Chimalum Nwankwo, fiery literary critic and award-winning poet, is Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English and World Literatures at Nigerian-Turkish Nile University, Abuja. He was Chair, Department of English and Speech, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, USA. Andi Bula, an Abuja-based writer and poet, spoke with him about Chinua Achebe, the controversies...

In what circumstance, I mean how did you receive the news of the death of Chinua Achebe? And what was your immediate reaction?

I was at the African Literature Association annual conference in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. It was my friend, Tanure Ojaide, who first called me early in the morning to inform me. I broke down and wept. Obi Nwakanma was there in the room with another friend. It was a strange but remarkable news to coincide with the opening of that annual global conference on African arts and letters, and it cast quite a pall on the event... a parting final exclamation on what Achebe did for us all.

Did you and Chinua Achebe have a personal relationship?

Awe and respect and admiration and all kinds of feelings always interfered with what you might call "personal" each time I was with him. I recall a night in the eighties when I had just returned from the USA, a young lecturer fresh from the Ph.D programme at University of Texas, one of my favourite undergraduate school teachers, Dr. Juliet Okonkwo, organised a special event in which she deliberately positioned me on the high table beside Achebe. I sat there dumb all night. I think that's what you call "celebrity struck". She thought she was doing me a favour. I was in paralysis.

So, if any, can you share those qualities of him that you cherished?

He always struck me as a very simple man, but that simplicity had a rare grace and dignity for such a famous person. When we were at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in the 1980s, he would breeze into my office and ask me one thing or the other and leave.

In the 70s, when I was an undergraduate, I remember that habit of his... always walking in the campus, to events at the Arts Theatre and so forth. You cannot imagine the personal pain I had been through watching him over these years sitting quietly on that wheel chair. I really have tremendous respect for his family who endured all that, especially his ever faithful wife, Christie, who was always there to help him.

Given the depth of your love and admiration for him, I like to think that you may have done or are going to do more than just granting this interview to honour his memory.

I have a long poem dedicated to him called "Bird of Distances" in my last book, OF THE DEEPEST SHADOWS AND THE PRISONS OF FIRE. I also wrote a new poem, "No Tears Today", after his passing which was read at the University of Nigeria ceremonies on May 21 to mark his death. Within four days I spoke or read at three different cities marking the event. On one occasion, I even took a dangerous night bus to make it on time to the UNN Night of Tributes.

Presumably, for easy access to the airport the event of honouring the heroic life of Chinua Achebe by the Senate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was held at the Enugu campus instead of the main campus where he wrote, edited, and taught so many years ago.

How was the Night of Tributes by the Department of English and Literary Studies to celebrate him the same day?

The Nsukka night was a great night of performances and readings. It was a fitting celebration for the soul of such a great man... quite an inspiration for young people.

With the colossal impact Achebe has made on millions of readers dead or alive on the African continent basically through the publication of the spiritual Things Fall Apart which has sold over 12 million copies, the sheer immensity of it being translated into more than 50 languages of the world, and the near 100 awards or more that he won among which are over 40 honorary doctorate degrees from so many universities across the globe, do you think there is any other African writer with the same stature as Achebe, given especially that Emenyonu, while paying tribute to him, said "legendary writers like Chinua Achebe come perhaps once in a century"? And do you foresee that in the nearest future someone else can achieve the same feat-- or even more? What is the future of African writing?

African writing has a very bright future. The energy is there, and the field is full of talents still inchoate but growing ever so steadily. A phenomenon like Chinua Achebe is a great boost, and one of his great prophecies is already flowering and manifesting... Morning yet on Creation day...

Emenyonu is right. It is very difficult but you never know with humanity and the periodic geniuses which tenant this planet. Cosmo-historic figures are always a rare breed, but Achebe will remain for ever an inspiration and a deathless phenomenon.

