Chinua Achebe

Progenitor of a Literary Tradition

[The works of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian litterateur, have been rated among the classics of African literature along with those of Senghor of Senegal and Wole Soyinka, another Nigerian (recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, 1986). Here the author gives an insight into the writings of Achebe who deals with universal themes in a way which transcends the contemporary settings.                                                  –Editor]

Three statements of Chinua Achebe, the famous Nigerian author, made on different occasions and quoted by critics in support of their respective viewpoints provide the clue to Achebe’s writings. The first is about the writer’s role:

“The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and re-generation that must now be done in Nigeria. In fact, the writer must walk right in front. For he is, after all, the sensitive point of his community.” (1965)

The second one is about the impact of an alien culture on one’s own:

“I am not one of those who would say that Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period .... But unfortunately when two cultures meet, one might expect, if we are angels, we could pick out the best in the other and retain the best in our own. But this doesn’t often happen. What happens is that some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added. So if it was for me to order society, I would be very unhappy at the way things have turned out....” (1967)

The third one is about his own culture:

“We cannot pretend that our past was one long, technicolour idyll. We have to admit, like other people’s pasts, ours had its good as well as its bad sides.”

Clive Wake of the University of Kent, a perceptive critic, rates Chinua Achebe’s works among the classics of African literature along with those of Senghor of Senegal and Wole Soyinka of Nigeria. While Achebe is primarily a novelist, Senghor is a poet and Soyinka is a dramatist. They all deal with universal themes of the human condition in a way which transcends the contemporary settings of their works.

Among African novelists, Achebe is sui generis. It is not as if he stands aloof from the main stream of ‘protest’ and cuts out a path for himself. He is very much in it – he protests against the imposition of an alien religion on the traditional way of life, against colonial rule and, after the independence of his country, against corruption in Government and society. It is in his handling of the English language to describe the moods and mores of a traditional society that he stands out. His ‘noble rage’ expresses itself in a language which is a blend of English in its conventional usage and the Ibo idiom. Far from detracting the flow of the narrative of making for clumsiness in structure, its effect is integral. An Ibo proverb, as Achebe uses it, besides giving a local colour, lights up a situation and invests it with a significance which would otherwise be missed.

Now in his later fifties, Achebe was born on November 16, 1930 at Ogidi in Nigeria. Educated at the University College Ibadan, from where he graduated with English, History and Religious Studies, he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service as Talks Producer in 1954. He rose to be the Director of External Broadcasting Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria in 1961. Since then he has been at the Universities of Nigeria, Massachusetts and Connecticut. He is widely travelled and much honoured. He has received high praise for his editorship of the African Writers Series of Heinemann, with over 200 titles.

Achebe’s reputation as an outstanding African novelist rests securely on his four novels – Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer At Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966). The first and the third form a class by them­selves in that they unfold the complexities of tribal life beneath its surface simplicity and calm; and the tribal societies symbolise the conflict of culture. The second and the fourth are satirical in intent and hold up a mirror against the New Rulers of the post-colonial era in Africa.

As a critic has pointed out, the imaginative qualities evident in the first group are not seen at full play in the later novels of satire. They have a topical interest and, as no universal or eternal principles are involved, they have a limited literary value. But Achebe’s narrative gifts, his keenness of observation, his wit and humour are all there to please the general reader and strike a sensitive chord in the serious one.

II

“Things Fall Apart” is the tragic story of the decline and fall of the tribal hero, Okonkwo of Umuofia, ‘known throughout the nine villages and even beyond’ for his valour Son of a lazy, improvident father, Okonkwo acquired fame and fortune by his feats of physical strength and tireless efforts on the field. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. “It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and the forces of nature malevolent red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father .... And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion – to hate everything that his father Unoke had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness” And the fatal flaw in the hero was this fear of himself of failure.

As it happened, Okonkwo finds himself in the centre of three disturbing episodes in the even tenor of tribal life. The first occurs during the Week of Peace, before the planting season, when no work is done and no physical injury is caused to anyone. Okonkwo, provoked to ‘justifiable’ anger by his youngest wife who, having gone to a friend’s house to plait her hair, delays his meal, in a fit of temper, and beats her in violation of the time-honoured tradition of observing the Week of Peace.

