Chinua Achebe’s Legacy: Illuminations from Africa 9780798304900

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Chinua Achebe’s Legacy

Illuminations from Africa James Ogude (ed)

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First Published in 2015 by the Africa Institute of South Africa Private Bag X41 Pretoria South Africa, 0001 ISBN: 978-0-7983-0490-0 © Copyright Africa Institute of South Africa 2015 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright owner. To copy any part of this publication, you may contact DALRO for information and copyright clearance. Any unauthorised copying could lead to civil liability and/or criminal sanctions.

Telephone: 086 12 DALRO (from within South Africa); +27 (0)11 712-8000 Telefax: +27 (0)11 403-9094 Postal Address: P O Box 31627, Braamfontein, 2017, South Africa www.dalro.co.za. Any unauthorised copying could lead to civil liability and/or criminal sanctions. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at in this book are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Africa Institute of South Africa. Project Manager: Mmakwena Chipu Copy- Editing: Write Skills Proofreading: Bangula Educational Services Design and Layout: Pamset Index: Dudu Coelho Printing: The Africa Institute of South Africa is a think tank and research organisation, focusing on political, socio-economic, international and development issues in contemporary Africa. The Institute conducts research, publishes books, monographs, occasional papers, policy briefs and a quarterly journal – Africa Insight. The Institute holds regular seminars on issues of topical interest. It is also home to one of the best library and documentation centres world-wide, with materials on every African country. For more information, contact the Africa Institute of South Africa at Private Bag X41, Pretoria, South Africa 0001 Email [email protected]; or visit our website at http://www.ai.org.za

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Table of Contents Dedication

i

Preface

ii

Notes on Contributors

iii

Introduction Why celebrate Chinua Achebe’s Legacy? James Ogude

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CHAPTER 1

Achebe, Art and Critical Consciousness Notes from/for South Africa

1

Bhekizizwe Peterson CHAPTER 2

Postcolonial Modernity and Normalisation Reading Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God in the Present Tense Harry Garuba

16

CHAPTER 3

There was a Country Achebe’s Last Salute Garnette Oluoch-Olunya

30

CHAPTER 4

Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child and African Cosmopolitanism  Ronit Frenkel

41

CHAPTER 5

Late Achebe Biafra as Literary Genealogy Christopher Ouma

50

CHAPTER 6

References, Traditions, Continuities Story-telling and Memory in Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain Dina Ligaga

61

CHAPTER 7

Nationalism in Dialogue Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubahi in conversation with Chinua Achebe’s Characters Unifer Dyer

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CHAPTER 8

Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air

92

Grace Musila CHAPTER 9

Things Fall Apart On Screen Re-thinking Closure in Achebe’s Narrative Innocent Ebere Uwah

106

CHAPTER 10

Chinua Achebe The Paradox of Exile beyond the Tropes of Migrancy Senayon Olaoluwa

118

CHAPTER 11

Revisiting the African Archive Chinua Achebe, Sol Plaatje and the Re-making of African History

138

Tribute 1 The Incredible Resonance of Achebe’s Work

145

James Ogude

Veronique Tadjo

Tribute 2 Chinua Achebe A Central Influence on My Writing

150

Susan Nalugwa Kiguli

Tribute 3 Chinua Achebe as Literary Influence A Writer’s Perspective

156

Index

159

Nthikeng Mohlele

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Dedication This tribute to Achebe is dedicated to Prof. Mbulelo Vizikhungu Mzamane, one of South Africa’s foremost men of letters. Prof. Mzamane, who passed away on 16 February 2014, was the keynote speaker at the Achebe colloquium held at the University of Pretoria, at which the papers and tributes published in this book were frst presented. May his works, like those of Achebe, continue to inspire new voices on the African continent and beyond.

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Preface The symposium to celebrate the legacy of Chinua Achebe at the University of Pretoria in November 2013 was an outstanding, historical, literary event. The critical refection on his contribution to Africa’s literary landscape, now made available as a book, is itself a major contribution to that landscape. As the reader will see in going through this collection, Chinua Achebe will remain, through his œuvre, a great son of Africa and a selfess visionary. When he published Things Fall Apart in 1958 his objective was to challenge and demystify some of the long-held perceptions about Africa, its peoples and their cultures concocted in the toxic crucibles of imperialist and colonial design. At the time, a lot of literature supposedly about Africa was written mainly by Europeans and had more to do with their misguided perceptions of Africa than with any African reality. In later years Achebe wrote ‘The Novelist as a Teacher’, an essay in which he describes his objective as being: ‘to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement ...’. Indeed, after the publication of Things Fall Apart there was an upsurge of literature from different parts of the continent and Achebe was instrumental in making these African voices heard. I believe this burgeoning of a new wave of writing across the continent is what earned Achebe the title of ‘Father of African Literature’. He was honoured with this title, not because he was the frst African to write a novel, but because, among other things, he tirelessly opened doors for a plethora of fellow African writers. In 1962, following the remarkable success of Things Fall Apart internationally – it had become an instant bestseller worldwide – Achebe was appointed founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series. As the Editor, he solicited manuscripts from writers across the continent and introduced the work of many African literary giants, including the likes of Christopher Okigbo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Alex la Guma, Ama Ata Aidoo and many others who went on to become household names across the African continent. Because of Achebe’s solidarity with the people of South Africa, not just the writers, Nelson Mandela’s frst published book, No Easy Walk to Freedom, was published as part of the series. Achebe brought hope to the African continent. In his fve decades of meaningful contribution to the development of African literatures, he worked tirelessly to bring African writers together and make their voices heard. And he continues to do so from his grave. Let me borrow the voice of an elder from Abazon in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah: ‘The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the ferce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards – each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story’. And I say boldly: read this book. Keorapetse Kgositsile National Poet Laureate

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Notes on Contributors Bhekizizwe Peterson is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has held invited Fellowships at Yale University and Birmingham University (UK) and served on various editorial, statutory and artistic committees, juries and boards across the continent. He has published extensively on African Literature, Performance and Cultural Studies, as well as Black Intellectual Traditions in South Africa. His publications include Fragments in the Sun, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality and Zulu Love Letter: A Screenplay. Peterson has been active as a writer and participant in Black cultural practices since the late 1970s and he was a founding member of the Afrika Cultural Centre and the Dhlomo Theatre. He is the writer and/or producer of internationally acclaimed flms including Fools, Zulu Love Letter and Zwelidumile (all directed by Ramadan Suleman) and Born into Struggle, The Battle for Johannesburg and Miners Shot Down (all directed by Rehad Desai). e-Mail: [email protected] Christopher Ouma is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s English Department, South Africa. His teaching and research interests are in East, West and Southern African literatures, popular cultures, as well as literatures of the contemporary African Diaspora. Chris is currently co-editor of the journal Social Dynamics. e-Mail: christopher.ouma@ uct.ac.za Dina Ligaga is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research is in the feld of popular culture where she looks at the interactions between everyday life and ideology. She has published work on radio drama and new media cultures. She is also the co-author of Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities (Wits Press, 2011) and Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2012). e-Mail: [email protected] Garnette Oluoch-Olunya is a senior lecturer in the Department of Language & Communication, and Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at the Technical University of Kenya. In her work as a research consultant for the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, she is part of the organising team for the East African Arts Summit, held biennially; Nai ni Who, a Nairobi festival that celebrates city diversity, urban geographies and cultures, and identity formations; and coordinator of the Creative Entrepreneurship Course. She is also an Ubuntu project associate fellow with the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow, and is a member of the Glasgow University Council. e-Mail: [email protected]

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Notes on Contributors Grace Musila teaches at the English Department, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She holds a PhD in African Literature; and her research interests include West, East and Southern African literatures, popular culture and gender studies. She is also interested in the politics of knowledge production and how to make knowledge produced by Africa-based scholars visible and relevant across the continent and, beyond, in the global academy. Her work has been published in various academic journals, including Journal of Commonwealth Literatures, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Research in African Literatures, Africa Insight, Social Identities and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has also co-edited (with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga) an essay collection titled Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2012). e-Mail: [email protected] Harry Garuba is a poet, anthologist and scholar. He is author of the collection Shadow & Dream and Other Poems and has edited the hallmark anthology of new Nigerian poetry entitled Voices from the Fringe. An associate professor of English and African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, he is widely published in the feld of African Literature and postcolonial studies, has held a Mellon fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, a Mandela fellowship at the WEB Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and a visiting fellowship at Emory University. He is currently Director, School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town. e-Mail: [email protected] Innocent Ebere Uwah is a lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Film Studies,

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He teaches Radio, Film and Television production at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He is the liaison offcer between his department and the offce of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor in charge of Research and Development at the University. Dr Uwah is well travelled and a recipient of many awards, including the Global Partners’ Award in Communications in 2010 (USA) and that of All Africa House Fellowship, University of Cape Town, South Africa (2013), hosted by the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town (UCT). He has published widely on the subject of Nollywood, the popular Nigerian flm industry and African cinema and literature in general. In 2013 he published a monograph titled The Rhetoric of Culture in Nollywood. His research interests are the interface between representations and cultures, media and theatre education, identity constructions in flms and religious communications. e-Mail: [email protected] James Ogude is a Senior Research Fellow and the Deputy Director at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria - a position he took up at the beginning of May, 2013. Until his recent appointment he was a Professor of African Literature and Cultures in the School of Literature, Language and Media Studies at the University of the

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Notes on Contributors Witwatersrand, where he worked since 1994, serving as the Head of African Literature and also Assistant Dean – Research, in the Faculty of Humanities. He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation. He has also co-edited a total of four books and one anthology of African stories. The most recent edited book is: Rethinking Eastern African Literary and Intellectual Landscapes. Professor Ogude has published numerous articles in peer reviewed journals in the area of African Literature and Popular Culture in Africa. His research interests include the African novel and the Postcolonial experience in Africa. More recently his research focus has shifted to popular cultures and literature in Africa, with special focus on African Urban and City identities. Ogude is the Principal Investigator of a University of Pretoria research project on the African philosophy of Ubuntu which attracted major funding from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to undertake research in the meaning and value of Ubuntu in human and social development in Africa. Nthikeng Mohlele is the author of three novels: The Scent of Bliss (2008), Small Things (2013) and Rusty Bell (due October 2014). e-Mail: [email protected] Ronit Frenkel is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Johannesburg (UJ, South Africa). Her book publications include Reconsiderations: South African Indian Fiction and the Making of Race in Postcolonial Culture (Unisa Press, 2010) and Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Cultural and Literary Studies (Rodopi Press, 2011) with David Watson (Uppsala) and Pier Paolo Frassinelli (UJ). She also works on contemporary South African fction and Cultural Studies. e-Mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Senayon Olaoluwa is the coordinator of the programme in Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Some of his work has appeared in African Affairs, English Studies, Current Writing, English Studies in Africa, Critique and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, among others. e-Mail: [email protected] Susan Nalugwa Kiguli is an academic and poet. She is a senior lecturer in and Head of the Department of Literature, Makerere University, Uganda. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Leeds (UK). She is the African Studies Association Presidential Fellow, 2011, and has held the American Council of Learned Societies/ African Humanities Fellowship, 2010–2011, whereafter she took up residence at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research interests fall mainly in the area of Oral and Written African Poetry, Popular Song and Performance Theory. She has served as the chairperson of FEMRITE, Uganda Women Writers’ Association. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the African Writers Trust (AWT). Her frst volume of poetry, The African Saga (1998) situated her among the most exciting poets from Eastern and Southern Africa. The volume won

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Notes on Contributors the National Book Trust of Uganda Poetry Award (1999) and made literary history in Uganda by selling out in less than a year. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies both nationally and internationally. Her most recent collection of poetry Home foats in a distance/Zuhause treibt in der ferne (gedichte) is a bilingual edition in English and German (2012). A critic of poetry herself, she has written on Ugandan poetry, oral performance and the position of women writers in African literature. e-Mail: [email protected] Tshimangadzo Unifier Dyer is currently a research assistant with the Centre for the Advancement for Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She holds a Masters degree in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her Master’s research was titled The Paradoxes of Silenced Trauma in Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood. e-Mail: [email protected] Véronique Tadjo has a doctorate in African-American Studies and has travelled extensively in West Africa, Europe and the United States, as well as in Latin America. She taught at the University of Abidjan for several years and has conducted many workshops on writing (and book illustration for children) in numerous countries. Her novel Reine Pokou (Queen Pokou) was awarded the prestigious literary prize ‘Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire’ in 2005. She currently lives in South Africa where she is Head of French Studies in the School of Literature and Language Studies, University of Witwatersrand,

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Johannesburg. e-Mail:[email protected]

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Introduction Why Celebrate Chinua Achebe’s Legacy? James Ogude

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian-born writer, who passed away in the US in March 2013, is widely regarded as the father of modern African literature. And, although he had many precursors in Africa such as Sol Plaatje, J.C. Jordan, Mofolo, Shaaban Robert, René Maran and Paul Hozaume, all of whom wrote in African languages, and was also preceded by Amos Tutuola in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe remains Africa’s foremost writer. In 2008 the world celebrated the fftieth anniversary of his frst and highly acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart, published at the tender age of 28. This novel, published in 1958 and written just two years before Nigeria’s independence, had such a profound impact on African minds at its publication and continues to have a resonance for us as we negotiate the diffcult aftermath of the colonial experience, of which apartheid was the ultimate expression. Whether we are thinking of Achebe’s novels set in deep colonial history or simply those dealing squarely with the post-independence experience in Africa, the works

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

remain profoundly relevant to some of those persistent problems facing the continent, such as the place occupied by African intellectuals, the role of African writers and indeed major political issues such as the crisis of authority and misrule on the continent. His works in general have had a tremendous impact within the academy in Africa and globally. Indeed, Achebe is read and discussed more than any other African writer. His works, to use his words, have always provided us ‘with a second handle on existence’ enabling us to create for ourselves ‘a different set of reality from that which has been given to us’.1 What then is the historical signifcance of Achebe which separates him from his contemporaries and predecessors? Why is it that many genealogies of African writing, even those of the so-called third generation writers, always seem to begin with him? Why have Achebe’s works been so indispensable in our understanding of the colonial and postcolonial condition in Africa? The colloquium held at the University of Pretoria in November 2013, just seven months after Achebe’s death, was intended to convene a range of voices of resident scholars and writers on the continent to refect on the legacy and impact of Achebe’s works on Africa’s literary historiography. In bringing together these scholars, the colloquium had hoped that it would stimulate debate on broad cultural issues such as black intellectual

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Introduction traditions, literary genealogies, memory and the African archive, among other themes, which are growth research areas in Africa. Conceptually, there is no better place to initiate a serious discussion on African literature other than with the works of Chinua Achebe, the frst black editor of Heinemann African Writers Series. There is no doubt that Achebe’s essays and novels offer the opportunity to crystallise some of the conceptual cells that might underlie and sustain research and development in the feld of African literature. This is partly because, as Simon Gikandi reminds us, ‘Achebe’s works and thought always return to the forgotten questions of the African experience: Where, why, and when does colonialism begin to seize the initiative in the organisation of African society?’.2 In essence, Achebe is constantly forcing us to interrogate experience by insisting that, ‘(a)lthough experience is necessary for growth and survival … it is not simply what happened. A lot may happen to a piece of stone without making it wiser. Experience is what we are able to and prepared to do with what happens to us’.3 In other words, experience is about awareness that the African universe in itself is complex and has been invented and continues to be created by a myriad of forces, not least of them the colonial experience and the African people’s struggle against it. Experience is also about registering the awareness that we can alter things within our situation; that is, showing the ability to shape the course of history. Although the colloquium’s aim was to grapple with some of the questions that I raise above, I felt that a ftting tribute to Achebe would go beyond praise-singing and seek to extend the boundaries of existing scholarship on him. This kind of approach would of necessity call for a re-reading of Achebe’s works in order to bring to the surface both the same and the new – the plural text as Roland Barthes would have it.4 It is with these in mind that we set out to not only read Achebe in context by locating his works within a

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complex and occasionally tortured African history, but also reading his novels and essays transnationally to fully realise his global provenance. For example, we were interested in raising questions around Achebe’s reception and impact as his texts travel across history, different generations and indeed across different geographies. How does location affect our reception of Achebe? What happens when Achebe is read alongside other foundational writers such as Sol Plaatje and Amos Tutuola? What new insights can we still glean from Achebe’s recourse to the story as an agent of history? What is it about his novels that enable them to play the unprecedented role of mediators of African experience and the depository of a certain idea of Africa? What is the novelty of Achebe’s narrative prose, particularly his use of the English language and his polemical pronouncements on the subject? Indeed, what lessons can we learn from Achebe’s representation of the postindependence politics, particularly excesses of power and failure of authority in Africa? And although this book may not answer all these questions, it is an important window into Achebe’s rich legacy which shaped many of us that had that rare opportunity to read some of his works in high school and at university. My frst encounter with Achebe was in the early 1970s and I can vividly recall when, in my second year of secondary school, I encountered Things Fall Apart. This was due to

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Why Celebrate Chinua’s Achebe’s Legacy? the infuence of the now famous Ngugi revolution, I would learn later, which called for the re-location of African literature at the core of our English literature syllabus. The East African Examination Council, which had just replaced the Cambridge Overseas examination, had grudgingly introduced a few titles by African writers to supplement what was predominantly an English syllabus. The introduction of African titles was left to the discretion of the school and the English teachers. It would take a young English and History teacher, freshly returned from the US, and imbued with black consciousness radicalism to carry out the experiment that was to change the lives of many of us. Instead of offering largely abridged editions of writers, such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Dickens’ Oliver Twist and others such as David Copperfeld and David and the Gangster, we were now going to read a series of African writers such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease; Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest and the Lion and the Jewell, Cyprian Ekwesi’s Burning Grass, Grace Ogots’ Land Without Thunder and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Ocol. And do not get me wrong here; it is not because the European works that we read had no impact on our lives. We enjoyed the oration of Mark Antony at Caesar’s funeral and anybody who has read Dickens’ Oliver Twist, could not fail to identify with Oliver and his tribulations in the city of London – an experience which was all too familiar and very close to what took place in a number of African cities to many orphans, and to street boys and girls. Interesting as these texts may have been, what was evident was that we could not connect with them culturally and politically, coming out as we did under the shadow of African nationalism – a Pan-Africanist impulse that had defned the decade before and continued to shape our identities. If there was a single text that spoke to the political and intellectual climate animating the continent at that moment, that text was Things Fall Apart. It had a transformative

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power which was closely associated with that role of literature and, broadly speaking, that of culture, in the making of the African subjects. Whether within the academy or outside the academy, and in spite of those problems that divided us, particularly in the decade of the seventies, we all seemed to clamour for those Pan-Africanist moments that defned our identities as we came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. We all felt that we shared a common cultural project and with it, a common political destiny. In the words of Benedict Anderson, Things Fall Apart had created the space within which we could imagine ourselves as a community of people.5 It is for this reason, I believe, that there is a consensus that Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was important for the marking and making of that exciting frst decade of decolonisation. There also seems to be consensus that the production of the novel, as well as its reading and its circulation within the institutions of education, came to defne who we were, where we were, and as Achebe would say, where the rain began to beat us. Achebe’s works also stand out because of his consummate and eloquent use of language; that ability to transform ordinary metaphors into myth and complex instruments of cognition. Through his creative use of the English language, Achebe has shown us that Africans were not mere passive victims of those institutions of western modernity,

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Introduction but rather, that they engaged with them, appropriated and quite often subordinated them to the African cause for freedom and liberty. He animates his works with Igbo linguistic genius through new images and idioms, and the imposition of new syntactic structures and rhythms, and quite literally forces the English language to mediate the peculiar Igbo and African universe. In this sense, he has not only helped in subverting and undermining the so-called purity and the unassailable position of the English language, but he has also succeeded in domesticating it to mediate our peculiar realities. Finally, in trying to map out a new vision for the postcolonial state in Africa, Achebe’s works teach us not to fall into the trap of essentialism and political dogma. They urge us to move beyond simple binary opposition and to come to terms with how we are implicated in our own political paralysis and social decay. Like the character, Ikem Osodi, in his novel Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe insists that the writer should ‘aspire only to widen the scope of that self-examination … (and) not to foreclose it with catchy, half-baked orthodoxy’.6 On this he remains adamant and reminds us that: ‘Whenever something stands, something else stands beside it’;7 or better still, in his most eloquent proverb on change and historical movement in society, ‘The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place’.8 It is the way Achebe’s vision forces us to reckon with the duality and complexity of existence, constantly urging us to look at things twice and to complicate meaning, which sets his works apart from the average writers. For those who cling to political dogma or seek ideological closures, he warns them that they have no space ‘in the complex and paradoxical cavern of Mother Idoto’.9 I hope this collection of essays is an enduring

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tribute to Achebe’s rich legacy.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe, C., 1988. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965 – 1987. Oxford: Heinemann, p. 96. 2 Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe. London: James Currey, p. 5. 3 Ibid. p. 11. 4 Barthes, R., 1974. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Muller. New York: Hill and Wang, p. 15. 5

Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

6 Achebe, C., 1987. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann, p. 158. 7 Moyers, B. (ed.), 1989. Interview with Chinua Achebe, in A World of Ideas. Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, p. 333. 8 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. (Revised edition). London: Heinemann, p. 46. 9 See Ikem Osodi’s conversation with Beatrice Okoi in Anthills of the Savannah, p. 101.

Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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CHAPTER

Achebe, Art and Critical Consciousness Notes from/for South Africa Bhekizizwe Peterson

Introduction This chapter forms part of a larger project on black art and the public sphere in South Africa. The usefulness of Achebe’s work is that it allows for a comparative analysis that, will substantiate, extend and even call into question some of the claims that I make with regard to black art and artists in South Africa. Furthermore, Achebe, because of his revered status, can be provocatively deployed in re-thinking the literary history, canonisation and the theorisation of African literature and, by implication, the theoretical procedures and propositions of those who locate and read African literature from a post-colonial perspective. For instance, scholars of African literature have often felt the need to make a double move when discussing the genealogy of African literature. The frst is to note the publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as marking the inauguration of modern African

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literature. Yet, simultaneously, the installation of Achebe as a beacon is immediately qualifed by reminding all and sundry of Achebe’s literary predecessors on the African continent. As far as South African precursors are concerned, the likes of Thomas Mofolo, Sol Plaatje and Peter Abrahams are often cited.1 The other value that I draw from Achebe’s works is that (similar to those of many other writers and theorists on the continent) they are illuminating in thinking through the wry paradoxes that fow from South Africa’s belated liberation. As a country that had one of the longest liberation struggles on the continent (at least in respect of the founding of formal political organisations such as the African National Congress – originally the South African Native National Congress), the emergence of a post-apartheid society occurred at a moment when – at least as far as the continent’s political trajectories are concerned – the realities and spectres of neocolonialism were familiar potentialities to politicians, civil society, artists, intellectuals and the citizenry at large. There is ample material attesting to these insights and, in the domain of the arts, exemplary texts are Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo (1956), Es’kia Mphahlele’s The Wanderers (1971) and Chirundu (1980), as well as Zakes Mda’s We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1979).2 Abrahams cites an extract from Walt Whitman’s To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire as the prologue to his novel: Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Postcolonial Modernity and Normalisation

‘Did we think victory great? So it is – but now it seems to me, when it cannot be helped, that defeat is great, And that death and dismay are great’.3

The interesting fact is that, in spite of such immersion into the unpredictable futures that were open to a democratic South Africa, the overwhelming preference was to bring to the foreground the exceptionality of the country in ways that trumpeted its positive socio-political attributes, rather than its historical, racial and socio-economic challenges. Hence the postulations that South Africa is a ‘miracle’, a ‘rainbow nation’, an example of racial reconciliation and multi-party democracy and, because of its supposedly good infrastructure, a ‘gateway into Africa’ and so on and so on. The blind spots in such celebratory perspectives are that they may lead South Africa fall into the same pitfalls as other African states after independence. I am reminded of one of Marx’s often quoted observations that history repeats itself ‘frst as tragedy, second as farce’.4 What I propose to do is frstly to initiate, in this instance, a dialogue between Achebe and his South African literary ancestors; and secondly, to tease out some of Achebe’s theoretical insights into the role of the arts and critical thinking that, in the light of the tumultuous politics of the post-independence Nigerian state, spark (at least in my view) important continuities/discontinuities with the trajectory of the post-apartheid South African state since 1994.5 Importantly, both exercises are inter-related. Hence my intention is to treat Achebe’s literary predecessors as interlocutors who can assist us in re-navigating the antimonies of the threshold between writers and readers, the saliences of art, and the making of critical dispositions in the service of the future. My discussion is in three parts: frstly, the thoughts and tactics of black South African Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

writers and Achebe with regard to the complexities of writing and representation; secondly, their implications for the role of art and narrative; and, fnally, the limits and possibilities of imagining redemptive futures in the troubled states of Nigeria and South Africa. Again, in line with Jacqueline Roses’ proposition, we need to grasp and navigate the intricacies of the distinctiveness and possible articulations between ‘states’ of consciousness and ‘states’ of governance.6

ON REPRESENTATION AND THE IMAGINATION The catalyst(s) for creativity is/are, at the best of times, deeply personal, historical and socio-politically over-determined; and it would seem that this is also the case with regard to black South African writers. The frst sentence in Plaatje’s preface to ‘Mhudi’ is the following: ‘South African Literature has hitherto been almost exclusively European, so that a foreword seems necessary to give reasons for a Native venture’.7 Elsewhere I have discussed the reasons behind and how to interpret the numerous occasions where the frst generation of black South Africa writers, frame our readings in their prefaces by

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adopting ‘a rhetoric of humility and disavowal’ or in Njabulo Ndebele’s description of Plaatje, a ‘tactical humility’ that thrived on a ‘dialectic of ambiguity’.8 I assume that it is with the above in mind that Tiyo Soga, writing in 1862 in the inaugural issue of the Xhosa newspaper, Indaba, invoked the newspaper and literature as, in principle, ‘a beautiful vessel’ and ‘big cornpit’9 – at once a store-house of history, memory, culture and experience and, just as importantly, as a catalyst of agency (an engine or vessel) for refecting on and shaping contemporary events, as well as conjuring up prospects of life beyond the rough side of the mountain. These are sentiments and tasks that Achebe set for himself in famous essays such as The Novelist as Teacher, Colonialist Criticism and An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.10 In these essays, Achebe extolled the exercise of historical, cultural and ideological recuperation and reconstruction, particularly in relation to colonial narratives and discourse on African polities and identitities. So, in this sense, Plaatje, Soga and Achebe are one in recognising the potential that the arts has to refect or represent and even recast knowledge and experience and, where necessary, even serve to displace or unsettle colonial discourses. The latter, Achebe opined, was reliant on ‘the vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonization’, with the intention being to provide ‘a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa’.11 Plaatje’s Mhudi and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart are compelling narrations of the sociopolitical and cultural integrity of pre-colonial African societies, the saliences and valences of orality, creativity and multiple perspectives. More importantly, both novels settle for denouements that confront us with a number of striking anxieties. Let me mention two. They both defer historical and narrative closure by, frstly, unmasking the anti-humanist and violent foundations of the ‘civilising mission’ that left death and destruction in its Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

wake. Plaatje rejects – rather than merely postpones – the mirages of the inter-racial or non-racial relationship that could have developed between Mhudi and Ra-Thaga and the De Villiers family. Okonkwo’s death, similarly, registers much more than the loss of an icon or the completion of colonial conquest. In both instances, we are compelled to confront, over and above the personal and historical catastrophès that we have lived through, the reduction of Africans to the status of being sub-human. Achebe, in his usual incendiary way, in an essay in honour of James Baldwin (which appears as a postscript in Hopes and Impediments), quotes Baldwin’s essay ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown’ where (in a sense) both of them insist on returning to the primary contradiction – the denial of the humanity of Africans. Baldwin writes: ‘Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible fnd this statement impenetrable’.12 So when Achebe, for instance, invokes Mphahlele’s The African Image, he is, again, reminding us of the over-determined nature and role of representation and the tasks of the writer.13 The use of and references to representation need to be understood in two specifc senses, each one of them fairly complicated in itself, but also intrinsically imbricated Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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with the other. Firstly, there is the deployment of signifcation to refer to, frstly, the social, cultural and political ideas and imperatives that we aspire to or deploy in an attempt to construct a consciousness, a perspective or a view of the world. In the process, we also give coherence and value to our experiences, senses of self, ways of understanding the world and the lives that we lead. We usually designate these forms of lived political consciousness as ideology. The second sense refers to the symbolic processes, forms and tools that we use to narrate or signify experience and ideology. Here, in particular, I have in mind the cultural, imaginative, performative, visual, linguistic and aesthetic codes and repertoires that we rely on daily, in order to practically create and communicate our political visions and subjectivities – particularly in relation to the interactions, relations and identities that inform our lives as individuals and as social groups. Not only are ideology and representation intertwined, but they are also not straightforward processes that simply refect a pre-existing reality or view. They are also not pre-determined, static or complete instances. On the contrary, they refract or mediate what they ostensibly signify: that is, they involve a range of deliberate strategic interventions and choices (particularly with regard to what is said or unsaid, what is selected and foregrounded, the point of view or angle used, and so on). The important point to emphasise is that signifcation and ideology are both active processes that are reliant on our daily, active labour to produce meaning – to advance or privilege this or that view of life and the world. Another element that is common to both ideology and signifcation is narrative, with narrative being understood as a primary, human cognitive tool. In a deep ontological sense, narrative, in the frst instance, strives to give coherence to experience; and it also constitutes us as ‘social actors’ in a ‘social world’ in which we are actors and Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

interpreters. It is through narrative that we create a sense of our personal and collective selves and destinies. In short, Achebe sees creative and intellectual work as deeply constitutive, since, together with language and narrative, they form primary tools of cognition and social interaction. As he notes in The Truth of Fiction, ‘… art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him; an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination … . [It is] one of the forms he has fashioned out of his experience with language – the art of fction’.14 Consequently, representation and interpretation are often partisan, partial and open to contestation. As Plaatje observed, ‘In all tales of battle I have ever read, or heard of, the cause of the war is invariably ascribed to the other side’.15 Or in Achebe’s words, ‘Wherever somethings stands, something else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute’.16 This is applicable not only in relation to the North and the South, or what Cheinuwezi provocatively called The West and Rest of Us, but, more importantly, even amongst ourselves. So a writer’s disposition should be dialogic. She or he must not only present the fact of a multiplicities of perspectives, but must do so in a manner that, frstly, calls into

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question what is considered to be normative and sensible, and crucially, side with the down-trodden and abused, whether they constitute the majority or the minority. It is with regard to the potential of art, to inform social actors in a social world, that Plaatje and Achebe propose a number of sharp provocations. What I fnd salutary is that Plaatje and Achebe also challenge us to grasp representation as, not only a practice, but as an analytical category as well, particularly in relation to what we generally designate as ‘the politics of representation’.17 Furthermore, there is the concomitant insistance that representation – as an analytical category – is also deeply shot through with a range of political and ethical imperatives. The most obvious one is, of course, the need to defne and affrm African senses of self and African desires in contra-distinction to colonial ones. There is, at the same, an equal insistence that writers and artists need to cultivate a similar ethical and critical disposition towards ideas, conduct and narratives that we gloss over or pass off as ‘the African experience’. In short, Achebe is dismayed with what he refers to as ‘the poverty of thought’18 (in The Trouble with Nigeria) that often passes for analysis. The insistence on a critical and committed disposition is because writers are expected to articulate (hopefully) visions that will unsettle the orthodoxies that currently hold sway and thereby aid in transcending the quagmires of both the colonial and postcolonial condition.

