There is a way Chinua Achebe has successfully tied himself to Nigeria, both in life and in death, in literature and in politics. I don’t think any other person has done that the way he did his. The first level at which this occurred is the way his first novel, Things Fall Apart is Nigeria’s greatest instrument of African leadership if we knew how to use it to effect. Unfortunately, we have not been able to use it although it is in that novel that the spirit of the African is resurrected, rejuvenated. In spite of its imperfections, it is in Things Fall Apart that the claim of African inferiority was humiliated but not humbled.
The second level is the way Achebe (and Soyinka too) saw very early why the humiliation of the theory of African inferiority wasn’t going to amount to its humbling. He saw quite early that there could be no humbling of the colonial discourse of Africa without liberation, a task he did not see the African post colonial elite as being equipped to accomplish. Whatever the ethno-regional reservations that greeted these observations, he spoke the truth. I am not sure he was merely castigating leadership from a certain part of the country but that collectivity called the post colonial elite.
In Achebe’s case, he followed it up with a portrait of this collective in A Man of the People whose publication on the eve of the first coup fitted into the analogy about the owl crying last night, the baby dying the following morning and the two things must, therefore, have something to do with each other. It remains to be resolved whether the sequence between A Man of the People and the 1966 coup is one of the literati as a seer or something systematic. What is interesting is that, before this time, Achebe had sought to demonstrate his then yet to be formed thesis that the trouble with the society is leadership.
This thesis started in Things Fall Apart with the crash of Okonkwo’s promise as a leader. His inflexibility and one-dimensional meaning of culture propelled him to one tragic act after another. In other words, his sense of leadership was flawed. He could sacrifice empathy to discourse to the point of irrationality. The thesis continued in No Longer At Ease where we encountered Okonkwo again but this time in the self-willed Obi Okonkwo who did what nobody could understand why he did it: accept bribe. Before the bribe, the trouble had started with his inability to make the sacrifice required by leadership. That was in his own inability to see that as a leader arising from his high education at a heavy cost to the community, he had lost a large part of his individualism even in matters of choosing a wife. By the time he crashed, he had been completely alienated from the community and it was with great pressure for the community to rally round him. It was the same story of hiatus between the leader and the community in Arrow of God where Eze-ulu, the priest-king engaged the community in a test of powers. It is basically the same story line we encounter in Anthills of the Savannah. So, very early, Achebe has foreseen what is happening today in Nigeria as far as leadership is concerned.
Just before he died, he released his There Was Country. The problem with the book is not the content but the context. Many wondered why he had to write it, why the Mandela of Literature had to sort of bring himself down to doing the job of the Public Relations Officer of Ohaneze Ndigbo. Achebe had gone beyond that, it was reasoned. But identity is a serious matter and his pains and privations or, in short, the lived experience of that war might have propelled him to write even as he too must have also thought about it as going against the spirit of sacrifice which his spokesmanship of Africa imposed on him.
This is more so that it is only by the Biafran War and its pains that we can say that Nigeria of today is not the Nigeria that Lugard put together. By that very unfortunate conflict, Nigerians re-made Nigeria in their own image. It is still a work in progress, with so, so much to do, a task which only humanists like Achebe could understand and contribute to seriously.
His contributions have been reduced since 1990 when he had to be away from Nigeria in order to survive. I once asked Professor Charles Okigbo what could be done to bring Achebe back to live in Lagos, Nsukka, Abuja or wherever he could thunder from in Nigeria. He said I should forget it, that Achebe could not survive in Nigeria. The Americans, he said, had built up the unique infrastructure for Achebe’s survival, nothing of the sort that Nigeria could do. It was not just that Nigeria didn’t have the money or the technology but more with our sense of value in these matters. The same pre-history value framework that says that there isn’t enough money to educate all children of school going age in this country. What a shame!
Twice, if not more, Achebe has rejected national honours. On each occasion, it was a public relations disaster for the government of the day. But, instead of the situation he critiqued by his rejectionist politics to abate, they have worsened. It must have been very frustrating for him and may partly explain why he released There was a country, a subtle notice that this country is up to no good. Unfortunately, the impression that Nigeria is up to no good or not worth it has concretised in the minds of many.
Still, such position is only a case of philosophers interpreting the world. The point is to change it. A number of what is happening to Nigeria today gives no one any hope about change but the eternal lesson of the Biafran War is that this centre must hold. What is certain is that even in his grave, Achebe would, instinctively, contribute to the process of the re-invention of Nigeria. He would do so because he is a humanist. It is because he is a humanist that he was in the People’s Redemption Party, (PRP) in 1978.
Finally, those who are mourning him are committing anti-literature ‘crimes’. The author of a timeless work like Things Fall Apart doesn’t die. He merely transits from life to life. So, the correct attitude to his transition is not mourning but a celebration of life.
…The Trouble With Nigeria By a Foreigner
Some Nigerians are predictably angry over this portrait of the country while others are overjoyed by it. The piece by a foreigner, a Dutch journalist has been massively circulated since last Thursday and the reactions have continued to this day. Below is not the entire piece but the portion that appears to be the vortex of critique from both sides – those who love it and those who don’t. The sharp division has been such that some of us can not say where we stand anymore. I thought I should reproduce the portion here. Not that the remaining portion is any less critical of Nigeria but space doesn’t allow another reproduction of it here. So, here we go with the quote from the piece in question by Femke Van Zeijl, the foreign journalist:
“I used to think corruption was Nigeria’s biggest problem, but I’m starting to doubt that. Every time I probe into one of the many issues this country is encountering, at the core I find the same phenomenon: the widespread celebration of mediocrity. Unrebuked underachievement seems to be the rule in all facets of society. A governor building a single road during his entire tenure is revered like the next Messiah; an averagely talented author who writes a colourless book gets sponsored to represent Nigerian literature overseas; and a young woman with no secretarial skills to speak of gets promoted to the oga’s office faster than any of her properly trained colleagues.
Needless to say the politician is probably hailed by those awaiting part of the loot he is stealing; the writer might have got his sponsorship from buddies he has been sucking up to in hagiographies paid for by the subjects; and the young woman’s promotion is likely to be an exchange for sex or the expectancy of it. So some form of corruption plays a role in all of these examples.
But corruption per se does not necessarily stand in the way of development. Otherwise a country like Indonesia—number 118 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, not that far removed from Nigeria’s 139—would never have made it to the G-20 group of major economies. An even more serious obstacle to development is the lack of repercussions for underachievement. Who in Nigeria is ever held accountable for substandard performance?”
