assurance that Achebe would still not have distanced himself from it if these his two colleagues had come up with it when he was alive?
In an interview with SaharaReporters a few days to Achebe’s funeral, Soyinka’s spirited insistence that Achebe was not the “father of modern African literature” was on fierce display. This interview caused avoidable controversy. Many were of the opinion that it was badly timed and a needless intrusion at a period when Achebe was still being mourned and celebrated widely. The question on several lips was: if your friend had throughout his lifetime rejected that title, why come out now that he was dead and unable to respond to mar the mood of his mourners with such assertions and the predictable acrimonious exchanges it provoked? Or was all that exertion intended to drown out the “father of African literature” to help the “pioneer quartet” which you prefer to float?
Soyinka also revealed in the interview that he was inundated with letters from people urging him to use his position as a Nobel Laureate to get Achebe a posthumous Nobel Prize! He did not say the class of people that wrote him those letters (who were stuck in pathetic ignorance that the Nobel Prize was not awarded posthumously). But by making public the information about those “letters” (probably, from uninformed cassava or vegetable sellers at an Ake evening market?) and using them to attempt scoring some very unedifying points, Soyinka unfortunately opened himself up to suggestions that he probably wanted to inject into the global celebration of Achebe this needless, (and as some added) mischievous reminder that could sound this way: you are all celebrating my friend as a global literary legend, but you seem to have forgotten that he didn’t win the Nobel Prize which I won?
That was totally unnecessary. Can any sincere observer attest that in both his utterances and writing, Achebe exhibited the slight hint of interest in the Swedish prize? In his 1989 interview with ThisWeek magazine (quoted earlier), Achebe had said: “I am not battling for their recognition.” And in every interview he granted, Achebe clearly spurned all opportunities offered to him to reassure the Swedes that he won’t reject their prize? So, why all that emphasis?
Several years ago, US-based poet and scholar, Obi Nwakanma, needed to volunteer this instructive opinion amidst the perennial, distracting din about Achebe and the Nobel. He said: “Frankly, I think that Achebe does not need the Nobel prize. The Nobel prize will merely dignify itself if it is awarded to Chinua Achebe. Everyone recognizes that he is among the greatest writers living on earth today. The real significance of Achebe was captured by that announcement in London two years ago in 2000, when he, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott were invited to a special program. The announcement read: ‘Two Nobel Laureates and a legend.’ There is no greater honour.” (USAfricaonline.com, June 4, 2002.)
The simple question is: would Soyinka have said those things in the interview when Achebe was alive – like stating that some poorly informed folks were putting pressure on him to use his “influence” as a Nobel laureate to help Achebe get a Nobel Prize, even if it was true? Why for instance is he now expressing his true feelings about the Asiwaju controversy after his friend had left the stage instead of the time the statement was still fresh? At that time, he had only jokingly said that he would like to be the “Ogbuefi” of Nigerian literature.
And when the African Guardian(November 28, 1988) informed Achebe about this friendly response, Achebe laughed and replied: “Yes, that’s the way these matters should be handled. In other words, he doesn’t disagree. He wants a change of title.”
To underscore the fact that the two remained friends to the very end, Soyinka told SaharaReporters that he had planned to be at Achebe’s house where they both would discuss Achebe’s last book, There Was a Country, while enjoying the sumptuous delicacies usually prepared by Achebe’s wife.
Also, when some years before Achebe’s death, America’s TIMEmagazine decided to do a story on Achebe, it was Soyinka they engaged to write it and he delivered a commendable tribute.
It was clear that Achebe, even while he was alive had no control over what his informed readers and critics had concluded about him and his place and role in the evolution of what is today known as “African literature.” He could only express his rejection of their opinions but lacked the power in a free society to stop them from continuing to voice them. Just google “Father of Modern African literature” and be shocked by how widespread the appellation is.