THE EMPEROR’S ART: CONCERNING THE SPECTACLE OF POWER AND THE POWER OF SPECTACLE Since its formation in 1912, the South African Native National Congress has accorded a Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

central signifcance to the importance of intellectual and creative pursuits. Many of its founding and subsequent leaders were quintessential Renaissance men who, apart from being educators, journalists, clergy and so on, also took a keen interest in the arts, with a considerable number of them being noted writers, poets, composers and patrons of the arts. In the light of this artistic and intellectual legacy, an interesting feature of postapartheid South Africa is the ever-changing perspective of the state about the nature and role of creative and intellectual work. Nelson Mandela, the frst president of a democratically elected government, was positive in his appreciation of the contribution that intellectuals and artists made in the struggle for liberation. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela acknowledged the profound infuence that the poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi had on him; he also praised Achebe as ‘the writer in whose company the prison walls came down’.19 Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second president in the democratic era, is well known for championing the African Renaissance (in which intellectuals are accorded signifcant status) and for his penchant to spice his speeches with literary quotations. After enquiring, ‘Where are Africa’s intellectuals today?’, he asks whether there is a need to ‘recall Africa’s hundreds of thousands of intellectuals back from their places of emigration in

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Europe and North America to rejoin those who remain still within our shores?’ For Mbeki, Africa’s renewal demands that her intelligentsia must immerse itself in the titanic and all-round struggle to end poverty, ignorance, disease and backwardness. Similarly, ‘(t)he beginning of our rebirth as a continent must be a recovery of our soul, captured and made permanently available in the great works of creativity ...’ And, lastly, ‘(t)he call for Africa’s renewal ... is a call to rebellion. We must rebel against tyrants and dictators, those who seek to corrupt our societies and steal the wealth that belongs to the people’.20 It would seem that under the current president of South Africa, intellectuals and artists enjoy a less admired status and are, increasingly, becoming the target of censure and derision. In August 2009, the Minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana, stormed out of an exhibition before delivering her opening address. She found the exhibition, Innovative Women by Zanele Muholi, to be ‘pornographic’, ‘immoral’ and ‘offensive’. In the statement that frames the exhibition, Muholi explained that: [t]he overall aim to my project is to commemorate and celebrate the lives of black lesbians in South Africa from an insider’s perspective, regardless of the harsh realities and oppressions (which includes rife murders and ‘curative rapes’ of black lesbians) that we are still facing in the post-apartheid, democratic South Africa.21

Other recent and controversial incidences include the furore (between May - December 2012) around Bret Murray’s The Spear (the painting has Zuma posing stridently à la Lenin, but with his genitals exposed) and the banning (on the basis that it is child pornography) of Jahmil XT Qubeka’s feature flm (Of Good Report) on the evening that it was to open the 34th Durban International Film Festival in July 2013. As was to be expected, Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

these incidences (and others), ignited national debate on the arts and censorship. Members of the black middle class and intelligentsia have not fared much better following the public perception that cronyism and corruption are rife under Zuma’s watch. The President’s amorous and polygamous life-style, coupled with the huge amounts of public funds used to renovate his personal home at Nkandla, have elicited wide-scale criticism. The report of the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, states that the fnal costs of Nkandla ‘are “conservatively estimated” to amount to R246 million, but could be higher’.22 Interestingly, Zuma’s ire has been pointedly directed at the black elite. In a number of veiled, ambiguous, but defnitely disparaging remarks, Zuma has castigated blacks who, in his opinion, are ‘too clever’ to the point that they question so-called ‘African cultural traditions’.23 Furthermore, while acknowledging that there are many challenges that still face the country, he is of the opinion that the ruling party has a ‘good story to tell’ as far as its achievements over the last 20 years are concerned. Again, it is the Afro-pessimism of intellectuals and artists that is disconcerting to him. The main charge against critically-minded citizens is that they are tainted, diseased ‘hybrids’ who have read too many books (and foreign ones at that) and that they have lost touch with their ‘roots’ or culture (à la ‘too clever blacks’). The obverse is the liberal disdain for articulate Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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blacks who, during segregation and apartheid, were dismissed as ‘cheeky natives’ and, after liberation, as being ‘aloof’ and ‘detached’ from the people (the latter insinuations were constantly leveled at President Mbeki). Interestingly, both sides repudiate a critical consciousness as a sign of loss of some primordial essence of some unstated notion of ‘Africanness’. The antidote is to call for a singing and dancing ‘Man of the People’ as president. However, once in power, as in the case of Zuma, the leader is charged with being all show and no substance! It is not surprising that ANC members in Parliament have discerned a lack of patriotism in the country and have suggested ways of ‘building national pride’. Without any sense of irony, ANC MP, Lindiwe Maseko, made the disturbing recommendation that the public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), should broadcast the national anthem at 6 am and at noon in a bid to strengthen social cohesion and moral regeneration: You know, during apartheid, we were forced to listen to Radio Bop and Bop TV. Up to today, I can sing the Bop [Bophuthatswana] anthem because we were forced to listen to it whether you liked or not. At 6 o’clock and 12 o’clock everything stops, and there’s the national anthem. For me, I don’t know why the SABC doesn’t do that at 6 or any other [time] ... and also hoisting the fag while the national anthem is singing. And by doing that, you will be educating. I mean that’s a process of education that would spread to so many places and many people to know how the fag is hoisted and to sing the national anthem.24

The Minister of Communication, Faith Muthambi, endorsed Maseko’s suggestions. Subsequently, the Minister of Arts and Culture, Nathi Mthetwa, announced that the govCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

ernment will spend R34 million to supply all schools with a national fag and for schools to teach students to sing the national anthem.25 These developments, as we know, were presciently anticipated in Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ and are worth citing in detail: The leader pacifes the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of finging them into the path of national reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led up to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt and either persists in expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. During the struggle for liberation the leader awakened the people and promised them a forward march, heroic and unmitigated. Today, he uses every means to put them to sleep, and three or four times a year asks them to remember the colonial period and to look on the long way they have come since then.26 Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Achebe is, similarly, not at ease with other strategies of enforcing obedience and conformity, such as the calls for patriotism, unity and faith in the ‘party’. His question is ‘Patriotism, unity and faith for what? and ‘To what end?’ If it is for the common good, then he is all in support. However, if it is the unity of crooks or faith in ‘money … talismans and fetish’,27 then he will have none of it. For Achebe, calls for patriotism can only be entertained ‘if the nation is ruled justly, if the welfare of all the people, rather than the advantage of the few, becomes the cornerstone of public policy’.28 For him, ‘[p]atriotism is an emotion of love directed by critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people’.29 There are a number of glaring parallels between neo-colonialism in Nigeria and the current socio-political and economic ‘transition’ that South Africa is going through. It is in this sense that all of Achebe’s post-independence novels (No Longer at Ease, Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannahs) become profound, self-refexive meditations on the seemingly intractable problems that seem to beset Africa. Apart from his dissection of the contradictions that typify post-colonial African states, what distinguishes Achebe’s refections on the challenges that face the continent is his willingness to also cast a critical eye on African leaders, intellectuals and artists who regard themselves as enlightened visionaries; and whether their ideas and analyses shed light or cast further darkness on the nightmares of the post-colony. Unlike many African leaders, intellectuals and artists, who are content to reduce all problems to being legacies of the ‘colonial experience’ – or apartheid in the case of South Africa – Achebe, without diminishing the impact of, or being apologetic about, the deep destruction and all forms of alienation wrought by colonialism – and, by extension, apartheid – is equally insistent that Africans also Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

acknowledge their complicities and contributions to the malaise that currently afficts the continent. Achebe pointedly describes our contemporary crises as being characterised by what he calls ‘social injustice and the cult of mediocrity’.30 There are at least three distinctive repertoires that Achebe repeatedly associates with the maladies typical of post-colonial African states. The frst concerns the performative proclivities and excesses of governance and leadership. These are further exacerbated by the tendency towards forms of ‘cargo cult’ mentality amongst the rulers and amongst the ruled. The last, related to artists and intellectuals, concerns the historical and political vantage points from which it would be best to excavate and understand the contradictions of the post-colony. The diffculty of perspective is further complicated by the fact that African writers often occupy a distinct position, since they operate from the ‘margin of the privileged class’. As a result, their outlook is likely to contain a ‘double simultaneous postulation’, because of the ‘fracture’ in the ‘actual public’ for which their art is produced and by whom it is consumed. Because the ‘real public’ consists largely of the conservative forces that compose the dominant class and ideology, the marginal writer is compelled to address ‘the progressive forces, or the virtual public’ even if ‘the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading’. In engaging the future and its Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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virtual public – ‘an emptiness to be flled in, an aspiration’ – the writing ‘exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step by step to the infnite’.31 Matters are made more complex by the layered and fuid temporal moments of writing, as far as historical time, ideological perspective and narrative point of view are concerned. For a start, whatever the temporality and perspective that is to be advanced, consciously or unconsciously, more often than not, intellectuals and artists are induced to negotiate the kinds of introspection and predictions that look, simultaneously, at the past, present and future. They are compelled, as Fanon opined, ‘to occupy a zone of occult instability’ where the convoluted demands of the moment and the passage (or rather the intricacies) of time require much more than mere chronological unfolding or apprehension.32 The zone of occult instability complicates time and agency and, instead, invites a more fuid, multiple, contingent and unstable sense of social contradictions, history and politics. George Lamming presents a somewhat even more challenging understanding of this dilemma and invites us to accept the continuous sense of estrangement or exile (at once universal and particular) that is the lot of artists and intellectuals: The exile is a universal fgure... . On the political level, we are often without the right kind of information to make argument effective, on a moral level we have to feel our way through problems for which we have no adequate reference of traditional conduct as a guide. Chaos is, therefore, the result of our thinking and our doing. We are made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and our irrelevance of function in a society whose past we cannot alter, and whose future is always beyond us.33

This is particularly true in relation to the shadows and unfnished business of apartheid Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

and neo-colonialism and, also, the limits and possibilities for imagining and creating a more just, egalitarian and humane world.

ARTISTS, INTELLECTUALS AND THE EMPEROR Now, if artists and intellectuals are faced with the test of rising above their fractured publics, ideological and narratorial points of view, as well as the liquid complexities of the worlds that they inhabit and are trying to think through, then, hopefully, the complexities of their relationship with the emperor should not be a surprise or a cause for undue concern. The frst salutary proposal that Achebe makes, in this regard, is to remind us that to refect on the relationship between the emperor and the poet as involving solely these two actors or protagonists, is to immediately lose sight of a range of other signifcant constituencies (or subjects), as well as socio-political and ethical concerns. In There Was A Country, Achebe makes the following pronouncement:

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Any artist, in my defnition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. If one did not realize the world was complex, vast, and diverse, one would write as if the world were one little country, and this would make us poor, and we would have impoverished the novel and our stories.34

The crux of this statement is its intimation that the relationship between the poet and the emperor, fundamental as it is, is part of a bigger, problematic one that includes, but also supersedes, the relationship between artists and rulers. So, in a sense, artists need to understand their social and creative roles, not only in relation to the emperor or, as in popular parlance, ‘speaking truth to power’, but also with due cognisance given to a wide range of other economic, ethical, cultural, gender, socio-political and aesthetic challenges and imperatives that inform our ideologies and narratives. Such a disposition also requires a more nuanced and critical grasp of the possible range of views and interests that may inform the relationship between artists, intellectuals and the general citizenry, over and above the perception or status of the emperor. If you hold views that are critical of the state, it does not necessarily mean that you also hold views that are informed by a perspective that is also for the poor, the homeless, refugees and other social groups that are subjugated in society. This tension is often apparent in the frequency with which artists, journalists and other opinion-makers tend to emphasise frst generation human rights (the right to freedom of speech and assembly), while remaining silent about second generation and third generation human rights (the right to employment, education, cultural, environment, and so on). All these rights are intrinsically linked and any attempt to privilege any one set of rights above another is a refection of, not only our ideological orientation, but also our class position. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

In this regard, Achebe, because of his awareness of the dangers of romanticising the status of intellectuals and poets, has presented readers in his novels with a number of profound observations about the equally fractious, contradictory and paradoxical perspectives and conduct that can be found amongst ‘enlightened’ and ‘visionary’ constituencies. There is the thematic contrast between Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, and his fellow musician, Okoye, in Things Fall Apart. The shifting interpretations and interventions that inform Odili’s messed-up morality in A Man of the People are powerfully instructive of the instabilities and complexities of language, meaning, conduct and politics in the post-colony. In Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe even draws attention to the antimonies and intricacies of storytelling: The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.35

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With all these individual, social and hermeneutical diffculties, how are we then to understand and respond to the intricacies of the post-colony – particularly the shifting alliances, muddled pronouncements and increasing abdicating of the demands and duties of governance and their replacement by a ‘theatre-state’? I cannot resist quoting Achebe on what he designates as the siren mentality (called the ‘blue light brigade’ in South Africa), where even: … the movement of president and governors is … a medieval chieftain’s progress complete with magicians and wild acrobats chasing citizens out of the way … Is there no one in this country perceptive enough to understand that after two decades of bloodshed and military rule what our society craves today is not a style of leadership which projects and celebrates the violence of power but the sobriety of peace?36

In essence, the ‘theatre state’ is hell-bent on mesmerising all and sundry with its inane performances and projects that are underpinned by more promises, double-speak, corruption and increasing violation of the rights, means and dignity of ordinary people. The question of how to grasp, depict and contest the complicated world that is the post-colony is a diffcult one. Answering it requires that we recall the advice that Ezeulu gives to his son in Arrow of God. Ezeulu observes that in order to remain pertinent and adept, we need to proceed from the awareness that ‘the world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place’.37 Ezeulu’s insight is consistent with Achebe’s frequent allusions to the dynamics that underpin the assumptions and protocols of the Igbo masquerade (which, in another sense, speaks to the permanent fuidity and

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

incompleteness that are at the base of contradiction): The Igbo believe that art, religion, everything, the whole of life are embodied in the art of the masquerade. It is dynamic. It is not allowed to remain stationary. For instance, museums are unknown among the Igbo people. They do not even contemplate the idea of having something like a canon with the postulate: ‘This is how this sculpture should be made, and once it’s made it should be venerated.’ No, the Igbo people want to create these things again and again, and every generation has a chance to execute its own model of art. So there is no undue respect for what the last generation did, because if you do that too much it means that there is no need for me to do anything, because it’s already been done.38

There are a number of crucial insights in Achebe’s formulation. There is the suggestion that since we live in a local and global context, where, like the masquerade, the world and life is constantly changing, we also need to regularly reassess our views. Secondly, the contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes of life are more likely to be better understood and ameliorated if we promote the need for a plurality of critical views in society, rather than to suffocate refection by insisting on singular or monological perspectives. Lastly, despite the value of recuperative projects (particularly in the domains of historical and

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cultural archives and practices), care needs to be exercised that such strategic interventions, aimed at unsettling the colonial archive, should not result in the inauguration of equally problematic orthodoxies, especially those that thrive on the edifcation of the ‘great men tradition’ as historiography. In South Africa, the meaning of Mandela or, rather, his deifcation, is one such unsound project. Crowned as the head of what is vaunted as a new ‘political aristocracy’ with so-called impeccable ‘struggle credentials’, Mandela and his ilk are simply touted as having ‘brought freedom’ to the country. What is disconcerting is, of course, the erasure of other political fgures and constituencies in the fght against apartheid and, more worrying, the institution of a politics of expected gratitude and praise-singing from the delivered, lest they be dismissed as sell-outs and reactionaries. Lastly, given his view in ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, that ‘no self-respecting writer will take dictation from his audience’, Achebe felt strongly that a writer ‘must remain free to disagree with his society and go into rebellion against it, if need be, not out of any indulgent sense of self-importance or eccentricity but because of the signifcant role that social interpreters can perform, particularly in contexts where ordinary voters or the masses of the population have so little access to untainted information’.39 In The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe throws the gauntlet at interpreters and demands their intervention in order to foster ‘decent and civilized political values’: We have stood too long on the side-lines; and too many of us have adopted the cynical attitude that since you cannot beat them you must join them. Our inaction or cynical action are a serious betrayal of our education, of our historic mission and of succeeding generations who will have no future unless we save it now for them. To be educated is, after all, to Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

develop the questioning habit, to be skeptical of easy promises and to use past experience creatively.40

And what are some of the crucial terms of engagement that should guide our social conduct and hopes? We must, frstly, be prepared to aspire and work towards a different and better future, instead of relying on the ‘cargo cult mentality’.41 Secondly, in as much as we may fnd fault with the foibles of ordinary people, we have to confgure a sense of camaraderie that is not condescending or patronising. This is because, whatever their limitations, ordinary folk have been stellar markers of the continent’s continued will to live, narrate, innovate and excel. This is powerfully manifest in their resilience, originality, creativity and achievements attained across a wide spectrum of social and cultural endeavours, particularly in areas such as the arts, technology, new media and global sport. Shot through these practices and interventions (often), is an abiding reliance on and valorisation of the complexities and politics of the quotidian. The everyday longing for food, clothing, shelter, joy, love, beauty, community and all sorts of emancipation presents (arguably) some of the most politically affective and effective occasions, where the wretched of the earth have called into question the dominant ideas,

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institutions and practices of the State and other powerful national and international forces. Artists and citizens – through recourse to texts, modes and repertoires of living – proffered alternative accounts, senses of self, memories, as well as incendiary and enchanting hopes for the future. These unsettled, redistributed and transcended dominant notions of the sensible and desirable in the post-colony and the world at large. Art offers one way of embodying and thinking through experience, conferring coherence and meaning to a myriad of life moments that range from the painful to the pleasurable. The best of its kind does so in ways that surpass mere recognition or identifcation, but gives us reality presented in a new light. It not only shapes our notions of self, but also, potentially, connects us to other people, allowing us to share our pains and joys, even with strangers. In this way, art allows us to form bonds that facilitate the cultivation of possible senses of collectiveness of humanity. In linking us together, art teases or compels us to examine social relationships, especially within the context of the social realities in which we live. In The Necessity of Art, Ernst Fischer remarks that ‘the magic role of art has progressively given way to the role of illuminating social relationships, of enlightening … (us)’. He notes that: Either of the two elements of art may predominate at a particular time … sometimes the magically suggestive, at other times the rational and enlightening; sometimes dreamlike intuition, at other times the desire to sharpen perception. But whether art soothes or awakens, casts shadows or brings light, it is never merely a clinical description of reality. Its function is always to move the whole man, to enable the ‘I’ to identify itself with another’s life, to

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

make its own what it is not and yet is capable of being.42

It is because of all these possible qualities that art has the potential to divide or to unite, to create new laagers of apartheid, or inaugurate ties and forms of consciousness that allow us to imagine and work for a better world. Aware of these potentialities, Achebe cautioned that we must remain vigilant about the kinds of narratives that we tell and the visions that we pursue. In ‘The Truth of Fiction’, Achebe observes ‘there are fctions that help and fctions that hinder. For simplicity, let us call them benefcent and malignant fctions’. Imaginative literature belongs to benefcent fctions. ‘It does not enslave; it liberates the mind. Its truth is not like the canon of an orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience’.43

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe has acknowledged the significance of these predecessors in his own growth. For the most recent statement in this regard see Achebe, C., 2012. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. London: Penguin, p. 53. 2

See: Abrahams, P., 1956. A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber Limited; Mphahlele, E., 1984. The Wanderers. Cape Town: David Phillip; Mphahlele, E., 2001. Chirundu. Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Mda, Z., 2000. We Shall Sing for the Fatherland. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

3 Abrahams, P., 1956. Prologue: A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber Limited. 4

Marx, K., 1973. Surveys from Exile. David Fernbach (ed). Harmondsworth and London: Penguin and New Left Review, p. 143.

5 It goes without saying that implicit comparative exercises such as mine require more ‘suspension of disbelief’, because of their conjoining of very different case-studies. In as much as South Africa and Nigeria were both British colonies, their respective historical and socio-political subjugations, experiential trajectories, acts of resistance and post-colonial paths are deeply singular. 6 Rose, J., 1998. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7–9. 7 Plaatje, Sol. T., 1978. Mhudi. London: Heinemann, p. 21. 8 Ndebele, N., 1991. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Johannesburg: COSAW, pp. 78, 80. See also Peterson, B., 2008.; Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Melancholy Narratives, Petitioning Selves and the Ethics of Suffering, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43(1), pp. 80–82. 9 Soga, T., 1983. The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga. Cape Town: A.A. Balkema. pp. 151–152. 10 The first two essays can be found in Achebe, C., 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, and all three are included in Achebe, C., 1988., Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–87. London: Heinemann. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

11 Achebe, C., 2009. The Education of a British-Protected Child. London: Penguin Books, p. 79. 12 Achebe, C., 1988. Hopes and Impediments. pp. 120–121. Achebe remains mindful that, as far as injustices are concerned, ‘the oldest of them all [is] – the discrimination by men against women’. 13 Achebe, C., 1988. Hopes and Impediments. p. 30. 14 Achebe, C., 1988. Hopes and Impediments. p. 95. 15 Plaatje, Sol.T., 1978. Mhudi. p. 21. 16 Achebe, C., 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. p. 161. 17 Achebe, C., 2012. There was a Country. p. 55. 18 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 11. 19 See Mandela, N., 1995. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London: Little, Brown, & Co, p. 49; and Condolences on the Passing of Chinua Achebe – Nelson Mandela Foundation, Available at http://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/media-release-condolences-on-the-passing-ofprof.-chinua-achebe [Accessed 6 July 2014]. 20 Mbeki, T., 1998. Africa: The Time has Come. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers & Mafube, pp. 298–300. See also Mbeki T., 1999. Prologue: Makgoba, M.W., 1999. African Renaissance: The New Struggle. Cape Town: Mafube & Tafelberg Publishers.

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Chapter 1 21 Van Wyk, L., 2010. Homophobic claims: ‘baseless, insulting’. Mail & Guardian, [online] 5 March 2010. Available at http://mg.co.za/article/2010-03-05-xingwana-homophobic-claims-baseless-insulting [Accessed 6 July 2014]. 22 Anon. 2014. 10 things worth knowing about Madonsela’s Nkandla report. News 24, [online] 19 March 2014. Available at http://www.citypress.co.za/politics/10-things-worth-knowing-madonselas-nkandlareport/. [Accessed 25 June 2014]. 23 Anon. 2012. Zuma scolds ‘clever’ blacks. News 24 [online] 13 November 2012. Available at http://www. citypress.co.za/news/zuma-scolds-clever-blacks-20121103/. [Accessed 25 June 2014]. 24 Makinana, A., 2014. Minister shows faith in SA’s national anthem. Mail & Guardian, [online] 02 July 2014. Available at http://mg.co.za/article/2014-07-02-minister-shows-faith-in-sas-national-anthem. [Accessed 9 July 2014]. 25 Anon. 2014. SA will spend R34m to fly flag in every school, teach everyone the anthem. Times Live, [online] 17 July 2014. Available at http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2014/07/17/sa-will-spend-r34mto-fly-flag-in-every-school-teach-everyone-the-anthem. [Accessed 22 July 2014]. 26 Fanon, F., 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, pp. 168–169. The leader’s stance is in stark contrast to the role played by intellectuals and artists in the build-up to revolutionary action in the struggle for liberation. Fanon notes three phases and, in the third stage or ‘fighting phase’, observes that ‘the native … turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature’. See Fanon, F., 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. pp. 222–223. 27 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 12. 28 Achebe, C., 1994. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 16. 29 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 15. 30 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 19. 31 Sartre, J.P., 2008. What is Literature, trans. Bernard Frechtman, London: Routledge. pp. 59–66. 32 Fanon, F., 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. p. 227.

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33 Lamming, G., 1984. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Longman, p. 24. 34 Achebe, C., 2012. There was a Country. pp. 58–59. 35 Achebe, C., 1988. Anthills of the Savannah. New York: Doubleday, p. 124. 36 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 34. President Zuma’s ‘blue light’ convoy has been involved in a number of skirmishes with citizens that have resulted in injury and incarceration. 37 Achebe, C., 1986. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann, p. 46. 38 Achebe, C., 2012. There was A Country. p. 53. This perspective recalls the generosity of spirit that underpins Fanon’s injunction that ‘[e]ach generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its own mission, fulfil it, or betray it’. Fanon, F., 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. p. 206. 39 Achebe, C., 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, p. 69. 40 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 59. 41 Achebe, C., 1984. The Trouble with Nigeria. p. 9. 42 Fischer, E., 1978. The Necessity of Art. London: Peregrine Books, p. 14. 43 Achebe, C., 1988. Hopes and Impediments. p. 98, p. 105.

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Reading Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God in the Present Tense Harry Garuba

Introduction True, Christianity divided the village into two – the people of the Church and the people of the world – but the boundary between them had many crossings. Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child.1 The success of the modern/colonial world system consists precisely in making subjects that are socially located on the oppressed side of the colonial difference think epistemically like the ones in dominant positions. Rámon Grosfoguel, Transmodernity, Border Thinking and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies.2 He had resolved that as long as he was in Okperi he would never look for the new moon. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

But the eye is very greedy and will steal a look at what its owner has no wish to see. So as Ezeulu urinated outside the guardroom his eyes looked for the new moon. But the sky had an unfamiliar face. It was impossible to put one’s fnger on it and say that the moon would come out there. A momentary alarm struck Ezeulu but on thinking again he saw no cause for alarm. Why should the sky of Okperi be familiar to him? Every land had its own sky; it was as it should be. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God.3

Many claims have been made about the signifcance and infuence of Chinua Achebe – especially his frst novel, Things Fall Apart – in the making of African literature, African worlds and African subjects. Many, if not all of these claims, are focused either on the historic signifcance of the novel in relation to the image of Africa inscribed in the colonial library, or on Achebe’s role in the constitution of modern African literature and in the making of the counter-image of Africa that currently circulates in the institutions of knowledge and knowledge production. There can be little doubt about the enormous cultural work that Achebe’s fctional and non-fctional writing has done; nor can there be

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any doubting the transformative reconfgurations that appear to fow from these texts. But to read Achebe’s work simply within the context of anti-colonial nationalism and the cultural politics of colonial erasure and denigration is to confne this work to an archive that does not provide us with adequate conceptual resources for dealing with the present. In this short refection, therefore, I will put these claims aside – located, as they are, in the past, in the work these texts performed at a specifc moment in history, monumental as it has been. Instead, here I want to explore what I believe is Achebe’s importance for this moment, this post-colonial present. In short, I will be attempting to move the ‘meanings’ we ascribe to and the ‘lessons’ we derive from his writing away from their mid-twentieth century location in the politics and poetics of anti-colonial nationalism and decolonisation to this twenty-frst century moment of globalisation, characterised by the crisis of legitimacy of modernity and its authorising paradigms, along with the dominant master narratives of knowledge. It is fair to claim that the moment of the crisis of colonial alienation and discursive erasure represented by colonialism (and the nationalist discourses that followed from it) is not exactly identical to the crisis of the present; and placing Achebe’s work in the here and now, embedding or inserting it, as it were, within a new ‘problem-space’, may go a long way in helping us understand the libidinal power of their importunate claims on us as post-colonial subjects. I borrow the term ‘problem-space’ from David Scott, who, in the prologue to his book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, says that every historical moment presents its own ‘problem-space’ – a set of questions and analytical and conceptual procedures for dealing with these questions – rather like Althusser’s idea of a problematic, with the addition that this problematic is located in a moment in history. ‘A “problem-space,” in my usage, is meant frst of all to demarcate a discursive context, Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

a context of language,’ Scott says. He continues by drawing attention to the historical locatedness of the notion: Notice also that a problem-space necessarily has a temporal dimension or, rather, is a fundamentally temporal concept. Problem-spaces alter historically because problems are not timeless and do not have everlasting shapes. In new historical conditions old questions may lose their salience, their bite, and so lead the range of old answers that once attached to them to appear lifeless, quaint, no so much wrong as irrelevant.4

When Frantz Fanon says, in that memorable opening to his essay ‘On National Culture’, that ‘(e)ach generation must, out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfl it or betray it’,5 this may have been what he had in mind; i.e. that every generation or historical moment has to confront a specifc set of questions, concepts, meanings, etc. and put in place new procedures for exploring and examining them. As I use the phrase in this essay, ‘reading in the present tense’ means precisely this: inserting a text within a new problem-space and reading it in the light of the different discursive context of the present.

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More specifcally, in relation to my concerns in this paper, I take my line of argument from another Scott essay, ‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection’, where he argues that there is a need to bring the work of the West Indian poet and cultural theorist, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, into the present. Here is how he frames that argument in his earlier book Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality: The critical task for those of us who think and write in the wake of (Brathwaite’s) work, therefore, is to pass through and re-position his thought in relation to the distinctive demand of our present. This is not a matter of simply getting beyond that thought or dispensing with it; nor is it a matter of simply (that is, uncritically) reproducing all of his assumptions. It is a matter rather of deploying that work as the basis of simultaneously continuing an on-going argument about black criticism and tradition, and reformulating the demand of the present in relation to which that argument is organized and undertaken.6

In short, what I seek to do in this piece is to ‘pass through and re-position (Achebe’s) thought in relation to the distinctive demands of our present’. Re-positioning Achebe’s work within the ‘problem-space’ of the present is a discursive move that he would have endorsed. In fact, I am guided by his own pronouncements about the task of the writer and the capacity of narrative and art to provide us with a handle on the world. One of Achebe’s signature essays of the 1960s is a short piece entitled ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ and, since its publication, the idea of the novelist as a teacher has become almost synonymous with the name of Achebe in African literature. Towards the end of that piece, he was to say: ‘I would be quite satisfed if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

night of savagery from which the frst Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them’.7 This sentiment was to become a major theme in many of his other essays and interviews of the 1960s. He reiterates this in another essay of that period, ‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’ (1964): This theme – put quite simply – is that Africa did not hear of culture for the frst time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry, and, above all, they had dignity.8

For Achebe this was the ‘fundamental theme that must frst be disposed of’9 before one moves on to other themes. He made the statement about a theme that must frst be disposed of as an ‘answer to those who say that a writer should be writing about contemporary issues – about politics in 1964, about city life, about the last coup d’etat’.10 But his recognition of the fact that this was a theme that frst had to be disposed of to make way for others, is signifcant: it is an indication of the nature of his historical consciousness, his awareness that this theme was specifc to a particular historical moment and spoke to that moment. For convenience, I will call this the moment of the colonial modern.

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Beyond this awareness of the signifcance of particular themes to particular historical moments, he also believed that ‘art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him; an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination’.11 These two statements – one about the temporal specifcity of art (the disposability of specifc themes) and the other about its perennial relevance (providing a second handle on existence through the work of the imagination) – provide the rationale and background for the questions I pose in this piece: namely, what new handle does Achebe’s oeuvre provide us with, as we deal with the post-colonial, post-modern, globalised world of the twenty-frst century? How do we read Achebe into the present in ways that take into cognisance the changes and transformations in the ‘real’ world and in the theoretical/discursive world of knowledge production? Can we proftably read Achebe’s fction by moving it from the colonial modern world of its location to the post-colonial, post-modern globalised world of the late capitalist present? In other words, what can the novelist teach us; or, more appropriately, what lessons for the present can we draw from his novels of tradition? My objective is to show that, in Achebe’s two novels of tradition, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the novelist thematises two major problematics that, for me, encapsulate the signifcant set of questions that confronts colonial and post-colonial societies and subjects. The frst question has to do with the validity and legitimacy of the traditional cultures of the colonised in the wake of modernity. The second question concerns the nature of post-colonial societies and subjectivities: How do post-colonial societies deal with the co-presence of two normative orders within their domains? This second question is the question of our present – and this is what I will be exploring in this paper. Let me begin this exploration by reiterating that the work that Achebe’s novels have Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

been made to do – did – at the historical moment of the colonial modern, was to affrm, to prove, that African societies were not mindless and savage, but were culturally sophisticated, functioning entities with their own rationalities and codes, and ‘frequently had a philosophy of great depth, value and beauty’. I believe that this theme has now been ‘disposed of’ – that, after Achebe, the idea of an African world of dignity and integrity has been validated, proven and put beyond reasonable questioning. Proceeding from this premise, I want to read an episode from each of Achebe’s two novels of tradition to suggest one way to go about answering my questions.

