Chinua Achebe – A Tribute

I wrote this on the one year anniversary of his tragic passing this March.  I’ve been holding onto it since. Think it would be great to kick-off the blog with a tribute to such a great man. Hope you enjoy. 

Source: Daily Herald

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on Nov. 16, 1930, in Ogidi, an Ibo village in rural Nigeria. His career took off with the publishing of Things Fall Apart in 1958, when he was just 28. The book would go on to become required reading for students and a classic of not just African but world literature, selling more than 10 million copies in 45 languages to become the most widely read and most important book in modern African literature.

Princeton scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah put it best when asked about Achebe’s influence on African writing – “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.”

This impact didn’t go unnoticed – Achebe has accumulated scores of fellowships, honours and prizes and been 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 once said “If you don’t like someone’s story write your own” and went on to be part of a generation of African writers that first wrestled to win back the image of our continent that was being held captive by Western Literature.

He re-imagined what was previously only known as the ‘Dark Continent’ replacing the shadowy, murky images of our land with vivid colour, with emotion, with stories, with laughter – not with animals and barbarians, but with people.

Achebe is now famous in his criticism of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ His essay and lectures made such an impression that reviews and opinions of Conrad’s work are divided into the categories ‘pre and post-Achebe.’ Achebe was born into contradicting lifestyles in a time of British colonialism of Nigeria; his father a builder of churches while his father’s uncle kept the traditions of the Igbo peoples, each of them trying to win the other over.

Achebe’s work his him trying to interpret and reconcile these different ways of seeing the world. His novels often explore this meeting of traditional African cultures and values with colonialist practices only ending in despair for the African. From Okonkwo in ‘Things Fall Apart’, who to resists British forces and ends up committing suicide in the forest, to the keeper of the shrine in ‘Arrow of god’ who tries to engage the white colonialists in a meeting of the cultures who is met with disinterest, is in the end humiliated and his shrine destroyed.

Despite the tragedies the Africans suffered, the blame for Africa’s plight over the decades cannot forever be placed only on the shoulders of colonialism. Achebe made this very clear, and pulled no punches, being just as critical of Africans as he was of foreigners.

Of our post-independence liberators who went on to commit the very same atrocities they vowed to champion against he wrote in ‘A man of the people’:

“We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart, and the lucky and hardly ever the best – had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in”

But once again, the blame is never one dimensional; in ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ one of the characters wonders about the citizens who sit by idly by tolerating the corruption and humiliation in a fictional state, with close parallel’s to Nigeria – where 100 Million people were ruled for 30 years by an army of only about 70,000 people.

Such criticism doesn’t come without consequence and as Achebe wrote in the same book:

“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”

He paid the price for being a ‘threat’ time and again. In ‘A Man of the People,’ published in early 1966, he predicted the course of events in the Nigerian political space at the time with such accuracy that the military government in Lagos decided he must have been a conspirator in the coup. For this, Achebe over the decades had his passport revoked, his house bombed and his wife suffered a miscarriage as she fled from Lagos to the safer Igbo stronghold of Port Harcourt in the South-East.

Achebe’s illustrious life career came to an end on 21st March 2013 when he passed on after a short illness while teaching in America where he had lived for the past twenty years.

As the world reflects on his works, his accomplishments and who he was, Achebe is best described in his own words. To quote ‘Anthills of the Savanna’ where an elder reflects on the power of the story:

“It is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story and not the others that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort – without it we are blind. It is the story that owns us and directs us.”

Achebe was Africa’s storyteller, our escort, our light. Light shows no favour in what to illuminate and what to leave untouched – it simply shows what is.

Such glaring honesty can be uncomfortable, even painful at times. And Achebe’s penetrates the skin and the flesh, filtering through to our hearts, our mind’s and our collective conscience. It lays bare the hard truths of the tragedies our continent has been subjected to, but not hiding the times we have used that past tragedy to subject our people to even more pain and hardship, or the times we did nothing and stood by while we watched our farms get stolen, our sons and daughters get murdered and raped.

We owe Achebe a great debt for enduring the burden that comes with being the light bearer – and suffering the consequences of challenging those in power.

This can only be repaid by staying true to his light, continuing to carry the torch that not only reminds just how far we have come, but reminds us that there is still a long way to go.

The light brings the truth. And it is only through being aware and embracing these hard truths that we can move forward as individuals, as a people and as a continent.

No words are fitting to send off this great man, poet, thinker and teacher – but these two will have to suffice:

Thank you