We should at least be happy that there is today a body of work duly recognized as “African literature” which is now engaging the serious attention of scholars as a very rich corpus with its own standards, ethos, rhythm and identity and accorded due recognition and taught in reputable universities across the world, not as an appendage to any English literature.
Indeed, many students and younger scholars tend to think that African Literature just naturally evolved simply because Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart and captured the attention of a global audience and several other works by other African writers also followed and were equally widely received. But the truth remains that the journey that brought us to the present stage was not an easy one. After a significant number of works by Africans had been published and circulated, there arose the need to classify this emerging body of literary works under a distinct umbrella. And as soon as the name “African Literature” was mentioned, there was uproar among several Western critics and even African scholars and writers who considered the mere thought of the phrase “African literature” a grand heresy, an anomaly!
Let me give a few examples. In his 1971 book which he called, Mother is Gold: A Study in West African Literature, Adrian Roscoe decreed: “if an African writes in English his works must be considered as belonging to English letters as a whole.”
John Knappert, in an article, “Swahili As An African Language,” (TRANSITION, No 13 (1964) was more elaborate: “In Europe there is no literature in a non-European language. Even in India, literature in English would not be called Indian literature. Every piece of literature written in English even if written in Africa, is a contribution to English literature, not to any African literature. Literary History has always been classified by language: Greek, Latin, Sankrit, not by country or continent. I do not think there can be any other African literature but literature in African language.”
Now, like I said elsewhere, “John Knappert’s deductions and conclusions, delivered with dogmatic absoluteness, are amazingly simplistic, arbitrary and misleading. Who, by the way, made the law that literature should be classified by language only and not by country or continent? Who said that the nationality of a writer, his subject-matter, setting, ‘colour,’ attitude, professed values, ethos, etc., should not play a leading role in classifying his work? And why should this law (assuming one exists except in the imagination of the Knapperts of this world) automatically apply to all peoples’ literatures without due cognizance and regard to the diverse linguistic histories of various peoples? That [an assumption] has always been taken for granted in the imagination of Knappert and his literary ilk does not automatically mean that it is right, acceptable and also binding on all peoples, more so, in a multifaceted discipline like literature which does not easily admit absolutes and dogmas. [A key] lesson here is that those who derive animation from making dogmatic pronouncements on literature would occasionally find themselves in tight corners” where the irrelevance of their views would be rewarded with undue advertisement.
The organisers of the memorable writers’ symposium that held at Makerere University, Uganda, in 1962, were careful to call it a “Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” Yet, attempts to properly define what should constitute African literature led to very stormy sessions that produced no immediate satisfactory outcome.
When the participants dispersed, Obi Wali, a Nigerian critic mocked them in an essay, “The Dead End of African Literature” (which appeared in the journal, Transition No 10, 1963). He wrote: “Perhaps, the most important achievement of the conference is that African literature as now defined and understood leads to nowhere…until these writers and their Western midwives accept the fact that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they would be merely pursuing a dead end, which can only lead to sterility, uncreativity and frustration.”
Even the great poet Christopher Okigbo had this to say, “There is no African literature. There is good writing and bad writing – that’s all.” (See Marjory Whitelaw: “Interview with Christopher Okigbo,” 1965, published in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, No 9, July 1970, p.35).
Also, in April 1966, when Okigbo was awarded a poetry prize at the Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal, he wrote to his biographer, Professor Sunday Anozie, informing him of his intention to reject the prize because he disliked “the whole idea of a Negro arts festival” which is based on race. He also stayed away from the conference because of the same reason.
To contribute their own effort to the clearing of this needless confusion, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike in their 1980 book, Toward The Decolonization Of African Literature, outlined what they referred to as “English language literatures.” These are: “(a) British national literature; (b) the national literature of those countries where an exported English population is in control, e.g Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand; (c) the national literature of those countries where English, though neither indigenous nor the mother-tongue of the politically dominant population or group, has become, as a legacy of colonialism, the official language or one of the official languages, e.g., Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India, Jamaica, Trinidad and Malaysia”.