INTERLUDE: Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DISCURSIVE AUTHORITY Things Fall Apart ends with the District Commissioner’s plans to write a book that will include, among other things, some of the incidents and characters that make up the novel. Though ‘(e)very day brought him some new material for the book’, he needed to be ‘frm in cutting out details’ and so a chapter on Okonkwo, no, a ‘reasonable paragraph’ would

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do. We may leave aside the District Commissioner’s belief that ‘a reasonable paragraph’ will be suffcient to sum up Okonkwo’s life; we may also leave aside the play on the word ‘reason’ in the idea of a ‘reasonable paragraph’; we may, in addition, leave aside his conviction that one must be frm in ‘cutting out details’, because the details of these lives or these cultures do not really matter; to him, all that matters is the colonial allegory that needs to be affrmed. Simon Gikandi notes that ‘(t)he ultimate irony of (this) novel is that although the Commissioner has the fnal word in the fctional text, Achebe – the African writer who has appropriated a Western narrative practice – writes the colonizer’s words and hence commemorates an African culture which the colonizer thought he had written out of existence’.12 While endorsing Gikandi’s reading, I want to add that this strategic placing is also meant to underscore the struggle for the power to narrate between the colonised and the coloniser; a struggle that, Edward Said tells us, is one of the major connections between culture and imperialism, in his book of that title. As Said so memorably states: ‘The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them’.12 At the end of this frst novel, it would appear, as Gikandi rightly asserts, that Achebe has appropriated (seized?) this power by reducing the District Commissioner’s narrative to secondary status – at least within this text. Indeed, Achebe’s narrator is speaking the District Commissioner’s words and, by so doing, he underscores and thematises once again the struggle for the power to narrate and to frame narratives of the Other – a power central to colonialism and colonial power. It is instructive to compare and contrast the manner in which Achebe frames his own narrative with the manner the District Commissioner plans to frame his own story of Okonkwo in his proposed book, Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

The Pacifcation of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. That this episode is located at the end of the novel suggests that Things Fall Apart is ultimately a novel concerned with the question of discursive authority. By ‘discursive authority’ I mean the authority or power to defne the limits of what is acceptable and normative and, conversely, what is non-normative or abnormal or deviant, within a discourse or a domain of human activity and thought, or within a social world. In short, discursive authority refers to power to dictate the norm, to specify what the norm is against that which lies outside of discursive acceptability. By thematising two forms of discursive authority, the one located in the traditions of Umuofa and its people and the other derived from the paradigms of European modernity and the District Offcer, the novel succeeds in affrming the normativity of Okonkwo’s world and his struggle to retain its primacy and supremacy. This frst novel therefore provides the answer to the frst question about the legitimacy and validity of traditional cultures. The power of the novel does not lie only in providing this answer. More signifcantly, the novel provides us with the tools with which to confront that question whenever it arises. This is why the last chapter of the novel Arrow of God is particularly signifcant, because, following upon this frst question, this other novel maps out the discursive Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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space in which the second question is located. In this novel, you will recall, after Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu, refuses to declare the New Yam festival, the people of Umuaro, facing the prospect of famine, harvest their yams and take them to the new Christian god for blessing. Amid the string of misfortunes that befall Ezeulu – the desertion of the community; the death of his favorite son, Obika; his slow descent into madness – he alone still has the prescience to discern the full import of what has happened. For him, it was not a simple glitch in the historical process that could be rectifed next time around; it was an irreversible tragedy from which none could escape. ‘What troubled him most – and he alone seemed to be aware of it at present – was that the punishment was not for now alone but for all time. It would affict Umuaro like an ogulu-aro disease which counts a year and returns to the victim’.14 Of course, the New Yam festival is a yearly event, so the reference to the disease that counts one year and returns is literally a reference to this festival. Metaphorically, however, Ezeulu is pointing us to a ‘disease’ that has the effect of being irreversible, returning year after year, like a plague for all time. What manner of ‘disease’ or punishment is this that afficts for all time? I suggest that this punishment/disease is that two discursive orders, both claiming normativity were established in the same social and geographical space. This requires some elaboration, because it is often claimed that traditional Igbo society was one of multiplicity. The proverb of the dancing mask that appears in Arrow of God is often evoked to show the cultural affrmation of this value and bolster the claim that this society thrives on the recognition and adoption of plural subject positions: ‘The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place’.15 This is largely true. However, it is important to emphasise that this value of traditional animist culture is anchored in a single, over-arching discursive order: the dancing mask thus shows Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

different faces of the same epistemic-ideological order, rather than different, contested normativities. The discursive order in which traditional proverbs such as this had been enunciated and anchored was not the order of discursive confict and contestation that colonial modernity had opened up: animist tradition can more appropriately be described as a single or singular order that welcomed plurality and multiple perspectives. This was a pre-modern, pre-capitalist world into which the homogenising imperative of modern power, with its disciplinary practices and normalising technologies, had not been introduced. When one of the characters in Arrow of God says that ‘(t)he white man is the masked spirit of today’,16 he is not claiming a continuity with tradition, but a fundamental dislocation, because this particular masked spirit demands allegiance to only one discursive order, one Archimedean subject position and, this time, it is one that is alien to the tradition of the people of Umuaro. Ezeulu is therefore correct when, earlier in the narrative, he interprets the sound of the church bell he hears, while performing his chiefy functions, as chiming a ‘song of extermination’,17 because it portends the extermination of one discursive order – or, at least, spells out its intention to do so. What Ezeulu foresaw at that moment of epiphany was that once the ability to migrate from one set of norms to another, or to shuttle between them in the same society without Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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appearing deviant, had been established, it was not going to disappear. That no one seemed aware of the immense historical signifcance of this insight and its epistemic implications is what is so unnerving for the high priest. Probably nowhere else but in the post-colonial world can subjects move between and inhabit two discursive and symbolic orders by simultaneous interpellation. By simultaneous interpellation, I mean the ability to operate under two different discursive orders and experience them as normative. I must stress that the simultaneous interpellation I refer to here is different from the concept of hybridity, as used in current post-colonial criticism and cultural theory. It is also different from the multi-cultural perspective that derives its conceptual resources from the old anthropological conception of cultures as bounded entities. Rather, as I have described it elsewhere,18 I see simultaneous interpellation as producing coeval subjects and coeval subjectivities that challenge the epistemic grounds of conventional dichotomous and binary conceptions of modernity and normalisation. For me, this is one of the defning characteristics of our post-colonial present that an engaged criticism needs to explore in framing new questions and seeking new answers. Reading Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God from this perspective – ffty years after its publication – may yet yield the insights with which we need to begin.

Arrow of God AND THE QUESTION OF EPISTEMIC CAPTURE In the conclusion of his essay on ‘Ezeulu as World Historical Figure: Preliminary Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God,’ Abiola Irele claims, ‘Ezeulu emerges as what Hegel describes as “a world historical fgure”, a force despite himself in the making of a new Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

epoch. Paradoxical as this may seem, his tragic grandeur derives from this role’.19 Irele had set the ground for this claim in a footnote in an earlier essay on ‘The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’ where he says: ‘The irony of history is more fully explored in this work (i.e. Arrow of God) in a fctional register that incorporates a religious element and is focused on a hero, Ezeulu, who assumes the dimension of a world historical fgure …’.20 I take Irele’s assertion here seriously and want to follow up on the specifc manner in which Ezeulu’s stature as world historical fgure may be read in the present. Hegel defnes the concept of a world historical fgure as a person who, without necessarily knowing it, embodies the change from one epoch to another, the shift from one structure of ideas or paradigm to another. In Arrow of God it is easy to identify this paradigm shift as Christianity acquires a foothold in Umuaro and implants itself at the centre of its material and symbolic universe, represented by the New Yam festival. It is also easy to identify Ezeulu as the one subject who makes this paradigm shift inevitable at this historical moment, because his action is shown to have immediately precipitated it. However, it is important to understand the nature of this epochal change and Ezeulu’s role in accelerating its coming. As I argue in an essay on the discursive production of the Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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colonial subject – ‘Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative’ – Ezeulu believes he can activate the cultural wisdom of the proverb of the dancing mask in his dealings with the white man and adopt multiple subject positions. But here he comes (up) against the exclusivist, hierarchical and binarist structure of colonial discourse. Being a friend to Winterbottom cannot be achieved in isolation: it means activating and occupying the signs that make up that side of the structure and excluding the other. Stated in the language of the plot of Ezeulu’s personal experiences, being Winterbottom’s friend means sending Oduche to school, it means imprisoning the sacred python, it means being the white man’s chief, it means refusing to name the date of the New Yam festival. Within the cultural economy of colonial discourse, his freedom to pick and choose, to retain and discard, is limited by this structure of discourse and power … . And the more he struggles to escape the grids of colonialist representation the more he gets locked into them.21

Without recognising it, at the point when he tells the white man the ‘truth’ about the ownership of the land in dispute between Umuaro and Okperi, his ‘truth’ has been inserted into a discourse of land tenure, property rights and ownership, different from the discursive regime previously operative in his community. Ezeulu fnds himself unintentionally, gradually, but inexorably, drawn into this discursive order defned by strict demarcations; an order in which the rigid ‘letter’ of the law, rather than the ‘spirit’ of fuidity that characterises the borders between ownership, access, rights of use, etc. is held to be sacrosanct. The more he tries to claim the possibility of multiple subject positions, the deeper he falls onto one side of the discursive divide constructed as tradition versus Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

modernity, until he is fully discursively captured. The moment he refuses to name a date for the New Yam festival, on the evidence of his eyes alone, he becomes fully captive to the ‘letter of the law’, the scopic regime of modernity and the rule of procedural reason. For a man from a culture that recognises that what one sees is framed by the categories of understanding deployed in interpreting it, this is truly tragic. As we are told in the novel, the evidence of the eyes alone is not enough to tell who is a man and who is a spirit during the festival of the New Yam: ‘The festival thus brought men and gods together in one crowd. It was the only assembly in Umuaro in which a man might look to his right and fnd his neighbour, and look to his left and fnd a god standing there …’.22 Though the man might know the identity of the man donning the mask, the evidence of sight had to be processed through other discursive grids beyond those offered by the naked eye. Even when your eyes tell you that it is really a man wearing the godmask, a man you may well know as a neighbour, you have to recognise that man as a god. It is the quiet knowledge of this epistemic change – where knowledge is processed only through the eyes – that fnally unhinges Ezeulu’s mind. His own stubborn dependence on the ‘eye-reason’ that only sees and recognises the uneaten yams, becomes the prelude to the epistemological crisis his action precipitates. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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For the people of Umuaro, the crisis presents itself more immediately as a question of material survival. Faced with the prospect of starvation and economic ruin, they make a simple existential choice that does not really appear to them as earth-shattering and epistemologically signifcant, as Ezeulu appears to know that it is. Here is how it is presented in the last sentence of the novel: In his extremity many a man sent his son with a yam or two to offer to the new religion and bring back the promised immunity. Thereafter any yam harvested in his felds was harvested in the name of the son.23

Notice that, at this point, subterfuge, pretence and dissimulation characterise the attitude of the people of Umuaro. They seem to assume that this change will only be temporary – that is, until things return to normal. They do not realise that this will become the new normal. Their offer of the new yam to the new god is an existential decision to stave off starvation; it is not seen as normative, nor is it even considered something that will become the new norm. The excuses that the villagers give show their uneasiness and their need to offer justifcation and to salve their conscience, which tells them that they are doing the wrong thing. First, they harvest the yams close to the homestead, pretending that these do not qualify, because the real harvest on the farms has not been done; and anyway ‘who was there when they were dug out to swear that they were new yams’?24 And then ‘the homestead crept farther and farther afeld as the days passed’.25 While the ordinary people offered excuses, those excuses would not do for titled men; so if any of them ate the new yams, they did so in secret. However, it is only Ezeulu who knows that there is no next time; that the new order Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

has lodged itself at the heart of things and will not be reversed. The analogy he makes to the brave warrior, confdent of the power of the metaphysical powers that protect him, suddenly discovering in the thick of battle that he has lost that protection, is very telling. But for Ezeulu there was no next time. Think of a man who, unlike lesser men, always goes to battle without a shield because he knows that bullets and matchet strokes will glance off his medicine-boiled skin; think of him discovering in the thick of battle that the power has suddenly, without warning, deserted him. What next time could there be? Will he say to the guns and the arrows and the matchets: Hold! I want to return quickly to my medicine-hut and stir the pot and fnd out what has gone wrong; perhaps someone in my household – a child, maybe – has unwittingly violated my medicine’s taboo? No.26

Ezeulu knows that every year thereafter his people will now be able to choose between making an offering to Ulu or making it to the new deity; he knows that this ability to pick and choose will permeate all things and become the new norm. What he may not have known and therefore could not provide us with the tools to deal with, is the form that this would take. Would one completely wipe out the other or would they be able to co-exist

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in the same community and the same people? If they could co-exist, would it be in the manner that he had envisaged for his son, Oduche, when he sent him to the white man’s school to bring the good and leave out the bad – or would it be different? Ezeulu is spared ‘knowledge of the fnal outcome’ but we are not. Colonial modernity and its mirror image, Okonkwo’s vision of the supremacy of tradition, had imagined an unbridgeable divide between the world of tradition and the world of the Church; Ezeulu had imagined a world of tradition from which you could go forth into the other world to bring its benefts to enrich your own world; but none of them had imagined the world of post-colonial modernity, in which the divide would collapse and the same subject would be simultaneously normalised into both worlds while at the same time retaining the fantasy of separation. As Achebe says in the frst epigraph to this essay, ‘Christianity divided the village into two – the people of the Church and the people of the world – but the boundary between them had many crossings’. The possibility of numerous crossings, the sense of a border that often underlines the presence of a boundary in the frst place, is upheld, but it will remain simultaneously marked and unmarked; and this was to defne the normalisation that was to take place in Ezeulu’s future – our present. A discursive order or moral order provides the rationale, the system that makes human action in a society understandable and acceptable – a discursive order specifes the norm. In every society, the spectrum of what is considered normative is defned by this order. But when two normative orders co-exist as normal, while rhetorically (?) insisting on their demarcation, then the spectrum stretches indefnitely and what is disallowed within one order is allowed – even demanded – within the other sphere. This produces subjects who experience the world coevally, and societies defned by coeval norms. With Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

coeval subjects and coeval societies the law of non-contradiction does not hold and the possibility of multiple entrances into and exits from different moral orders present themselves at every point. In Arrow of God, it is clear that the villagers understand that what they are doing is wrong, hence the numerous attempts to explain and justify their surreptitious harvesting of the new yams. But with the passage of time, after the time of Ezeulu, the guilt wanes until it disappears: offering the yams to the Christian god and to Ulu becomes the new way of doing things. It is interesting to consider the discursive manœuvres that have been brought to play in the long journey from that moment of colonial modernity, the time of Okonkwo and Ezeulu, to our post-colonial present, where there is no longer the need to make excuses, to explain or justify. If we take our cue from the novel, Ezeulu seems to think that the traditional New Yam festival will be completely displaced by the Christian harvest and lose its relevance, as it is repeatedly delayed year after year. If this is true, then the Chief Priest is obviously still trapped in his discursive capture within a linear conception of time that is far removed from the cyclic rhythms of time that his compatriots are used to. However, his awareness of the emergence and likely ascendancy of a new linear, calendrical conception of time Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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is right. But, with the hindsight of our post-colonial present, we can see that instead of one completely displacing the other, the people learn to live both times simultaneously. Doing this, it seems to me, involves a complex move that insistently and consistently frames each discursive order as different, even as they are co-articulated and co-inscribed on the same bodies, the same subjects and the same social space. The journey from Ezeulu to our present is this normalisation of difference and coevality as the nature of post-colonial subjectivity. In short, post-colonial modernity is anchored on the construction and normalisation of a complex form of subjectivity premised on this co-articulation and coevality. The co-articulation exists, survives and thrives on the understanding that the two norms continually proclaim their difference and each, now and again, insists on its incompatibility with the other. To return to the lexicon of sovereignty (Okonkwo) and discursive/epistemic capture (Ezeulu) that we have been employing, it would seem that the post-colonial descendants of these totemic fgures avoided each extremity by resorting to a dynamic duophony that created the space for being in a different way. This – I believe – is the space that theorists of African political and social/cultural modernity have, in various ways, tried to account for, employing different conceptual tools and frameworks. From Peter Ekeh’s theory of colonialism and the creation of two publics in Africa, to Mahmood Mamdani’s theorisation of the ‘bifurcated state’ as the legacy of late colonialism in Africa,27 the idea of a duality haunts post-colonial social science. But Ezeulu’s anxiety is even more fundamental than these theories show. For him, it was the much deeper haunting of time, of being always, forever behind in time that was truly tragic. What he foresees as the consequence of the delayed New Yam festival is insertion into a new linear temporality, a new historicity in which his people will always remain behind in the new scheme of universalised time Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

and the new regime of knowledge that accompanies it. The white man’s harvest will now always come frst, several moons before his own people’s harvest; and this temporal precedence will not only be as a result of a Eurocentric construction of time, but will also be the result of his own unwitting co-optation into this time. It will thus become part of his community’s own plot of time. And within this time scheme, there can be no catching up: every year and in every way, Umuaro’s present will become the white man’s past. And Umuaro’s future – given a lot of good luck – is the white man’s present. Achebe’s Arrow of God literally depicts an African harvest that will always, forever come after the Christian, European harvest: and, in so doing, the novel literalises a dominant concept of Western thought about different temporalities for different peoples and presents it to us for contemplation and refection. In Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, Johannes Fabian argues that this conception of time ‘promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, others downstream’.28 He goes on:

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Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specifed, from evolutionary Time. They all have an epistemological dimension apart from whatever ethical, or unethical, intentions they may express. A discourse employing terms such as primitive, savage (but also tribal, traditional, Third World, or whatever euphemism is current) does not think, or observe, or critically study the “primitive”; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object, of Western thought.29

To borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, a major epistemological dimension of the insertion into a new temporality is that you are no longer the ‘sovereign, theoretical subject’ of your own history;30 your history becomes a record of how well you walk or follow (in the present) in the footsteps of those who have previously trod those paths (in the past) or how grievously you fail to follow adequately. This is what epistemic capture truly means – that you now think and speak your world through categories and concepts derived from another world. This is what the second epigraph encapsulates. For a man like Ezeulu, who knows that ‘(e)very land had its own sky’,31 seeing the world through another man’s sky is not in the nature of things. ‘What could it point to but the collapse and ruin of all things?’32

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS As demonstrated in the previous sections, we now know, with the beneft of post-colonial Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

hindsight, that Ezeulu’s fear that his god, Ulu, will be completely displaced, made irrelevant, and supplanted by the Christian church did not come to pass in those terms. Rather, an accommodation was reached that led to the normalisation of a coevality that legitimised the presence of two discursive orders with numerous crossings, entrances and exits. Any curious observer can see this again and again in present day Africa, the overwhelming evidence of this ‘spectre’ of choice or movement between normative orders in every facet of society – from the practice of every-day-life to the highest echelons of the institutions of government, business and the economy. In some instances, this has proved benefcial and in others it has had some unarguably untoward effects. This coevality, as we have seen, also involves the conjoining of two temporalities and the introduction of a new knowledge regime that is fundamentally discontinuous with the old one. From Kuhn and Foucault we know the ruptures that paradigm shifts and epistemic changes create. But we have not – in my opinion – adequately inserted the presence of two knowledge regimes into our conceptual and analytical frameworks. Witness, for example, the often uncritical embrace of a grammar and practice of ‘development’ that positions African polities in ways that refect the paradigm of a temporal lag. And this

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positioning is embedded in almost every facet of the theoretical and conceptual resources we have inherited. For me, this is one of the defning characteristics of our post-colonial present, our postcolonial modernity that an engaged practice of criticism needs to explore in framing new sets of questions and seeking new answers. Re-reading Achebe’s novels of tradition from this perspective may yet yield the insights with which we need to begin to engage this problematic.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT A short extract from this essay was published in a PMLA special tribute to Chinua Achebe. See Harry Garuba, ‘Chinua Achebe and the Struggle for Discursive Authority in the Postcolonial World,’ PMLA 129 (2), pp.246–248.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe, C., 2009. The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays. New York: Knopf, pp. 3–24. 2 Grosfoguel, R., 2008. Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies. Eurozine, [online] 4 July 2008. Available at http://www.eurozine.com [Accessed 6 July 2015]. 3 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. (2e). London: Heinemann. 4 Scott, D., 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke UP, p. 4. 5 Fanon, F., 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Classics, p. 166. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

6 Scott, D., 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton UP, p. 110. 7 Achebe, C., 1989. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987. New York: Doubleday, pp. 40–46. 8 Achebe, C., 1973. African Writers on African Writing. Killam, G. D., (ed.), London: Heinemann, p. 8. 9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 Ibid., p. 8. 11 Achebe, C., 1989. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987. New York: Doubleday, p. 139. 12 Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction. London: James Currey, p. 50. See Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. 13 Said, E. W., 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, p. xiii. 14 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. (2e). London: Heinemann, p. 219. 15 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. p. 46. 16 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. p. 154. 17 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. p. 43. 18 I discuss these issues more fully in a forthcoming essay, ‘Power and the African Subject: Modernity, Colonialism and Normalisation’.

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Chapter 2 19 Irele, F. A., 2006. ‘Ezeulu as World Historical Figure: Preliminary Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God’ in The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honour of Ben Obunselu. Diala, I., (ed.). Trenton: Africa World Press. p. 110. 20 Irele, F. A., 2000. The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. African Studies Quarterly, 4(3) p. 35 (endnote 13). 21 Garuba, H., 2002. Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative. Alternation 9(1), pp. 87–116. 22 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God, p. 202. 23 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God, p. 230. 24 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God, p. 218. 25 Ibid., p. 218. 26 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God, p. 228. 27 See: Eke, P., 1975. Print. Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17(1), pp. 91–112. Mamdani, M., 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton UP. 28 Fabian, J., 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia UP, p. 17. 29 Fabian, J., 1983. Time and the Other, pp. 17–18. 30 For a fuller elaboration of this idea, see Chakrabarty, D., 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton UP, pp. 27–46. Here are the pertinent lines: ‘I have a more perverse proposition to argue. In so far as the academic discourse of history – that is, “history” as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university – is concerned, “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Kenyan,” and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories become variations on a master narrative that could be called the “the history of Europe”.’ (27) 31 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God, p. 159. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

32 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God, p. 229.

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CHAPTER

There was a Country Achebe’s Last Salute

Garnette Oluoch-Olunya

PREAMBLE As I re-read There was a Country in March 2014, I refected on the huge gift that Achebe had been – and is – to African Literature (even as I pondered the protracted burial rituals of the Igbo). Although I was specifcally located in Nairobi, it was disturbing that we were going through upheavals that were uncannily and presciently refected in what I was reading. Now I knew how the Nigerian government had felt when Achebe published A Man of the People, just after the January 1966 coup. It really was like he knew. The signs were all there, of course. Like they are all here now – only we refuse to see them.

Introduction: ‘One Nation’—The making of Nigeria Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history? Chinua Achebe1 To explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not fnd gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. Salman Rushdie2 But Biafra was deliberate, an act of Man. Frederick Forsyth3

In There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra,4 Chinua Achebe establishes categorically, in the introduction, the tenuous link between coloniser and colonised. He insists that those who share the historical burden of where Africa fnds itself today must themselves be part of the solution.  If Africa has a problem, then it is as much Africa’s

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as it is that of the West. This chapter refects, against the backdrop of the 2013 Kenyan elections, on key issues that persist today as the diverse groups that form the ‘unitary’ states of Africa continue to struggle for nationhood, for autonomy, and for a way to live together. There was a Country will be read alongside The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria, as well as selected essays in The Education of a British Protected Child.5 Achebe describes Biafra as ‘a cataclysmic experience that changed the history of Africa’.6 Over two million people died in this protracted war that he compares in scope to the two world wars, and that was arguably more brutal.7 This challenge to nationhood, coming so soon after Nigeria’s independence, pitted imperial intention of a unifed state against internal dynamics on the ground, threatening the very process of state-in-formation itself. In response to the clamour for African independence, the British advanced an overt strategy for disengagement on the one hand, and subtler continued robust engagement on the other, here almost coming unstuck. Only the British could manage the delicate balancing act that they had employed in Nigeria – between the Northern Muslim states, former autocratic Kingdoms of the Hausa and Fulani, the West, and the Igbos in the Eastern part of the country. The British had deliberately not disrupted life in the Muslim North, and so, at policy level, failed to develop economic, administrative and educational opportunities. This oversight may have been embraced as ‘indirect’ rule; yet the failure to provide opportunity was to have far-reaching consequences. The Igbo – whose traditional practices have been described as being democratic – beneftted from these educational opportunities offered by the British, and assuming one country, came North, where the locals soon saw them as the enemy. With independence came the withdrawal of British mediation on the ground, and

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

faring tensions. As part of their exit strategy, the British appointed Sir James Robertson as last Governor, to oversee the elections and transition period. His hidden task, however, was to rig the election so that Britain’s ‘compliant friends in the North would win power, dominate the country and serve British interests after independence’.8 If the British strategy was that a non-western-educated – and therefore non-threatening – North should control the educated workforce, then things did not quite go to plan. One of the great ironies of Western education (which came in the same package as Christianity) was that the very thing that was supposed to civilise, to elevate and to integrate the native into the nation system also severed him from his provincial one. Achebe remarks the strangeness of this new thing, superimposed on ancient practice that led Uncle Udo to ask, ‘What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?’9 In Nigeria, colonial alienation, or integration of the native took a tragic turn in the meeting between the North and the South. The spread of education was badly skewed, because in Frederick Lugard’s determination to allow the North to keep their culture, the Northerners eschewed that of the coloniser. With the exit of the Europeans after independence, the Northerners were ill-prepared economically, educationally and administratively to take over jobs. More Southerners now came in, adding to those already in the North due to Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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harsh conditions at home.10 This is what actually led to unrest and uprisings that saw the North, for instance, give preference to whites over Southerners when it came to jobs, and which eventually led to the breakdown that saw pogroms instituted against the Igbo.11 This, then, is what directly triggered the Biafran war, and spurred the Igbo to secede. According to Chimamanda Adichie, over 7 000 Igbo were killed in what she calls a ‘massacre … Nigerian civilians killed by Nigerian civilians’.12 From May to September 1966, government failed to act; it did not intervene. When refecting on this period of time, Achebe says: I was one of the last to fee Lagos. I simply could not bring myself to accept that I could no longer live in my nation’s capital, although the facts clearly said so. My feeling toward Nigeria was one of profound disappointment. Not only because mobs were hunting down and killing innocent civilians in many parts, especially in the North, but because the federal government sat by and let it happen.13

The idea of one nation, of ‘one Nigeria’, was real for Achebe’s generation. His primary identity sat quite comfortably within the larger polity and was unequivocally Nigerian – what John and Jean Comaroff have called policulturalism.14 Adichie, too, in her review of There Was a Country, sees both sides in this confict as Nigerian. National identity was, of course, a new thing. In Things Fall Apart, in which Achebe was already writing back to misconceptions about his culture, he charts the disintegration of traditional society.15 I want to argue that if homogeneous groups were themselves in crisis, and could not hold together in the face of an outside challenge, how was this external infuence itself going to achieve the reverse and suture together an even broader, and therefore more complex, and Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

diverse polity? And even more importantly, once sewn together how might the sutures, be they a foreign religion, language, or administration hold against, or even replace, the systems they sought to graft? What complications might arise from the conjoining of the diverse local to the foreign colonial? Was it inevitable that ‘traditional’ systems were replaced by a ‘modern’ arrangement? And if so, did this new arrangement – however ill conceived, little thought through, unlikely seeming, or doomed to failure – have to, somehow, succeed? Many questions. It has been argued that Nigeria was actually more given to loose confederation than to Unitarian government, an idea actually recognised by all regions, with varying degrees of clarity at different times; only Britain, with her huge vested interests in the country, would not allow it.16 And yet one of the ideas that Achebe dares to interrogate is that of this nationalism transplanted against insurmountable odds. There is strong consensus today that, as Adichie observes ‘A nation is, after all, merely an idea’.17 Indeed, she reminds us that colonial policy neither tried to entrench, nor propagate the idea. The opposite was, in fact, the case, as demonstrated by the fall-out that led to the war. With his last breath, Achebe names this deepest of our fears – that this idea was never really embedded apart from as something that spoke to the economic interests of the outsider.18 Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Indeed, many people blame Achebe for pointing out the uncomfortable truth that nationalism has come unstuck – that the cultural and social glue holding it together is missing and is even accepted, tacitly, as missing. In response to Achebe’s observation, the writer Odia Ofeimun is emphatic when stating: ‘There was NO country’.19 The authority of Achebe’s own experience is diffcult to counter, as is his embrace of his past. As one of a people who dared to secede, he can say, unequivocally, ‘But the most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was that they were fnally in a safe place … at home’.20 More revolutionary still, the British journalist Richard West remarked after a visit that, ‘Biafra was the frst place I had been to in Africa where the Africans themselves were truly in charge’.21 For the British, the stakes were high indeed. According to Michael Gould in The Biafran War,22 Shell Oil Company had explored and found rich oil reserves in parts of Nigeria. But it only disclosed half of the fnd and kept the rest of the information from the Nigerian government until after the war. If, at frst, the British had a political interest in the matter and could not allow the country to disintegrate as this might follow in the rest of its former territories, it now had an even more compelling economic interest – untapped natural resources that would one day translate into petro-dollars. And so the secessionists had to be checked, notwithstanding their own early recognition that ‘Nigeria did not belong we’23 – that already they were outsiders in this country.