Never mind that I have already stated the number of languages in which Things Fall Apart has been translated. But I'm not sure really, since there are variations of the figures. Some people put it at 60 languages or below. In his tribute essay to Achebe, Emenyonu says there are 65 languages into which the novel has been translated. Yet, recently, a journalist, Victor Ogene, has put it at 150 languages. What can you say is the accurate figure? Could Ogene be correct?

In future, the numbers thing will become unimportant and irrelevant as in the case of the ancient Greeks. Classics proliferate with the rising awareness of various peoples about issues that are squarely within the precincts of the unavoidable crises of self-determination and oppression all over the world.

As the Guest Editor of African Literature Today number 30 (the issue before Achebe's death), you asked this rhetorical question in your editorial which has been a small talk among Nigerians in the field of literature: "Why has the Nobel Prize in literature eluded Chinua Achebe?"

And Elechi Amadi seems to have responded, not as a direct answer to your question though, where part of his tribute to Achebe reads: "I believe the Civil War affected Achebe very deeply and probably robbed him of the Nobel Prize.

Between A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah(1987),Achebe's creativity had a lull of 20 years which dealt a fatal blow to any Nobel Prize ambition". This, no doubt, is an over flogged issue but it is often interesting talking about. Could you please respond to what Elechi Amadi has said?

First of all, check out the Nobel Prize qualifications. They claim in summary that they are looking for impact. The manner the whole world reacted to Achebe's death affirms an impact which the Nobel laureate committee obviously missed.

The prize has never been directed or determined by a numbers game. How many books did Toni Morrison write? I want you to note that in the past I predicted a number of times that Achebe would never get the Nobel Prize. See at least my interview in The Muse no 40, journal of the English Association of the University of Nigeria... Not after the really deadly onslaught at the citadels of white superiority racially and intellectually.

Please go back again and read the end of Chapter 8 of Things Fall Apart where the white skin is compared with leprosy. Go back and re-visit Achebe's attack of Albert Schweitzer, and then of course re-read Achebe's destruction of Conrad's Heart of Darkness , and tell me whether if you were white you would recommend Achebe for the Nobel Prize.

Heart of Darkness, by the way, is one of the top 100 great books in the Western tradition. Those who thought they were the "custodians" of that tradition fought Achebe's essay for many years. It was only a few years ago that a man as eminent as Professor Graff came to the conclusion that "Achebe was right" about Conrad's book. Graff indeed encouraged his colleagues in the American academy to accept that fact !

In Ngugi's tribute to Achebe, the latter came off as "the father of African Literature" even though the Kenyan writer did not state it in the exact words. Besides, many in Africa and beyond see Achebe in that light even though the late writer did not seem comfortable with the appellation.

In an interview, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is obviously irritated by this reference to Achebe as the father of African Literature, hence he has referred to the appellation as one of "literary ignorance" or "momentary exuberance" and has gone on to say "education is lacking in most of those who pontificate", adding that it is an "embarrassment" and "it is all rather depressing" to him.

How would you react to all this? Is Ngugi correct? Was Achebe's refusal of the title out of modesty? Do readers of literature and literature scholars alike have absolute right in saying who is their hero? Do you perceive "jealousy," "rivalry" and "ill-will" in Soyinka towards the late Achebe as some people are echoing? Could this be why he wasn't even present at his friend's burial?

In his tribute, famous Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o noted that at one point in his life, people who did not know him asked him if he was the author of Things Fall Apart in his country. In the same tribute, he also pointed out that Soyinka acknowledged that he met a similar fate elsewhere... whether he was the author of Things Fall Apart?

These encounters are very significant in terms of their implications in relation to the stature of the writers with Achebe. Whatever anybody says about that appellation, "father of African Literature", now or tomorrow, I would find rather inane, amusing, and redundant.

