| A long way from home
Chinua Achebe, ‘the father of modern African literature', talks to Ed Pilkington about inventing a new language, his years in exile from his beloved Nigeria -- and why he changed his name from Albert By
rights I should be talking to Chinua Achebe in Ogidi, his home town in
Nigeria. He should be telling me about his efforts as chair- person of
the village council to build schools, improve the water and bring
health to the people. We should be talking about whether and when the
rains will come and how the yam harvest is doing this year.
Instead we are sitting
in a bungalow on the banks of the Hudson, upriver from New York,
surrounded by clapboard houses, rolling green hills and cows chewing
the cud. The nearest restaurants have names such as Rose's Kitchen,
Pat's Place and Hickory. As I arrive, Achebe is sitting at his desk at
the window overlooking a gravel front drive.
It seems a strange place
to find the writer credited above all others with inventing the modern
African novel. Nadine Gordimer, one of the many writers indebted to
Achebe for the ground he broke, described him last month as the "father
of modern African literature". She was one of the judges who awarded
Achebe, now 76, this year's Man Booker International prize, given every
two years for an exceptional lifetime's achievement. A writer as driven
and as political as Achebe neither needs nor solicits such recognition,
yet he is grateful to receive it.
"I'm a practised writer
now," he says, as we start to talk in his small, homely sitting room.
"But when I began I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew
that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was and
that would have come out even if I didn't want it."
That "something inside me" was his first, and enduringly monumental, novel, Things Fall Apart.
Rereading it before I see Achebe, I find the book has lost none of its
power to shock. Set in the 1890s, the first two-thirds of the story
steeps you in the ancient ways of Achebe's Igbo people, with their
several gods, elaborate ceremonies and hierarchies, and the tough but
effective policing mechanisms that force Okonkwo, the subject of the
book, into exile for accidentally killing a boy.
And then comes the
memorable line: "During the last planting season a white man had
appeared in their clan." The white missionaries, and the terrible
destruction they brought, had arrived.
Published in 1958, Things Fall Apart
turned the West's perception of Africa on its head -- a perception that
until then had been based solely on the views of white colonialists,
views that were at best anthropological, at worst, to adopt Achebe's
famous savaging of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
"thoroughgoingly racist". As research for his 1975 essay on the Conrad
book, Image of Africa, Achebe counted all the words spoken in Heart of Darkness
by Africans themselves. "There were six!" he tells me, laughing
luxuriously. The rest of the time Conrad's Africans merely make animal
noises, he says, or shriek a lot.
By contrast, Things Fall Apart
was, Achebe says now, "a story that only someone who went through it
could be trusted to give. It was insisting to be told by the owner of
the story, not by others, no matter how well meaning or competent."
And it was not just the
ownership of the story that was revolutionary --the language was too.
Achebe's novels are part standard English, part pidgin, part language
of folklore and proverb. His writing crackles with vivid, universal and
yet deeply African images. "Living fire begets cold, impotent ash"; "If
you want to get at the root of murder ... look for the blacksmith who
made the matchet". "Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded
very highly," he writes in Things Fall Apart, "and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."
Achebe says he is particularly pleased that the Booker judges recognised the way in which he created a new language for Things Fall Apart.
"The story is so different from what I had read as a child; I knew I
couldn't write like Dickens or Conrad. My story would not accept that.
So you had to make an English that was new. Whether it was going to
work or not, I couldn't tell."
If bald sales statistics are any measure, it did work -- handsomely. Things Fall Apart
has sold more than 10-million copies and has been translated into 50
languages. More importantly, it spawned a whole generation of African
writers who emulated its linguistic ingenuity and political vision. In
the same week as Achebe won the Booker Prize, one of his great
admirers, fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, took the Orange
prize for Half of a Yellow Sun.
Achebe's parents lived
the life of converts, changing their names to Isaiah and Janet and
christening him Albert. Born in 1930, he lived a childhood full of the
Bible and hymns and he learned English from the age of eight. Later he
was sent to the University of London -- located in the Nigerian city of
Ibadan (it is now called Ibadan University).
Through his early years
this goodly Christianity was life as he assumed it should be. Villagers
in Ogidi who remained aloof from the church were considered "lost" by
his family. "We called them the people of nothing," says Achebe.
But as he grew older he
puzzled that others, especially an uncle who resisted conversion, were
leading different lives. They would hold "heathen" celebrations and
offer food to "idols", as his parents would have it. What began for the
young Achebe as curiosity grew into bemusement and finally anger about
the lies that he had been told as a child.
"The difference between
what I had been told and what I saw was very powerful. The language the
church people used -- of ‘idolisation' -- was in itself an assault. And
it hasn't changed. Missionaries today still believe they are going to
save lost souls. And it is a great lie."