Judicialising the Political: Waging Law-fare In March 2013, as I read Achebe’s book for the frst time, Kenya was tense with postCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

election anxiety. Once again, as had happened in 2007, many Kenyans believed that the election had been stolen – as had the earlier one in 2007, which gave victory to Mwai Kibaki (Party of National Unity) over Raila Odinga (Orange Democratic Movement) and led to violence on an unprecedented scale. This time it was the Jubilee coalition, headed by Uhuru Kenyatta (The National Alliance) and William Ruto (United Republican Party). Kenyatta and Ruto have both been indicted by the International Criminal Court sitting at The Hague for crimes against humanity, for being key players in the election violence. With newly established institutions, such as the Supreme Court, to deal with such matters, the country anxiously awaited its judgment on a contested presidential ballot. The Court, however, delivered a judgment so ‘backward looking, mean-spirited (and) cramped’24 that the Chair of the Law Society, Eric Mutua, immediately asked the membership not to cite it in their rulings, as it was not based on sound jurisprudence. In Kenyan law, under the doctrine of stare decisis ‘all courts … are bound by the decision of the Supreme Court.’ Mutua immediately issued a statement: ‘… in order to promote good practice of law, I urge our members to exercise bar restraint’ in citing this decision from the Supreme Court.25

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The Nigerian link in this particular case not only demonstrates the similarity in concerns, it also shows that vigilance is required in order to ensure best practice. Kenya’s Attorney General, who asked to be a friend of the court (amicus curiae), is said to have offered up a Nigerian legal precedent to guide the Court. He referred to the 2003 and 2007 Nigeria Supreme Court election decisions, already strongly critiqued as ‘discreditable’, thereby conferring a dubious legitimacy to a suspect process. Here is one Nigerian response to this appropriation: ‘It is tragic that the court has relied on some of the most awful and questionable jurisprudence from the Nigerian Supreme Court elections’.26 Even with what is touted as one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, it was still possible for the Kenyan judges to interpret Section 83 of the Election Act away from the intended spirit of single, and not double proof. The burden of proof of electoral foul play, and further proof that without this foul play he would have won, rather than the one or the other, rested solely with the petitioner. It is in the context of failure to ‘appreciate that the question of who should rule (Kenya) is not one to be decided by a perverse and narrow legalism, by the technicalities of the rules of evidence, practice and procedure and by considerations of expediency’ that the Kenyan case was lost by the petitioner.27 After weeks of waiting, the actual reading of the judgment by the Chief Justice was described by journalist Rasna Warah as ‘abrupt and abrasive, bordering on the arrogant’ – it took less than three minutes, after which citizens were referred to the Internet for the full text.28 That a political process was being hijacked by what John and Jean Comaroff have referred to as ‘law-fare’ was not lost on the Chief Justice who, instead of ensuring a maturity to the process that might be acceptable, even if contentious, abdicated responsibility, only later cautioning against the judicialisation of the political.29 Dialogue was insouciantly,

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

and quite unrealistically, for the mainly ‘analogue’ population, deferred to technology.30

A Rare Earth: Oil, Water, Minerals…and friends Kenya today is in much the same position as Nigeria was in 1966. It is potentially rich, but the full extent of this wealth is as yet unknown, at least in the public domain. Early in 2014 it gifted 46 oil blocks to Nigeria and asked for Nigeria’s help to develop its mineral wealth. But local conjecture is that this was given in exchange for political support regarding the ICC cases. The Government denied this gifting in the Kenyan press, but in Nigeria, on President Goodluck Jonathan’s return from Kenya, it was announced by the Minister for Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, and openly celebrated in the media. New names, like Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian business magnate and co-Chair – with the Kenyan, Dr Kiprono Kittony – of the Nigeria-Kenya Chamber of Commerce, sit alongside local Kenyan entrepreneurs like Manu Chandaria. Dangote was himself allocated seven out of the 46 oil blocks, and has set up a 52 billion shilling cement plant, complete with tax waivers that have raised the issue of unfair competition and which is already causing tension in the local industry.31 Even the Chinese have negotiated an undisclosed

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stake in the emerging industry, with the unprecedented visit by the Chinese Premier, Li Keqiang, to seal several deals. There is also a notable increase in Kenya of Chinese nationals on special visa terms. Kenya apparently has one of the largest known fnds of rare earth minerals in its coastal town of Kwale. And oil and water have been found in Turkana. At the UN Security Council in 2013, China voted resoundingly in the Kenyan corner in support of discontinuing the ICC trials. Kenyan leadership might be fexing its new geopolitical muscle and inviting new ‘friends’ to the party – but at what cost to the citizen? There was a Country presents us with a unique opportunity to review the situation in Kenya. It also provides a lens through which to re-examine the arbitrary, yet much vaunted idea of unity in diversity, and to re-evaluate this bedrock of the nation-state. In Nigeria, diversity was read as difference, rather than strength. Even though the North held the presidency of the country, the infux of educated and professional Igbo was to prove problematic, inviting the envy and soon the wrath of the Northerners. The British policy of cultural preservation in the North was at once a great strength, but also proved to be a crippling weakness and a real handicap in the changing landscape. And yet national integration for the citizenry was not actively pursued, apart from as a power sharing arrangement at the level of top leadership. For the Igbo, local regional government soon turned hostile and perceived their increasing number as threat. Suddenly, the advantages of their outward-looking culture, when read against the Islamic conservatism of the North, were perceived as aggressive, as problematic, as haram. Kenya, in sharp contrast, started off as White Man’s Country. The settler brought with him ‘nation’ as the rationalising principle, with the mzungu as the most important of all the tribes. Having opposed and fought off colonialism, why should the local ethnicities Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

expect that colonialism’s operational logic and legacies might outlast the colonial moment and transition into independence? Indeed, what are the compelling ways in which we have reorganized post-colonial life so as to draw people together again in the present? In Nationalism and Culture in the Postcolonial World, Neil Lazarus32 makes a persuasive argument, derived from that of Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism: ‘… new integrative or contrapuntal orientation in history sees western and non-western experiences as belonging together, because they are connected with imperialism’.33 He argues for continuities and contiguity, which are clearly visible in Kenya, where a settler community stayed on after independence and took part, however imperfectly, in local life. It took the Mau Mau war to partially settle this issue. As Kenya emerges from yet another tense election, what lessons can she learn from the Nigerian experience that might lead to a clearer understanding, not only of the specifc events that impacted so profoundly on Achebe himself, but also of the peculiar condition in which the largely postcolonial continent fnds itself?

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Where one thing stands: Gould’s Biafra Michael Gould’s exhaustive PhD dissertation, published as The Biafran War, is widely researched, well-resourced, takes advantage of old and newly de-classifed colonial archives and demonstrates ingenuity in accessing materials on the ground and elsewhere.34 He has lived and worked in Nigeria for the last 50 years and is an honorary Igbo chief. He is well travelled locally, and has personal and family connections that he uses effectively, as demonstrated in interviews with informants who are carefully selected for their knowledge. He has met both Yakubu Gowon and Lt Col Emeka Ojukwu, and spoke to Achebe as well. He frst wrote on Biafra in 2000, before embarking on the extended PhD study, and is palpably passionate about his subject. Anthony Kirk-Greene, Oxford historian, in a blurb on the back cover accurately refers to the text as ‘an outstanding account and analysis of the Nigerian Civil War’. Gould painstakingly gathered all the details and put them together in a coherent, sharply annotated narrative. It is a well-told story – both factual and nuanced. I draw attention to Gould’s selection of images on pages 76 and 77, a small detail. He carries a picture from the 1966 killings of a named victim, Onwanaibe Anyaegbu, travelling from Pankshin (near Jos in the North), whose head was chopped off with an axe, his insides ripped out, and his body put on the train headed for Enugu. This is the kind of graphic public display of the dead one cannot imagine in Achebe’s book, even to make a point. Of course the act itself was voyeuristic and meant to serve as a warning to the Igbo at the time, but still the question must be asked: Why publish this picture? Is it a marker of the difference in perspective that distinguishes the insider from the outsider? After ffty years, is Gould an outsider? He nevertheless demonstrates the rawness of the Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

type of violence experienced by the Igbo – what we call in Kiswahili unyama: the type that is impossible to forget. And yet in his determination to distinguish the Igbo in the telling of his story, Achebe may, because of his stature, achieve the more lasting fracture to Nigerian society. Achebe sets himself an impossible task. As a former publisher, he is concerned about leaving behind a responsible document.35 Like Gould, he takes notable recourse to archival and secondary sources in his own telling, which is what may have led Adichie to critique the coda to the book title, ‘a “personal” history’. She notes that Achebe had previously touched on this period in the poems and stories in Girls at War,36 but not in a sustained or comprehensive manner. Indeed, ‘many have waited and hoped for a memoir, for his personal take on a contested history. Now at last he has written it’.37 In an insightful, incisive and candid interview, Odia Ofeimun touches on the nerve centre of what bothers many readers, particularly those from Nigeria, about Achebe’s book.38 He charges Achebe with acting as a ‘foreign correspondent’ in this citing of secondary sources – yet he was an eyewitness. It is this distancing of himself, this withholding of the inside story, the refusal to provide what could have been new, that is bemoaned as a missed opportunity. An even more serious charge is that Achebe demonstrates a double Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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morality, ultimately privileging Igbo-ness over Nigerian-ness. For Ofeimun, Achebe has failed to use the opportunity to strike a blow for ‘one Nigeria’ in his telling of the collective story. In his sifting through a painful archive for benefcent truth, is Achebe, keenly conscious of his role as a writer, signaling, therefore, the futility of holding on to unrealistic expectations beyond the ethnic? Such are the questions this book provokes. The book arguably rewards with singular and now priceless detail. In describing Ojukwu’s delivery of the Ahiara Declaration, for instance, Achebe says, ‘Ojukwu read it beautifully that day.’39 This line resonates with an intimate depth, refecting love, respect and a collective hope. Achebe also speaks to the erasure of the very name Biafra on defeat, with the re-naming of the Bight of Biafra.40 Adichie herself cites the moment Achebe heard the news of the poet Christopher Okigbo’s death. Okigbo’s ‘vibrancy and heightened sense of life touched everyone he came into contact with’.41 And now he was dead, a ‘rebel’ killed by ‘gallant’ Federal forces. Everything stopped: I pulled up at the roadside. The open parkland around Nachi stretched away in all directions. Other cars came and passed. Had no one else heard the terrible news?42

Achebe is hazy with some recollections, selective with others and silent on many. The silences echo his inability to foist on attendant generations, for whom Nigeria still struggles to be a nation, the intense bitterness and the crippling burden he must carry. This text, perhaps, demonstrates the impossibility of history – and its subjectivity. Binyavanga Wainaina, once Director of the Chinua Achebe Centre at Bard College, notes in a recollection soon after Achebe’s death a certain sadness and loneliness about Achebe, which was brought on by two things, both rooted in the time of Biafra: Nigeria’s failure to fnd Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

a moral centre; and an overwhelming sense of loss, usually associated with very old age, which, in his case, came early: ‘One day you woke up and everyone you knew was dead’.43 Alienation and loss become the very subject of the book, which Chimamanda reads as a dirge, ‘[a] Nigerian nationalist lament for the failure of the giant that never was: Achebe is mourning Nigeria’s failures, the greatest and most devastating of which was Biafra.’ His great disappointment manifests itself in a rare moment of defance towards the end of the book, an anger that is best understood within the current context of a resurgence of Biafra through such organisations as the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (Massob).44 There are many international observers who believe that Gowon’s actions after the war were magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of treatises that talk about how the Igbo were wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have news for them: the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country’s continued backwardness, in my estimation.45

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The Igbo have indeed been marginalised since Biafra and, in the process, standards arguably compromised. In Igboland itself, even where they were the best qualifed, having already established impressive local standards, teaching jobs were given to Westerners and Indians. As Senator Uche Chukwumerije observed, ‘Although the civil war ended almost 34 years ago, Igbos are still treated as a conquered people’.46

The personal is political Achebe has always maintained that the African is best suited to tell the African story. But he also maintained that where one thing stands, another must stand beside it. While his authority as Biafran is in no doubt, he is constrained by this very state of belonging. Reading There was a Country and The Biafran War side by side, Gould’s mastery of the story of Biafra, his remarkable attention to the detail of the war and to its context, but also his commitment to capturing the spirit of the time, provide an urgent complement to the things that Achebe cannot possibly say. Gould’s is an inter-generational commitment, having started with the deep friendships that his father, Joseph, formed in Igboland. In 2008, Achebe consented to write the foreword to a book about ‘Africa’ by the Africanist scholar, Richard Dowden: Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles.47 Here, he says of Dowden, ‘One could not ask for a more qualifed author to explore Africa’s complexity;’ of the book, ‘A welcome addition to the growing library of serious critical analysis of Africa’. Taken together, Gould’s erudite telling of the detail of The Biafra War is the perfect foil to Achebe’s insistence that there was a ‘country’. For Achebe, this has been ‘the thing around his neck’, the sadness that he has carried.48 In his fnal act as a writer, he re-visits Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Biafra, signaling, in last salute, Biafra’s right to be. He fnds that he cannot go gently. And what one ultimately hears is an echo of the question posed by Uncle Udo: ‘What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?’

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. London: Allen Lane, p. 53. 2

Cited in Horta, P. L., 2014. Cosmopolitan Bias: Salman Rushdie Reads Richard Burton. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 1(1), pp. 89–106, p. 99, my emphasis. The argument is that humans are mobile, nomadic, unrestrained beings.

3 Gould, M., 2012. The Biafran war: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria. London: I B Taurus. 4 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. 5 Achebe, C., 2009. The Education of a British-Protected Child. London: Penguin. 6 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 2. 7 In Gould, Biafra has been described as ‘a war among brothers’, with Yakubu Gowon insisting that at the end, there was ‘No victor no vanquished’ (p. 201). Gould describes a rare moment in September 1967: a

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Chapter 3 truce was called during the World Cup so the two sides could watch Santos, the Brazilian team, featuring Pele, play two matches! (p. 202) 8 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. p. 271. 9 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. p, 13. 10 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 75. 11 In 2002, Boko Haram ( Jama’atu Ahl As-Suna Li-D’awati Wal Jihad), Hausa for ‘Western education is a sin’ its origins in deprivation, war and state collapse, was born. (Achebe, 2013, p. 318) I see it as having antecedents in these early inequalities. 12 Adichie, C. N., 2012. Things Left Unsaid. London Review of Books. 34 (19), p. 32–33. Available at http:// www.lrb.co.uk/v34/no19/chimamanda-adichie/things-left-unsaid. [Accessed 16 November 2013]. 13 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. p. 71. Also See Tayie. S., 2013. Ghana Must Go. London: Viking, p.106. Tayie broadens our reading of this putsch, reminding us that the events leading to Biafra were not a singularly Igbo affair: ‘She sensed the change immediately, in the tone people took when they learned that her father had been murdered by soldiers; in the way they’d nod as if, yes, it all makes sense, the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, but of course. Never mind that the Hausas were targeting Igbos, and her father was a Yoruba, and her grandmother Scottish, and the house staff Fulani, some Indian even. Ten dead, one an Igbo, minor details, no matter…’ Gould puts it at a more conservative 5 000. As part of propaganda, Ojukwu invariably, by his own admission, inflated casualty figures. See Gould, M., 2012. The Biafran war, p. 202. 14 See Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., 2009. Ethnicity Inc. Durban: UKZN Press, p. 52 for a thorough look at the idea of policulturalism, where ‘poli’ stands for ‘plurality and its politicization’. They proffer a sophisticated understanding of what Biafra signaled. 15 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. 16 Gould, M., 2012. The Biafran war: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria. pp. 18–19.

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

17 Adichie, C. N., 2012. Things Left Unsaid. London Review of Books. 34(19), p. 32. Available at http://www. lrb.co.uk/v34/no19/chimamanda-adichie/things-left-unsaid. [Accessed 16 November 2013]. 18 Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., 2009. Ethnicity Inc. Durban: UKZN Press (pp. 117–138; p. 118) have argued that once the neo-liberal cloak is removed, this is what the nation is about. It is a corporation. This is what it was for the imperial power. The Royal Niger Company was this corporation in Nigeria. 19 See Ofeimun, O., Interviewed in Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s funeral sparks literary debate. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y06D6xFyVBc [Accessed 30 June 2014]. 20 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 171. 21 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 172. 22 Gould, M., 2012. The Biafran War, p. 2. Also see p. 128 for a record of the talks between Mr Stanley Grey (Managing Director of Shell), the British High Commissioner and the Dutch Ambassador, that confirmed huge oil reserves and their resolve to withhold this information from local government – and even play politics to protect their interests. 23 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 87. 24 Maina, W., 2013. Verdict on Kenya’s Presidential Election Petition: Five Reasons the Judgment Fails the Legal Test. The East African Online, [online] 20 April 2013. Available at http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke [Accessed 24 June 2014]. 25 Mutua, E., 2013. Technicalities vis-à-vis Substantive Justice: Impact of The Supreme Court Ruling on The Practice of Law. Chairman’s Address to the Law Society of Kenya. Kenya Stockholm Blog, [online] 31 March 2013. Available at http://www.kenyastockholm.com [Accessed 24 June 2014].

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There was a country 26 Maina, W., 2013. Verdict on Kenya’s Presidential Election Petition. I substitute Kenya for Nigeria, to which this quotation actually refers. 27 Maina, W., 2013. Verdict on Kenya’s Presidential Election Petition. 28 Warah, R., 2013. It is not what the Chief Justice said, but how he said it that really hurt. Available at http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Warah-Chief-Justice-Supreme-Court/-/440808/1754470/-/geiwsaz/-/index.htmlint. [Accessed 24 June 2014]. 29 See Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J., 2009. Ethnicity Inc. Durban: UKZN Press, pp. 53–59. Mahmood Mamdani has looked extensively at issues of politics and justice, especially in post-conflict areas, and argues that criminal justice is difficult to apply to politicians, because they come with a constituency; that political solutions should be sought for political problems. Mamdani, M., 2014. Public Lecture, Kenyatta University. Can Courts End Civil Wars., February. Available at http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/ news/Courts-and-civil-wars-subject-of-first-East-Africa-debate/-/2558/2208062/-/b2mfx5z/-/index.html [Accessed 30 June 2014]. 30 Olu Oguibe has pointed out the ease with which the majority can be excluded from exercising agency, which is then given to a small networked minority. An election is a public process; the Chief Justice turned it into a privileged one. See Olu, O., 2002. ‘Connectivity and the Fate of the Unconnected’, in Goldberg, D., & Quayson, A., 2002, Relocating Postcolonialism. Oxford: Blackwell. 31 Owuor, Mike, 2013. Kenya gave us 46 oil wells, claims Nigerian Petroleum minister. mowuor@ ke.nationmedia.com, [online] 14 September 2013. Available at http://www.mobile.nation.co.ke [Accessed 5 July 2014]. 32 Lazarus, N., 1999. Nationalism and Culture in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 8. 33 Said, E., 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, p. 279. 34 This work was done at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Available at http://www.soas.ac.uk/cas/events/19jan2012-book-launch-the-struggle-for-modern-nigeria-the-biafranwar-1966-1970.html [Accessed 5 July 2014].

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

35 Achebe, C., 2013. There Was a Country. On pp. 178–179, he refers to an incident in which, as publisher of The Citadel Press, he declined to publish The Ifeajunwa Manuscript, much as it was an important document, because it was an insincere account of the 1966 coup, containing inconsistencies and callousness, and was ultimately irresponsible. 36 Achebe, C., 1972. Girls at War. London: Heinemann. 37 Adichie, Op cit, pp. 32–33. 38 Ofeimun, O., interviewed in Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s funeral sparks literary debate. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y06D6xFyVBc [Accessed 30 June 2014]. 39 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 148. 40 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 149. 41 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 116. 42 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 184. 43 2013. Binyavanga Wainaina remembers Chinua Achebe.[online video] Published 16 May 2013. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrnwsR4JoSk [Accessed 27 June 2014] 44 Gould, M., 2012. The Biafran War. p. 208. 45 Achebe, C., 2013. There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, p. 235. 46 Gould, M., 2012. The Biafran War, p. 209. 47 Dowden, R., 2008. Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. London: Portobello Books. 48 Adichie, C.N., 2009. The Thing Around Your Neck. London: Fourth Estate.

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CHAPTER

Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child and African Cosmopolitanism Ronit Frenkel

I would like to start this chapter with two quotes that form the intellectual corner-stone of my argument. While they may appear to point in different directions initially, please bear with me, as I hope to make these connections clearer as I proceed. The frst quote is by C.L.R. James, who remains one of the most under-rated iconoclasts of the last century. C.L.R. James says: Now to talk to me about black studies as if it’s something that concerned (only) black people is utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization. I can’t see it otherwise. This is the history that black people and white people and all serious students of modern history of the world have to know. To say it’s some kind of ethnic problem is a lot of nonsense.1

The second quote is by Paul Gilroy and begins his book, Darker than Blue (a series of

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essays) as follows: The geo-political order is changing. Old inequalities persist and new varieties of unfreedom emerge. The racialised structuring of our world, which was established during the nineteenth century, is evolving too. The north Atlantic no longer lies at the centre. The situation requires new analytical tools and conceptual adjustments. The scale on which analysis operated previously has to be altered in order to take emergent patterns into account. The teleological sequence that made the overdeveloped countries into the future and their formerly colonized territories into the past is being left behind. If the West now represents the past while the rest are to be the future, what does that change do to the assumptions about history and historicity that were required by racial hierarchy?2

Our world is indeed changing, as we see the collapse of world banking systems and the dominance of the cold North ending. Fanaticism and intolerance wear the guise of religiousity or the state, while ethnic nationalisms have resurfaced within a transnational age of tightened border controls and freer trade routes.

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Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child and African Cosmopolitanism

While the context that made Area Studies a necessity has changed, the need to re-examine the scholarship that emerged within these traditions is perhaps even more pertinent now than it was before. It is within this intellectual context that I believe we need to re-read Chinua Achebe – not just as the progenitor of modern African literature in English, but also as a cosmopolitan intellectual for a transnational analytic today. The term ‘cosmopolitanism’ has become one of the keywords of the present context and has a range of interpretations. At its base lies the idea that human variety and choice are good things. Things get trickier once we move beyond its most simplistic defnition. For some theorists, like Martha Nussbaum, cosmopolitanism is a sort of morality where humanism is more pertinent than nationalism; for others, it signifes hybridity, fuidity and fracture for people whose aspirations cannot be bound by the nation-state or other imagined communities, like many post-colonial theorists maintain. Cosmopolitanism is also read as a ‘normative philosophy for carrying the universalistic norms of discourse ethics beyond the confnes of the nation state’,3 as Habermas delineates. ‘(C)osmopolitanism describes ideals for communities in which outward orientation among citizens is emphasized, and where strangers and cultural differences are accommodated by the group’.4 Neil Lazarus looks at cosmopolitanism as something that is constructed, something we are not born into, but rather make5 and where all versions of cosmopolitanism are local cosmopolitanisms, because it comes out of ‘a particular way of registering self-hood in a particular time and place’;6 and, as a construct, there is no necessary contradiction between ideas of the universal, local or national when we are at home in the world. Similarly, Stephanie Newell reminds us that: As Arif Dirlik suggests, “the local” will always be “very contemporary … serv(ing) as a site Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

for the working out of the most fundamental contradictions of the age.” Such present-ness makes “local cosmopolitanism” a useful historical concept, giving us an entry point to categories, ideas, styles, recreations and reactions from periods and locales that have informed, but are no longer necessarily relevant to, contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism.7

Local cosmopolitanism is then a useful concept in re-reading Achebe’s work. His seminal ideology is a form of local cosmopolitanism that can be described as African cosmopolitanism, as it is undergirded by a type of cosmopolitan humanism with distinctly African roots. ‘Cosmopolitan perspectives have restructured the feld of literary studies, transforming the way scholars imagine their object and method of study, and have brought to the fore such (renewed) frameworks for literary studies as world literatures, or the transnational, the global, and the planetary’.8 Yet, competing notions of cosmopolitanism, coupled with changes in the political economy of the globe and increasing ‘global securitocracy’,9 have given the nation prominence too. Scholarship that is cosmopolitan in orientation is often precariously placed in this context. Frassinelli and Watson call this a cosmopolitanism in crisis or a precarious mode of cosmopolitanism that entails ‘a dual task: to both narrate

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an ongoing fdelity to the possibilities enabled by certain modes of cosmopolitanism and (to) think through the precarity of these potentialities’.10 However, as Seyla Benhabib points out, cosmopolitanism must also take into account what she calls the paradox of bounded communities11 – of those who do not wish to interact beyond what they consider to be their own kind, like the Amish. It is at this juncture that Achebe’s ideas become crucial, both in terms of the content and in the global infuence of his work. With Things Fall Apart, he ‘bequeathed a whole new catalogue of cultural historical stories to readers across the globe’ re-imagining representations of Africa for readers in Nigeria and the rest of the world.12 Elleke Boehmer has examined the impact of his writings, not just in terms of content, but also through ‘transliterated language, communal narrative position, and epistemological framing where all of these elements working together’ can be traced in writings from Zimbabwe, Papua New Guinea, Australia and India – to name just a few locales.13 Achebe clearly inhabits a global space where local history and cosmopolitan confgurations combine seamlessly. Achebe, much like C.L.R. James with whom I began this article, sees no contradiction between local particularities and transcendent humanist values – or to quote how Kwame Anthony Appiah describes his father, ‘between being part of the place you were and a part of a broader human community’.14 Achebe is usually designated as a nationalist writer and nationalism is often situated as the antithesis of cosmopolitanism, as Appiah theorises. However, other intellectuals, like James Ogude, have discussed Achebe’s work as a type of local cosmopolitanism, inhabiting an iconoclastic place in global intellectual history as his work foreshadows the term decades before it came into being. Ogude has recently discussed Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease as straddling two

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types of cosmopolitanism: … I argue that Achebe navigates this dilemma of transition by pointing to two forms of cosmopolitanism in tension with each other: one is idealistic and outside local history, a universalist type of cosmopolitanism that “resists settlement” in particular, conficted social and historical contexts, while the other is inside history, a cosmopolitanism of local colonial subjects who, as Stephanie Newell argues, have been labelled mimics … .15

Ogude examines Achebe’s brand of local cosmopolitanism as universalist, rather than reading the local as anti-cosmopolitan in any way. Following on from Ogude’s work, I argue that Achebe’s later texts, like The Education of a British-Protected Child that was published in 2009, reveals no tension between cosmopolitanisms, but rather theorises its own particular version of local cosmopolitanism – that I call African cosmopolitanism – as it is rooted in Achebe’s Igbo ontology, while simultaneously drawing on a global cosmopolitan humanism. While it may seem contradictory to couple the terms African and cosmopolitan, Achebe offers us a version of cosmopolitanism that forges connections across sites, but originates with local knowledge that allows for a different lens into the global imaginary. It is a lens that transcends the local, while simultaneously rooting us

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in it. There is no contradiction here, as Achebe has a solid, but not unequivocal, sense of history and tradition when examining the global from within his cosmopolitan frame. In his collection of essays called The Education of a British-Protected Child, Achebe utilises everyday experiences to comment on broader topics, ranging from: colonialism in Africa to Martin Luther King and his impact on ideas of African-ness; from the relationship between African immigrant life in the US, to the nationalist phase in African literatures. Achebe’s writings are undergirded by a concept of cosmopolitan humanism that is context-bound, without relying on narrow ideas of authenticity and belonging. However, Achebe is able to synthesise nationalist and cosmopolitan perspectives quite seamlessly into his own type of African cosmopolitanism, which is rooted in his cultural background, as well as in his transnational contexts of interaction. Achebe utilises Igbo ontological confgurations to comment on various global issues, allowing for a different lens of understanding. The collection begins with the title chapter. Achebe takes his title from his 1957 passport classifcation as a ‘British protected person’.16 Three years later, that arbitrary protection ended with Nigeria’s independence – yet it remains central to Achebe’s self-defnition in 2009, as this collection’s title reveals. He explains this seemingly odd confguration as follows: I hope nobody is dying to hear all over again the pros and cons of colonial rule. You would get only cons from me, anyway. So I want to indulge in a luxury which the contemporary culture of our world rarely allows: a view of events from neither the foreground nor the background, but the middle-ground. That middle-ground is, of course, the least admired of the three. It lacks lustre; it is undramatic, unspectacular. And yet my traditional Igbo culture, which at the hour of her defeat had ostensibly abandoned me … yes, that very culture taught Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

me a children’s rhyme which celebrates the middle-ground as most fortunate … . The front one, whose eyes encounters spirits The middle one, the dandy child of fortune The rear one of twisted fngers Why do the Igbo call the middle-ground lucky? What does this place hold that makes it so desirable? Or, rather, what misfortune does it fence out? The answer is, I think, Fanaticism. The One Way, One Truth, One Life menace. The Terror that lives completely alone … . The preference of the Igbo is thus not singularity, but duality. Wherever Something Stands, Something Else Will Stand Beside It.17

While written in a plain and simple style, Achebe’s words are anything but. He combines the movement from protected child to free citizen with his intellectual journey in understanding colonialism and singular ideologies. While the Igbo may have been physically defeated, their particular conceptual paradigm survived, allowing Achebe to see contemporary culture differently. Colonialism as an ideology is then relegated to the past,

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while the ideas of the Igbo become the future, thereby returning us to Gilroy’s teleological repositioning with which this argument began. The content of Achebe’s middle-ground also offers an alternative view that returns us to James’ point, where the artifce and limitations of Ethnic Studies divisions, like black history, are highlighted and repositioned as central or global in a cosmopolitan re-telling in the present, with its warning against fanaticism of any kind. Achebe continues as follows: The middle-ground is neither the origin of things nor the last things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony. When the Igbo encounter human confict, their frst impulse is not to determine who is right, but quickly to restore harmony. In my hometown, Ogidi, we have a saying … . The judgment of Ogidi does not go against one side. We are social managers, rather than legal draftsmen. Our workplace is not a neat tabletop, but a messy workshop. In a great compound, there are wise people as well as foolish ones, and nobody is scandalized by that.18

Achebe is essentially raising questions as to what sort of relationship we wish to develop between different cosmopolitan existences and ethnic identities within our changing geopolitical world order. He is asking us to take the middle-ground, where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity without resorting to any sort of fanaticism. And on our current world-stage, where politics and morality have been high-jacked by fanaticism of various kinds, in their denial of the basic humanity of the other, this middleground is one that is certainly appealing in its desire for ascendant humanism within a Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

cosmopolitan frame of harmony. He says: What I have attempted to suggest in this rambling essay is the potency of the unpredictable in human affairs. I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it. But I am also fascinated by the middle-ground I spoke about, where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity. And this was to be found primarily in the camp of the colonized, but now and again in the ranks of the colonizer too

… .19 This move is one that shifts away from the Manichean thought that has characterised our pasts. It is a move away from both colonial and anti-colonial dichotomies; it is a move away from the either/or logic of Osama Bin Laden and George Bush in the early 2000s; but it is also a future hope that we move global politics onto what Glissant might call a relational positioning that is not characterised by binary logic at all. Simple? This is a cosmopolitan perspective that is rooted in local knowledge, as it offers us a glimpse of what we might be if we inhabit the middle-ground, where an expansive humanism and the desire to create harmony transcend boundaries of all kinds. Achebe seems to

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be pointing towards a larger cosmopolitan circuit that draws in identities from beyond a range of borders. In the chapter entitled ‘Recognitions’, he describes the famous slave Olaudah Equiano as follows: (Equiano) did achieve a certain recognition, because his book went through nine editions in England between 1789 and 1797, when he died. He is today being rediscovered in Igboland and far beyond it … . One example of the fascination of Equiano was an international conference in Salt Lake City to commemorate the bicentennial of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself. Geography Contracts; history is telescoped. (Emphasis my own) The restraint in expectations which Equiano cautions regarding immortality and literary reputation is well taken. But his extraordinary life and his record of it are clearly the stuff of great literature. Was he indeed the frst writer in England to carry his books from place to place and door to door? If so, he took a major cultural practice from West Africa to Europe. If not, we may limit ourselves to calling him the stuff of legend.20

