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Two of Chinua Achebe's novels feature in the list of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century.
To read extracts from those books, click on the relevant title below.
Chinua Achebe's presented the 2002 Steve Biko memorial lecture in South Africa.
Seeking balance in the world of stories
To read extracts from those books, click on the relevant title below.
Home and Exile
Chinua Achebe
2003
Canongate (First published 2001 by Anchor Books, USA)
Reviewed by Duncan Proudfoot
This is a book, as the jacket blurb has it, about "the importance and dangers of stories". Achebe, whose 1959 debut novel Things Fall Apart was a landmark in African literature, was born in 1930 and raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centres of Anglican missionary work in eastern Nigeria. Home and Exile comes out of three lectures that Achebe delivered as the 1998 McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard University.
In the first piece, "My Home Under Imperial Fire", Achebe describes being "five years old and riding in a motor vehicle, also for the first time.... Sitting in the back of the truck and facing what seemed the wrong way, I could not see where we were going, only where we were coming from" (the other first is his first visit to his "home town", Ogidi). The occasion was his father’s retiring from 30 years of missionary work. In fact, as the book goes on to show, Achebe was indeed facing the wrong way and it is through living in Ogidi among his people the Igbo that he understands, importantly, where he has come from.
Achebe begins his task of renaming and reclaiming by dismissing the appelation of "tribe" as defined by the Oxford dictionary for the 10 million Igbo people. While allowing that the concept of "nation" is not without its own difficulties, the Igbo, Achebe asserts, are a nation. As he writes: "The subject of naming, especially naming to put down, will come up in a variety of forms in the course of these deliberations."
There is an Igbo expression, "Nku di na mba na-eghelu mba nni" meaning, "Every community has enough firewood in its own forests for all the cooking it needs to do". Achebe employs this as the starting point for an exploration of intellectual imperialism. He describes the bemused welcome extended by Ogidi to newcomers who asked how to worship the gods of Ogidi. What terrible thing had these newcomers done to their own gods that they should make such a request? Best not to pry, the people of Ogidi felt, and gave them their gods Udo and Ogwugwu to worship, though requesting the newcomers to refer to Udo’s son and Ogwugu’s daughter in order to avoid any confusion. What, Achebe goes on, must the people of Ogidi have made of strangers who appeared from far away over the sea come specifically to tell them that they were worshipping false gods and to impose a God of their own? It is interesting to note in passing that today there are 17.5 million Nigerians who belong to the Anglican Church, a quarter of the worldwide communion; one wonders what Achebe would make of the largely conservative influence that they exert on the much smaller church at the centre of the empire that
was.
"Achebe's vision for world literature is that everyone should have a voice and that no-one should speak on behalf of anyone else"
Achebe tells the wry story of how his father the priest, on discovering that his younger half-brother had constructed a pagan shrine in the "piazza"—as the front room in the Achebe household was termed—while acting as caretaker, half-smiled in seeming ironic reflection on a life spent converting strangers in far-flung parts of Olu and Igbo while Satan was hard at work in his front room.
In discussing a story in which the chicken is absent from a meeting of the animals and is elected, in its absence, to be the main sacrificial animal, Achebe describes the African ideal of democracy as a gathering sufficiently small for everybody to be present and to "speak his own mouth", as it is put locally. This is very much Achebe’s vision for world literature: not that it should be a small gathering, but that everyone should have a voice and that no-one should speak, or be accepted to speak, on behalf of anyone else.
Achebe is scathing about Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, a book that he studied as an undergraduate, described by Time Magazine in 1952 as "the best novel ever written about Africa". He describes Cary as a disgruntled colonial employee taking out his frustration on a people and a place which he neither understood nor felt empathy for, a writer parroting the distaste and contempt of a long history of denigration of Africa and Africans in European literature. He traces this back to Captain John Lok’s account of his voyage to West Africa in 1561, and even before then, to judge from Lok’s references. This is what Lok has to say about Africans:
a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion ... whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie ... whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speach, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.
