John Mwazemba
6 April 2008
opinion
Nairobi — The 50th anniversary of the African classic, Things Fall Apart, was greeted with newfound excitement coupled with a flurry of fiery reviews reflecting upon it.
In a distant land far away from home, the celebration was less glamorous for the author - Chinua Achebe. Living in self-exile, the world is not only a wide place, but a lonely one too.
Hillel Italie, an Associated Press writer, hauntingly wrote: "At age 77, author Chinua Achebe is living in grace and in exile, housed in a cottage built just for him on the campus of Bard College, lonely for his native Nigeria and the people for whom his stories have been written. Chinua Achebe longs for home in Nigeria, the inspiration for his novel, Things Fall Apart."
"I feel that's where I should be," he says of Nigeria, where he has not lived since the 1980s.
"Having that relationship active, and working, is important for the health of my stories."
As the world marked the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart, I found myself drifting from the book and instead thought about the man who wrote it.
The man is now confined to a wheelchair after an automobile accident left him paralysed from the waist down. His ideas are still as sharp as ever, though he has not written a novel of late.
Thinking of Achebe and other African writers either in voluntary or involuntary exile made me wonder why Africa hates and persecutes her brilliant sons.
Most political leaders in Africa have tried to discipline writers into conformity by trying to silence their dissenting views.
Writers have had to choose between staying at home to face imprisonment and death or running away into exile and remain alive.
In his article, African Writers, Exile and the Politics of a Global Diaspora, Tejumola Olaniyan writes that for exiled writers, the "physical distance from home and its commonly associated feelings of being victimised, of bitterness, sorrow, loneliness, dejection not to say depression, nostalgia, and the likes, may be painful and distressing, but being at home is often not any less so. In fact, staying at home may simply be to live a death. Exile may be anguish and alienation, but home is neither warm nor welcoming. The Somalian writer, Nuruddin Farah, who has been in exile since the 1970s and even now has no country as such to return to, understands this very well "
The list of writers who went to exile is long, our own Ngugi wa Thiong'o included.
Even after regimes changed, some of these writers are still either afraid to return to their countries or their countries do not care enough to have them back.
For Africa to develop, it needs its exiled sons to contribute ideas and resources. After all, some of these great Africans stand shoulders above all other giants internationally.
Unfortunately, writers are still flying into exile in fear of states that crack down on dissidents.
Thinking about the deplorable situation makes one wonder whether Africa has already experienced "the exile of intelligentsia" that Russia experienced at the height of the Bolshevik revolution.
Undesirable elements
In his book, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, Lesley Chamberlain wrote about how the Soviet leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, forced intellectuals into exile.
In 1922, Lenin personally drew up a list of 160 names of brilliant philosophers, academics, scientists and journalists he considered "undesirable".
Chamberlain writes: "These thinkers clashed with Lenin and in an instant lost their homeland. They had committed no crime other than to think, write or teach in the context of Russia's brilliant 'Silver Age'". Chamberlain tells a sad tale of the two ships that "sailed from Petrograd that autumn, taking these eminent men and their families away to what became permanent exile in Berlin, Prague and Paris."
Leaving home was not easy for these exiled intellectuals. They tried to cling to all memories they could gather of home.
A critic wrote: "Chamberlain movingly describes the experience of exile in ways that echo the great exiled novelist Nabokov himself. Berdyaev bade a last farewell to his much-loved library of Russian classics. Prince Trubetskoy went to view the Bronze Horseman statue in Petrograd Others bade farewell to ancient relatives with an insincere 'We'll be back in a year, Granny.' The writer Osorgin spent three days picking mushrooms in a pine forest before turning himself in for deportation One lady refused to clean her Berlin abode in the forlorn expectation of returning home."
Brilliant Africans in exile are innumerable. It is surprising why a continent in need would allow such eminent personalities to flee to other countries with their much needed skills and expertise.
No wonder, as Ken Saro Wiwa once narrated, we are still called the 'Dark Continent'.
A narrator in one of Saro Wiwa's stories said: "I recall, many years ago as a young child, reading in a newspaper of an African leader who stood on the grave of a dead lieutenant and through his tears said: 'Africa kills her sons.' I don't know what he meant by that, and though I've thought about it long enough, I've not been able to unravel the full mystery of those words. Now, today, this moment, they came flooding back to me. And I want to borrow from him. I'd like you to put this on my gravestone, as my epitaph: 'Africa Kills Her Sun.' A good epitaph, eh? Cryptic. Definite. A stroke of genius, I should day. I'm sure you'll agree with me. 'Africa Kills Her Sun.' That's why she'd been described as the Dark Continent? Yes?" Is it then a surprise that we are the 'Dark Continent'? Africa Kills Her Suns!
The writer is the publishing manager of Macmillan Kenya Publishers.
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