This paragraph highlights a number of intersecting ideas. Slavery, as we know, created one of the largest groups of post-modern peoples. And Equiano epitomises this process, as he was sold as a child and had what Achebe describes as ‘many adventures’ before buying his own freedom and settling in London. Achebe adds an additional layer to interpreting his life as part of a cosmopolitan circuit where he is the agent of a new type of transnational book culture, as Equiano imports the mobile literary traditions of West Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Africa to England in the eighteenth century, where it is so successfully integrated that its African roots are forgotten. This links us to Isabel Hofmeyr’s work on the history of the book as a mobile transnational and very cosmopolitan cultural form. The idea of a transnational, mobile and cosmopolitan book culture continues in a chapter entitled ‘Teaching Things Fall Apart’, where Achebe draws together three reader responses – a set of letters from a girls’ college in South Korea, that of a young white student at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the present and James Baldwin’s response to the novel. All three had a similar response, i.e. that Okwonkwo was like their own fathers. While Achebe inserts the caveat that Okwonkwo is certainly not an ‘everyman’ fgure, he says that ‘it does suggest that, in spite of serious cultural differences, it is possible for readers in the West to identify, even deeply, with characters and situations in an African novel’.21 In the case of the South Korean letters, the girls were able to draw parallels between the nineteenth century colonisation of the Igbo people by the British and the twentieth century colonisation of Korea by the Japanese.22 While an argument can certainly also be made that patriarchy has similarities worldwide, the circuits that connect these diverse sites also create a pattern that imagines ‘post-identitarian forms of borderless collectivity’,23 while allowing us to think through Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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the new routes that cosmopolitanism is forging across borders of various kinds today. This is not to say that a post-identitarian world is imminent, or even possible, but the ability to imagine patterns beyond such identitarian divisions opens up the space for different sorts of conceptual shifts beyond what capital allows to move freely in the present. The South Korean school girls’ linking of Achebe to their own context of colonialism and patriarchy, coupled with Baldwin’s 50 year old response to Okonkwo, on the other side of the globe, and the empathy of a contemporary student at Amherst College reveals a cosmopolitan circuit of connection that moves beyond both the temporal and the spatial to reveal the universalist humanist underpinnings of the cosmopolitan that connect in Achebe’s ideas. This transnational circulation of cosmopolitan humanism emerges from Achebe’s distinctly Igbo knowledge systems, while simultaneously transcending them – highlighting Achebe’s construction of an African cosmopolitan analytic. The last essay that I would like to focus on is the chapter entitled ‘Africa is People’, which forms the fnal chapter in this collection of essays. Achebe relates the story of being invited to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. He accepted the invitation, unsure of what he would contribute to this forum. He describes the situation as follows: Here was I, an African novelist among predominantly western bankers and economists – a guest, as it were, from the world’s poverty-stricken provinces – at a gathering of the rich and powerful in the metropolis. As I listened to them – Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians – I was left in no doubt, by the assurance they displayed, that these were the masters of our world, savouring the benefts of their success. They read and discussed papers on economic and development matters in different regions of the world … . The matter Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

was really simple, the experts seemed to be saying: the only reason for failure to develop was indiscipline of all kinds … the most recurrent prescriptions for this condition were the removal of subsidies on food and fuel and the devaluation of the national currency … . Suddenly I received something like a stab of insight and it became clear to me why I had been invited … . I signalled my desire to speak and was given the foor. I told them what I had just recognized. I said that what was going on before me was a fction workshop, no more and no less!24

Achebe continues by explaining to this room of world economists why their policies are a spectacular failure in Nigeria, centering the idea that Africa is not fction, but consists of real people – a fundamental idea that is being lost in these policies. However, this not a surprising story, as I believe we are all aware of the short-sighted approach to many Western development interventions. The really central part of this story, for our cosmopolitan purpose, is the following:

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The director-general … of the OECD, beside whom I was sitting, a Dutchman … had muttered to me under his breath, at least twice: “Give it to them!” I came away from that strange conference with enhanced optimism for the human condition. For who could have imagined that, in the very heart of the enemy’s citadel, a friend like that Dutchman might be lurking, happy enough to set my cat among his own pigeons! “Africa is people!” may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still give us a lot of trouble … .25

What Achebe gives us here is both simple and ‘offers us much trouble’, as he epitomises an African intellectual with a cosmopolitan ethic faced with those who cannot see beyond old area studies models of uneven development that are undergirded by a history of raciology that we can all live without. But Achebe offers us a way to sustain a cosmopolitan sensibility through ‘constituting an “us” that transcends the existing identitarian parameters, while at the same time making us aware’26 of the precariousness of that ‘us’. And if we return to the quotes by James and Gilroy with which I began this article, where our changing ‘situation requires new analytical tools and conceptual adjustments’ in order to take emergent patterns into account, while also recognising that African intellectual history is really global intellectual history in this teleological positioning, then we can re-read Achebe as a cosmopolitan theorist for this future.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

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1 James, C. L. R., 1969. Black Studies and the Contemporary Student. Reprinted in James, C. L. R., 1986. At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings. London: Allison and Busby, p. 4. 2 Gilroy, P., 2010. Darker than Blue. On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, p. 4. 3 Benhabib, S., 2008. Another Cosmopolitanism with Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 18. 4 Newell, S., 2011. Local Cosmopolitans in Colonial West Africa. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46(1), pp. 103–117, p. 104. 5 Lazarus, N., 2011. Cosmopolitanism and the Specificity of the Local in World Literature. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46(1), pp. 119–137, p. 120. 6 Ibid., p. 134. 7 Newell, S., 2011. Local Cosmopolitans in Colonial West Africa. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46(1), pp. 103–117, p. 115. 8

Frassinelli, P. & Watson, D., 2013. Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O’Neil’s Netherland and Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 15(5) pp. 1–10, p. 2.

9 Gilroy, P., 2010. Darker than Blue. On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. 10 Frassinelli, P. & Watson, D., 2013. Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O’Neil’s Netherland and Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 15(5), pp. 1–10, p. 2.

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Chapter 4 11 Benhabib, S., 2008. Another Cosmopolitanism with Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 18. 12 Boehmer, E., 2009. Achebe and his Influence in some Contemporary African Writing. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 11(2), pp. 141–153, p. 141. 13 Boehmer, E., 2009. Achebe and his Influence in some Contemporary African Writing, pp. 141–153, p. 142. 14 Appiah, K.A., 2006. Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, p. xviii. 15 Ogude, J., 2014. Reading no longer at ease as a text that performs Local Cosmopolitanism. Uncorrected proofs from the author. PMLA,129(2) pp. 251-253, p. 251. 16 Achebe, C., 2009. The Education of a British- Protected Child. New York: Knopft, p. 4. 17 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 18 Ibid., p .6. 19 Ibid., p. 23. 20 Ibid., p. 74–75. 21 Ibid., p. 127. 22 Ibid., p. 128. 23 Frassinelli, P. & Watson, D., 2013. Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O’Neil’s Netherland and Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 15(5) pp. 1–10, p. 2. 24 Achebe, C., 2009. The Education of a British- Protected Child. pp. 156–157. 25 Ibid., pp. 157–158.

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26 Frassinelli, P. & Watson, D., 2013. Precarious Cosmopolitanism in O’Neil’s Netherland and Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 15(5) pp. 1–10, p. 9.

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CHAPTER

Late Achebe

Biafra as Literary Genealogy Christopher Ouma

Introduction Achebe’s There was a Country refects extensively on the Biafran war and, not only his presence as a witness to this moment of national confagration, but also the war as an aggregative culmination of colonial history. In the aftermath of Biafra, Achebe’s initially instrumental role in the founding of modern African literature evolved into an embodiment of the critical legacy of this civil war. This enduring legacy, the traumatic nature of it, created a literary heritage, a corpus of writing and flial bonds of creative expression informed by the embodied trauma passed down from one generation of writers to another. The emergence of narratives about the Biafran war in the recent past, testify to the coming together of heritages and genealogies of writing about it. This chapter considers Achebe’s memoir There was a Country, alongside recent fctional narratives about the war by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani. The chapter argues that Biafra becomes Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

a literary genealogy, negotiating itself as an evolved cultural memory – through an event that easily fashions points of connection between the embodied traumatic experience for Achebe, and the Biafran story as passed down to a new generation of story-tellers. Adichie and Abani, amongst other writers, become part of what Marianne Hirsch calls (elsewhere) ‘The generation of Postmemory’1 – of people whose connection to the traumatic events experienced by their parents or a generation just before them, is mediated by ‘stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up’.2 In crucial ways, this mediated experience of trauma for Adichie and Abani is not a product of ‘recall’, but, as Hirsch posits ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation.3 I will return to this later in the essay. Biafra’s re-emergence into both the Nigerian and global imaginary is pertinent now more than ever, given the coming into the global political limelight of Boko Haram. Anyone familiar with the tragic history of Biafra will be able to see the continuing structural histories of ethno-religious violence mediated, in fact heightened, during the sixty years in which Fredrick Lugard, colonial Governor-General of British West Africa, re-constructed the geo-political landscape of the area now called Nigeria. Effectively, as Achebe’s preface in There Was a Country argues, colonial cartographical policies set up the maps of violence,

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of which Biafra is an enduring legacy.4 With that in mind, however, this occasion remains, in the frst instance at least, salutary – a quick tribute. The idea for this paper was conceived on an earlier occasion in 2008, in which similar to this one, scholars around the world gathered to refect on Chinua Achebe’s most infuential novel, Things Fall Apart. It had been 50 years since the publication of the novel and I was attending a conference at the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies in October that year. I had just begun my doctoral project, in which I was looking at the ‘new’ generation of African writing. However, having been brought up as a student of African literature on a ‘canonical’ diet of East, West, Southern and African Diaspora literatures, Achebe’s frst novel had biblical repercussions. So I took that occasion to grapple with how the more recent generation of writers, particularly Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, not only drew inspiration and affrmation but also revised and departed from Chinua Achebe’s most infuential novel. The highlight and subject of the conference, Professor Chinua Achebe, was wheeled in to a remarkably prolonged standing ovation, after an enchanting praise poetry performance by acclaimed poet and scholar Abena Busia. An even bigger highlight and very humbling moment for me was the opportunity to personally greet and have a quick word with Achebe, whose work I have written and given numerous classes on: a writer whose work continues to affrm the discipline of African literature in very enduring ways. It was a moment of signifcant affrmation, in which Achebe’s genteel, unassuming personality effected a profound calming of my extremely nervous self, as he took off his right glove to greet me. He had spoken, at some point in his conversation with Professor Simon Gikandi, about the ‘ground clearing’ work he felt writers of his generation had done, to bequeath to those after them the freedom to open up more spaces of story-telling. So it was quite serendipitous and Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

hugely symbolic that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was present at the conference and, at the risk of sounding hopelessly sentimental, this was an occasion on which I felt there was an inter-generational audit of the discipline and the family of African literature. Embodied in Achebe and Adichie (although this is by no means exclusive) were symbologies of a literary genealogical framework that was unfolding. However, the topic of Biafra continues to be a historically generative moment for even more distinct flial, authorial and even public intellectual bonds between these two writers and those of their contemporaries who continue to grapple with it. Achebe’s There was a Country reads along this familial spirit drawing on symbolic, cultural and flial capital, to dissect a moment that for him was a defnitive rupture for intellectuals, writers and poets of his generation. Indeed, to engage with Achebe’s memoir, which has received the sharpest, most acerbic responses in Nigeria,5 is to grapple with not just Achebe as a writer and individual, but also to consequently take stock of an institution – the terms beftting Achebe’s impact on the discipline of African literature, on Nigeria’s public intellectual space and on the continent’s discourse on literary and cultural history. Qualifying the text’s title using the sub-title ‘A personal history of Biafra’, Achebe brings together various sub-sets of his identities – authorial, ethnic, national, African and Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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diasporic – to bear on a legacy that would have to take on this multi-generic grand fnale. There was a Country brings together poetry, memoir, factual history and autobiography in an imaginative scaffolding that presents the concrete legacy of a war that has become the genealogy of individuals, ethnicities, nations and the contemporary world of African letters. Achebe in his memoir takes on story-telling as pedagogy, refecting on a war whose legacy he embodies but which he uses as an educational pathway for the next generation of story-tellers. He says: ‘It is for the sake of the future of Nigeria, for our children and grandchildren, that I feel it is important to tell Nigeria’s story, Biafra’s story, our story, my story’.6 While locating the story of Biafra in a network of collective ownership, Achebe creates narrative spaces as crucial sites of map-making. In the introduction to There was a Country he constructs a concise narrative cartography that locates the Biafran war at the crossroads of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial spatio-temporalities. Achebe’s conviction in this introduction is that the cataclysmic nature of Biafra affected the history of, not only Nigeria, but also Africa. This traumatic history therefore acquires continental dimensions – it becomes metonymic of the continent’s fractured past(s). In a way, Biafra becomes the traumatic unconscious of the continent, which raises questions about the unfnished business of the continent’s previous histories of slavery and colonialism. There was a Country maps out the fractured nature of traumatic history within, not only the psychic schema of Achebe as an individual writer, novelist, essayist and public intellectual, but also the collective psyche of the Igbo, Nigeria, the continent and a global humanity. If we take a quick look at Achebe’s intellectual biography for a moment, perhaps we can see how these sub-sets of his identities cast a wider net in which to frame the genealogical project for

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which this essay is arguing.

GENEALOGY: GENERATIONAL AND CULTURAL MEMORY As the founding editor of Heinemann African Writers Series (AWS), Achebe played the crucial role of helping to inaugurate modern African literature. Indeed we can argue that the African writers series helped set up a genealogy of modern African literature with Chinua Achebe credited for this foundational role (Keith Booker;7 Simon Gikandi;8 Emmanuel Ngara9). In Caroline Lynn-Innes’ book, Chinua Achebe,10 she refects on the role Achebe played in the generic re-formulation of the African novel – especially with the publication of Things Fall Apart. Elsewhere, Ezenwa-Oheato, Achebe’s independent biographer, points out that the period in which AWS was set up was ‘a fruitful decade for Heinemann Educational Books, but taxing for Chinua Achebe, who continued to roll back the frontiers of African literature, until soon he had a reputation – at the age of 32 – of a father fgure in African literature’.11 Achebe had begun embodying that referential point within the growing discipline of modern African literature. He therefore embodied this foundational spirit, going on to infuence younger writers, as Innes and Lindfors prophetically point out.12 While a genealogy

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of African literature cannot be made synonymous with Achebe, he is considered a crucial pioneer of the institutional frameworks of modern African literature. Indeed, Achebe’s instrumental role in the construction of these frameworks enabled his own contemporaries to put paid to the beginning of what is now referred to as the ‘frst’ generation of modern African literature. The idea of a genealogy is therefore substantiated, in the case of Achebe, by the notion of generation. Questions of lineage, ancestry and family trees are mapped out through the idea of a generation. In the case of the family of African literature, the formation of institutions and the critical visibility of individual writers like Achebe threw into sharp relief the logic of a wave – a generation of African literature – and perhaps even the contested notion of a canon. Moreover, by the time of the Biafran war (1967-1970), Achebe’s public intellectual life as a modern African writer placed him at the forefront of public commentary – as the intellectual, the teacher and the novelist, amongst other roles. Ezenwa-Oheato elaborately traces Achebe’s multiple roles during this period, as a roving ambassador for Biafra and as a publisher (with Christopher Okigbo) of Citadel Press. Achebe himself delineates the various public roles for us with more intimacy in his memoir. Ezenwa-Oheato’s biography of Achebe frequently returns to the primary subject of analysis, anchoring its narrative, as the genre demands, on Achebe. Achebe’s memoir, on the other hand, frequently turns its vision extraneously to his contemporaries – the people with whom he worked and who affrmed him – his generational context of value. What is interesting to note about this traumatic period is Achebe’s agonistic balance between family, ethnicity, nation and continental identities. This period meant a re-engagement of entangled loyalties. Traumatic events of this nature open up affective landscapes and, for Achebe, it meant a renewed and focused sense of commitment. He points out quite Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

categorically that, ‘I believe that the African writer who steps aside can only write footnotes or a glossary when the event is over’.13 In the same vein, Achebe asks a pertinent question: ‘Why has the war not been discussed or taught to the young – over forty years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, because we are too stubborn to learn from them?’14 In asking the question above, Achebe under-scores a crucial point at the heart of the traumatic history of the Biafran war: its interrogative memory within the narrative of the Nigerian nation. Wole Soyinka’s The Burden of Memory asks similar questions about projects on traumatic memory.15 Traumatic memory is seen to follow the non-linear, non-schematic patterns within individual and collective psyches. The work of Cathy Caruth captures this interrogative memory clearly, pointing out the diffculty of possessing traumatic history. It is a history, Caruth says, that, ‘literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood’.16 The fragmenting framework of traumatic history, and its concomitant ways of remembering and forgetting, presents the kind of temporal disjuncture that Achebe’s question raises. In this sense, for Achebe, the task of continuing to unpack this

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history – a bitterly contested one at that – ought to be in the framework of a heritage or legacy in the manner of an ethico-moral responsibility whose pathway is genealogical. Achebe’s question above therefore fgures the unassailable process of generational responsibility. In this vein of inescapable continuities, despite the competing and contesting strands of narrative about the war, There was a Country evolves into a generative moment for the articulation of a cultural memory. This is because the very existence of the secessionist Biafran nation meant a re-engagement of the post-colonial nation-state as a problematic heritage of colonial modernity, and whose structural history of a problematically racialised modernity come to bear in the present moment of the war. Here, therefore, questions on ethnicity, nation and state come into confict with the violent cartographies of colonial map-making. The traumatic memory occasioned by the Biafran event aggregates into a cultural memory, as Achebe positions himself as part of a generation, not only of writers, but also of public intellectuals who embody these structurally historic entanglements that imploded with the Biafran war. In the early parts of the text, Achebe explores the project of the new Nigerian nation as, partially, the legacy of a particular generation of intellectuals. In the section ‘A lucky generation’ Achebe sets the tone, saying that his generation was ‘standing fguratively and literally at the dawn of a new era’.17 It is this generational narrative that takes into account the shift from the high optimism of a new Nigerian nation to the confagration of the civil war. More particularly, the role of the artist and creative imagination comes into sharp focus – hence these become sites of a cultural memory, James E Young refers to this elsewhere as ‘texture of memory’.18

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

GENEALOGY: LITERARY AS ‘ARCHIVE’ In three successive sections ‘The Writers and Intellectuals’, ‘The War and the Nigerian Intellectual’ and ‘The Life and Work of Christopher Okigbo’, Achebe under-scores the renewed commitment of artists, writers and intellectuals. Drawing from ancient ‘Nri philosophy’, Achebe discusses how artists, putting on their new jackets as ‘warriors of peace’ and ‘armed with ancient wisdom’,19 evolved into public intellectuals. He then goes on to pay tribute to a wide range of writers who had begun publishing before and during the war. This tribute is clearly to make a distinction between the writers and intellectuals during this time and the political and military class. But this tribute is also signifcant as to what embodies the cultural memory of Biafra. In fact, thinking about the creative work that came out of this generation of writers, literature on the Biafran war takes on the crucial dimension of an archive. The novels, poetry, drama, non-fction, biographies and autobiographies about this war take on the dimension of a bibliographical and referential archive, and the fgure of Christopher Okigbo becomes an embodiment of intellectual activism and cultural memory. The vast amount of literature on the Biafran war can also be found in the bibliographies of Chidi Amuta20 and Craig McLuckie.21 This vast body of work complicates the idea of an

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organic socio-economic and political history of Nigeria, therefore opening up the space of an alternative archive. Achebe’s tribute to this generation of artists re-curates this archive through the uneasy conjuncture of traumatic and cultural memory. Hence, the literatures of the Biafran war themselves become sites of memory in their cultural and traumatic dimensions. In their bibliographic form, these literatures function as a monument in fxing the events of the Biafran war within the pages of the texts they inhabit. Biafra’s materiality is in the books, articles, journals and magazines. This materiality creates tension with history, especially re-fguring a traumatic history that is assumed buried in the neat chronology of national timelines. But the atemporal nature of traumatic history, captured in a book – a material object accessed through certain socialities of reading – continues to disturb these neat chronologies of Nigeria’s national history. Susan Stewart captures this elsewhere in a manner worth quoting at length: The simultaneity of the printed word lends the book its material aura; as an object, it has a life of its own, a life outside human time,the time of its body and its voice … the book stands in tension with history, a tension reproduced in the microcosm of the book itself, where reading takes place in time across marks which have been made in space.22

Susan Stewart’s idea of simultaneity refects on the writer-reader dimensions of the book, going back to the idea of an imagined audience or a ‘community of readers’ and their ‘abstract existence’.23 In Stewart’s refections, one fnds undertones of Benedict Anderson’s notion of Imagined Communities, and the ‘publics’ in the history of print media.24 The idea of community is fascinating here, because it underscores the importance of the collective, of a shared sense of values, artifacts (books and other material cultures) and memories (as with Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

the trauma of Biafra). More interestingly, at the heart of the imaginative narrative of Biafra is an actual nation – predominantly Igbo – and its fore-closed attempt at imagining itself as a nation-state, with a communal sense of victimhood. Hence the literatures about the Biafran war are themselves repositories of a collective trauma that refects on a collective memory of either the macro-community of the Nigerian nation-state at this point in time, or the specifcally micro-community of the Igbo. While not globally monumentalised like the Holocaust, Biafra was and still is a traumatic time of Nigerian history, monumentalised in the material products of its discourse – in the novels, the journal articles, the poetry, the drama and the fction that have collected over the years into a signifcant textual archive. Due to its traumatic effects on the nation-state’s consciousness, it remains a wound that refuses to heal and, in borrowing the words of Houston Baker Jr, a ‘critical memory’ that ‘judges severely, censures righteously, renders hard ethical evaluations of the past that it never defnes as well passed’.25 Therefore, if we read Biafra as a critical memory, we can make the assertion, like Baker, that it is ‘the cumulative, collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationship signifcant instants of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now’.26

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Achebe’s There was a Country constructs the Biafran war as a critical memory, one that, through the apparatus of trauma, continues to ask questions about an ‘impossible history’.27 In some ways, like Stewart’s assertions above, Achebe’s memoir stands in ‘tension with history’ – it has indeed opened a can of historical worms, given the reaction it has engendered. Achebe’s project also addresses that lag-time – that time frozen in the capsule of trauma that has become, not only a cultural memory within the narrative history of Biafra, but also what John Hawley calls ‘heritage and symbol’ that has been passed down to another generation.28 While Hawley argues that the notion of ethnic memory has instead worked to silence what was deemed a shameful history for Nigeria, this essay is arguing that, for Achebe, the traumatic and contested memory is instead a cultural heritage, which, if seen within the context of artistic and public intellectual responsibility, should be an authorial inheritance to a new generation of writers. In this way, one can read the recent emergence of the Biafran war stories as part of the ‘moral obligation’ that Achebe believes is the responsibility of writers.29

Literary genealogy: the idea of ‘postmemory’ Achebe therefore says, ‘Every generation must recognise and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform’.30 Biafra becomes that ‘generation gap’ frozen in the lag-time of traumatic history. As Jane Bryce argues elsewhere, Biafra becomes a ‘rite of passage’ within its sub-generic (‘Biafran novel’) distinction in Nigerian literature.31 So the new emergence of stories about Biafra, including Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun32 and Chris Abani’s Song for Night,33 can be read in the context of Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

generations of Biafran war narratives. While, for the Achebe generation, the traumatic dimensions of the event meant recreating them into a cultural memory and subsequently building an archive of textual imagination; for this recent generation, this is the work of what Marianne Hirsch has called elsewhere ‘postmemory’.34 Postmemory, according to Hirsch, is the passing down of traumatic history from one generation to the other. Hirsch’s idea relates to holocaust memory work. She says, quite aptly, that postmemory works through ‘connection to the past … mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation’.35 In a sense, for writers like Adichie and Abani Biafran heritage is, in borrowing the words of another Holocaust studies scholar (Erin McGlothlin) ‘the mark of a history they did not themselves experience, a visceral feeling that something critical distinguishes them from their contemporaries’.36 For both Hirsch and McGlothlin, postmemory is a space of mediation, in which memories are inherited in a process that can be overwhelming, even over-determining and therefore encapsulating how a generation can process themselves out of the danger of having their own ‘life stories displaced, even evacuated’37 by those of the generation before them. The idea of a ‘process’ is crucial for us here, because we have been talking about competing and contesting sites of a traumatic, but critical, cultural memory. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Abani and Adichie both share Igbo ethnicity. Abani, who was born just before the war to a Nigerian Igbo father and English mother, talks about his mother telling off a soldier who wanted to recruit his older brother, Mark, as a child soldier into the Biafran army.38 His novella, Song for Night, works through a visceral aesthetics of silence. The complicated creation of a narrative, whose protagonist speaks through signs, because his vocal cords have been severed, allows a re-articulation of sensibility in which the aesthetic regimes of apprehending trauma are re-distributed across an intra-psychic landscape of narrative interiority. Abani’s Song for Night therefore works through a fascinating re-imagination of the Biafran war without the circumscription of chronology or even geography. The metaphysics of death, as it were, are explored through a deeply lyrical and existential narrative. Abani, drawing on this inherited imagination of Biafra, marks out child soldiery, a phenomenon more common recently in narratives of war on the continent, but which actually begun with Biafra. Adichie, as opposed to Abani, takes on a deliberately historical realist mode in Half of a Yellow Sun. Adichie lost both her grandfathers during the Biafran war and her parents lost property and had to evacuate their university house when the town (Nsukka) fell to federal soldiers. Adichie, who was born seven years after the end of the war, grew up hearing stories about Biafra. The University of Nigerian Nsukka, where her parents worked, was in fact the intellectual factory for the imagination of the new Biafran nation. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Nsukka is that site of cultural memory in Adichie’s imagination of Biafra. When Biafra seceded, University of Nigeria Nsukka’s name was changed to University of Biafra. Biafra in the Adichie household is a familial heritage. Adichie’s ‘Author’s note’ captures this genealogical tribute – it acknowledges individual and collective memories, providing the

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book with a material platform to launch a familial monument: However, I could not have written this book without my parents. My wise and wonderful father, Professor Nwoye James Adichie, Odelu Ora Abba, ended his many stories with the words agha ajoka, which in my literal translation is “war is very ugly.” He and my defending and devoted mother, Mrs Ifeoma Grace Adichie, have always wanted me to know, I think, that what matters is not what they went through, but that they survived. I am grateful to them for their stories and for so much more. I salute my Uncle Mai, Michael E.N. Adichie, who was wounded while fghting with the 21st Battalion of the Biafran Army, and who spoke to me of his experience with much grace and humour. I salute, also, the sparkling memories of my Uncle CY (Cyprian Odigwe, 1949–98), who fought with the Biafran Commandos, my cousin Pauly (Paulinus Ofli, 1955-2005), who shared his memories of life in Biafra as a thirteen- year-old, and my friend Okla (Okoloma Maduewesi, 1972 2005), who will now not clutch this under his arm as he did the last.39

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Reading like a family monument, this note eulogises the departed in a cross-generational and extended family network, dispersing the trauma memory of the war across familial lines, while allowing the author, through the vantage point of the present, to assemble those memories and accord them a monumental space within the confnes of literary history. When the author was born, seven years after the end of the war, she was born already with its scars, visible within her own familial line in the form of memories and persons who had been scarred psychologically and physically by the war. Nsukka, the place of her childhood, abounds with markers of these memories and in Half of a Yellow Sun, it forms the terrain where individual and collective memories are triggered and narrated. Adichie’s commitment to this contested terrain of history, one which her novel reengages, is perhaps best captured as genealogical statement in an article (published in the Nigerian newspaper Premium Times), which later appeared as an essay in Chinua Achebe: Tributes and Refections. The frst was on the occasion of the publication of Achebe’s There was a Country; and the second in the book of essays put together by Nana Ayebia Clarke and James Currey in memory of Achebe, after his death on 21 March 2013. In this essay, titled ‘We Remember Differently’, the markers of generational memory, of ‘postmemory’ are clear.40 Centering her ideas on an Igbo proverb (which she quotes as saying, ‘If a child does not ask what killed his [sic] father, that same thing will kill him.’),41 she points out the visible markers in her childhood that were residues of this traumatic history. Most crucially, she says: ‘My generation was born after 1970, but we know of property of lost relatives who never “returned” from the North, of shadows that hung heavily over family stories. We inherited memory. And we have the privilege of distance that Achebe does not have’.42 Adichie here brings together inherited memory within the perspective of a generational distance, of re-experiencing through family stories that ‘hung heavily’ over her childhood. In this sense, Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

inheritance and distance become frameworks for engaging with a traumatic memory as a critical cultural memory through the structured framework of a familial heirloom within the crucial vehicle of story-telling. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie takes on the narrative of a familial genealogy of the Biafran war. But beyond this, she takes on the literary genealogies of the Biafran war. While Susan Andrade points out the genealogies of the feminine and national in Adichie’s works, Half of a Yellow Sun carries the distinct traumatic, cultural and critical memory that specifes a Biafran literary genealogy.43 In her author’s note, Adichie talks about her attempt at an ‘imaginative truth’, which is constructed through a deliberate inter-textuality. She gives a list of books – fction and non-fction – that she says have partially infuenced the construction of her own story. What is clear here is the creation of a lineage, generation and genealogy of Biafran story-telling that, for Adichie, as for Achebe, carries the ‘moral obligation’ – that generational responsibility that Achebe says every generation must recognise and embrace.

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CONCLUSION While I have, in the latter parts of this paper, considered Adichie and Abani as cases in point to argue for the notion of genealogies of Biafran war literature, the works of Uzodinma Iweala,44 Dulue Mbachu45 and Helon Habila46 are part of the recent emergence of stories about the war, which continue to enable this generational narrative. Biafra becomes a literary genealogy, negotiating itself through the memory of the war – an event that easily fashions points of connection between the traumatic experience of the event for Achebe and the story as passed down to the new generation of story-tellers. These contemporary story-tellers’ emergence can be captured in Achebe’s description of Adichie as ‘a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient story-tellers’.47

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Hirsch, M., 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 5. 2 Ibid., p. 5. 3 Ibid., p. 5. 4 See also Malia, J., 2007. Biafra: The Memory of the Music. Cambridgeshire: Melrose Books. 5 See Ibrahim Bello-Kano., 2014. Chinua Achebe: A dissenting opinion. Chinua Achebe: Tributes and Reflections. Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke, pp. 112–118. 6 Achebe, C., 2012. There Was a Country: A Personal Memoir. London: Penguin, p. 3. 7 Keith, B., 1998. The African Novel in English: An Introduction. Oxford: James Currey.

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8

Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.

9 Ngara, E., 1985. Art and Ideology in the African Novel. London: Heinemann. 10 Lynn-Innes, C., 1990. Chinua Achebe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 11 Ezenwa–Ohaeto., 1997. Chinua Achebe. Oxford: James Currey, p. 92. 12 Innes and Bernth Lindfors., (eds), 1978. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, p. 5. 13 Achebe, C., 2012. There Was a Country, p. 55. 14 Ibid., p. 228. 15 Soyinka, W., 1999. The Burden of Memory and the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press. 16 Caruth. C., 1995. (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 153. 17 Achebe, C., 2012. There Was a Country, p. 39. 18 Young, J., 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. ix. 19 Achebe, C., 2012. There was a Country, p. 109. 20 Amuta, C., 1982. A Selected Checklist of Primary and Critical Sources on Nigerian War Literature. Research in African Literatures, 13, pp. 68–72. 21 McLuckie, C., 1987. A Preliminary Checklist of Primary and Secondary Sources on Nigerian Civil War/ Biafran War Literature. Research in African Literatures, 18, pp. 510–527.

