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Nigeria: Chinua Achebe - Eagle On the Iroko

Obi Nwakanma

23 November 2008

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FROM early in the year, scholars of African and world literature rolled out the drums to celebrate the life of Chinua Achebe and his famous novel, Things Fall Apart; the book which the critic Simon Gikandi has described as constituting "the inaugural moment of African literature."

I have on my own occasion noted that Things Fall Apart is the biography of a continent. It accomplished its narrative status and served notice to those who were wont to maintain the lie of Africa as a historic and cultural tabula rasa that Africa indeed, as he would put it, was people.

That people formalized themselves through their own authentic narrative acts; and that it is imperative in the balance of stories to insist on showing the true and equable heritage of the story both as a rite of memory as well as a challenge to the misuse of the power of narrative.

In challenging Conrad and other Euro-modernist cant for example, Chinua in a sense, through his now canonical novel, restored Africa to itself. That is why this year of celebration dedicated to the arrival of Things Fall Apart is also an act of restoration. Published in 1958, on the eve of decolonization, Achebe's novel rode significantly on the euphoria of a new Africa emergent in that period from many years of colonial rupture.

The novel began to tell the story that challenged the entire construct and lie of the "civilizing mission" upon which the colonial and imperial enterprise was founded. Things Fall Apart appearing in that moment was a necessary story.

It was so especially for many Africans who had been shown a different image of themselves and their past through the mirror of colonial narratives.

These narratives attempted to extirpate and erase the African past from the memory of a new generation as a way of reconditioning them and structuring their cultural consciousness to the will of a European modernity. Achebe's book was necessary in that season of renewal because it basically restored, or attempted to renew that sundered compact with a disappearing past.

As he said in his essay, "Morning Yet on Creation Day" it was to show that the African past indeed, in spite of what his own generation had been taught by Europe, was not one long night of savagery. It was important to know all the sides of the truth in order to know exactly "where the rain began to beat us."

These were the principles which Chinua Achebe came to note later in his essays as the ideological basis or foundations of his fiction, particularly, Things Fall Apart. The book embarked upon a world tour through Africa to Europe to Asia and the Americas this year of its jubilee.

The first celebrations were in Nigeria, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. It moved on to London, to Rio de Janeiro, Hyderabad and Dhaka. Earlier in the year, Princeton University featured a celebration of Achebe. Just last week Achebe and his novel were celebrated in a grand occasion in the grand halls of Harvard. Among the many celebrations of Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart this year, perhaps the most symbolic is the one organized by Chido Nwangwu, publisher of the USAfrica On-line newspaper in Houston.

Under the auspices of his newspaper, Nwangwu, one of Chinua Achebe's former students at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the 1980s drew such Achebe scholars as Bernth Lindfors and many others from many diverse places to Houston to mark the ascendant "Eagle on the Iroko." Achebe grew up among his Igbo people and absorbed important attributes of the culture at the moment of its greatest crisis, perhaps even transformation.

Remarkably, he was born in that year when the high priest, Eze Nri Obalike was forcibly brought to the courts in Awka, marking his desacralization.

According to the renowned Igbo anthropologist, Angulu Onwuejiogwu, this singular incident marked the completion of the thirty-year European conquest of the Igbo, and also the end of the Igbo resistance. Achebe, therefore, was born at the cusp of a new era; indeed at the confluence of cultures or what he himself has described as the "crossroads of cultures."

Three situations, I think, and all of which have been identified by Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Achebe's biographer, were important in shaping Achebe's historical imagination and thus his response to the Igbo world from which Things Fall Apart emerged: one was that Chinua Achebe's father was one of those early Igbo converts to the Christian religion and essentially to the whiteman's ways. As a Christian convert and agent of the Church Missionary Society in that era, he was essentially a native informer, and was in very crucial ways complicit with the colonial process.

As Achebe has noted in one of his biographical essays, "Named For Victoria," his parent's Christianity and the early Christian's alienation and even disdain for the indigenous religious rites of Odinani-Igbo essentially placed him at that "crossroads of cultures" that has produced both the disconcertments of hybridity and the ironic consolations of its situational neutrality.

It was that essential zone of neutrality and of the unconscious from which Achebe became a profound and acute observer of the Igbo world: its rituals and festivals from which the young Achebe had been bared against participating because of the early Christian's isolationism from the rest of the community.

The impact of this is unquantifiable but it soon became obvious, for Achebe attained that crucial visionary advantage untrammeled by his father's prodigious Christian piety, to observe the grandeur and enchantments of the Igbo world curiously and even longingly: he was in the great historical audience intently watching the dance of the great Igbo ancestral masquerade - the Egwugwu in its many motions.

As he has said himself, he was in that fortunate position in which he could not take that culture for granted. He had to re-enter it through narrative.

The second fact was Achebe's early mobility within the Igbo world, as his family moved through one evangelical station or the other until his father returned to Ogidi, and as he joined his elder brother Frank at Nekede where he was a teacher, and where Achebe went to live with him.

It was while living in Nekede that he became aware of the Mbari arts and its central meaning both in Igbo epistemology and theology. Mbari was the cult of renewal and rebirth. It affirmed the centrality of cyclic time and of the inexorable power which the elemental forces exert upon material time. Mbari modeled, not only the Igbo ritual sense of history but also its theosophic arguments against monumentalism.

These aspects of the Igbo world came to signal the basis of Achebe's later argument about the profound validity and complexity of the world which European informants of that culture either failed to comprehend or willfully misrepresented. In 1944, Chinua Achebe was admitted to the very elite Government College Umuahia, a boarding school for boys modeled after the English schools.

This third factor is important only perhaps in terms of the continuous education of Chinua Achebe alongside English models. But Umuahia provided his first secular education, and possibly the first early grounds for his interrogation of the world he had inherited from his Christianized father.

For a school that emphasized science education, it must have been a happy accident to discover Saburi Biobaku who taught History and English at Umuahia from 1946 when he returned from Cambridge to 1948, when he left. While at Umuahia, Biobaku was conducting his foundational research on African history, and Chinua Achebe was among the boys whom he often took as his research assistants into the neighbouring Umudike village.

Not much has been made of the impact of this, but it must be clear by now, that Achebe's capacity to read between the lines of the European narratives which he later encountered at the university, arose from these conscious moments of re-cognition; and to restore to the African world the ornaments taken off her waist from those who have robbed her.

In writing Things Fall Apart, Achebe cured us all, of the strange burden of being "other" and the anxiety of misrecognition. This year's wild celebration of Things Fall Apart speaks firmly to that.

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