These writers maintained that since “language and nation are not the same, and language criteria are not the same as national criteria” especially as some “fundamental differences in values and experience” may often be noticed “between two nations who use the same language,” then the “language employed to carry out larger and more important cultural functions, is hardly by itself to be considered sufficient, let alone exclusive grounds for assigning a work to one tradition or one body of literature rather than another”. (Pp. 9-14)
Earlier, as this controversy raged, Achebe had asked, “But what is a non-African language. English and French certainly. But what about Arabic? What about Swahili even? Is it then a question of how long the language has been on African soil? If so, how many years should constitute effective occupation? For me it is again a pragmatic matter. A language spoken by Africans on African soil, a language in which Africans write, justifies itself” (emphases not mine) (“Thoughts on the African Novel”, Morning Yet on Creation Day, London: HEB, 1975, p.50)
Interestingly, several scholars find it convenient to forget that while Achebe and some other African scholars and writers argued at forum after forum that African literature is real, and that that is where they comfortably belong, some among their contemporaries were prostrate, cap in hand, before the European “literary lords” pleading to be accepted as “international” and “universal” writers, vowing and swearing that their Africanness was a mere coincidence, and that they were too big to be confined within the crude fences of African literary aesthetics. Of course many received warm acceptance, and some were rewarded handsomely for saying and doing the “right” things, and for intermittently throwing “bomb shells” that ensured that the establishment and growth of African literature was discouraged, but the fact remains that African literature has remained their key and abiding identity, and that without the rescuing hand and landing space of African literature, many of them would have since been lost in the dark bottomless pit of Euro-universalism.
In a paper he read at a conference in Canada in 1973, Achebe had this to say: “I dare not close without a word of recognition for that small and proprietary school of critics who assure us that the African novel does not exist. Reason: the novel was invented in England. For the same kind of reason that I shouldn’t know how to drive a car because I am no descendant of Henry Ford… Only fifteen years ago a bright, skeptical academic at a Nigerian university could raise a laugh by saying: ‘That would be the day when English literature is taught from Chaucer to Achebe.’ Today, I much regret to say, that same academic makes a living teaching African literature in some cosy corner of the globe, presumably teaching more Achebe than Chaucer. Na so dis worl’ be.” (See Achebe, Morning Yet On Creation Day, 1975, p..54)
We salute Achebe for his consistency and clarity of vision and on this issue, and for holding on tenaciously to it and allowing time to vindicate him. We thank him for the African Writers Series which he was the founding editor, and which made it possible for many writers of African origin to be discovered and published in the first place and announced to a larger audience.
By his stature and merit, Achebe could be published anywhere. But he preferred to be counted among his kith and kin, guiding many of them and pruning their output and using his looming image to authenticate the fledgling Series even when other “established” writers spurned the venture, describing it as putting African Writers in a “ghetto-like grouping”. We understand that Africa has long been “proved” and concluded a “primitive” tribe with a mindless past and incapable of creating anything meaningful, but Achebe was not ashamed of his “primitive” and “undeveloped” race and their emerging literature; he spurned the pride of place offered him by the Euro-universalists, insisting on finding for African literature its own place, instead of leaving it an appendage to Euro-world literature. I once heard a prominent scholar and writer make reference to the “prestigious African Writers Series.” It is good that the project overcame all the internal and external obstacles and succeeded.
In the earlier cited interview with Sahara Reporters published a few days to Achebe’s funeral, Soyinka admitted that he was not the one that made the move for his work to be published on the African Writers Series. In other words, he was unwilling to identify with such a remarkable project that helped secure African literature a sound footing. Some accounts credit that beneficial move to a relative of his, an action that obviously gave traction to his work.