Though he feels repentant later and is made to appease the Goddess of the Earth, the incident is a portent. The priest tells him: “The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The Earth Goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall perish.” (How reminiscent of Thakazhi’s ‘Chemmeen’ in which the Goddess of the Sea is provoked by the profanity of Pareekutti and Karuthamma.)

Then follows the second episode in which Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna, brought to Okonkwo’s village as a reparation for woman slaughter from a neighbouring village, but brought up as his own son. The killing was not Okonkwo’s fault as it was done in obedience to the pronouncement of the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. But Okonkwo kills the boy for fear of being called a coward though a village elder had warned him: “The boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death.”

The third episode drives him into exile for seven years. Ezedu, ‘a great man and a noble warrior’ of the clan is dead, and is being given a fitting funeral, with drums beating, guns booming and people dancing. A one-handed spirit (mask) calls forth: “Ezedu! If you had been poor in your last life, I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before. If your death was the death of nature, go in peace. But if a man caused it, do not allow him a moment’s rest.” (The passage quoted highlights some of the values cherished by Ibo society – they are typically Indian.)

When the festivities rise to a crescendo, Okonkwo’s gun explodes unexpectedly and kills the sixteen-year-old son of the dead man whose burial the crowd attended. The punishment for manslaughter, not deliberate, but due to inadvertence, is exile from the village for seven years. And Okonkwo bows to the will of the society and goes away with his three wives and eleven children to his mother’s village of Mbanta.

Okonkwo is very unhappy, bowed with grief, but is reminded by the village elder: “Motherland protects. Mother is supreme.” (Mother and Motherland are superior to Paradise, according to an Indian saying.)

In the new village of his forced exile. Okonkwo applies himself diligently to land and prospers–and adds two more wives. But something within him has snapped and he longs for his return to Umuofia. But tidings from his village are dis­turbing. The missionaries had arrived and had started making converts. One of the seven villages, Abame, was wiped out by military action as the people had killed a Whiteman and taken possession of his ‘iron horse’. But here again there was a viola­tion of a traditional injunction: “Never kill a man who says nothing .... There is something ominous behind the silence.’ (Achebe gives a story to support this.)

Christian missionaries arrive in Mbanta also and build a church on a piece of land reserved for burying all those who died of ‘evil diseases like leprosy and small-pox and dumping potent fetishes of great medicine-men when they died.” Okonkwo, the tribal hero, is restless but the men of Mbanta counsel caution: ‘When a man blasphemes, what do we do? Do we go and stop his mouth? No, we put our fingers into our ears to stop us from hearing. That is a wise action.”

“Let us not reason like cowards,” said Okonkwo. “If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head.” Okonkwo thought that the Mbanta clan was a womanly clan; such a thing would never happen in his fatherland, Umuofia!

Okonkwo suffers the greatest humiliation when his son joins the missionaries, deserting his home. His father’s killing of Ikemefuna, to whom he was greatly attached, in deference to the wishes of the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, had never gone out of his mind. “Okonkwo saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days and his children all the while praying to the Whiteman’s God.”

Okonkwo returns to his village at the end of seven years but, in the changed situation, his return is not as memorable as he had wished. The clan had undergone such a profound change during his exile that it was barely recognisable.

Events move swiftly. The people of Umuofia raze to the ground the newly-built church when one of the converts unmasks a spirit during the annual worship of the Earth Goddess. This is followed by the arrest and detention of the village elders including Okonkwo by the colonial rulers. They are released, after torture, on payment of a fine. A meeting is called to decide on the action to be taken to avenge the humiliation. Okonkwo comes to his own decision: “If Umuofia decided on war, all would be well. But if they chose to be cowards, he would go out and avenge himself.”

