Indeed, we cannot help wondering if the recent
insensate massacre of Chinua’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 Chinua Achebe, who died last
week 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 decolonization. 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
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
Odo Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1936), 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 characterization is one-dimensional.
For example, neither Ikem, Beatrice, Abdul on the
one hand nor Professor 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 characterization 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 narrativization 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
pot holes) so that all the talented, intelligent,
hardworking, 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).
The novel has other defects as well: the author’s
heavily moralized, didactic view of life repeatedly
intrudes in the narrative, and, in particular, in the
facile and tired representation of the Military Ruler,
the Head of Sate. Ikem and Beatrice’s romanticism,
their romantic view of social relations, is clearly the
real author’s because the entire drift of the
narrative is towards a heavily moralized view of life
(Light versus Darkness; Enlightenment versus
Ignorance; Diligence versus Parasitism).
Yet it is in Achebe’s essay, The Trouble with Nigeria
(1983), that his romanticism comes full circle. In that
book, Achebe argues that “the trouble with Nigeria is
simply and squarely a failure of leadership… the
unwillingness and inability of its leaders to rise to the
responsibility, to the challenge of personal
example” (p. 1). This postulation of Achebe’s ignores
the deep structural constraints on human action and
psychology. It is pre-critical to ignore the complex
ways in which social structures mediate, modify,
condition, and constrain human choices. Leadership
works within institutional, historical, cultural, and
economic contexts which place limits on what human
agents can and cannot do. This notion of the
structural determination of leadership means that a
leader has inevitably to work within, and exist in, a
system and a political logic whose proper system,
laws, and operation his or her “leadership” cannot, by
definition, dominate absolutely. The leader, despite
his having a certain measure of freedom, has
inevitably to be governed by the system within which
he or she exists. And although men and women make
their own history, they clearly do not make it as an
act of will, or in their own freely-chosen
circumstances, but under the structural constraints
of the accumulated past and inherited traditions. This
is what The Trouble with Nigeria has missed: Nigerian
leaders cannot be the miraculous changed men or
women of their country but the changed men and
women of their country’s changed circumstances.
This is the truth of the time-honoured liberal credo
that the educator herself needs educating and that if
leaders are educators, who will educate the
educators?
From this perspective, Achebe’s conception of
leadership may properly be called “voluntarism”, even
a form of messianic thinking: on Achebe’s flawed
logic, all a leader need do is become, by the force of
sheer will power, a morally good person, who has only
to lead by example rather than by veritable political
principles. Achebe’s is another way of saying that
Nigeria needs a strong leader, one who has
miraculously escaped all the cultural and historical
pressures of his community or country; in effect, a
messiah. This dubiously Christian view of leadership is
a convenient way of avoiding the complex problem of
institutional, cultural, and historical constitution of
subjectivity and moral choice in a multi-ethic, multi-
religious country, one with a large, primordialist,
backward-looking civil society. Indeed one reason for
the failure of Achebe’s little book to capture the
scholarly or popular imagination was its threadbare
romanticism and an un-modern (a feudal and mystical)
vision of political leadership.
Perhaps Achebe’s most disappointing book, or to
phrase matters differently, his most inferior work, is
There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
(2012). As a personal testament, the book vindicates
the time-honored dictum that “the personal is
political”. Perhaps we need not be critical of Achebe’s
passionate defence of his ethnic group, or of the
short-lived Biafra, and his role in it. Yet there is
something distasteful about open myopia of blind
ethnic solidarity or communal jingoism. What is
striking about the book is its complete lack of a keen
political insight, its petty romantic vision of Nigeria’s
political history. For example, consider the book’s
astonishing claims, namely that the Igbos wholly
deserved their entrenched positions in the military,
economic, and bureaucratic structures of pre-civil
war Nigeria (“… the Igbos led the nation in virtually
every sector— politics, education, commerce, and the
arts”, pp. 66-67); that all non-Igbo Nigerians are
united by their hatred for the Igbo ethnic group; and
that British rule in Nigeria and elsewhere was not, as
popularly assumed, an unmitigated disaster.
