Achebe - Fall of the Iroko
29 March 2013 , By Adamu Adamu, Source:
Daily Trust
The death last 8month at 83 of Professor
Chinua Achebe, one of Africa's towering
men of letters and its most well-know
novelist, was a great and irreparable loss
and a big blow to African literature and Igbo
culture. In a long career, which spanned
more than a quarter century, Achebe would
come to tame English language and create
a brand new form—African literature -for it.
A great storyteller of enduring impact, a
poet, essayist, novelist, short-story writer
and literary critic of note, Achebe was a
master of the tale and of the vernacularised
English turn of phrase, always pregnant with
layers of meaning and each take garnished
with the palm oil of proverbs, but which
proved incapable of conveying the stuff of
which the work of the great masters was
couched. Even though the medium was less
than the message, his work was
nonetheless received by the world to great
critical acclaim.
His first novel, Things Fall Apart, went on to
become a classic of African literature,
though, it must be said that it was a classic
that was not truly literary, at least not in the
tradition of great world literature. In spite of
all its other merits, Achebe's writing,
especially in his novels, is characterised by
plainness or what sympathetic critics have
called deceptive simplicity; and it is a
plainness that cannot be rescued or made
up for by even the most powerful and
compelling of themes. Some of it indeed
betrays the perfunctoriness of an intellectual
work-in-progress that is yet to begin an
approach to the level of a world classic of
great, timeless literature. Though he had
said that the "English of the African will have
to be a new English, still in communion with
its ancestral home but altered to suit its new
African surroundings," his style could not but
be compared with other notable English
writings.
The Igbo society in which Achebe lived is a
community with a culture in which status is
dependent on masculinity and eminence is
judged by the value of yam harvest, or, in
Achebe's words, the culture "believed in too
much manliness. Perhaps this is part of the
reason it crashed," a conclusion that, in
retrospect, ought really to have absolved the
other regions of blame.
In the end, however, it would seem Achebe
and other Afro centric writers might have
worried too much what colonialism thought
of, or said about, Africa and the African
condition; and he was perhaps the most
successful African anti-colonial exponent of
native Igbo culture who probably saw
himself as the midwife of a cultural synthesis
that would restore pride to a wounded tribe.
Achebe saw the establishment and
imposition by colonialists of '"warrant-
chiefs"—[as] a deeply flawed arrangement
that effectively confused the Igbo
democratic spirit;' and, here, he seemed in
practice to have negated all that he had, in
theory, stood for; but what was there in pre-
colonial Igbo society was not a democratic
spirit as such—it was merely pre-feudal
republicanism that was all too elementally
primitive in its pre-modernism. It was as if he
wanted to celebrate the fact the Igbo society
had democracy before the coming of the
White man.
He was a pioneer of African—or Africanised
—literature; he was not just the doyen of
African writers of that literary genre; he
actually reinvented it, turning almost
everything else prior to Things Fall Apart a
mere prologue to his output. But this teller of
tales was not an artist for arts' sake; he saw
himself as a man with a mission—'to write
back,' as he said—and write back he did,
using the language of the new master, the
language in which the original lie was told
and an insult couched; and, in the process,
he bent it to serve his own purposes. A
great and playful manipulator of words,
which to him were bullets, Achebe
domesticated and indigenized the tongue of
the conquering English to serve as his
weapon for the counter-attack in his battle
against what he interpreted as a
condescending representation by the
colonial enterprise.
There Was a Country, which he described
as his personal history of the Biafran civil
war, released as a literary swan song
almost at the very last hour, was meant to
exorcise the ghost of it, and lay it all neatly
to rest; because, unfortunately even here
and up to this late hour, Achebe was still
writing back, not to the earlier
misrepresentation but to a reading of the
nation's contemporary history that was for
him altogether too inconvenient. And so, he
now decided perhaps unconsciously but
certainly not unmindful of his expected role
as the intellectual arm and 'writer-back' of
the Biafra experience, to take his final
parting shot at Nigeria. If soldiers fought with
guns, Achebe, the intellectual, would do his
bit with words. And so he did.