Some years before Achebe’s Things Fall Apart appeared in London in June 1958, writers like Cyprian Ekwensi and Amos Tutuola and some others writing in indigenous languages have been published from our part of the world. There were also some works by some francophone, Portuguese and Arabic African writers. But it was the publication of Things Fall Apart that alerted the world to the existence of Africa’s own important and distinct story and the availability in the continent of the will and talent to tell this story convincingly and admirably.
Things Fall Apart soon grew in stature and influence, gathering readers and admirers across the globe and engaging the serious attention of critics and scholars. It equally became a model for many other African writers. The American literary scholar, Charles Larson, wasted no time in calling it the “Archetypal African Novel” while the Ghana-born professor of philosophy at Princeton University, Kwame Anthony Appiah, offers this remarkable testimony: “In every English and non-English speaking country on the planet, if you ask a student to name just one African novel, it is most likely to be ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Achebe. It is the beginning of the African canon. It is difficult to think of anything without it”. (ThisDay, November 16, 2018, p. 19).
In a lecture hosted by the Faculty of Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, to precede the memorable “Eagle on Iroko” Symposium to mark Achebe’s 6oth birthday in 1990, Prof Dan Izevbaye said: “Things Fall Apart … is a representative African novel, not only because it is an archetypal African story, but also in the basic sense of speaking on behalf of a people who have not been adequately understood because they were not adequately represented.” (Dan Izevbaye, “History’s Eye Witness: Vision and Representation in the Works of Chinua Achebe,” Okike: 30, pp24-25)
By 2002, Things Fall Apart, has, sold fifteen million copies. With its translation into Persian in 2012, the novel can now be read in 60 major languages of the world – the only book by an African to have attained such a distinction. When Things Fall Apart turned forty-six, its publishers in the United States, Doubleday, a subsidiary of Random House, New York, announced that the novel had sold over five million copies in the USA alone. It also continues to be offered in over 2000 of the about 3000 universities, schools and colleges in North America and in countless institutions across Asia, Europe and, of course, Africa. It has reportedly equally remained a prescribed text for Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) which is viewed as the highest level of the Cambridge Examinations in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and several O’level and Advanced level examinations across the world.
In 1964, when the South African journalist and writer, Lewis Nkosi and Wole Soyinka interviewed Chinua Achebe in Lagos, Soyinka asked Achebe whether he would accept the opinion that Things Fall Apart betrayed signs of “unrelieved competence.” Achebe tried to give some answer, but when John Agetua of the Bendel Broadcasting Corporation came to Nsukka in 1976 to interview Achebe and reminded him about that 1964 question by Soyinka, Achebe did not mince words this time. He responded that he preferred “unrelieved competence” to “relieved incompetence.” (See John Agetua, Critics On Achebe: 1970-76, Bendel Newspapers Corporation, Benin City, 1977: p38).
Interestingly, forty-two years later, Professor Soyinka had cause to revise his opinion about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Writing in the TIME magazine of November 13, 2006, Soyinka stated that “Chinua Achebe’s first novel [Things Fall Apart] is a work of extraordinary power and insight.”
Indeed, Things Fall Apart remains the most widely known and read novel by an African, and its author, despite his demise, may not have been displaced as Africa’s best known writer.
Achebe founded the journal, Okike: An African Journal of New Writing in 1971 to give greater expression to African writing. The journal features both creative works and literary essays. Ezenwa Ohaeto in his biography of Achebe reports that one spectacular feature of the September 1972 edition of the journal “was its publication of three young Nigerian writers: Osmond Enekwe, Maxwell Nwagboso and Odia Ofeimun.”
When Achebe saw the need to establish an association for Nigerian writers and began to reach out to other writers to share his vision about it and bring them together for the realisation of the dream, several writers and critics thought he was embarking on an impossible task. They wondered how possible it was to bring writers together, with their “strange” ways and diverse ideological preferences to agree to gather together under one umbrella. The brilliant scholar, Professor Harry Garuba, for instance, wondered whether Achebe was not setting himself up for an “ennobling failure.” But Achebe did not give up. The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) was eventually born on June 27, 1981, with a conference convened at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, by Achebe, which was also attended by two Kenyan writers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Gacheche Wauringi. Today, ANA has grown into a formidable organisation with its headquarters at the serene Mamman Vatsa Writers’ Village, Mpape, Abuja.
