The Demise of the Eagle on the Iroko: Chinua Achebe (I)

There are expectedly, already an avalanche of offerings on the life and times of Achebe. Some of the tributes are defiant of the traditional African don’t-values to offer acerbic criticism of the deceased—the don’t talk ‘evil’ of the dead, even when that so-called evil has purifying and redemptive power for the society which Achebe in […]

There are expectedly, already an avalanche of offerings on the life and times of Achebe. Some of the tributes are defiant of the traditional African don’t-values to offer acerbic criticism of the deceased—the don’t talk ‘evil’ of the dead, even when that so-called evil has purifying and redemptive power for the society which Achebe in his life—time sought to cure, guide and teach. In this regard, I don’t know how many people read the comments of the radical, profoundly perceptive critical tribute on Achebe by Ibrahim Bello Kano, in which, after some disarmingly eulogistic expose on the Eagle on the Iroko of the African literary plane, went on to deal with realms of literary and political deficits of Achebe’s odyssey. For instance, having agreed with the commonly held view that Achebe is perhaps the most comprehensively lucid novelist coming out of Africa, with his legendary power of clairvoyance and the uncanny, expressed reservations about the aesthetic and visionary quality of his later works beginning from The Anthills of the Savannah(which he adjudged as lacking in plottal and thematic coherence and structural beauty, to his last work, There Was a Country, which, he finds, like many of us have remonstrated, was presaged by the earlier polemic outing, The Trouble With Nigeria which has manifested the geo-political reductionism ( the emerging  ethnic nationalist bent of a foremost pan-African nationalist). I shall retrieve from my immediate scripted memory my own capturing of Achebe’s painful descent into ethnic politics after having championed the honing of the consciousness of the Nigerian and African literati for identity re-scooping and retrieval in his classic, pervasively popular, populist novelistic masterpiece, Things Fall Apart (1958)  
It is a matter of historical irony that Achebe exponented the counter-West literary controversy in African literature, planting the seed that essentially germinated Africa’s Postcolonial creative writing and ended his literary career with a highly controversial and provocative book which gave inadvertently him an image of an irredentist, even recidivist ethno-nationalist. As things stand, from both extremes of the poll, Achebe’s name and contribution to the humanist and humane domain of African literature, culture and politics remain indelible, elevating and inspiring  for now and for all times.
On the bombshell called There Was a Country, I drew inferences of the summative statements of Achebe as an exemplar of polemic and rhetorical controversy and public intellectual enigma’
For instance, take his Achebe’s portrayal of Azikiwe and Awolowo. Here are the features and profiles that the author draws of the two frontline Nigerian political giants.
He posits, without blinking  and with frightening finality, that, ‘The father of African independence was Nnamdi Azikiwe. There is no question about that at all.’ He ‘was the preeminent political figure of my youth and a ‘man who was endowed with the political pan-Africanist vision.’  Many will have debated this with mortal fervour. The reasons Achebe adduced for this claim here are, among other tenuous rationale, ; Achebe’s  mentoring of great leaders, including Nkrumah who led Ghana to its independence, his pioneering journalism, especially his opening up the media space for political activism, populist and accessible journalism, departing from Aristocratic media establishmentarianism  in West Africa; c) the founding of the national Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons ( NCNC)in 1944 (by Achebe?) and which later became the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC). Where did Achebe dump the likes of Herbert Macaulay?
Achebe stated that Obafemi Awolowo ‘emerged as one of Nigeria’s dominant political figures; that he re-united his ancient Yoruba people, resuscitated their ethnic pride and created a political party for them. That Awo’s central worry and concern was with the domination of the NCNC by the Igbo elite led by Azikiwe.
He opined that Awo manoeuvred, through making ‘tactical political moves, to regain regional and southern political power and influence from the dominant NCNC. He further argued that Awolowo galvanized political support in Yoruba land and riverine/minorities who ‘shared a similar dread of the prospects of Igbo political domination.’
It is easy to take these perceptions, coming in the early part of the book (p.46), as fore-shadowing the pro-Igbo (the eulogy of Azikiwe) and anti Yoruba (ethnicizing Awo’s politics) bent of the entire book thus generating the unfortunately, rabid ethnic discourse that emerged with such frightening passion in the aftermath of the publication of the book which many of the authoritative critics from both sides of the divide churned out.
Thus when Achebe drew further conclusions on Awolowo’s role in the Civil War, at p.233 onward, the  Pro-Awolowo reader were helped into no other conclusion than they have arrived at. Achebe concluded from the statements he found credited to Awolowo about the expediencies of war (a statement he found ‘most callous and unfortunate’) to the effect that ‘All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder.’
In a manner that sounded like reductionist politics, Achebe stated, that ‘It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for the advancement of his Yoruba people in general…Awo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose—the Nigerian-Biafran War—his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. I (p.233)
Heavy words, if you ask me, even though the genocide theory was placed, frontally, at the door-steps of the Gowon/northern led federal government, and the complicity of senior technocrats like Ayida and Enahoro, the contrivance of the instrument of genocide was, in Achebe’s view the handiwork of Awolowo, for a purpose that was ‘diabolical’, for personal and ethnic political opportunism.
 It also blurred the author’s view points, even on the more positive, largely futuristic and patriotic aspects of the book. Such aspects include the illuminating story of Achebe’s own childhood, growing up history, which informed his creativity and choice of the writing career, the place of the writer as a voice of his age and the creator of ‘African voice in world literature and the ‘telling of the African story and the African perspective (p53, 56, 58), with an obligation ‘not to align with power against the powerless’. Many of these perspectives, including the inevitability of the political role of the writer—the dialectical web of the relationship of political art and the artistic politics in which the African writer is inexorably entangled, have been offered by critics and by himself.