Achebe understands this European literature about Africa arising in part from the need to justify the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed some of this writing specifically makes the outrageous claim that to be sold into slavery was a mercy compared to remaining in Africa.
Achebe describes the simple delight he’d taken in stories as a schoolboy, but Mister Johnson called into question for him his "childhood assumption of the innocence of stories". Apocryphally, it is supposed to have been a spur to his becoming a writer; certainly Achebe quotes approvingly Salman Rushdie’s quip, "the Empire writes back".
Achebe does Conrad an injustice, and his own argument a disservice, to lump him together with writers such as Joyce Cary and Elspeth Huxley. He mistakes Conrad for his narrator Marlow when he fulminates against Marlow’s comment in describing the Africans he had seen from his paddle steamer on the Congo River, "Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman."
Achebe comments on the reception of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1957 [Read an extract of The Palm-Wine Drinkard here]. Many Nigerians living in London and the United States seemed embarrassed by what they saw as the crude English in which it was written; they seemed to feel that it served only to further denigrate Nigeria and Nigerians in Britain and the USA. Achebe dismisses their criticisms as a kind of craven self-hatred; his preference is for truthful stories about places like Nigeria written by the people who live there, supposedly objective literary "standards" be damned. He praises Dylan Thomas for his enthusiastic review of the book, a writer recognising good writing, and damns Elspeth Huxley for her condemnation of Tutuola’s book. He sees Huxley’s criticism as begrudging those with real authority to write about Africa, her knowing on some level that she was an impostor, writing about Kenya and Kenyans with neither real love nor understanding, writing as an apologist for the imperial project.
The final piece, "Today, the Balance of Stories", begins by looking at the African proverb: "Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter". Achebe uses an account of how, as children, he and his friends had given the relatively innocuous Royal Mail lorry that linked the Empire’s postal service to his small village the name of Ogbu-akwu-ugwo, which means Killer-that-doesn’t-pay back — "that mixture of admiration and fear that children can handle so well", he explains—to discuss how "strong language is the very nature of the dialogue between dispossession and its rebuttal". A further related anecdote recounts how while a British person might boast of the first empire in history on which the sun never set, an Indian riposte might be: "Yes, because God cannot trust an Englishman in the dark!"
Achebe describes the twentieth century as witnessing the significant beginning of "‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession". Their voices should be raised in what he calls "the universal conversation". Percipiently he notes: "After a short period of dormancy and a little self-doubt about its erstwhile imperial mission, the West may be ready to resume its old domineering monologue in the world". We can take it by now, I think, that he has been proved correct in this.
VS Naipaul is another writer that Achebe lambastes. He dismisses passages of Naipaul’s writing on Africa as "downright outrageous" and "pompous rubbish", and describes Naipaul toadying to the West, praising its benevolence in the world. By contrast, Achebe is admiring of the Indian writer RK Narayan who "invested in India; he did not take himself out". In Achebe’s account, Narayan describes himself sometimes looking out of his window and quickly walking away again because there were simply too many stories out there!
Returning to his opening theme of the postal service of Empire, Achebe recounts a ridiculous scene from the 50s in which the Nigerian educator and social critic Tai Solarin is asked, on presenting a letter to go to Nigeria in a British post office: "Is Nigeria ours or French?" Withgreat dignity, Solarin replied: "Nigeria is yours, Madam". As Achebe points out "that exchange ... could not happen today and, if it did, Solarin would have been glad of the educational opportunity to tell the good lady that, for good or ill, Nigeria was neither hers nor French but his."
Achebe ends this collection by disputing Salman Rushdie’s assertion that "literature has little or nothing to do with a writer’s home address". Achebe sees his role and the role of all writers to be to write from home, about home, to take part in that "universal conversation" that will lead to a truly universal civilisation. What the world needs, Achebe feels, is a "Balance of Stories".
Duncan Proudfoot is a South African working in the publishing world of London.