The paradox, I suggest,
is that if it weren't for the missionary influence, for that very
English education, he would not be the writer he is today.
"Our lives were nothing but paradoxes," he replies.
The dawning realisation
that his childhood world was founded upon a lie provided the rocket
fuel that propelled him into writing, and made him swap the name Albert
for the local name Chinua. In his more recent work he has turned the
focus of that anger from the colonial intruder on to the African
interloper -- the corrupt and corrupted leaders who inherited the
mantle of power from the white man and went on to abuse the hopes
generated by independence.
In A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah
(1987) he tears into the greed, egomania, lust and laziness of
post-independence African rulers, giving us a chronicle of Nigeria's
descent into the autocratic rule under which it still labours today. In
those books, and in a stream of non-fiction essays, he has been a
consistent irritant to the powerful.
And he has paid the
price. His literary life has been punctuated by threats and periods of
semi-exile. The most bizarre incident arose out of his depiction of a
fictional coup in A Man of the People. At the time West Africa
was a stranger to military revolts, but he decided to include a coup in
the story, he says now, simply to "frighten my readers. I wanted to
scare the hell out of those politicians who were misbehaving so badly."
On the Friday before the
book was published, he was attending a meeting of writers in Lagos when
a friend who had just read the proofs of the novel burst in,
exclaiming: "Chinua, you are a prophet. Everything in this book has
happened, except the coup."
The next morning,
however, Nigeria's first military coup was set in train. On the Sunday
Achebe's British editors contacted him via the embassy to check he was
OK and to see if he wanted to go ahead with publication. Yes, he said,
and the novel went public on the Monday.
The coincidence of that
fictional description and the real-life coup that was led by plotters
from his own Igbo people put him under suspicion.
Drunken soldiers came by
his office looking for him. Eventually, he fled to his home in
Igboland. In the Biafran civil war that followed he acted as
part-diplomat, part-proselytiser, making the case for the short-lived
Biafran republic. He captured the tragedy of the war, and the famine
that it prompted, in poetry. He wrote of the starving boy with "large
sunken eyes stricken past boredom to a flat unrecognising glueyness".
Meanwhile his political activities were monitored closely from the
north -- "I was not popular with the military," he says with admirable
understatement -- and in the end he was forced to spend periods in
America, where he took up university teaching.
More recently he has had
to live in America once again, but for very different reasons. In 1990
he was driving between Ogidi, where he had just been made chairperson
of the village council, and Lagos, when his car crashed.
Achebe was knocked
unconscious. "Apparently the car rolled over and over and was virtually
lying on top of me. My son couldn't do anything himself so he ran to
the road and shouted ‘This is Chinua Achebe' at people to make them
stop. Crowds came to lift the vehicle off me."
He spent six months in a
hospital in London. "It changed my life," he says, unnecessarily -- the
impact of that crash is visible. Achebe sits in a wheelchair, paralysed
from the waist down. He says he feels "continuous, curious" pain and as
we talk he rubs his knees from time to time as though trying in vain to
soothe them.
The fact that he cannot
sit for long periods makes it difficult for him to do anything quickly
and he regrets that his work has suffered. His desk is covered in
unfinished essays and manuscripts, or in his peculiarly precise
diction: "There is a need for a number of things on my table to move to
the finish spot."
Two things stand out
among that pile of unfinished business: a new novel that he says is
well under way, though he won't talk about its narrative.
And a translation of Things Fall Apart into his mother tongue -- remarkably it has yet to appear in his Igbo dialect.
The other huge impact of
the crash is simply his location. He came to the US after London in
search of the best specialist treatment. He teaches at Bard College in
New York state, but says he is here really because of the medical care
he is getting. He intended to stay for a year, but 15 years later there
is still no end in sight for his medical exile.
I ask him what he misses
most about Nigeria. "I miss having to be told how things are there.
When the old people came and told me they wanted me to be chairperson
of the council of my village I had to respond. That's what I intended
-- to strive to develop, to build schools and hospitals ... "
The accident has left
him weakened and, the longer we talk, the softer his voice becomes.
When I come to transcribe the recording of our conversation, I have to
turn up the volume.
Achebe is not lonely: he
has his family with him by the Hudson. There are African masks and
ivory carvings all around the room. But you can almost touch his
longing to be back home.
Someone asked him recently, he says, to write about his favourite place.
It got him thinking
about why he loves Ogidi so much when it has no great mountain or
cathedral and even the River Niger is miles away. So what is it that
explains this deep longing?
His voice rallies just a
little as he replies: "I can't really explain it. But for me this
place, this village, is significant. It is where I formed my identity."
-- © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007
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Chinua Achebe: ‘I'm a practised writer now.' (Photograph: AP)
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