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

Chinua Achebe, with others of his generation of writers – a gneration that includes Africa’s and black’s first nobel laureat, Wole  Soyinka, J.P Clark –Bekederemo, the frontline African poet and dramatist, Gabriel Okara, Chukwuemeka Ike, Mabel Segun, the late Cyprian Ekwensi, and so on, has made Nigerian literature a covetable cultural product across the globe. […]

Chinua Achebe, with others of his generation of writers – a gneration that includes Africa’s and black’s first nobel laureat, Wole  Soyinka, J.P Clark –Bekederemo, the frontline African poet and dramatist, Gabriel Okara, Chukwuemeka Ike, Mabel Segun, the late Cyprian Ekwensi, and so on, has made Nigerian literature a covetable cultural product across the globe.
When the elephant passes, knives of myriad shapes and sizes slash away their chunks from its mammoth sizes. When a great hero is celebrated, various sages offer a festival of encomiums of his great exploits. When the maiden product of a the literary Iroko turns golden, the literary birds come to perch and to sing. For, it is impossible to separate the man from his art,  especially when that artistic product has become a world classic, the exponent of the quintessential African fiction and the trail-blazer and protopype of the Postcolonial novel. A couple of years ago, the world was at Achebe’s feet celebrating his most widely read, widely translated work of fiction, Things Fall Apart. We celebrated fifty years of Things Fall Apart and we celebrated the creator of Things Fall Apart, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. The story of this great and universal man of letters; this master of story-telling; this front-liner teacher of African values, lores and mores; has been told and re-told, leaving ever so much yet to be told. Every new and sharp knife finds fresh and lean meat to chisel in great chunks.
Chinua Achebe, as he later preferred to be called and is known, was born into an emerging world of cultural syncretisn—an age in which colonialism was taking its firm root and the indigenous culture was being greatly assailed to the extent that things began to fall apart—things are still prophetically and uncanningly falling apart in Nigeria, in Africa and in the globe. Thus, Isaiah Okafor and Janet N. Achebe, who fetch Chinua to the world on November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Anambra State, Nigeria, were both devout Christians—the father is even an Evangelist. But the environment to which he was born was a thriving cauldron of indigenous Igbo culture, where the masquerade cults were vibrant, and where proverbs provide th tasty oil with which yams of words are eaten. Thirty One years later, in 1961, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, who bore him ‘God’s bits of wood’—Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi and Nwando. Chinua Achebe attended Government College, Umuahia between 1944 and 1947 and recieved the Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of London in 1953, having studied English, History and Religion at the University College Ibadan, where his peers of the literary fraternity, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo also studied.
We celebrate the life of Achebe becuase he cleared the path and carved a canon for the germination and blossoming of Modern African fiction. He is not the first Nigerian novelist. Cyprian Ekwensi and Amos Tutuola wrote their first novels before him. But it was Things Fall Apart that provided the counter-factual response to the colonialist paternalistic perception of Africa—as we found in the racist fiction of Joyce Carry in Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. The novel was regarded as  a classic- one of the half- dozen best  European novels, and it gave the imperialist perspective of Africa. Things Fall Apart is the classic African novel which gave a fitting reconstruction of that pejoration. He reconstructed and transmuted the conventions, cannons and aesthetics of the novel, a  European art into African Literature” which carries African thought, Africn message, African rhthym and flow, while profoundly enriching that language in a way no English man could ever do with his own language.
Chinua Achebe gave the pristine form and essence to postcolonial literature. In Things Fall Apart, all the post-colonial nations found a mirror into their own history, life and culture before and around colonialism. As Maya Angelou once aptly asserted, in Things Fall Apart, ‘All readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents, friends and themselves along Nigerian roads’.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is one of the few novels which have been translated into about fifty other languages acrosss the world, with many more to come.  But the novel is, essentially, the proponent of the many great works of fiction, poetry, polemics and  scholarship that have emmited from the pen of this partiarch of African fiction and a ‘magical writer who ha been correctly described a one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and I dare of all times. Peruse and ponder this staggering output: Things Fall Apart, 1958, No Longer at Ease, 1960The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, 1962, Arrow of God, 1964, A Man of the People, 1966, Chike and the River, 1966, Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems, 1971, How theLeopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi), 1972, Girls at War, 1973, Christmas at Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973, Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975, The Flute, 1975, The Drum, 1978, Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christofer Okigbo (edited with Dubem Okafor), 1978, Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry (co-editor), 1982, The Trouble With Nigeria, 1984, African Short Stories, 1984, Anthills of the Savannah, 1988
Hopes and Impediments, 1988.  And recently we were to the most controversial of his creative output – There was a Country – A Personal History of Biafra (2012).
The great artificer whom the feminist scholar Elaine Showalter referred to in her citation on the occasion of the award of  the Man Booker Prize as the man who ‘illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking words and forms for new realities and societies’ has departed from this troubled shores. The Nobel Prize never came his way, but Achebe was the recipient of numerous prestigious Awards including the Commonwealth Prize for Literature, the Honorary Fellowship of American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Man Booker Prize, and very significantly from the home front, the maiden issue of the Nigerian national Order of Merit Award.
Not many have cause to remark and his last offering did not improve that situation. The truth is that Achebe’s palpable concern for Nigeria is not just in his literary mediations, some of which have been found to be uncanny and clarevoyant. Achebe, when he found it compelling, actively engaged himself in partisan politics, like when he join the People’s Redemption Party (PR), the most radical political party of the late 70s and 80s. As captured, eloquently, in the epigraph above, Achebe’s genial minds dreamt dreams for emancipation and redemption of his country. He was not only engaged in political art, he was a political animal of the noblest order. It is now morning yet on creation day as the great masquerade finally danced out.