Soyinka himself said that Achebe was uncomfortable with the " father of African literature" ascribed to him. Christians can, I am sure, appreciate the story about the response by Jesus to a similar question,. "Art thou the son of God?" The modest non-committal response was, "Thou sayest." It is unfortunate, sad , and also rather depressing that Soyinka should go so far as to charge the millions of readers and critics... young and old people... all over the world with "ignorance" for calling Achebe "father of African Literature".

You see... just as Soyinka ascribed to himself and his favourite contemporaries "pioneer quartet", I think that if claims were heinous crimes, it is a more heinous crime that Soyinka's was more direct, with quotation marks or without. He claimed "pioneer quartet".

Achebe never claimed that he was "father of African Literature". Also, the four of them were not the only serious writers at that point in time in the history of literature in Nigeria. Forget the eminence which greeted their names down the road. Note that the Nobel Prize Committee gave Soyinka the Nobel Prize.

Not all readers thought he deserved the prize, but it is the right of that group to dispense that honour according to its choices or preferences. That an eminent highly respected Nigerian thinker and writer referred to the Nobel committee as "a gaggle of Swedes" in disgust over preferring Soyinka to Achebe is irrelevant just as it should be irrelevant to some of us that anybody thinks that Achebe is the "father of African Literature'.

Mark also that of all the names Soyinka mentioned of those who could also be called father of African Literature, whether it is Mazisi Kunene or Kofi Awonoor or any other name that we could all think up, no one has a global text such as Things Fall Apart in his or her resume.

Not even Soyinka himself. Let everyone try a shot at some honesty about this point... The last point about this really sad subject is that, I do not think Soyinka raised this subject at the right time. The whole thing is really so untimely and unfortunate... And this is about a man that supposedly was his friend.

They wined and dined together. I truly really really wished that he had waited till after Achebe's burial for such utterances or debate. I wish he had never opened his mouth so early about this subject because I find it so untimely... but who am I anyway?

A man like Professor Afejuku has wondered with shocking naiveté and zany insensitivity whether Achebe thought about his Itsekiri and Yoruba in-laws while writing There was a Country. Now... that is how horrible and how low Nigerian primordiality could descend.

And do we wonder how Achebe's family would be feeling about the kind of strange sentiments swirling crazily out there at the heels of the transition of a man who suffered so much and sacrificed quite a bit of his time for oppressed people all over this world?

Asked earlier in the same interview how he saw Achebe's role in the popularisation of African literature as editor for Heinemann's African Writers Series, Soyinka replied :"As a literary practitioner , my instinct tends towards a suspicion of "ghetto" classifications-- which I did feel this was bound to be... .I refused to permit my works to appear in the series... Permission to publish The Interpreters was granted in my absence... All in all, the odds come down in favour of the series--which, by the way, did go through the primary phase of sloppy inclusiveness, then became more discriminating." How do you see this?

There is so much that is so dreadfully infra dig about this whole interview... so abysmally beneath what many of us had before now thought of Wole Soyinka. To associate AWS with ghettorization is not something which anyone who claims commitment or engagement with the problems of the black world would say.

I am appalled at the troubling Caucasian condescension in the sub-text or sub-tone of that remark, though in terms of Soyinka's consciousness, the pedigree is still clearly from his old thing about the tiger not having to proclaim his tigritude which the late high priest of Negritude, Leopold Sedar Senghor, dismissed with a telling "the Negro talks"... Can you see why so many Africans are so suspicious of his Nobel Prize?

Can't you see how such rather unkind suspicions and misgivings find fuel in Soyinka's politics of culture... ? Can you imagine the number of very serious African writers that one would probably never have heard about without AWS... whether the series started sloppily or not... ?

Think about the story Achebe told about the near loss of the Things Fall Apart manuscript, and the rejection it encountered before Heinemann gave that gift to the world... And as for this other thing about Adewale Maja-Pearce, that's their business... If I were Maja-Pearce, I would be celebrating because when a big guy anywhere is beating up on a little guy, sympathy always stays with the little guy.