The meeting breaks up abruptly when five court messengers want the meeting to stop. Okonkwo cuts off the head of the leader of the messengers and his clan breaks into tumult instead of action. The District Commissioner arrives to arrest Okonkwo only to find him hanging from a tree behind his house. His close friend mourns: “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog,” (Traditional custom forbade touching the body and giving it a normal burial when a person committed suicide.) As irony would have it, the minions of the court take down the body and the Commissioner gets new material for his book: “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”

This summary version of the story does scant justice to Achebe’s fascinating technique of narration. Dialogues peppered with proverbs and tales pointing to a moral add spice to the narrative.

Achebe poses the conflict between traditional religion and the new religion of the Christian missionaries and lets the reader draw his own conclusion. He invests the story with literary value by his authentic delineation of the tragic hero of the tribal society, Okonkwo.

The title of the novel is taken from W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold!
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

As Okonkwo explains, ‘the Whiteman has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart’–the binding forces of their gods, beliefs, customs, festivities, were all gone.

III

“Arrow of God” is the magnum opus of Achebe. Here is the story of a tribal priest standing his ground in the teeth of opposition to his ways of thinking and doing, seeing himself as the ‘arrow from the bow of God.’

Ezeulu, ‘the magnificent man’ as Achebe calls him, is the chief priest of Ulu, the deity protecting six villages constituting Umuaro. He is introduced to us as one conscious of his strength and power as the chief priest. “Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his power over the year and the crops and, therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real. It was true he named the day for the Feast of Pumpkin Leaves (before the planting season) and the New Yam Feast (before the harvest); but he did not choose it. He was merely a watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that was said to be his. As long as the goat was alive it could be his; he would find it food and take care of it. But the day it was slaughtered he would know soon enough who the real owner was – No! the Chief Priest of Ulu was more than that, must be more than that. If he should refuse to name the day there would be no festival–­no planting and no reaping. But could he refuse? No Chief Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done. He would not dare.”

Ezeulu was stung to anger by this as though his enemy had spoken it.

“Take away that word, dare,” he replied to his enemy. “Yes, I say, take away. No man in all Umuaro can stand up and say that I dare not. The woman who will bear the man say it has not been born yet.”

It is precisely this pride, this stubbornness, that leads him towards the close of the novel, to stand firm in his decision to postpone the New Yam Festival–and thereby driving his clansmen into the arms of the Christian missionary. He ends up a demented man and the people see in his fate the upholding of the wisdom of their ancestors – that no man, however great, was greater than his people; that no one ever won judgement against his clan.

Achebe unfolds the story of the fall of Ezeulu through a series of episodes – the Festival of Pumpkin Leaves, the ‘war’ with the neighbouring village of Okperi over a piece of land against his advice, the sacrilege committed by his son in putting the Royal Python inside a box, the offer of Paramount Chieftaincy to Exeulu and his refusal to accept it (‘Tell the Whiteman that Ezeulu will not be anybody’s chief, except Ulu’) and the tragic finale of his madness caused by the death of his first son. (‘Why, he asked himself again and again, why had Ulu chosen to deal thus with him, to strike him down and then cover him with mud?’)

Ezeulu, headstrong though he was, was also a man of truth; his voice was also the voice of sanity; his counsel, always, one of sobriety and moderation. He made enemies, as men of his type always do, including his own son. But he shines through it all ‘a magnificent man’.

Ezeulu’s character can best be brought out in his own words.

To his son whom he sends to the Christian Mission School in the face of opposition from everyone close to him he says:

“I want one of my sons to join these people (missionaries) and be my eye there. If there is nothing in it, you will come . But if there is something there, you will bring home my share. The world is a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not see it in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the Whiteman will be saying had we known tomorrow.”

About the belief that the sound of a gun would scare away the spirit afflicting a sick man:

“This gun-shooting is no more than a foolish groping about. How can we frighten spirits away with the noise of a gun! If it were so easy any man who had enough money to buy a keg of gunpowder would live and live until mushrooms sprouted from his head.”

About the rivalry of a minor priest of another God:

“No. It is not jealousy but foolishness: the kind that puts its head into the pot. But if it is jealousy, let him go on. The fly that perches on a mound of dung may strut around as it likes, it cannot move the mound.”

To his friend:

“I can see things where other men are blind. That is why I am known and at the same time I am unknown. You are my friend and you know whether I am a thief or a murderer or an honest man. But you cannot know the thing which beats the drum to which Ezeulu dances.”