According to Achebe in There was a Country, the
British government ruled the Nigerian colony “with
considerable care… and competently… British
colonies were more or less expertly run” (p. 43). In
the same book, however, Achebe accuses British
colonial officials of rigging the election and the
population census in favour of conservative elements
such as Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto
from the “Islamic territories” (p. 46; Achebe does not
say that the Igbo were from the “Christian
territories”), people who “had played no real part in
the struggle for independence” (p. 52). In addition,
for Achebe it was the behaviour of the British that
sowed the seeds of Nigeria’s eventual descent into
civil war. If indeed Achebe has this rosy view of
colonial rule, then his entire corpus of anti-colonial
polemic and cultural nationalism has been in vain, or,
in a way, a hypocritical effort at self-publicity.
Worse, Achebe argues, in an astonishing moment of
historical revisionism, that the originators of the
very idea of one-Nigeria were “leaders and
intellectuals from the Eastern Region” (p. 52). This
may explain why he credits Nnamdi Azikiwe with the
enviable position of being “father of African
independence” (“There was no question at all about
that”, (p. 41). In sum, then, there are many
instances of sloppy argument and poor judgment in
the book, as, for example, Achebe’s claim that Nigeria
failed to develop because the Igbo, despite their
“competitive individualism” and a unique “adventurous
spirit”, were excluded from Nigerian economic, social,
and political life. Examples of Achebe’s
unsophisticated political perception of things are,
first, his lack of political sensitivity concerning non-
Igbo political leaders such as Obafemi Awolowo,
Ahmadu Bello, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The first
two are seen by Achebe as ruled by inordinate
ambition (“resuscitated ethnic pride”) and
conservative traditionalism respectively. The latter
Achebe almost casts into the role of a lackey of the
Western world, which, he claims, turned (“built up”)
Balewa through flattery into a great statesman (p.
51).
It is thus fair to say that, in There was a Country at
least, Achebe is an overwhelmingly “ethnic
nationalist”, an “Igbo-phile” (or a philo-Igbonis, to
coin a new term), and a Biafra apologist to boot. He
is, in this book at least, a homo duplex, the Double
Man, in effect, both Biafran and Nigerian; Igbophile
and Nationalist; Anti-colonial Writer and a Post-
colonial Apologist of Expert British Rule. This should
explain why the book has a schizoid thematic
orchestration and its claims pressed within a
phlegmatic stylistic mode, which, again and again, has
proved incapable of sustained irony. Surely, then,
There was a Country is a patchwork of Achebe’s deep,
even unconscious, prejudices. In one moment after
another, the book fails to offer a finely integrated
presentation of a realistic historical, geographical,
economic, and culturally diverse, though troubled,
country.
So while I pay tribute to this important novelist and
essayist, I should remark, at the same time, that we
should not, in our romantic rush to venerate our
little (culture) heroes, forget earlier illustrious and
master English-speaking storytellers such as Amos
Tutuola (1920-1997) and Cyprian Odiatu Ekwensi
(1921-2007). Their books, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town
(written 1946 and published in 1952) and People of the
City (1954), are two outstanding pieces of literature
and narrative self-assertion that blazed the trail in
modern, English-speaking African fiction writing. In
the same manner, while we pay tribute to Achebe and
his literary legacy, let us not also forget great post-
colonial African storytellers such as Ayi Kwei Armah,
Sambene Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiog’o, and, not least,
the incomparable Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi, the
author, in my opinion, of the finest African novel ever
—Going Down River Road (1977).
As for Achebe, I say “goodbye”; for there was indeed a
great novelist, but who, tragically, had to write the
greatest anti-novel of his career—There Was a
Country: A Personal History of Biafra.
Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano is of the Department of
English and French, Bayero University, Kano.


http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/03/chinua-achebe-a-non-romantic-view-by-ibrahim-bello-kano/

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