As an activist, his politics was as dismal a
failure as his fiction had been a phenomenal
success. A self-proclaimed follower of M.
Aminu Kano, Achebe never really threw
himself headlong into the fray of radical
politics as would be expected of a social
critic of his standing; but identifying with the
political tendency dominant in the former
Biafran enclave, which from his writing was
something he would naturally have wanted
to do, would have exposed him as a tribal
champion, which was probably what he was
at heart.
While in his fiction the plotting might
sometimes be as gripping as the
characterization is memorable, his analysis
of Nigeria's misfortunes had often been
neither thoroughly original nor strikingly
profound—and nor yet as prophetic as
touted. It never went beyond a justification of
rebellion or Hausa-Fulani bashing. But if
Nigeria was a proposition worth saving—
and it was and is—then rebellion against its
authority and territorial integrity ought never
to have been attempted; but since it was, it
was only right and proper that it was
crushed. And if federalism was itself an idea
worth defending—and all leaders of all
sections of the country had always
maintained that it was the only right way
Nigeria could be governed—then Nigeria's
real heroes were the soldiers who risked
their lives in July 1966 to save the nation's
federal spirit that then faced clear and
present danger at General Aguiyi-Ironsi's
hand and not those who precipitated the
rebellion that pushed the country into a civil
war.
Today, neither the British nor the Hausa-
Fulani are rulers of Nigeria; but, still haunted
by the spectre of an incurable persecution
complex, he was to return again and again
to that exhausted theme of a permanent
victimhood for his people. Harping on that
theme might help by rekindling the grand
idea behind that early post-independence
communal orthodoxy of I-before-others. And
here, to all intents and purposes, Achebe
was the African grandfather narrating the
account to children around one of the civil
war's last bushfires. If, as is often said,
memoir writing is chiefly inventing the truth,
here Achebe had indeed really spun some
yarns; and it was here also that he finally
revealed his last literary persona, of which
the world would come to see four. He wrote
his novels as a black man, his criticisms as
an African, his essays as a Nigerian, and he
wrote There Was a Country, as an Igbo
man.
And in retrospect we must now read The
trouble with Nigeria backwards and see it for
what it is—merely that book's prematurely
released epilogue of the swan song. For, if
with the Anthills of the Savannah, he had,
still embittered and not by way of a choice
unforced, come in from the Biafra cold to re-
embrace Nigeria, with the publication of
There Was a Country, he was back, boots,
bayonets and all, in the trenches. And today,
with the benefit of hindsight, even his
admirers might have to indeed begin to
wonder whether their patriot had in fact all
along been a closet ethnic jingoist.
For, the fact of patriotism is not established
by the mere act of dissidence or social
criticism in which Achebe revelled
throughout his career; and, in any case, it
would remain difficult and problematic to
accurately measure the degree of the
fervour of the patriotism of a former rebel,
especially more so in a nation like Nigeria
that is now out to prove the innocence of
many a self-confessed convict by an all too
convenient reinterpretation of his guilt. And
our hero finally exited the stage as an anthill
of the rainforest.
But all this in no way diminishes the quality
of his writing or the Africanness or even the
Nigerianness of his total output, or the allure
of his authentically drawn native characters
or the piquant domestication of the colonial
tongue, or his place in the pantheon of
African literature, which for a long time to
come will remain assured. During his life,
Achebe was the recipient of multiple literary
honours, though he was to miss the Booker
and the Nobel. On the national scene, he
twice rejected Nigeria's national honours
given by two regimes that he believed had
no honour to bestow. But at the real home
where it mattered, he was honoured by his
kinsmen in 1999 for his dedication to the
myths and legends of his ancestors. And
now that he had gone to join them, may they
receive him with all the honours and the
glory due to a devoted descendant.

Who be this intellectual dwarf

Good command of words