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Late Achebe: Biafra as Literary Genealogy 22 Stewart, S., 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, p. 22. 23 Ibid., p. 19. 24 Anderson, B., 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. 25 Baker, H, Jr., 2001. Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, p. 264. 26 Ibid., p. 264. 27 Caruth. C., (ed.), 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. p. 154. 28 Hawley, J., 2008. Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala. Research in African Literatures, 39 (2), pp. 15–26. 29 Achebe, C., 2012. There Was a Country, p. 15. 30 Ibid., p. 14. 31 Bryce, J., 2008. Half and Half Children: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel. Research in African Literatures, 39(2), pp. 49–67. 32 Adichie, C. N., 2006. Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Fourth Estate. 33 Abani, C., 2007. Song for Night. New York: Akashic Books. 34 Hirsch, Postmemory, p. 5. 35 Ibid., p. 5. 36 McGlothlin, E., 2006. Second Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester NY: Camden House, p. 9. 37 Hirsch, M., 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. p. 5. 38 See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14982742. Song for Night Highlights, Hope, Despair. Interview with Michael Martin [Accessed 8 May 2012]. 39 Adichie, C. N., 2006. Half of a Yellow Sun, n.p.

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40 Adichie, C., 2014. Chinua Achebe at 82: We Remember Differently. Chinua Achebe: Tributes and Reflections. Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke, pp. 90–97 41 Ibid., p. 95 42 Ibid., p. 95. Emphasis mine. 43 Andrade, S., 2011. Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels. Research in African Literatures, 42(2), pp. 91–101. 44 Iweala, U., 2005. Beasts of no nation. London: John Murray. 45 Mbachu, D., 2005. War Games. Lagos: The New Gong. 46 Habila, H., 2007. Measuring Time. New York: Norton. 47 See Achebe’s comment on the blurb of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

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CHAPTER

References, Traditions, Continuities Story-telling and Memory in Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain Dina Ligaga

INTRODUCTION In his novel, Anthills of the Savannah,1 Chinua Achebe has privileged the story-teller as a central fgure in the process of narrating the post-colonial nation. As Simon Gikandi2 points out: Achebe’s concern with the power and authority of storytelling, of the function of the storyteller in the contemporary African situation, and the relationship of writers and intellectuals to the men of power in the postcolonial state, acquires its most urgent resonance in Anthills of the Savannah. For this novel … centres not so much on historical events and those who perform in the theatre of postcolonial politics, but on the form which the story of the nation takes and the interpretative problems its polis presents for those seeking concrete

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meanings to some of the most turbulent events on the African scene.

Achebe’s identifcation and exploration of the narratives told through the story-teller refect quite strongly the power that memory has over mainstream canonical historical accounts. Indeed, as Linda Hutcheon3 has argued elsewhere, the greatest façades of historical accounts are their supposed ‘natural’ accounts of the past. This view has been contested by arguments that question the validity of claims to one historical truth. Such arguments have shown that history, just like any other fctional representation of the world, is constructed to refect the ideological world views of societal power structures. For Hutcheon, the process of writing history is one imbued with power and control. It is a process that foregrounds aspects of history that refect existing societal power structures, while suppressing others that have the potential to question or disrupt the main story frame. Thus, to present multiple narratives is to present ‘plural, interrupted, unrepressed histories (in the plural) …’.4 Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia perhaps best captures this idea of multiplicity of narratives that collide, contest and, sometimes, are in sync with one another. To quote Michael Holquist in the introduction to Bakhtin’s book The Dialogic Imagination, ‘Literary language is not represented in the text (as in other genres) as a unitary, completely fnished

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off, indubitably adequate language – it is represented precisely as a living mix of varied and opposing voices …’.5 To use a more recent account, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie6 warns about presenting only one version of a story to the world, arguing that, in fact, it is through the multiplicity of stories that the truth about one’s experiences can be told. If one takes Adichie’s conception and applies it to the post-colonial nation, it becomes possible to understand why writers such as Achebe were invested in engaging with alternative narratives of the nation. In telling the narrative of the post-colonial nation, some of the dominant themes are those of pain, trauma and crisis as articulated through the works of several African writers. Such narratives counter historical accounts that speak of nationalism in linear, celebratory ways; that speak of it as a triumph over colonialism and as a way towards charting a new future for Africa. In setting the agenda for discourses about the post-colonial nation, Franz Fanon7 speaks of the pitfalls of national consciousness, in which the promise of liberation at the end of the long struggle against colonialism is squandered by greed, corruption and injustice. Recognising the danger of the single, dominant narrative of the nation, as projected in nationalist accounts that are sanctioned by the state, writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Sembene Ousmane, Ayi Kwei Armah and many others took on major projects of writing against this dominant account. One such critique of the postcolonial Nigerian nation is by Wole Soyinka. In his 1972 autobiography, The Man Died, he writes of the atrocities that were committed, not just on him (he was imprisoned at the beginning of the Nigerian civil war), but on a number of civilians who stood up for truth in the face of extreme state violence under Yakubu Gowon’s regime. For Soyinka, the greatest offense was committed by those who chose to remain silent in the face of such atrocities. He Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

speaks of the silence of the media and intelligentsia, whom he argues should have come out strongly to oppose the state’s oppression of citizens. For him, what mattered most was not the torture – and in some cases killing – of those who refused to remain silent. What mattered was the failure of self-asserted progressive voices of the nation’s intelligentsia to ask questions, the failure to understand that such events (of state violence) ‘are habit-forming in the psychology of power, and that the boundaries of the geography of the victims eventually extends to embrace even those who think they are protected by silence’.8 Soyinka argues that, in refusing to speak, such people enabled the state to continue its rampant squandering and misuse of power – hence his use of the metaphor ‘The man dies who keeps silent in the face of tyranny’. In this chapter, I build on both Achebe’s concept of memory and the story-teller and Soyinka’s theme of silence to explore competing ways in which the post-colony is engaged with in the work of Nigerian writer Okey Ndibe. Both Soyinka and Achebe are concerned with the relationship between writers and intellectuals and those in positions of power in the post-colony. While Soyinka examines the question of the responsibility of writers, Achebe dwells on the power of the story-teller in re-telling a different story – a story of hope for those who feel despondent and defeated in the face of tyranny. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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I also want to argue that Okey Ndibe draws on both Achebe’s and Soyinka’s concerns, in writing his frst novel Arrows of Rain.9 He does this both overtly, as well as in much more subtle ways. Obvious references include his alluding to Achebe’s third novel, Arrow of God, in the title of his novel.10 However, while Arrow of God addresses an imagined universal truth, Arrows of Rain suggests multiple truths told from multiple positions. Also, Arrows of Rain, like Anthills of the Savannah, recognises the dangers of the singular narrative and uses multiple voices to suggest different ways of accessing the post-colonial narrative. Here Ndibe projects the necessity of multiple voices against the dominant voice of the often irrational, dictatorial post-colonial leader. Like Sam in Anthills of the Savannah, General Isa Palat Bello (in Arrows of Rain) demonstrates the extremities of leadership in a postcolonial state. Lastly, Ndibe’s metaphor that reoccurs throughout the novel – ‘A story never forgives silence’ – draws on Soyinka’s motif ‘The man dies who keeps silent in the face of tyranny’. In many ways then, Ndibe’s use of inter-textual references suggests possible ways of accessing his novel. Arrows of Rain is a familiar post-colonial story written in a convoluted style that rejects the linearity that often marks realist fction. Instead, it is a novel that is told in competing voices: sometimes in the form of stories within stories; at other times as personal refections by different characters. Set in the fctional state of Madia, which bears similarities to the West African nation of Nigeria, the novel is a narrative of a failed nation, which is told from different positions by different narrators. Perhaps its uniqueness lies within its many layers of narrative that are deliberately intricate and seemingly chaotic. It is told from the point of view of the main narrator, Bukuru – a madman who, at the beginning of the novel, is a witness to the rape and eventual death of a young female prostitute. Bukuru is arrested soon after and taken Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

to prison, where he awaits trial for rape and murder. In the course of his imprisonment, he feels a strong urge to tell the truth about what he witnessed; he then speaks of the atrocities committed by the country’s security forces – and, indeed, by the president himself. However, as he later recounts in a ‘confession’ letter, he was a former journalist who had witnessed frst-hand the atrocities committed by General Isa Palat Bello, long before Bello became president. He had, however, chosen to remain silent out of an irrational fear of Bello and, through his silence, helped create a monster. In the twenty odd years in which Bukuru lives as a madman, Bello commits multiple rapes and murders, and runs the country down due to corruption. Because of Bello’s tyranny, Madians now live in complete fear and he appears unstoppable, precisely because no-one is able to confront him. Bukuru’s last act of courage before his death is to use the courtroom as a stage from which to speak the truth; and to write a confession in which he provides his personal history and the history of others as a counter-narrative to the offcial Madian history. The second narrator and constant presence in the novel is Femi Adero, a journalist who is in search of his identity. He carries within him a yearning for his roots, having been adopted as a little baby. It turns out that he is the son of Bukuru and Iyese (the madman and a prostitute) – both of whom are marginalised in the society in which they live. Further Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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investigation reveals that, in fact, both his parents had stood for ideals that were betrayed in the new nation. A third important narrative is that of Iyese, a prostitute, who tells her story to Bukuru in the years when he was still a journalist, trusting that he would act as custodian of her story. However, Bukuru falters when he witnesses Bello raping Iyese, and later, when he discovers Iyese’s body in a pool of blood, next to that of little Femi, who survives the attack.

THE MULTIPLE VERSIONS OF HISTORY – THE JOURNALIST, THE PROSTITUTE AND THE MADMAN Although writing in a period that Hope Eghagha11 calls a ‘post-military Nigeria’, Ndibe takes a historical approach to imagining Nigeria’s past of military dictatorship, state corruption and subsequent violence. Principally, by locating the novel within ‘The Nigerian Crisis’,12 Ndibe engages with the consequences of the past on the present cyclic occurrences of political crises in Nigeria; and argues that they result from the failure of the collective memories of the past impacting the present. Ndibe argues that a lack of historical hindsight and collective amnesia are the causes of the current debilitating conditions afficting contemporary Nigeria. Through a series of interviews,13 Ndibe maintains that, although Nigeria was no longer under military dictatorship at the time of writing Arrows of Rain, there was still a danger of continued state abuse and violence for as long as Nigerians refused to engage informatively with their national history.14 The novel is thus an engagement with this history, in ways that reveal nuanced relationships between state power and citizens. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

As shown earlier, Ndibe acknowledges the contributions that Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah15 made to the writing of his novel.16 He says that he was particularly fascinated by the character in the novel of the old man of Abazon, who represents an ethnic group that is neglected by His Excellency Sam, because of their refusal to support his political ambitions. As a result, the dictator withholds resources from the Abazonians. In the novel, the old man argues the necessity of struggle against power, even if it futile: My people, that is all we are doing. Struggling. Perhaps to no purpose except that those who come after us will be able to say: True, our fathers were defeated but they tried.17

The old man emphasises the archival power of the story that continues to offer lessons and insights regarding power. To demonstrate, he uses a story of the tortoise and leopard. In the anecdote, leopard is about to eat tortoise who is powerless against him. Tortoise requests that leopard allow him a few minutes before killing him, and leopard agrees. Tortoise then proceeds to dig up the ground around him and throw soil in various directions. When leopard asks him to explain his actions, tortoise replies, ‘Even after I am

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dead, I would want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here’.18 Like Anthills of the Savannah, Arrows of Rain presents an opportunity for the past to speak to and bear witness to the present, and for this process to positively affect the future. As has been observed by Pumla Dineo Gqola,19 ‘The project of memory creates new ways of seeing the past and inhabiting the present’. Gqola’s reading of memory follows Toni Morrison’s idea of ‘re-memory’ … in which events and knowledge are ‘memoried’, ‘memoryed’, ‘remembered’ and ‘re-memoried’’,20 suggesting, not just a process of recollection, but an active process of rebuilding or reconstructing the past, as well as unremembering it. The process of rememorying takes place outside of offcial history and allows for an alternative process of reconstructing the past. Importantly then, Arrows of Rain is told from two positions. One is the offcial position of history, which is linear, neat and unproblematic. This version follows the story of Ogugua, Bukuru’s alter ego. Ogugua gives a chronological account of Madia’s history from the moment in which the country gains independence from the British. As a young journalist, he considers Madia a space of freedom and hope, and frequently takes the country’s leadership to task. His is an elitist position from where he feels he can attack power without worrying about consequences. In fact, he is fearless and untainted by the disillusionment that comes with the death of hope. On one occasion, he writes a column calling for the resignation of Chief James Amanka, a member of the then President Alhaji Askia Amin’s government. His article, appearing in the national newspaper, The Monitor, stirs a near-revolution among students, politicians, academics and labour activists, with letters to the editor pouring in to support his call. Because of his article, rather than fre Amanka, the President re-assigns him to a different department. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

The truth is important to Ogugua and he stops at nothing to get to it. As his grandmother reminds him, he comes from a long line of seers and truth-seekers. His father, who had been a successful broadcaster, and whose reputation as a reliable and brilliant journalist was still recounted, is one of the big infuences in his life. His grandmother also infuences him, providing him with a sense of integrity. Her voice remains a constant throughout the novel: ‘A story never forgives silence. Truth is the mouth’s debt to a story’.21 It is from this almost self-righteous position that Ogugua enters into his role as a writer and journalist. He takes his work seriously, and is committed to telling the truth to Madians. Through his stories he reveals an obsession with truth, untainted by power. He disapproves for instance, of Professor Sogon Yaw, a Marxist professor who preaches against the evils of capitalism, yet who does not hesitate to transform himself when he is invited by Amin to become the country’s new Minister for External Affairs. A similar disapproval is seen later when Iyese, his girlfriend, tells him of her ex-husband, Dr Maximus Jaja, a die-hard Marxist who moves to a remote village to practice medicine. There, he offers to treat all the villagers for free in exchange for some food and shelter. Jaja, however, succumbs to the pressure from some government offcials to give up this simple and Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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apparently wholesome lifestyle when he is forcefully transferred to the city. Here, he begins to value material things and eventually loses himself. Ogugua is, in this way, extremely ideological in his engagement with Madia as a nation. He sees his role as a journalist in black and white. Even when things threaten to get complicated, he refuses to see himself as complicit in the present corruption in any way. An example of this is when he is invited to the home of the Minister of Social Issues, Rueben Ata. In his account of this visit, Ogugua remembers ‘the crowd of women jostling to be let in’ at the minister’s gate;22 ‘several cabinet ministers … seated, attended by a retinue of women’;23 and a general atmosphere of waste and excess. That he sees nothing wrong with what he encounters reveals the jaded position from which he is able to access the state and therefore tell its stories: Madia was in the stranglehold of the most vicious kleptocracy anywhere on our continent – a regime in which ministers and other public offcials looted whatever was within their reach, and much that wasn’t. In comparison with the thefts committed by many of these crooks, Ata’s passion for cigars, cognac and women seemed relatively benign peccadilloes. Everyone who knew him agreed that he was not a thief. He liked a good time, and he indulged himself at the expense of the nation, and that was all.24

Unsurprisingly, at the party, Ogugua meets up with and is able to strike a ‘conscious’ rapport with the minister’s father. Pa Ata is his son’s greatest critic, but, even then, does so with a lot of affection and generosity. Having discovered that Ogugua is a journalist, Pa Ata goes on to recount the problems of post-colonial Madia, in what can arguably be seen as a reproduction of Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria.25 Both Pa Ata and Ogugua Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

are relentless in their close scrutiny of the corrupt state of Madia – so much so that they allow themselves to imagine the possibility of an overhaul of the entire nation’s government structure to create an ideal non-corrupt state. One of the things Ndibe seems to be suggesting rather strongly is that Ogugua fails in his role as truth-seeker precisely because of his ideological, elitist position in society. Ndibe is suggesting that the arrival of complications, in the form of the prostitute Iyese, marks the end for Ogugua. For Ndibe, the snotty position from which Ogugua critiques the state cannot be sustained, as he is removed from the reality of the people on the ground. In order to access this alternative story, Ndibe has to basically remove Ogugua from his comfort zone and place him in a more vulnerable position. Like Chris in Anthills of the Savannah, Ogugua can only see the truth to a certain extent. However, as Bukuru, his eyes are suddenly opened and he can fnally confront the rot that is Madia without the mask of his elitism. This limited view of the world is tested by the arrival of the character, Iyese. Iyese is a prostitute, who has a double identity, from where she generates competing narratives of self. The fgure of the prostitute evokes very specifc images in the narrative of the post-colony. The prostitute has been used in African literature to symbolise moral Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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degeneration and she is consistently negatively portrayed. Hardly ever is another narrative of the prostitute ever told. Prostitutes are the ‘painted women beckoning from numerous windows and balconies … ladies of the night … dirty and forbidden’.26 Deborah Nord27 similarly observes that a prostitute knows ‘poverty, loneliness, fear, humiliation and shame; she (is) faced (with) mistrust, suspicion, and general inability for strangers to place her in the social scheme of things’. In African literature, the prostitute is used as a fgure that captures the decay and degeneration of the post-colonial nation. At the same time, the prostitute is also a fgure of revival and hope, of subversion and resistance. Dambudzo Marechera, in engaging with the politics of an ailing Zimbabwe, signifcantly uses prostitutes who survive the violent conditions of their existence in ‘House of Hunger’.28 Similarly, Ndibe introduces Iyese, not to sustain Ogugua’s linear narrative, but to muddy it up. They meet at the Good Life Nite Club, a place frequented by Ogugua and his friend Ashiki. Ogugua is immediately drawn to Iyese, because she is different. She tells him her name is Emilia – the name she uses when plying her trade. However, as they get to know one another, Ogugua discovers that Iyese has another story to tell, a story intertwined with that of Madia. Importantly, Iyese’s ex-husband, Maximus, is a failed communist – representative of a failed ideal Madia. He is swallowed up in the tornado of greed that has come to mark power and control in the post-colony. He rejects Iyese, a representative of his past ideals, and marries another woman, with whom he has a child. Dejected, Iyese leaves her home and moves to the city of Langa, where she becomes a prostitute. This deliberate choice to occupy a marginalised identity is an important trope in the novel. For instance, Bukuru rejects his position of privilege when he chooses to hide behind his new identity as a madman. Both characters occupy positions of vulnerability, symbolising the instability, fragCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

mentation and marginalisation in which citizens fnd themselves in Madia. These marginalised identities become sites of discourse where the complex relationship between voice and silence are played out. Ndibe explores the theme of duality, with both Bukuru and Iyese occupying double identities and being able to choose voice or silence. Importantly, both characters give account of events and piece together narratives that run counter to offcial history – and therefore become witnesses to competing truths that challenge power. For instance, Iyese, it turns out, is Isa Palat Bello’s mistress. Years before he becomes president, Bello was a soldier in the Madian army, and, though married, kept a mistress to satisfy his sexual needs. Through his brief, but violent, encounters with Iyese, glimpses of his controlling and abusive nature are shown. In one instance, he goes to see Iyese and fnds Ogugua in the room, which sends him into a ft of rage. He tries to strangle Iyese, as Ogugua watches, unable to act. Clearly, Ogugua the intellectual has never been confronted with this kind of crude violence. Ogugua is so shaken by this encounter that he stays away from Iyese for some time. When he eventually decides to visit her again, he fnds her mutilated body on the foor of her house. Lying next to her, he sees what appears to be a lifeless body of a newborn child. He quickly realizes that Bello and his men had returned to Iyese’s apartment and killed her, upon discovering that Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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the baby she had just given birth to, was another man’s. It is at this point that Ogugua decides to change his identity and hide from Bello.

(UN)MEMORY AND VIOLENCE The idea of ‘unmemory’ or ‘unremembering’ unravels the deliberate acts of forgetting that occur in Arrows of Rain. In the novel, characters are unwilling to speak out against Bello, in spite of the fact that they witness his violence against citizens of Madia. In this case, silence becomes a necessary technique for survival in the military political set-up of collective fear. It becomes a sanctuary for citizens who do not wish to suffer the brunt of the dictator, Bello. As such, victims and witnesses of oppression go to extreme lengths to avoid confrontation with perpetrators of violence. As expected, memory becomes an undesired component of these people’s lives, because it forces them to come to terms with their silences and exposes them to the violence of dictatorship. The novel opens with the death of a prostitute, who, it turns out, has been murdered by a group of military men. The only witness to the crime is Bukuru, a madman who lives on the beach where the prostitute’s body is found. Bukuru is arrested and accused of killing this woman – an important moment in the novel. His arrest unlocks his memory. He narrates these stories to Femi Adero, a young journalist who believes that Bukuru is innocent and who seeks to publish these stories to expose Bello’s corrupt government. Femi Adero becomes a custodian of stories that have been restored through narration, while Bukuru represents the failed intellectual who refuses to confront the state’s violence and who would rather hide away behind a veil of madness. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Juxtaposing these two characters, Ndibe seems to want to confront the complexity of silence and fear. In an interview he says, ‘I am deeply intrigued by silence, especially by its portents in situations where speech/utterance is called for. In the face of political perfdy and oppression (and other forms of injustice), why do we lapse into silence?’29 This is a recurrent question in the novel as he tries to grapple with the meaning of Bukuru’s silences and, more importantly, the effect it has on actual victims of the state. To differentiate between Bukuru, who chooses silence to avoid the wrath of the state, and the real victims of the state, Ndibe introduces Iyese, a prostitute whose complex character soon reveals several cleavages in the ideological failures of Madia as a state. Femi, Iyese and Bukuru become crucial starting points for engaging with how Ndibe explores memory as silence and memory as speech in the novel. Bukuru lives away from the Madian civilisation as a madman. But Bukuru is not insane. He has deliberately chosen to ‘hide’ on the beach out of fear for his life. As has already been recounted, Bukuru is the only witness to Bello’s crimes. He witnessed both violent abuses, including the rape of Iyese, a prostitute, but also his lover. At the time of the attack, Bello was a soldier in the military. After witnessing the murder of Iyese, a profound fear engulfs Bukuru and he runs away from his responsibility as a journalist. However, during his years on B Beach, he witnesses Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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even more murders, pillage and extreme anarchy and eventually decides to come out of hiding and share his stories with the citizens of Madia. The entire novel, framed around his story, is divided into three books: ‘mists’, ‘memories’ and ‘malaise’. Ndibe begins his narrative in the present day Madia. It is important for him to provide as close a picture of the present as possible, so that the project of memory becomes relevant. In this section, the story revolves around Bukuru, frst presented as a madman, whose disheveled appearance and stench immediately catch the attention of the journalist, Femi Adero. Bukuru is accused of murdering a prostitute, whose body is found on the beach. After his arrest, Bukuru’s madness ‘bubble’ is broken and he is forced to deal with the present realities of his situation. Ndibe uses this section of the novel to engage with ideas of police brutality and corruption. He also uses Bukuru as the fresh eye through which readers are allowed to follow the extreme decay that has paralysed the legal system of Madia. In other words, while Ndibe is critical of Bukuru’s choice of madness as a hiding space, he also celebrates it as the only untainted spot from which Bukuru can attack Bello. Niyi Osundare, in a review of Arrows of Rain, perhaps captures this aspect best when he states: The trope of madness is both a mask and a method. Behind that mask is a universe of freedom, even indemnity, hardly ever available to the ‘normal’ person. From behind that mask you can upbraid the gods, damn the despot, transgress all taboos and still roam free in the streets.30

It is this aspect of ‘roaming free’ that perhaps gives Bukuru the kind of courage to speak out when he is taken in for questioning and subsequently sentenced for murder. Unlike Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

before, when he had gone into hiding out of fear of a witch-hunt by Bello, this time, Bukuru tells the ‘truth’ to anyone who will listen. He recounts the rape and murder of Iyese to the police, as well as the numerous rapes that he witnessed in the following years, which were committed by Bello’s military offcers, who had been assigned the duty of ridding Madia of prostitutes in order to attract tourists. The multi-layered aspects of Bukuru’s character allows for a space of vision and clarity that had been missing in his days as Ogugua the journalist. Through Bukuru, Ndibe is able to draw attention to a series of state-sponsored atrocities: the collapsed legal system that causes the characters of Justice Kayode and detectives John Lati and Jerome Okadi to shut him up after he accuses Isa Palat Bello of rape. Interestingly, while these characters are presented as Bello’s sycophants, they are also pitched against the Madian masses, who follow Bukuru’s court case as if hoping its signifcance will lead to the end of their suffering. At such points, Ndibe imbues Bukuru with messianic characteristics that betray his extremely subjective position in the narrative. Like several other African writers before him, Ndibe presents a character who is able to see and act, while the rest of the citizens are muted, much like the Man in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.31 Madness, in this case, becomes the unstoppable voice of truth, from where Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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accounts of violence can be narrated. However, Ndibe is careful not to present Bukuru as a saint, but as a person who has imperfections. As such, it becomes imperative to explore Bukuru’s memories that lead him to a point where he is able to ‘damn the despot’, as Osundare argues above. Thus the second section of the novel titled, ‘memories’, offers a much more honest account of Bukuru’s life as Ogugua, a successful journalist who loses his path because of his fear of speaking the truth. In this section, Ndibe engages more with the meaning and consequences of choosing silence for Bukuru and the pain and violence of memory that leads to Bukuru’s ‘madness’. The entire section is presented in the form of a letter – a confessional letter – to Femi Adero, a journalist, who colludes with the psychiatrist SPJC Mandi to circulate Bukuru’s story as far and wide as possible. Bukuru reveals a series of inter-related stories: Iyese’s past and her disgust at her once-communist husband turned capitalist accumulator; and her eventual decision to leave that life behind and to choose prostitution; Bukuru’s own story as Ogugua and his relationship with rogue journalist Ashiki; and so on. The novel ends on a note of renewal. Bukuru has to die to show the consequences of silence … the man dies who chooses silence. Femi, the courageous young man, represents new hope. Interestingly, the last section of the novel dwells on Femi Adero’s search for self-identity. He fnds out rather late that the people he thought were his parents had actually adopted him. His search for the truth about who he is leads him to pursue Bukuru’s story; and it comes as no surprise that he is actually the child who was left to die after Bello attacks and murders Iyese. The novel demonstrates the inter-connectedness of personal narratives with the narrative of the nation, and the inability to separate the two. The search for personal identity culminates in the search for the nation’s identity beyond Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

the corrupt and violent state of Bello. Hope becomes the fnal theme explored in the book.

NARRATIVE AND THE POWER OF THE STORY-TELLER One of Achebe’s great concerns is the form the story of the nation takes during the turbulent times of post-independence.32 Importantly, Achebe is concerned with the idea of renewal and rebirth. As Gikandi emphasises, ‘The power of the storyteller, Achebe suggests … does not lie simply in his or her mastery of the narrated event; rather, the narrator outlives the events he or she narrates and becomes an avatar of those memories which are crucial in the reinvention of our lives’.33 Narrative, according to Gikandi, gives meaning to history and memory, and allows for a recreation of an alternative meaning in moments of crisis. Narrative transcends the crisis to ‘point out new vistas for the future’.34 What Achebe is suggesting in Anthills of the Savannah is the possibility of looking back into the past, and recreating it in a way that is useful and benefcial to the future. The story of the tortoise and the leopard best demonstrates this theory. In it, the tortoise recreates the story of his fght with leopard, which is hardly a fght because he has no

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power against leopard. However, this does not detract from his will to fght and recreate the narrative of the encounter. Part of what the recreation of narrative does is to provide hope for those who will come after. In imagining possibilities for the nation, Achebe seems to stress the signifcance of looking within, rather than at colonial encounters to explain the pitfalls that the post-colonial nation has stumbled into. As Gikandi reminds us, ‘For narrative to dramatise and provide imaginary answers and resolutions … for narrative to map a terrain in which diverse groups of Africans can speak about their condition and its problematics, it must clearly go beyond what Said called a politics and rhetoric of blame, to come to grips and hence rethink the process of decolonisation as the condition that has established the post-colonial society Achebe deals with in Anthills’.35 Part of this re-thinking process has to do with refection. Arrows of Rain offers this kind of refective process. While it contains a more linear broad history of Madia, there is an insistence by the author on adopting narrative techniques that privilege the story-teller in ways that make it possible to constantly draw on the past so as to understand the present. Bukuru, as it turns out, is more than just a madman. He is a man full of potent, active and creative history, and he has a past that collides with Madia’s present history. In a dramatic letter to Femi, titled ‘Final silence’, Bukuru writes: I had wanted some time to refect on our last painful meeting. But soon after your departure a powerful silence engulfed me. A monstrous and greedy silence, swollen with memories, it displayed before me an array of dead things: people betrayed, hopes dashed, dreams unfulflled, roads forsaken, paths not taken … I felt the tremor in the still air, then dead quiet.36

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Bukuru chooses death as a way of earning some dignity, for he realises that his past mistakes have brought a lot of suffering to many. He realises that he betrayed himself and others by not trying to help Iyese or stop Bello. Bukuru becomes the voice of several who are in a position to speak, but choose not to. Bello represents power and greed, while Iyese represents the victim of silence. Bukuru says: My grandmother was right: stories never forgive silence. My silence has no hope for redemption. It is too late in the day for me to look for grand insights. What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silence. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power’s viciousness. I know … that a voiceless man is as good as dead.37

In reinforcing the value of memory and of the story, Ndibe, through Bukuru is providing a meta-commentary that emphasises the responsibility of telling the truth. Unlike Achebe, who looks at this responsibility as remaining with the elite journalist, Ndibe seems to suggest that all Madians, all Africans, bear the responsibility of confronting those in positions of power. As in Achebe’s novel, Ndibe’s protagonist dies. Death becomes an

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opportunity for renewal. In his case, Femi, his son, becomes a seed of truth that will terrorise power. He passes on the responsibility he himself squandered. Femi, for his part, demonstrates the courage that his father once possessed. However, unlike his father, he does not shy away from Bello. Surprisingly, after he publishes his story about Bukuru, nothing happens to him. Ndibe is suggesting that the fear that contributes to silence is often exaggerated, and that power does indeed dread memory. The project of manufacturing histories by dominant states is partly an attempt to thwart the efforts made by intellectuals and writers. However, the story is persistent and lasting. The story breaks through the ceiling put in place by power and allows citizens to refect on their reality using their past. As Gikandi observes, narrative becomes a form of insight and agency.38 He argues that Achebe, rather than dwell on the failure of the state, chooses instead to imbue narrative with power, which makes it possible to imagine different futures with possibilities of revival and renewal. Like Achebe, Ndibe is ‘seeking ways of establishing new forms of narration that might have the power to liberate us from the circle of our post-colonial moment; he seeks a narrative that speaks about, but also transcends its historical imperatives’.39 His choice to use marginalised characters – such as Bukuru who is a madman, Iyese, a prostitute, Mandi, an underdog doctor and Femi, an orphan – is deliberate. These characters not only function very specifcally in African literature, but they also move the gaze away from power, focusing on the fringes as new vistas of narrative. Through them, it becomes possible to imagine the nation from a different location and, as has been shown, these locations are often those of the vulnerable, and supposedly voiceless, in society. For these

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

characters, only the story can save them.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe, C., 1987. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann. 2 Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and ideology in fiction. London: James Currey, p. 125. 3 Hutcheon, L., 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge. 4 Ibid., p. 65. 5 Bakhtin, M. (ed.), 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays. Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, p. xxviii. 6 Adichie, C., Danger of a Single Story Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. TED Talks. Available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg. [Accessed 9 June 2014]. 7 Fanon, F., 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 8 Soyinka, W., 1972. The Man Died: prison notes of Wole Soyinka. Great Britain: Rex Collings, p. ix. 9 Ndibe, O., 2000. Arrows of Rain. Oxford: Heinemann. 10 Ndibe does not actually deliberately use Arrows of Rain as a reference to Achebe’s title, Arrows of God. Ndibe adopts the title from Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Source: email conversation with author, 22 August 2015.