Legendary South African leader, Nelson Mandela once said that he derived a lot of comfort reading Things Fall Apart while imprisoned at Robben Island. He described Achebe as “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down,” while the esteemed American writer, James Baldwin, said that after reading Things Fall Apart in France he immediately saw Okonkwo as his father.
I am glad that I made it clear in a widely published essay while Achebe was alive that I do not always agree with him, especially on his views about Christianity, which like many intellectuals, he appears to have largely misunderstood. This is mainly because, Christianity (not the life-less orthodox, ritualistic and perfunctory type), is not a religion, but a living experience, explainable only by one who had genuinely experienced it. And because the carnal mind, no matter how well developed, is incapable of understanding spiritually discerned matters, the average intellectual falls easily into the common error of dismissively criticizing what he has not deployed adequate effort to understand and experience, his monumental intelligence in literary and other matters, notwithstanding.
One would have wished that these intellectuals entered their closet and sincerely asked God to reveal Himself to them instead of basing their impression about Christianity on what they observed from some hypocritical and racist orthodox European missionaries and the lifeless rituals, perfunctory ceremonies and hypocritical lifestyles of today’s orthodox sects, or even the scandalous effusions of the clearly uncalled and unregenerated charlatans that have infiltrated Pentecostalism and true Christian circles.
I would also have expected Achebe to yield some grounds on the issue of Igbo orthography and sacrifice his own preferred alphabets to make way for the evolution of a standard Igbo orthography so that hope could be retained of rescuing Igbo language which appears to be gasping for breath.
What would be the fate of Igbo language if everyone continues to write in his own preferred dialect as he advocated? Wouldn’t we have a Babel situation, with our children utterly confused as to which one to adopt for mutual intelligibility among their peers?
In a brilliant interview with The Paris Review (Winter 1994-1995), Achebe said something I would have wished he hadn’t said: “There are grammarians who now sit over the Igbo language the way Dennis did in 1906 and dictate it into Standard Igbo. I think it is a terrible tragedy. I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out. When I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect.”
When will this “fullness of time” arrive? I have read Achebe’s Igbo poems, and I sincerely believe that his rejection of the Standard Igbo goes beyond dialectal chauvinism. I believe that he sufficiently made his point about the mistake of Dennis, but he must have noticed that “Standard Igbo” had undergone a lot of orthographical metamorphosis, and, presently, it now has very negligible semblance to what Dennis produced in 1906. Indeed, today Igbo language remains the only major language in Nigeria that has the lowest readership and has ably frustrated all attempts to even publish a newspaper in it. I wonder if we can still talk about Igbo literature anymore, because from my own modest research among school children, since the separation of Igbo language and literature which are now offered as two different subjects at O’level examinations, I doubt that many of them have heard about Pita Nwana, Tony Ubesie or F.C. Ogbalu, let alone read their works! Almost every pupil prefers registering for Igbo language which they merely memorize to earn an average score. Most of them cannot read a modest paragraph in an Igbo story book!
But the linguists and Igbo language scholars have no reason to allow the language to die, despite the position held by Achebe who was not a linguist and who continued to experiment with his own preferred alphabets. Did the English use as excuse Bernard Shaw’s vigorous proposition of changes in the English language to let their language die? Creative writers are given to innovations and experimentations and Achebe could not have been an exception.
It must however be hastily observed that despite these observations, Achebe’s great contributions to African literature remain undiminished. I think that the mere thought that the standard form of his native language emanated from something put together by a colonialist called Dennis to suit some alien tastes was quite difficult for Achebe to swallow. And that should be quite understandable for a writer whose anti-colonialist stance was legendary.