There is a minor role in the story for Capt. T. K. Winter­bottom, the cynical but shrewd District Commissioner who is not unlike the Vidushakain Sanskrit drama. We also get to know the queer and quaint customs of the tribal society such as the breaking of kolanuts when friends meet or a guest arrives, marriage rites, the Pumpkin Leaves Festival and the dance of the Masks on the occasion, etc. Ezeulu personifies the Lord’s injunction in the Gita: “Be you only an instrument, Arjuna:” (Bhagavad Gita Ch. XI -33).

IV

‘No Longer At Ease’ is the story of an educated young man putting up a brave fight against corruption and succumbing to the temptation under the pressure of circumstance but not before losing the peace of his soul. Obiajulu Okonkwo (Obi for short), sent to England by his tribesmen of Umuofia for further studies, returns to Nigeria, self-willed, sceptical, determined not to countenance corruption and in love with a girl whom he had first met in London and later on board the cargo boat that brought him to his country. As a student of English literature, he wrote poems on his visions for the future of his country.

God bless our noble countrymen
And women everywhere.
Teach them to walk in unity
To build our nation dear;
Forgetting region, tribe or speech,
But caring always each for each.

But even when he disembarks, he encounters corruption in the form of a customs official. He gets a senior civil servant’s post and sets his face sternly against attempts at bribing him. Soon he is up against the opposition of his parents and his clansmen tohis marriage with the girl (Clara) he loves because she was born an Osu – “one whose great-great-great grandfather had been dedicated to serve a God, thereby setting himself apart and turning his descendents into a forbidden caste to the end of time.” His own father, a catechist for 25 years and one who had preached against heathen customs, is against the marriage because:

“Osu is like leprosy in the minds of our people. I beg of you, my son, not to bring the mark of shame and of leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children’s children into the third and fourth generations will curse your memory. It is not for myself I speak; my days are few. You will bring sorrow on your head and the heads of your children. Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry? Think of that, my son. We are Christians but we cannot marry our own daughters.”

Obi is unable to understand the logic. What made an Osu different from other men and women? Nothing but ignorance of their forefathers. Why should they, who had seen the light of the Gospel, remain in that ignorance?”

If Obi faced a wall of ‘ignorance’ in his personal affairs he was constantly under pressure, as the Secretary of the Scholarship Commission, to favour this or that candidate, some of them girls, for money or worse. He stood his ground so long as he could but, when he found himself in sore financial straits–­repayment dues to his community, Clara’s abortion expenses, income tax arrears, car insurance, etc. – he threw idealism to the winds. His mother’s death came on top of it all–a great shock to him but as the days passed, he began feeling like a “brand new snake just emerged from its slough,” Many thoughts assailed him. “Beyond death there are no ideals and humbug, only reality.” The impatient idealist says, “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.” But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace. The most horrible sight in the world cannot put out the eye.”

Though a defeated idealist, Obi did see the error of his ways and almost shrank from those who offered bribes. But it was too late. For a paltry twenty pounds, which he did not even touch he was arrested, tried and convicted. Everyone was sur­prised including the judge who said: “I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this. “Treacherous tears came to Obi’s eyes. He brought out a white handkerchief and rubbed his face. But he did it as people do when they wipe sweat. He even tried tosmile and belie the tears. A smile would have been quite logical. All that stuff about education and promise and betrayal had not taken him unawares. He had expected it and rehearsed this very scene a hundred times until it had become as familiar as a friend.”

His name was Obiajulu – which meant “the mind at last is at rest”. His birth, of course, brought peace of mind tohis father as Obi was the first son after four daughters. But Obi’s own life and experience gave the lie to the name. His life turned out to be a restless one, “no longer at ease”.

“No Longer At Ease!” is more a short story stretched out to some length. It brings to focus an officialdom with an itching palm for which the people had a large share of responsibility.

Humour, wit, innuendo and satire are all part of the Achebe armoury. There is no place for romance in his writings – which is indeed one of Ngugi’s strong points. His genius is native racy of the soil.