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Chapter 6 11 Eghagha, H., 2004. A Story never forgives silence: Military dictatorship, empty rhetoric and a writer’s artistic obligations in Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain. Paper presented at the University of Ibadan, Lagos. 12 Na’allah, A.R., (ed). 1998. Ogonies Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the crisis of Nigeria. NJ: Africa World Press; Wiwa, K., 2000. In the shadow of a saint. London: Doubleday; Soyinka, W., 1996. The Open Sore of a continent: a personal narrative of the Nigerian crisis. Oxford: OUP. 13 Interview with Benjamin Kwakye: Available at http://africoperadio.com/writersshowcase/okeyndibe. htm. [Accessed 10 November 2003]. Interview with Vanessa Baird: Available at http//www.newint.org/ issue330/mix.htm. [Accessed 1 December 2003]. 14 Ndibe explains his position in a number of op-eds and articles published in different avenues, for instance, ‘Past imperfect, future tense’ explores a series of issues that Ndibe feels should be analyzed in order to understand present Nigeria. Available at http://africaresource.com/scholar/ndibe.htm [Accessed 1 December 2003]; ‘Still hope for Africa’. BBC News website. Available through: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/world/africa/760924.stm. [Accessed 1 December, 2003]. 15 Achebe, C., Anthills of the Savannah. 16 In an interview, Ndibe says of the renowned African author, ‘Achebe opened my eyes to the beauty of the African story.’ Okey Ndibe in an interview with Benjamin Kwakye. Available at http://afriscoperadio. com/writersshowcase/okeyndibe.htm [Accessed 1 December 2003]. 17 Achebe, C., 1987. Anthills of the Savannah. p. 128. 18 Ibid. p. 128. 19 Gqola, P., 2010. What is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial slave memory in Post-apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, p. 10. 20 Ibid., p. 8. 21 Ndibe, O., 2000. Arrows of Rain. p. 55. 22 Ibid., p. 111. 23 Ibid.; p. 118. 24 Ibid., p. 118.

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25 Achebe, C., 1984. The trouble with Nigeria. Oxford: Heinemann. 26 Senkoro, F., 1982. The Prostitute in African Literature. Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, p. xi. 27 Nord, D., 1995. Walking the Victorian streets: women, representation and the city. London: Cornell University Press, p. 116. 28 Marechera, D., 1978. House of Hunger: short stories. Oxford: Heinemann. 29 Personal interview with author, 18 December 2003. 30 Osundare, N., 2001. ‘Arrows of Rain: a gripping parable’. Available at http://www.usafricaonline.com/ niyiosundare_ndibe.html [Accessed 1 December 2003]. 31 Armah, A. K., 1988. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Oxford: Heinemann. 32 Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and ideology in fiction. 33 Ibid., p. 126. 34 Ibid., p. 126. 35 Ibid., p. 127. 36 Ndibe, O., 2000. Arrows of Rain. p. 244. 37 Ibid., p. 248. 38 Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and ideology in fiction. 39 Ibid., p. 130.

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Nationalism in Dialogue

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani in Converstaion with Chinua Achebe’s Characters Unifer Dyer

Introduction This chapter considers the ways the two contemporary works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani re-visit and reconstruct nationalist narratives by engaging with Chinua Achebe’s prominent narratives. This critical consideration opens further dialogue on Achebe as an African author whose works inspire the shaping of alternative narrative voices. Adichie and Nwaubani, drawing upon the larger theme of nationalism, open new avenues for the discourse. The fexibility with which Adichie and Nwaubani intertwine their narratives in an inter-textual conversation with Achebe’s characters in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, respectively, shatters any fxed appropriation of nationalism and makes the theme accessible to a variety of narrations. Adichie’s début, Purple Hibiscus, being the most widely read and critiqued of the two contemporary works investigated Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

here is revisited in order to highlight the excitement around her one fnds amongst critics of African Literature. Analysis on her work includes: debates around whether she narrates a ‘continuum’1 of Achebe’s earlier themes, or merely uses them as a springboard to launch her own discourse around similar concerns in her inter-textual references to Things Fall Apart; the position from which she writes the nation; and the diffculty critics face in placing her alongside third generation writers (pitfalls of periodisation). I begin a more extensive discussion on Nwaubani’s frst novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, so as to initiate a conversation on what Achille Mbembe calls the ‘postcolony’, through the theme of laughter in 419 scamming, arguing that Nwaubani presents her work as post-ideological and that this is the point from which we can read her use of laughter. There are two things this chapter is concerned with. Firstly, it intends to elucidate the varied ways these two contemporary authors focus on major themes of the African literary canon in very different ways and in this respect they afford us the opportunity to engage further with both Achebe’s œuvres. Secondly, it intends to engage with the novels of Adichie and Nwaubani and their respective contributions to the conversations Achebe has with the African author, intellectual and indeed, his reader.

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ACHEBE, THE AFRICAN AUTHOR Writing as he did in 1958, Achebe was concerned with depicting Nigeria and its people, who were presented as an unrecognisable ‘undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred and mockery’ in Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson.2 Achebe had not always felt the need to re-present the image of Nigeria in a humane light, admitting that, through the ‘colonial classics’ he had encountered, ‘I did not see myself as an African character’.3 Divorced from an image of Africans consistent with the environment he grew up in, he says, ‘I took sides with the white men against the savages. The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at most, cunning. I hated their guts’.4 As Achebe matured as a literary scholar, his scorn for the ‘savage’ turned to a critique of distorted images closer to himself and the Nigeria he was born into. Eager to rectify the distorted literary illustrations of African people as savage he once agreed with, Achebe took this perversion of the African portrayal to task, writing into what would become the African canon, as authentic an African tale as he knew. Responding to the literary canon that came from the colonial centre, Things Fall Apart immediately became a pioneering national literary work by an African author. Achebe’s concerns in it were the colonial effects on communal values, the role of the artist, and the artist’s use of artistic techniques of language, symbolism and story-telling. Shaping a narrative to speak on and about colonial Africa through literature, Achebe’s writing resonated very closely with the historical events of the time. Inevitably, it seems, Achebe wrote within a nationalist discourse. In his distinction between bourgeois nationalism and liberationist, anti-imperialist, and nationalist internationalism, drawn from Frantz Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Fanon’s classical critique, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, Anouar Abdel-Malek says this about a ‘nationalitarian’ concern: (The) nationalitarian phenomenon as well as nationalisms ... has as its object, beyond the clearing of the national territory, the independence and sovereignty of the national state, uprooting in depth the position of ex-colonial power – the reconquest of the power of decision in all domains of national life ... . Historically, fundamentally, the struggle is for national liberation, the instrument of that reconquest of identity which ... lies at the centre of everything.5

Achebe is clear on the necessity for opening up ‘African Literature’ to the changes it will face once the African nation has broken from empirical British colonialism. In the following passage he eloquently illustrates this: Any attempt to defne African literature in terms which overlook the complexities of the African scene at the material time is doomed to failure. After the elimination of white rule shall have been completed, the single most important fact in Africa in the second half of the

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twentieth century will appear to be the rise of individual nation-states. I believe that African literature will follow the same pattern.6

The chapter the above excerpt comes from is entitled, ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, and was written in response to the 1962 Makerere ‘Conference of African Writers of English Expression’. The paper concerned itself with one of the key issues on the agenda of the conference namely, defning ‘African Literature’, but the paper also went beyond this and saw Achebe discuss discourses around writing in English – an offcial language of colonial rule and law – that he explains is problematic because it is ‘adopted and adapted as a means of access to an indigenous aesthetic and cosmology’,7 which is different to the Western paradigm but is also wrongly defned as inferior to Western understanding. Adichie and Nwaubani engage with Achebe at the point where ‘the struggle to enunciate African structures of feeling in the face of encounters with the West is often loaded with unresolved contradictions’.8

PROBLEMATISING Things Fall Apart Chimamanda Adichie writes Purple Hibiscus in the frst person narrative through the character of the young seventeen-year-old Kambili, who is from a religious family that is headed by her abusive father, Eugene Achike (Papa Eugene). The narrative is set in the domestic space of her home in Enugu, and sets the tone for the events leading up to her pivotal visit to her Aunty Ifeoma’s home in Nsukka. It is at Nsukka that Kambili matures as a young woman and is afforded the freedom that allows her to narrate the Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

tale of what led to her father’s tragic death. In her novel, Adichie is visibly concerned with those aspects of the domestic space that parallel the dominance of the state. The narrative turns the gaze away from the larger matters of the Nigerian post-colonial state, to matters primarily concerned with the private household space. This is a deliberate move away from what Achebe was most concerned with, namely the colonial state and the Nigerian nation. However, when Adichie pens her novel she takes off from where ‘things fall apart’ and weaves a narrative from a set of themes that open up the silences around the domestic tyrants who champion masculinity at the expense of the narrative of women and children. ‘Purple Hibiscus can be understood within an inter-generational, inter-textual revisioning of Achebe’s novel’,9 or what Adesanmi and Dunton more precisely refer to as an ‘intertextual continuum’.10 It is important to note that Adichie’s novel cannot easily be placed alongside third generation writing since her writing is still primarily fxated on the state of the nation in ways that resonate with the ideas and concerns in works of frst generation writers. She is therefore still writing within the space of ‘many national literatures’11 (my emphasis). Indeed, narrative affords a space where art and memory do not have to remain bound by history, as Adesanmi and Dunton articulate through the Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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work of John Hawley who writes on contemporary works on the Biafra war.12 Similarly, Daria Tunca argues: Adichie’s choice of temporal backdrop may have been motivated by the “continuing historical relevance” of the conficts and experiences recounted in Achebe’s book, combined with a wish to more fully explore the religious legacy of colonization in the contemporary period, this time from the perspective of a female narrator.13

When considering Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, we see that the post-colonial is evoked through an inter-textual conversation with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which seems to bind her work to the most visible inheritance colonialism leaves behind for post-colonial Nigeria – namely the state. Both the fgures of Okonkwo and Papa Eugene represent a masculinity that upholds patriarchal values at the expense of women and children in the domestic space. Their masculinity points to what they fear and despise most, their fathers, who are feminised and ridiculed along with their beliefs. Both their fathers share strong ties to African traditions and both traditional sets of beliefs are feminised against the aggressive Okonkwo and the dogmatic Eugene, respectively. Even as Okonkwo’s fght against the colonialists is for a traditional African past, it is a predominantly masculine and patriarchal one. The theme in both works is how overbearing fear of failure works alongside the theme of the changing nation (Achebe) and state (Adichie). In Umofa, the village in which Things Fall Apart is set, the past is looked upon with great nostalgia. Okonkwo remembers how wars were fought before the powers of colonial offcials triumphed over the indigenous people, and were exercised through violent force. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Okonkwo is a hero and warrior, and is depicted as the highest upholder of tradition and patriarchy, and a man ‘clearly cut out for great things’.14 Colonial intrusion disrupts the position Okonkwo occupies in his community and his eventual death seems to allude to his inability to adapt to the rapid change; this is what brings him to commit suicide. Colonialism works as a violent system that humiliates Okonkwo, along with other infuential and elderly men in Umofa. Turning towards Purple Hibiscus, we are presented with the character of Eugene, in a time of dictatorship rule in Nigerian which fourishes in the aftermath of a coup d’état. It typifes the period Adichie writes about. This is a time in Nigeria’s history that is fraught with violence after a coup d’état was staged by Ibrahim Babangida’s regime, in 1987, and which unseated General Muhammadu Buhari, who had ruled from 1983 to 1985. Eugene is illustrated as a man who openly criticises the nation state through his renowned newspaper, the Standard, which preaches liberalism, democracy and freedom of speech. Those oppressed by the government applaud his bravery for openly deploring the injustices committed by state offcials, as well as Eugene’s generosity to church charities, which earns him reverence amongst his community. Eugene’s faw lies in his inability to mirror his commendable activism in his household or with his domestic relations. He Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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fails to allow the freedoms that he preaches publically to fourish in the domestic space. This disjuncture is a large part of what leads to his death.

BREAKING GENERATIONAL SILENCES When considering the relevance of the domestic space for Adichie and Achebe, it is clear Adichie wishes to investigate the child’s and woman’s narrative in post-colonial Nigeria under dictatorship, a space that remains largely silent in Achebe’s work. Although creating this space through narrative is itself a form of breaking the silence, Beatrice, Kambili and Jaja never get to voice their silence publically, but instead communicate to each other through eye contact; this becomes their coded language. It is an acknowledgement of the pain they share. This coded language highlights the silence in the home which is to them a system of imposed structured schedules and tasks, church rituals and punishment. Papa Eugene dictates the role of each family member – who says what and when – and he determines who has sinned and what the punishment should be. Examples of corporal punishment include: Jaja’s paralysed fnger broken my Papa Eugene when Jaja misses two questions on his catechism test;15 Kambili, her mother and Jaja’s beating when, during Kambili’s monthly menstrual period when she experiencing stomach cramps, she eats 10 minutes before communion.16 Yet another example is Beatrice’s miscarriage which results from a beating by Papa Eugene after she suffers from morning sickness and nearly misses a meeting with Father Benedict.17 The moments of domestic brutality are often presented alongside Papa Eugene’s engagement with the politics of the nation. When Kambili is meant to receive punishment Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

for the low grades on her report, Papa Eugene receives an urgent call concerning the arrest of the Standard’s editor, Ade Cocker, and he abandons the punishment: The phone rang then; it had been ringing more often since Ade Cocker was arrested. Papa answered it and spoke in low tones. I sat waiting for him until he looked up and waved me away. He did not call me the next day, or the day after, to talk about my report card, to decide how I would be punished. I wondered if he was too preoccupied with Ade Cocker’s case, but even after he got him out of jail a week later, he did not talk about my report card.18

What happens in the larger politics of the state directly infuences the domestic politics, situating both in a shared space. The monologue of the military regime seeps into the home of Eugene and reduces the domestic space to silence. This silence is enforced through the control of time in the form of rituals that determine the periods of silence. These are only ruptured by a religious monologue from Papa Eugene. As Ouma articulates, ‘Punishment, a ritual of correction in Papa Eugene Achike’s familial space is a major occasion of silence within the familial space’.19 Silence reduces space and intensifes the presence of Papa Eugene. It becomes the only experience Kambili knows, leaving her with no voice but that

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of her father, as the domestic objects that haunt her imagination come alive in silence. Silence is described to us as follows: The silence was broken only by the whir of the ceiling fan as it sliced through the still air. Although our spacious dining room gave way to an even wider living room, I felt suffocated. The off-white walls with the framed photo of grandfather were narrowing, bearing down on me. Even the glass dining table was moving.20

Objects themselves become instigators of silence. Silently they come to life, as if they were co-conspirators of the silence Papa Eugene enforces in the household. In another passage the presence of silence is again illustrated: Lunch was Jollof rice, fst-size chunks of Azu fried until the bones were crisp, and ngwongwo. Papa ate most of the ngwo-ngwo, his spoon swooping through the spicy broth in the glass bowl, silence hung over the table like the blue-black clouds in the middle of the rainy season. Only the chirping of the Ochiri birds outside interrupted.21

Silence defnes the tense domestic space and noise represents the joy that is outside its walls. Silence represents what is repressed – sound, what can be expressed. If Enugu feels like a large prison cell that echoes the silences of suppressed voices and expressions, then, by contrast, Nsukka is small, homely and abuzz with conversation - it becomes ‘a dialogised familial space’.22 If Kambili is to escape the silence, both mind and body have to journey out. Kambili grows from a silenced space through laughter, music and inter-personal relations, which allows her to discover her own voice.23 Nsukka disCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

rupts the order brutally enforced by Papa Eugene. There is no order in Nsukka, lights go off unexpectedly, there is a shortage of gas, people protest, and her aunt breaks into song in the middle of a rosary – something never done in her family. Kambili begins to see the dynamics of life in this unpredictable and uncontrolled space. It is unlike the enclosure of Eugene’s compound walls, where Jaja and Kambili are totally cut off from the outside world and only get information from secondary sources such as school friends. While in her home they read certain newspapers and listen to limited radio stations and no TV is watched; at Nsukka they watch TV freely and discussions are openly held and differences expressed. Nsukka opens the following narration after Jaja ‘did not go to communion and Papa fung his heavy missal across the room and broke the fgurines on the étagère:’24 Nsukka started it all; Aunty Ifeoma’s little garden next to the veranda of her fat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja’s defance seemed to me like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus; rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowd waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.25

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The only agency Kambili has is telling her story: her father controls the rest of her life. Yet even this she can only do after his death. Narrating from this position signifes the alternative narrative it opens up for what Ouma identifes as ‘contemporary forms of identity’.26 If we are to read Eugene’s death symbolically, then it can be argued that it is the ultimate demise of oppression that opens up voicing within the domestic or private space. We should, however, not abscond from the complexities of life’s hardships that Nsukka presents before us. It is a space in which Kambili’s Aunty Ifeoma struggles to pay bills and eventually has to leave for London where, ironically, she works two jobs and often complains about the high cost of living in England compared to Nigeria. The freedom from her awareness of the oppression she faces at home that Kambili wishes to attain from her time in Nsukka is not possible. Beatrice, Jaja, and herself, cannot rise to the level of the crowd, who marches towards Government Square chanting against the incumbent dictator’s rule, with green tree branches in their hands.27In Kambili’s instance, the demise of dictatorship is epitomised in Papa Eugene’s death. This inability to attain freedom is partly because the domestic space here occupies a similar status to Achebe’s fctional space in Things Fall Apart, where it is still protected from public scrutiny. In both texts, power is one-directional, applied within and projected outwardly: the public does not look inwardly into the domestic tyranny of power. In Things Fall Apart domestic violence is treated as so insignifcant that all Ekwef can say when her friend Chielo asks how she is after she heard Okonkwo near killed her, is: ‘I cannot yet fnd a mouth with which to tell the story’, and the only response Chielo has is: ‘Your chi is very awake, my friend ...’28 Similarly, Kambili is unable to speak out about her suffering, instead, a loss in speech results in inarticulateness that produce mumbles and anxiety attacks. Jaja’s defance literally chokes Kambili: ‘My body shook from the coughCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

ing’,29 and she is unable to process the rapture of silence. An oft-quoted scene in Achebe’s book is of Okonkwo, who beats his youngest wife after being ‘provoked to justifable anger’,30 who is punished, not for the domestic abuse, but because he beats her during the Week of Peace. Not even the earth goddess, Ani, can save a woman who disobeys her husband’s order; the goddess is only stirred because peace has been disturbed between ‘fellows.’ In considering such an appropriation of the woman fgure in Achebe’s book, Stratton enables us to consider how ‘things could fall apart for African women because they never had been and never would be together’.31 In Eugene’s home he controls all conversations at the dinner table and regulates what information can be received from the outside world. When anyone else speaks they echo his words and speak in one voice – his. No one but Jaja dares to show any resistance and when he does: Mama had realised that she would not need the fgurines anymore; that when Papa threw the missal at Jaja, it was not just the fgurines that came tumbling down, it was everything.32

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Jaja takes the blame for his father’s death and has to serve the full sentence in jail on behalf of his mother, bearing the faults of the previous generation. He is the only fgure in the narrative, other than his grandfather and aunt, who challenge Eugene. Although this passage espouses hope in the reader, Adichie does not resolve any of the diffculties of the domestic space for us; instead she problematises this space, further emphasising the domestic silences: Beatrice remains with the scars of silence, Jaja goes to jail and Kambili is left hanging on to the image of the rare hibiscus. The second contemporary author whom I discuss adopts an approach to Achebe’s characters that exposes them to laughter and leaves us with little room for refection through silence.

NWAUBANI’S POST-COLONIAL JOKE Laughter purifes from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrifed, it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naïveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality.33 Mikhal Bakhtin 1984

The ability to openly laugh at ourselves is all but refreshing, despite how diffcult it is to fnd humour in the post-colony many African authors have found the most creative ways of scorning. Nwaubani’s novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, leaves us in stitches, laughing at the most absurd depictions of fctional Nigeria. I Do Not Come to You by Chance is a novel about a young chemical engineering graduCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

ate, Kingsley Ibe. Kingsley has grown up under educated parents, Paulinus ‘Engineer’ and Augustine, both graduates from the UK who have come back to serve the newly independent Nigeria. Paulinus works as a civil servant and when infation rates soar, the value of his income plummets, leaving the family with little to live off. Things get worse when Paulinus is diagnosed with diabetes and the family income cannot support his dietary requirements and medical bills that include lengthy admission to the hospital, as well as supplying medical equipment that the hospital does not provide to its patients. After unpromising applications and interviews, no fnancial income to pay medical bills or the following year’s school fees for his siblings, coupled with the depressing reality that he has no job prospects, Kingsley decides to pay his Uncle Boniface a visit and borrow money from him. Transformed into Cash Daddy, Boniface not only gives Kingsley all the money he needs to pay medical bills, he also offers Kingsley a job; and when the illness ends Paulinus’ life, Cash Daddy pays for a more than suffcient burial ceremony. He takes Kingsley under his wing and introduces him to the world of 419-ers. Kingsley thrives in this enterprise and through him we enter the world of scammers, mugus – ‘the sucker’34 – and the exorbitant life of luxury this business offers to its best performers.

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It is against this plot that we enter into the unpredictable, fast-paced, performative and fctional Nigerian space that Nwaubani illustrates for us.

EMPLOYING GUISE IN THE POST-COLONY Achille Mbembe’s article entitled ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’ allows further exploration of the Nigerian post-colonial state that Nwaubani illustrates. Mbembe identifes the post-colonial subjects as having ‘a marked ability to manage not just a single identity for themselves but several, which are fexible enough for them to negotiate as and when required’.35 It is said the subject is able to deploy a talent for acting and readily being able to ‘splinter their identities and to represent themselves as always changing their persona. We could in fact say that they are constantly undergoing mitosis, whether it be in the “offcial” space or not’.36 This is what enables the emergence of characters such as Cash Daddy in the post-colony, since they are able to change with the moving times and are not held back by notions of morality in the same way that the character Paulinus is. For such a character as Cash Daddy to exist, the post-colony must be a space in which anything is possible; it is no longer the romanticised world of Paulinus, in which time progresses in a linear trajectory; acquiring a Eurocentric education, applying for a job and earning an honest living. Instead, it is a world that is not governed by morals, where modes of living are made up as and when things happen, so that adaptability becomes the defning factor of who can, not only survive, but thrive. Giving up the ideals of his parents, and faced with the problem of having to fnd a way out of the fnancial crisis the family is in, Kingsley has to fnd acceptance in the world Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

and lifestyle that Cash Daddy embodies. In order to do so, he is initiated into the world of over-indulgence through laughter. Jessica Voges draws on the European philosophers Aristotle and Henri Bergson to show laughter as ‘a social phenomenon’ specifc to humans, evidenced after we have perceived something as humorous at a textual or visual level.37 She argues that, in literature, ‘characters have the opportunity to perform a shift in social status by laughing intentionally’, even in complicity, in specifc situations, enabling them to ‘acquire the qualities of a laughing community’ and to thus be identifed as belonging to that community.38 In the light of this understanding, we may see Nwaubani’s character, Kingsley, as engaging with us as our ‘joker’, to the extent that he enables us to laugh or guides us in laughing. This joker character is ‘the individual who constructs the comic,’ who allows for joking, defned as ‘the manifestation of humour in comic situations and utterances’.39 Kingsley becomes an expert in the appropriation of laughter or laughing that allows him entrance into the world and language of Cash Daddy. The ultimate marker of complete participation in 419 scamming is portrayed in the following passage of joke-telling and laughing, when Kingsley shows anxiety over a big mugu they are to meet the next day and fool into believing Cash Daddy is the Minister of Aviation in Nigeria: Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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‘Cash Daddy’, I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other to conceal some embarrassment I felt at my cowardice, “what if he sees the real minister on TV?” Both men laughed as if I had just cracked a splendid joke. Cash Daddy cleared his throat and wriggled the toes of the foot dangling over the tub ... . ‘But Kings’, he dragged in his dangling foot and sat up in the tub, “white man doesn’t understand black man’s face. Do you know that I can give you my passport to travel with? Even if your nose is ten times bigger than my own, they won’t even notice.” It was my turn to laugh.40

In such a community the world his parents have painted for him becomes accessible to laughter. Kingsley’s university graduate parents consider their degrees to be their greatest achievement, to the extent that they idolise education. In the following passage, this is the object of Cash Daddy’s laughter: So after all this your education – the one you’ve done so far – what have you gained from it? With all the big, big calculations you did with your calculator in school, has it made you to calculate those same amounts of money in your own pocket? Or in your own bank account? Or in different currencies?41

Not only is Cash Daddy, and what this character represents of the post-colony, available for our laughter, so too is the utopian Nigerian model Paulinus and Augustina epitomise – to Kingsley’s disappointment. It is not simply the false glamour of his parents’ lives, though, that gets us to join Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

in the laughter with Kingsley, but also the fact that we sympathise with his situation. Laughing with him, we accept that his only avenue out of the family’s fnancial predicament is for him to resort to mastering fraud and duplicity; and we can laugh at this in the character of Cash Daddy, an uneducated, physically grotesque scammer. Nwaubani zooms in on Cash Daddy’s belly and his relationship to it his body in ways similar to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s illustration of his capitalist and bourgeois characters in Devil on the Cross. Kingsley describes Cash Daddy in the following words: Cash Daddy’s cheeks were puffy, his neck was chunky, his fve limbs were thick and long. I half expected his bloated belly to wriggle free of his body and start break-dancing on the tiled foor in front of us. It seemed to have a life of its own.42

This lecherous indulgence in a lavish material lifestyle is what Mbembe says makes up the political culture in the post-colony: The obesity of men in power, their impressive physique or, more crudely, the fow of shit which results from such a physique – these appeal to a people who can enjoy themselves

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with mockery and laughter, and, sometimes, even join in the feast. They thus become themselves part of a system of signs that the commandment leaves, like tracks, as it passes on its way, and so make it possible for someone to follow the trail of violence and domination that is intrinsic to the commandment.43

This consumerism is what makes the post-colony available for ridicule and laughter, even by those who are the object of laughter, ‘the fetish, seen for the sham it is, is made to lose its might, and becomes merely an idol’.44 Even in the image of the grotesque, Cash Daddy gains our sympathy, since he seems to rise against all odds from a mischievous and impoverished Boniface to a resourceful and rich Cash Daddy. He does not hoard his money; instead the wealth he gains is generously shared amongst his family, but most impressive is his grandiose public show of material riches. As Chabal and Daloz highlight in Africa Works: The question of corruption in Africa cannot be understood simply within the context of the abuse of power. A well-managed moral economy of corruption does involve the abuse of formal power for personal gains. But, ultimately, personal gains are aimed at achieving a position of legitimate respectability recognised by all.45

The major theme in the novel of the infamous 419 scam is only possible in a context where technology can be manipulated to suit those who are meant to be excluded from it. Nwaubani’s Nigeria quite closely resembles modern Nigeria: riddled with power cuts and where people have to use their own generators. Public hospitals are more places of death than recovery; they require patients to make payment before consultation and those paCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

tients must supply the hospital with medical necessities from bedding to syringes. Public roads are obstacle courses for drivers and it is well known by people that nothing happens without ‘long leg’ – bribery.46 The way that people are duped by 419 scamming, and all the social and bureaucratic acrobatics ordinary people have to master to get by, are eloquently articulated in the argument Larkin makes, that in African states, technology has been exposed for its weaknesses.47 Although this may not be a phenomenon endemic to Africa, the Nigerian post-colonial state is evidently fertile ground for scammers and hackers. Much of the infrastructure in this African state seemed to fail after independence and this is none other than the colonial bureaucratic system left behind by British administration. The question then is what are the effects of inheriting poor colonial mechanisms? Put differently, what does the African post-colonial state have to offer that is better than what was left by colonialist who built states meant not only to exclude Africans but also dominate them in very violent ways – quite successfully in many respects? I do not aim to answer this question, but rather I am interested in the ways this environment is creatively and critically explored in Nwaubani’s novel.

