Professor Chinua
Achebe, David and Marianna
Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown
University, USA and the Nigerian author—“in many ways
the conscience of Nigeria”—died in Boston on Thursday, 21 March 2013, at
the age of 82.
Chinua Acheba portrayed
the destruction of his native Igbo
tribal
system and culture by the colonial rule of the Europeans in quite a realistic
way through his well known novels—Things
Fall Apartt, Arrow of God and No
Longer at Ease— that are usually treated as a trilogy. But it is his first
novel Things Fall Apart —published in
English in 1958, which till date has sold more than ten million copies and has
been translated into more than fifty languages—that earned him a
permanent place in the world literary
canon.
This novel is all about the life of an
African farmer, Okonkwo—an Igbo elder having “a manly
and a proud heart”—and his fight against the assault of the colonizers
from Britain to preserve his native customs. The novel plots the rise, fall and
destruction of Okonkwo, the headman of Umuofia. The novel traces the
apocalyptic journey of Okonkwo’s from “great poverty and misfortune to be one
of the lords of the clan” whom finally the colonizers “drove to kill himself”
and “to be buried like a dog” by the strangers.
Everyone knowing
Okonkwo’s grim struggle against poverty and misfortune would not say he had
been lucky. At the most one can say that his chi, personal god, was good – “When a man says yes his chi says yes also, is what Igbo people
believe – Okonkwo said yes strongly, and
his chi agreed”. He is deeply rooted in his clan’s traditions: His commitment
for the upkeep of the tradition was so strong that he will not wink even for a
minute to disapprove the conduct of his own son —his taking to
reading in preference to physical labor—considering him to be effeminate—“has
too much of mother in him.” Once during new Yam festival, as the village is
pulsating with the persisting, unchanging, beating of drums of “unmistakable wrestling dance” when his
daughter Ezinma, placing her mother’s dish before him, and sits, he shout at
her, “Sit like a woman!” where upon she brings her two legs together. That
bespeaks of this unusual man’s unusual concern for upholding his Igbo standards
of behavior.
But as he once
shoots a boy with his gun killing him, nemesis overtakes him. As per his clan’s
traditions he gets banishment from his native village for seven years as
punishment. He then moves to his mother’s village and restarts his life all
over again. In the meanwhile, things grow worse in his native village. The
white missionaries first set up a church and start converting the vulnerable,
including his own son, Nwoye.
Umuofia has
indeed changed during Okonkwo’s seven years exile beyond recognition as revealed
in the lamentations between Obierika and himself: “The white man is very
clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. …Now he has won our
brothers …He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have
fallen apart.”
Okonkwo’s return
from exile is not as memorable as he wished for. White missionaries, by then have
set up a church and started converting the vulnerable people to Christianity. Okonkwo
gets terribly disappointed by the destruction of native traditions at the hands
of white men thoroughly. However for the first time after his return, Okonkwo
feels happy when his clansmen meet in the market place to decide on their
action after the destruction of the church. He, a warrior, addresses them too
like a warrior. Three days later the District Commissioner summons the leaders
of Umuofia, among whom Okonkwo is one, who are handcuffed and confined to
guardroom.
After the release
of the leaders on payment of fine, the villagers assemble in the market-place.
Being the first man to speak Okika, getting up, says: “You all know why we are
here…All our Gods are weeping… because of the shameful sacrilege they are
suffering… our brothers have deserted us and joined a stranger to soil the
fatherland …And if our brothers take the side of evil we must root them out
too.And we must do it now…”
At this point,
five court messengers come ordering the meeting to stop. Becoming furious at
it, Okonkwo draws out his matchet and in a flash beheads one of the messengers.
The meeting is stopped. What follows is tumult instead of action. He could
discern from it what his clan is up to. Wiping his matchet on the sand he goes
away as the voices ask: “Why did he do it?”
Perhaps, in
utter disappointment at the inaction of the crowd and their letting the remaining
mesangers run away, and driven by his optimum self-pride, like a prototypical
Greek tragic hero, Okonkwo, instead of being subjecting himself to be penalized
by a Whiteman, kills himself by hanging from a tree. Thus brings Achebe the
destruction of the Igbo culture, in specific, to an end, and by extension of
the traumatic cultural uprooting of the colonized nations all over.
That is the
striking narration of Okonkwo’s fight against colonialism, in which Achebe
austerely crafted the voyage of a single protagonist, Okonkwo, in the classic
Greek tragedy style. To convey the rhythm of African life in its true pulsating
fashion from an African
perspective,
Achebe, like Rajarao’s ‘sanskritized’ English for Serpent and Rope and ‘Kannadized’ English for Kanthapura, synthesized his
own English —preferring expressions such as, “For whom is it well, for whom is it well? / There is no one for
whom it is well” that best resonates the African tone instead of copying usual
British expression, “It won’t do anyone any good.” The novel is a reflection of
Achebe’s “ebullient, generous, great talent” that filled the novel with full of
African similes and metaphors, proverbs: “…he grew rapidly like a yam tendril in
the rainy season”; "Okonkwo's fame had grown like a bush -fire in the harmattan"; "iron horse" for bicycle; native axioms like, "if one finger brought oil it soiled the others", etc., because of which his Things Fall Apart became a modern
classic.
Achebe was a
staunch champion of the Igbo culture; nevertheless, “he never hesitated to lay
the blame for the woes of the African continent squarely where it belongs”,
says Wole Soyinka. Indeed, in his later novels, Achebe even criticized African
leaders for pillaging the African economy. He is essentially a “cultural
nationalist” who struggled all through his writings “to help African society
regain belief in itself and to put away the complexes of the years of
degeneration and self-abasement.”
All
through his writing—five novels:Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A man of the People (1966), Anthills of the Savannah (1987), collections of short
stories and poetry, and numerous essays and lectures—Achebe had passionately argued
for the right of Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and had
also trenchantly attacked the writings of European authors. Achebe, “the patriarch of the African novel”, warned
about the danger of relying on someone else to speak for Africans: you can only
be sure of your message being communicated accurately only if you speak with
your own voice.
He is not only a
novelist, short story writer and a poet—who through his writings raised his
voice in varied ways about the trials
of Nigeria’s pre-colonial and colonial history, and the traumas of its
post-independence ordeal—but
also a critical thinker and
essayist who has written extensively on the questions of the role of culture in
Africa and the social and political significance of aesthetics in African
lives. His essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" in 1975, is famous for his trenchant critique of
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which, he argued, made Africa as
"a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into
which the wandering European enters at his peril”—and made him a literary champion of global significance.
Besides acquiring the status of a writer of repute through his
prolific but imaginative writing, Achebe, as the advisory editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, became the godfather of modern African literature by
discovering, mentoring and presenting so many new African authors— Ngugi wa
Thiong’o, Dennis Brutus, Tayeb Salih, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ousmane Sembène,
Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer —to the world literature.
As a storyteller, as a voice of his nation, as a cultural impresario, an intellectual combatant and provocateur, a fighter against the relentless corruption in Nigearia, Achebe gained with age the status of a bard of Nigeria. Indeed, Nigerian government volunteered to confer national honor on him not once but twice, but Achebe refused to accept it, citing failings in government to offer its people clean governance.
Achebe received many
prizes for his literary contributions: the Man Booker International Prize in
2007 for his contribution to literature, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize of $300,000,
one of the richest prizes for the arts, in
2010, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize In 1979.
The injuries
that he sustained in a car accident in Lagos in 1990 left Achebe confined to a
wheelchair, and he was forced to seek medical treatment in the United States. He
once returned to Nigeria in 1999, but finding Lagos “confusing and very
depressing” and “life so unsafe”, exiled reluctantly.
With his death, the subaltern world has
lost one of its greatest champions who fought for the rightful place for native
cultures.
grk
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