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COLONIAL STEREOTYPES AS POST-COLONIAL MASQUERADES It is against the background of this world I have presented above that we should read Nwaubani’s character, Mr Winterbottom, the object of Kingsley’s laughter, and a character who strikingly echoes Captain Winterbottom from Achebe’s Arrow of God. This work is counted amongst Achebe’s great works in the 2010 publication of The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God.48 In the narrative timeline that the three works represent, this novel focuses on second generation Nigerians under colonial rule, and is set in the 1920s. The narrative is set in the aftermath of its major focus: a land dispute between the villages of Umuaro and Okperi. The Igbo priest Ezeulu is identifed as an honest character and is consulted in the process involving a dispute resolution between the two communities. Later, he is summoned by the British District Offcer and co-narrator, Captain Winterbottom, to accept an appointment as Warrant Chief – which he refuses. Before us unfolds the tale of Okonkwo’s son’s generation who were faced with European colonial administration’s encroachment into the communal system of Igboland. Set in a time of rapid change, Arrow of God depicts, with clarity, the ambiguities in a community where the effects of colonialism are already evident. Ezeulu is the central character, in whom we see the greatest struggle against colonial humiliation that treats men of power and infuence with contempt, fogging them and forcefully implementing a justice system far removed from the communal laws of the community. Unlike John, a character who quickly adapts to a Nigeria where the industrious town/city provides loopholes to eke out a living in tobacco (notwithstanding the risks that come with selling this), Ezeulu, like Paulinus, indulges in his pride and the morals he lives by to the extent that he dismisses these avenues of opportunity. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

The British administrator, Captain Winterbottom, like many colonial administrators, lives alone in a government bungalow and has a ‘house boy’ to clean, cook, serve his guests and run any domestic errands expected of him by his master. In the scene when the new Assistant District Offcer of Okperi, Mr Clark, has dinner with his superior, Captain Winterbottom is quick to present Boniface, his house boy, as if he were a possession he has acquired. To his guest he says: He’s a fne specimen, isn’t he? He’s been with me four years. He was a little boy of about thirteen – by my own calculations, they’ve no idea of years – when I took him on. He was absolutely raw.49

Suffce it to say, it is hardly coincidental that in I Do Not Come to You by Chance, Winterbottom’s benefciary is Boniface. With great ease, Nwaubani turns the relationship between these characters into a parody of the post-colony. An almost insignifcant character in Achebe’s novel becomes one of the central fgures in Nwaubani’s narrative. In Achebe, Boniface serves largely as a critical commentary on the colonial stereotypes of Africans, and yet even here his character is not developed. His character remains fxed,

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and defned only by Captain Winterbottom in the meagre words in the above excerpt. Nwaubani’s Mr Winterbottom, however, is a character only signifcant to Cash Daddy in as far as he can fund a well-performed scam. Considering Nwaubani’s use of humour in the post-modern provides a lens for reading her unrestrained and unapologetic use of laughter in the post-colony. A refection on reactions to post-modernism shows that it has generated mixed feelings amongst certain critics in African Literature. Despite the argument that post-modernism decentres the subject and privileges culture and its use of absurd language, Tejumola Olaniyan recognises its signifcance. He accentuates: ‘The postmodern debunking of the West as universal norm, and the authorization of multiple histories has given rise to a relativism that, while still requiring great vigilance on our part, is an advance worthy of notice’.50 It is not only the over-arching Western concepts that we have had to move away from. Post-modernism has ‘decentralized African counter-grand narratives, such as nationalism and anti-nationalism, and has shown that they can be no less repressive, politically and epistemologically, than the Western grand narratives they oppose’.51 Jonathan Ngate describes the francophone literature of the 60s as literature engaged in ‘a politics of anger’ and argues that ‘the satire that results leaves little room for a too easy celebration of Africa’.52 He focuses on the narrative of ‘ferocious comedy’53 appropriated by writers who are not precious about pre-colonialism, the moment of colonialism or the post-colony, but destroy what he calls the ‘political kingdom ... rejecting wishful thinking’54 and the idealisation of Africa. Once this wall has been broken down we are able to see how laughter can be used to comment on the state of the post-colony; by laughing we are free from the restrictions of patriotism. Nwaubani is evidently unattached to an idealised notion of the state and in this way she is able to engage us in Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

creative ways of laughing at every aspect of life in post-colonial Nigeria. This laughter is not bound by time, space, ideology, morals or language. Laughter is best elucidated in the trope of death. When the government discovers ghost pensioners, the elderly are expected to go in person to register to prove they are alive and still eligible for income. Nwaubani takes the opportunity to ridicule state bureaucracy through the image of a pensioner who dies on his way home, moments after registration.55 In another example, Cash Daddy becomes the butt of the joke when his death is reduced to an orgasmic moment. Ironically, his 404 dog meat is poisoned – a dish he claims protects him from all evil and gives him sexual potency.56 Death laughs at dependency; nothing in the post-colony can be counted on; and nothing is certain – not even death itself. Ato Quayson tells us that post-modernism ‘appropriates everything from tradition, history, and other genres and respects nothing’.57 Nwaubani is able to open up and free the post-colonial space from the inability to laugh at ourselves or relieve ourselves from suffering and pain by laughing by appropriating all the aspects of the post-colony. In the series of acts performed for Mr Winterbottom, a number of characters are assumed as well as numerous stereotypes played out. This character play is really part of the directing of the performances. When we frst meet Mr Winterbottom, a critical Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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performance is staged for him in a hotel in London. Kingsley is ‘engineer Lomaji Ugorji’, the Protocol Offcer is Mr Akpiri-Ogologo and Cash Daddy is ‘Alhaji Mahmud, the Minister of Aviation of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.’ They are there to convince Mr Winterbottom to invest in an international airport project, a purely fctitious story created to scam him and make money from this narrative, which is clearly a performance that is well executed. As the plot thickens, Cash Daddy draws on the common ethnic divide manipulated heavily in colonialism. He brands the Igbo the ‘niggers of Nigeria’ who live in the ‘only geographical zone in Nigeria without an international airport’.58 Cash Daddy plays their Igbo advocate. Winterbottom, who grew up in Uganda, is a ‘White African’ ‘brother’, yet he is fully convinced by the Igbo Alhaji Mahmud, a name Kingsley reminds us is ‘more likely to belong to a Hausa person from the northern part of Nigeria’.59 To explain the irony of this scene Kingsley goes into a detailed description of Cash Daddy’s features which are considered of Igbo origin and those of the Hausa, quite different to his. The very same ethnically distinguishing features used by the colonial administration to divide and rule are appropriated to illustrate the ironies of the post-colony. Also, we cannot forget that for this act to be completely convincing, Cash Daddy has to act as ‘African’ as is possible – and what better way than to arrive in ‘African time’ – something Nwaubani refers to as the ‘African Time epidemic’.60 It is considered a culturally African phenomenon and it is one Nwaubani fully dramatises through her characters.61 This notion draws on ideas of Africa as a timeless zone, where time is at people’s leisure. In a pejorative sense, it is about tardiness with regard to appointments, meetings and events. These stereotypes are appropriated by Cash Daddy and make him convincing, reaffrming to a narrow minded Winterbottom the age old distorted idea that ‘the white man ... was several scales ahead of me (Cash Daddy) in the evolutionary process’.62 Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

It is useful to refer to Homi Bhabha’s theory on colonialist stereotyping here, as a ‘productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse’ that makes use of ‘“otherness”, which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity’.63 It is evident that several factors go into making or creating stereotypes, most of which work on a binary system. For Bhabha, colonial discourse is an apparatus of power that works on the ‘recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences’.64 It subjects people to distorted illustrations of themselves by producing ‘knowledge of coloniser and colonised which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated’ and designed to ‘construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’.65 Whereas Achebe focuses his attention on illustrating the distorted image that colonial stereotypes have projected of Africans and the complex and ambiguous African community they play out in, Nawubani depicts how, in post-colonial Nigeria, these can become ‘costumes’ of survival. Nichols illuminates an understanding worth considering in further working out what Nwaubani seems to do with stereotypes. He writes, ‘The black writer is probably more keenly aware than most that he lives at the edge of a precipice, in constant danger of Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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some bottomless abyss of chaos and destruction. This very consciousness heightens his wild joy. His art is his only real freedom, his mastery of the ludicrous his only redemption’.66 Such art is meant to redeem the image of black Americans and to preserve ‘honour and self-esteem by a witty retort’.67 We may agree that when the slave appropriates as caricature the stereotypical image of himself in the eyes of the slave master, the ridicule is aimed at those who appropriate stereotypes of the slave and fx them upon black individuals. No longer ‘savages’ and yet still having to negotiate the inheritance of what being branded as such meant, Nwaubani’s post-colonial characters stage multiple scenes of acts that ridicule these former colonial beliefs.

PLAYING OUT STEREOTYPES Getting Mr Winterbottom to invest in the construction of an airport, and indeed the whole performance, is a lengthy process that includes identifying the right candidate. The nationality of a mugu and their surname is used to determine the success of the scamming act. Targeted are the Wiggleworths, Albright and Letterman, while an Iranian mugu proves ‘almost as smart as we are’.68 Once the scammer has successfully chosen a mugu, the scammer assumes a character that will suit the act of scamming, from the writing of e-mails through to meeting the mugu in person, drawing them deeper and deeper into the scam, and demanding a greater sense of commitment, all the while making the character appear more dependent and in greater need of their help. Nwaubani takes the whole ordeal a step further. Mr Winterbottom’s double, the Captain in Arrow of God, becomes a performer himself. Touring Abuja, Mr Winterbottom is eager to ‘get some Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

real shots ... of real Africans’.69 His idea of this (given to us by Kingsley) is ‘babbling with awestruck natives, listening to a bare-bottomed lad playing a bamboo fute, and taking photographs of men drinking  fura da nono on raffa mats in front of their shacks’.70 Mr Winterbottom leaves only after Kingsley cautions him, saying, ‘Nigeria is a dangerous place ... . Especially for a white man’.71 This draws the curtain on the performance. Mr Winterbottom retreats to his safe hotel room and Kingsley escapes seeing more of ‘real Africa’ for the day. The irony of the day’s events is evident in Kingsley’s response to the tour with Winterbottom. ‘Someday, he (Winterbottom) would look back and understand why I had been so shy throughout the African tour, why I had declined every one of his fervent invitations to feature in his photo shots’.72 The most obvious reason is that the photos could be used as evidence that Kingsley was a scammer, and thus could be used to trace him. But another reading would show that Kingsley disassociated himself with the kind of ‘real Africa’ captured in the images. Both Achebe and Nwaubani’s Winterbottom share a similar a distorted image of the ‘real Africa,’ yet focus on this problèmatique is dealt with very differently by each author. Where Achebe’s depiction of colonial Nigeria works towards a moral argument for a truer, but nonetheless, ambiguous refection of Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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colonialism’s effects on African communal life, Nwaubani laughs at all images of Africa, especially any kind that may aspire to a moral high ground. Naturally, the world Achebe depicts is that of the emasculated African warrior and traditional priest. Adichie and Nwaubani take as their central fgures, echoes of Achebe’s characters, decentralising them from the narrative and choosing to situate these fgures of the nation within the larger post-colonial arena, rather than at the centre of it. The nation/state encroaches into private matters and is no longer illustrated as the jurisdiction of fallen chiefs and defeated leaders; it is the concern of all aspects of life. The continued relevance of the theme of nationalism ensures that the work that these authors present is still pertinent and worthy of critical appreciation, whether through re-emphasis in relation to the larger nation state, from the perspective of the micro, private space; or through reducing the state to an object of ridicule and unrestricted laughter.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Adesanmi, P. and Dunton, C., 2008. Everything Good Is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation. Research in African Literature, 39(2), pp. vii-xii. 2 Adichie, C. N., 2010. The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart; No Longer at Ease; Arrow of God. New York: Alfred, A. Knopf, p. viii. 3 Ibid., p. viii. 4 Ibid., p. viii. 5 Abdel-Malek, A., 1981. Social Dialectics: Civilisations and Social Theory (Vol 1). Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 13.

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6 Achebe, C., 1975. Morning Yet On Creation Day. London: Heinemann, p. 7. 7

Msisika. M. H., 2008. ‘Introduction’ Things Fall Apart. Cape Town: Heinemann African Writers Series, p. iii.

8 Quayson, A., 1997. Protocols of Representation and the Problem of Constructing an African ‘Gnosis’: Achebe and Okri. The Yearbook of English Studies, 27, pp. 137–149. 9 Hewett, H., 2005. Coming of Age: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voice of the Third Generation. English in Africa, 32(1), pp. 73–97. 10 Adesanmi, P. and Dunton, C., 2008. Everything Good Is Raining, p. ix. 11 Adesanmi, P. and Dunton, C., 2008. Everything Good Is Raining, p. x. 12 Ibid., p. x. 13 Tunca, D., 2012. Appropriating Achebe: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and ‘The Headstrong Historian’, in Nicklas, P. and Lindner, O. (ed.), Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts. Berlin: De Gruyter, p. 237. Also see Cooper, B. A., 2008. A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language. Oxford: James Currey, p. 123. 14 Achebe, C., 2008. Things Fall Apart. Cape Town: Heinemann African Writers Series, p. 7. 15 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate, p. 45. 16 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 120. 17 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 29; p. 32; p. 33. 8 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 42.

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Nationalism in Dialogue 19 Ouma, C. E. W., 2007. Journey Out of Silenced Familial Spaces in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. MA Research Report. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, p. 51. 20 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 7. 21 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 32. 22 Ouma, C. E. W., 2007. Journey Out of Silenced Familial Spaces in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. MA Research Report. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, p. 53 23 See Ouma, C. E. W., 2009. Childhood(s) in Purple Hibiscus. English Academy Reviews, 26(2), pp. 48–59. 24 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate, p. 3. 25 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate, p. 16. 26 Ouma, C. E. W., 2011. Childhood in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction. PhD thesis. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, p. 9. 27 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 27. 28 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. 2008. London: Heinemann, pp. 38–39. 29 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus. London: Fourth Estate, p. 14. 30 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. 2008, p. 23. 31 Stratton, F., 2002. Contemporary African Literature & the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge, p. 22. 32 Adichie, C. N., 2009. Purple Hibiscus, p. 15. 33 Bakhtin, M., 1984. Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press. 34 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. London: Phoenix, p. 151. 35 Mbembe, A., 1992. Provisional Notes on the Postcolony. Journal of the International African Institute, 62(1), pp. 3–37. 36 Mbembe, A., 1992. Provisional Notes on the Postcolony, p. 5. 37 Voges, J., 2013. Language Movements: Fictions and Effects of Laughter in Black British Literature, in Munkelt, M., Schmitz, M., Stein, M. (ed.), Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking. New York: ASNEL Paper, p. 275. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

38 Schmitz, M. and Stein, M. (ed.), Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking. New York: ASNEL Paper, p. 277. 39 Pye, G., 2006. Comedy Theory and the Postmodern Humour, 19(1), pp. 57–70. 40 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. p. 196. 41 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. p. 127. 42 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. p. 184. 43 Mbembe, A., 1992. Provisional Notes on the Postcolony. pp. 3–37. 44 Mbembe, A., 1992. Provisional Notes on the Postcolony. pp. 3–37. 45 Chabal, P. and Daloz, J. P., 1999. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Bloomington: James Currey, p. 159. 46 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. pp. 71–81; p. 73. 47 Larkin, B., 2004. Degrading Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy. Public Culture, 16(2), pp. 289–314. 48 Adichie, C. N., 2010. ‘Introduction’ The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart; No Longer at Ease; Arrow of God. New York: Alfred, A. Knopf, pp. vii-xiii. 49 Achebe, C., 1964. Arrow of God. 1986. London: Heinemann, p. 35.

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Chapter 7 50 Olaniyan, T., 2004. Postmodernity, Postcoloniality, and African Studies, in Magubane, Z. (ed.), Postmodernism, Postcoloniality and African Studies. Trenton: World Press, p. 44. 51 Ibid., p.44. 52 Ngate, J., 1988. Francophone African Fiction. Trenton: African World Press, p. 59. 56 Ngate, J., 1988. Francophone African Fiction, p. 61. 57 Ibid., p. 61. 58 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance, p. 64. 59 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance, p. 330. 60 Quayson, A., 2005. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, p. 92. 61 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance, p. 201. 62 Ibid., p. 201. 63 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance, p. 278. 64 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance, pp. 199; 278. 65 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance, p. 202. 66 Bhabha, H., 1983. The Other Question ... The Stereotypes and Colonial Discourse. Screens, 24(6), pp. 18-36. 67 Bhabha, H., 1983. The Other Question, p. 23. 68 Ibid., p. 23. 69 Nichols, C. H., 1978. Comic Modes in Black America (a ramble through Afro American humour), in Cohen, C. B. (ed.), Comic Relief. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 105. 70 Nichols, C. H., 1978. Comic Modes in Black America, p. 107. 71 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. p. 313. 72 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. p. 212. 73 Ibid., p. 212. 74 Ibid., p. 212. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

75 Nwaubani, A. T., 2009. I Do Not Come to You by Chance. p. 213.

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CHAPTER

Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air Grace Musila

Introduction To my mind, there are two key climaxes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: the moment when Okonkwo strikes down his adoptive son, Ikemefuna; and the closing of the novel, when Okonkwo commits suicide.1 In similar vein, Ezeulu’s madness in the closing pages of Arrow of God represents, for me, the climax of that novel.2 It embodies the breaking point of the confict between Ulu, his chief priest and the community of Umuaro. In both cases, we have literal death and mental death (insanity) as ways of marking either defeat, fear of defeat, or self-sacrifce in the face of impending defeat, as some critics have read Okonkwo’s suicide. At the core of Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s tragedies is the crisis of failure. As Jasper Onuekwusi describes it, ‘Achebe’s protagonists in his early novels are men whose quests for excellence are ruined by their inability to survive the throes of personal faws and the overwhelming forces in their environments’.3 Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Apart from their various equally important thematic concerns, Achebe’s two novels are also interested in the question of human failure. This is a concern that recurs in much contemporary writing by frst generation African diaspora writers, including Taiye Selasi and Dinaw Mengestu. If Okonkwo and Ezeulu’s respective crises are in part precipitated by the two men’s personalities, which make it diffcult for them to successfully navigate the points of collision between African and colonial world views, this trope recurs decades later, when writers turn to another site of colliding world views: frst-generation African migrants’ experiences in the global north, where, in this case, Dinaw Mengestu and Taiye Selasi offer narratives that feature the eventual death of two black men, whose struggles to navigate the complex pressures of immigrant life in the US are, like Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s struggles, both successful and unsuccessful. In this respect, I read these three men –Kweku Sai and Mr Lamptey in Ghana Must Go and Yosef Woldemarian in How to Read the Air –, as Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s grandsons. Although Selasi and Mengestu are yet to explicitly signal connections to Achebe’s three men, I nonetheless argue that it is possible to read the imprint of these literary forefathers in the crises that face Selasi’s and Mengestu’s men – and in how they respond to them.

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Perhaps the best known line in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is, ‘He was afraid of being thought weak,’ when Okonkwo strikes his son, Ikemefuna, dead.4 This statement sums up the crisis and tragedy of Okonkwo’s life: a fear of weakness, which, in his mind, is also a deep-seated fear of the failure that he has come to associate with his father, Unoka. Lindsay and Miescher read Things Fall Apart as a portrait of complex masculinities and the impact of colonial urban economies, formal education and wage labour on Igbo gender epistemologies.5 To a large extent, Okonkwo’s fear of failure and weakness is a product of Umuofa society’s prescripts of hegemonic masculinities, coupled with his father’s disregard for these prescripts. Unoka’s refusal to abide by social prescripts of what it means to be a hegemonic man ironically sets Okonkwo up for failure, because he spends his life being haunted by an unrelenting fear of ‘becoming his father’s son’. In an interview with Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin once said of Okonkwo: ‘I know that man; that man is my father’.6 This is one of the many public acknowledgements of Okonkwo’s sons and grandsons, both literal and literary. Baldwin provides a detailed portrait of this man (his own father) in both his fctionalised autobiography, Go Tell it on the Mountain7, and in his essays – most lucidly in ‘Notes of a Native Son’. Here, Baldwin describes his father as a ‘very handsome black man … who knew that he was black, but did not know that he was beautiful’.8 Part of the frst generation of free men post-slavery, Baldwin’s father ‘lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit’9 and bore a deep distrust of the world in general and white people in particular; a distrust which, for a long time, Baldwin considered paranoid. This anger, bitterness and contempt towards the world – products of a life of humiliation and suffering – turns Baldwin’s father into a hard man, who terrifes his children. Later, after leaving home and experiencing the world’s racism, Baldwin is forced to reckon with his father’s bitter warnings: ‘I had discovered the Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me, an awful thing to live with; and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me’.10 I open this discussion with Baldwin’s father, because, in many ways, he mirrors the fctional Okonkwo, Dinaw Mengestu’s Yosef Woldemariam and Taiye Selasi’s Kweku Sai. These are men who fnd themselves at the cross-roads of major generational, historical and familial changes that are framed by racist, capitalist scripts and intertwined with prescripts of hegemonic masculinity, which exact a high price on the souls of men illequipped to negotiate them. Both Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go have, at their centre, frst-generation African immigrants who are confronted with the pressures of life in America and the pressures of family expectations, both those back in Ethiopia and Ghana, respectively, and their own families in the US. Despite being vastly different men on the surface – a celebrated surgeon and an assistant at a shipping factory – Kweku Sai and Yosef Woldemariam also have a lot in common. First-generation economic migrants on the run from inhospitable homes – the Red Terror’s brutality in Ethiopia following the fall of the Selassie empire and the harsh poverty of Accra’s slums, respectively – the two men manage to settle down in the US and Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air attain some degree of success and future for their families. But both men’s family lives disintegrate, corroded by the pressures of capitalist America and its racism, eventually leading to broken marriages and lonely deaths away from their wives and children – in a pattern that evokes both Okonkwo’s tragic death and Ezeulu’s dementia. As a young man in Addis Ababa in the 1970s, Yosef Woldemariam actively supports the revolution that overthrows Emperor Selassie. This is a time when ‘the dream of revolution was endemic and seemed almost a birthright for this generation of men’.11 It is also a time of much excitement, when, ‘with so much at stake, it was easy to give yourself over to another person (and) declarations of love were general all over Addis, offered simply, without hesitation’.12 In line with the moment, Yosef Woldemariam declares his love for Mariam at a café, in-between a revolutionary speech on the need for ‘a violent and unrelenting upheaval of society’ delivered to radicalised students.13 Soon after a short courtship, against a back-drop of ‘fery speeches and gunfre’14 that accompany the fall of the monarchy, the couple wed. But instead of bringing with it the promised reform of land ownership laws, democratisation and modernisation of Ethiopia, the revolution plunges the country into deep bloodshed and despair, as the new regime unleashes terror and violence on the citizens. Soon the newly-wed Yosef fnds himself in prison. After a narrow escape from prison and its tortures, Yosef hitch-hikes his way into neighbouring Sudan and eventually arrives in Europe as a stowaway curled up in a box in the belly of cargo ships; then onwards to the US, where he settles down at a factory job. Once in the US, Yosef promptly renews contact with his wife, who has by now settled into a civil service job that affords her an affuent lifestyle as a single woman in Addis Ababa. By the time Yosef saves enough money to send for his wife to join him in the US, years later, he is a burnt-out, bitter man, who Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

deeply resents his life and everyone around him. Worst of all, his wife’s barely hidden disappointment at his failure to live up to the American dream she had imagined worsens an already strained marriage. Ghana Must Go traces three generations of a family, at the centre of which is Kweku Sai, the fourth child of six born to a poor family. Kweku grows up in the poor neighbourhood of Kokrobite, Accra, knowing poverty intimately. A scholarship earns him passage to the US, where he excels as a medical student, becoming the best surgeon in his region. Together with the love of his life and fellow immigrant, Fola, he starts a family and they raise their talented children in relative comfort, before he is unfairly dismissed and fnds himself back in Accra, having walked out on his wife and children – like his father did. For Kweku Sai, his life’s dream has been to bridge the gap between the life of his mother and the life of the US and its promise of success; and to be a different father to his children compared to his own father, who walked out on the family, leaving behind only his signature artistic gesture – a beautiful, rather eccentrically designed thatch hut. That, after abandoning his family in the US, Kweku Sai returns to Ghana where he builds an equally eccentric house, at whose doorstep he dies of a heart attack, is the heartbreaking irony at the center of the book. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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One of the philosophical questions explored by Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the tension between success, failure and pleasure, as articulated through the father-son duo of Unoka and Okonkwo. In Arrow of God, Achebe returns to another set of tensions, this time expressed through the proud priest of Ulu and his battles with both his god and his community, and the Christian movement. For Virginia Ola, Arrow of God15 examines ‘the death throes of an age, and signals the turning-point in the history of a people’.16 Despite being very different from each other, Okonkwo and Ezeulu have a shared investment in power and a deep contempt for weakness. A third shared element is their tragic location at the intersection between traditional epistemes and colonial modernity’s moral grids; the latter of which emerge victorious, to the two men’s unbearable disappointment. In the end Okonkwo enacts a complex act of transgression, submission and sacrifce to the communal good, by committing suicide; while Ezeulu is spared this dilemma by the author’s loving shroud of madness, which, at the very least, cushions the proud high priest from facing up to the double blow of failure and desertion by Ulu. Decades on, contemporary African writing continues to be marked by these motifs. Through a reading of Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read Air, I argue that some contemporary African fction features the imprint of Achebe’s men – or what I term Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s grandsons – in the shape of Taiye Selasi’s and Dinaw Mengestu’s male protagonists. These men grapple with the threat of failure when confronted with the contemporary version of Ezeulu and Okonkwo’s intersection – the clash between Africa and the diaspora in their locations as immigrants in the US – on the one hand; and Selassi’s rendering of Unoka’s spirit of pleasure as an act of subversion in the face of harsh capitalist urban economies that seek to reduce human worth to possession and dramatisation of material wealth. I argue that Achebe’s earlier fction Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

inaugurates ideas of failure, success and pleasure as concerns that would preoccupy African writers over half a century later.

ACHEBE AND MIGRANT EXPERIENCES Frantz Fanon’s prophetic vision of what he termed ‘the pitfalls of national consciousness’17 is now a well-acknowledged fact. But it bears revisiting here as a candid portrait of the foundation for Africans’ economic migrancy in the global north. Fanon notes that ‘national consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallisation of the innermost hopes of the whole people … will be, in any case only an empty shell, a crude travesty of what it might have been’.18 If Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s experiences unfold at the indexical moment of Africa’s conquest, then the forces of economic despair and the abuses of power that force Kweku Sai and Yosef Woldemariam to seek refuge in the US signal Africa’s second defeat at the hands of the African political elite. Achebe’s later novels and essays grapple with this ‘crude travesty’ of post-colonial Africa with searing honesty, perhaps most memorably in A Man of the People. Indeed, as Simon Gikandi also reminds us in

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Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air an essay titled ‘Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality’, the discourse of neocolonialism in newly independent African and Asian former colonies ‘was premised on the belief that decolonization had failed in one of its crucial mandates – the fulfllment of the dream of modernity and modernization without the tutelage of colonialism’.19 At frst glance, it may appear contrived to link Mengestu and Selasi to Achebe’s early fction, not only because (unlike their contemporary, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) the two authors are yet to list Achebe as a key infuence, but also because their fction narrates African migrants’ experiences in the American metropolis, while Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are portraits of African societies at the cusp of colonial encounter. But I read Selasi’s and Mengestu’s novels as continuing some of the conversations inaugurated by Achebe and his contemporaries, and signaling certain recurrent patterns of experience. If we read Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s tragedies as emblematic of both personal and collective encounters with the imperial project, then African immigrants’ experiences in Europe and the US offer a critique of both globalisation and what Simon Gikandi terms ‘arrested decolonization’.20 When asked why he hasn’t written a novel about America, Achebe responded ‘America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few’.21 Despite this view, Achebe offers provocative refections on African experiences of migrancy in the global north, especially in the 2001 collection of essays, ‘Home and Exile’, which is very much in conversation with the narratives of African migrants’ experiences that have become an important part of the African library in the 21st century, of which Selasi and Mengestu are important voices. In Home and Exile, Achebe makes two observations that are crucial to my reading of Selasi’s and Mengestu’s men here. Firstly, he notes that, although the question of race Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

which WEB du Bois underlined as the main concern of the twentieth century, is still an unfnished business, his hope for the twenty-frstt century is that ‘it will see the frst fruits of the balance of stories among the world’s peoples’.22 Achebe sees this project as consolidating the gains of the twentieth century, which witnessed ‘a signifcant beginning, in Africa and elsewhere in the so-called Third World, of the process of “re-storying” peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession’.23 For Achebe, what he calls the balancing of the stories of the world is necessary precisely because ‘a universal civilization’ is yet to be achieved by the world; and indeed, ‘to suggest that it is in place already is to be willfully blind to our present reality and, even worse, to trivialize the goal and hinder the materialization of a genuine universality in the future’.24 As he reminds us, while many American and European writers in history have ‘roamed the world with the confdence of the authority of their homeland behind them (and) the purchasing power of even very little real money in their pocket might often be enough to validate their authority without any effort on their part, the experience of a traveler from the world’s poor places is very different, whether he is travelling as a tourist or struggling to settle down as an exile in a wealthy country’.25 Although he does not use the term, Achebe’s observations here are nonetheless important critiques of discourses of Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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globalisation and the rhetoric of border-crossing and global citizenship. In this respect, his views mirror Simon Gikandi’s critiques of globalisation. In the afore-cited essay, Simon Gikandi writes that ‘while we live in a world defned by cultural and economic fows across formally entrenched national boundaries, the world continues to be divided in stark terms between its “developed” and “under-developed” sectors. It is precisely because of the starkness of this division that the discourse of globalization seems to be perpetually caught between two competing narratives, one of celebration, the other of crisis’.26 Gikandi’s critique here coheres with Kweku Sai’s and Yosef Woldemariam’s experiences of migrancy in the US.

MIGRANT ENCOUNTERS Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air is infused with a sense of quiet bitterness. A vague threat of violence seems to haunt the story, promising to erupt at any minute; and in fact, it does erupt a few times in the novel. The novel gets its title from the main protagonist’s acquired fair for reading the air for changes that denote violent eruption: ‘the abrupt and dramatic shift in the air that precedes any violent confrontation. (He) had learnt early in life that before any violent gesture there is a moment when the act is born, not as something that can be seen or felt but by the change it precipitates in the air’.27 In line with this notion of charged air, the novel opens with the narrator’s parents – Yosef and Mariam – leaving on a road-trip; and closes with the death of Yosef alone in a YMCA hostel, after Mariam leaves him. If Yosef and Mariam’s marriage is grounded on a shaky, but fery foundation of passionate courtship and declarations of love at the Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

height of the revolution, the pressures of migrancy in the US, Yosef’s failure to deliver the American dream, and America’s inability to be a homely space for the young couple, converts the few embers of love that survive their three years apart into toxic mutual resentment. Early in the novel, Mengestu refects on Yosef’s failure to live up to the American dream he has carefully painted for his wife, who is waiting for him back in Ethiopia: The one picture she had received during those three years was of him sitting in the driver’s seat of a large car, the door open, his body half in the car, half out … she didn’t believe the car was his … Still, that didn’t stop her from showing the picture to her mother, sisters and girlfriends, or from writing on the back, in English: Yosef Car. She expected other pictures would eventually follow: pictures of him standing in front of a large house with a yard; pictures of him in a suit with a briefcase in hand.28

The American dream turns out to be an unattainable mirage and the physical and emotional distance between the two becomes impossible to bridge in the US, where both the language and the pressures of making ends meet become too much for the two. They Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air speak to each other ‘in whispers, half in Amharic, half in English, as if any one word uttered too loudly could reveal to both of them that, in fact, they had never understood each other; they had never really known who the other person was at all’.29 By the time of his death, after the marriage has disintegrated, and their son (and narrator), Yonas, is a grown man in a marriage that is also disintegrating, Yonas is not surprised that, unlike with conventional families, there is no family secret to be revealed at his father’s death, because they were ‘something closer to a jazz trio than a family – a performance group that got together every now and then to play a few familiar notes before dispersing back to their real, private lives’.30 Yosef seems desperately unhappy and angry. His wife, Mariam, notes strange elements about him, such as the tendency some days to ‘sit parked in the driveway for an extra ten or twenty minutes while she watched him from behind the living room curtains (and some nights) wake up and leave the bedroom, careful not to rouse her and … lie down on the couch in the living room, naked, and from the bedroom, she would hear him let out a small whimper followed by a grunt, and he would return to bed and sleep soundly until morning’.31 These two examples underline Yosef’s deep sense of estrangement and loneliness in which even his wife becomes a stranger he resents. The resentment between Yosef and his wife is mutual. She holds their three years apart against him – and more so he fails to deliver the affuence she had expected of life in the US when she fnally joins him: ‘For every day they had spent together, 3.18 had been spent apart. To her, this meant a debt had to be repaid, although who owed the other remained unclear. Is it the one who gets left behind who suffers more or is it the one who’s sent out alone into the world to forage and create a new life’?32 Through Mariam, Mengestu ponders the impact of immigration on family bonds and the often Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

irreparable damage that the failure of the promise of migrancy does to familial bonds. The novel prefgures Yosef’s violence in the opening pages, with the two short bleeps for Mariam to hurry up, which the narrator describes as ‘piercing through the silence … with its suggestion that something violent had occurred’.33 Mariam resents Yosef’s impatience, holding her three-year wait against him and convincing herself ‘she had, after all, waited for him for years … if she was owed anything now, it was time’.34 Fights punctuate the couple’s marriage and, as a child, the narrator learns to think of these like a ‘real physical presence lurking in the shadows of whatever space’ his parents occupy.35 Yosef’s life is haunted by boxes and boats, signaling an unshakeable link to the moment of displacement from Africa to the US. As his son describes it, Yosef: … had been dreaming of boxes since coming to America … He had just begun work on a factory foor as the assistant to the deputy assistant manager of shipping and inventory, and there, for the second time in his life, he found himself circumscribed by boxes. (He) saw boxes folded and fat, stacked one on top of another in long, endless, elegant rows. Boxes large enough to hold a man and small enough to ft under an arm. (His) life had been made and unmade by boxes, and what he felt towards them could only be called a guilty Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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obligation, one that hung hard and heavy around his neck like a debt that however much he tried could never be fully repaid. (In) his dreams, he gave the boxes the consideration they deserved, granting them their full and proper place in his life. He spoke to them. He asked them questions and waited in vain for a response.36

Like the life haunted by boxes, once he dies, Yosef’s possessions are delivered to Jonas in a box.37 Most intriguingly, he had made hundreds of drawings of boxes and boats – as if he ‘were trying to fnd a way of ftting those boxes inside the boats themselves’.38 For Jonas, the drawings of boxes and boats suggest that his father ‘had never ceased to try to recapture the moment everything in his life seemed to go wrong’.39 This moment is the moment of forced economic migrancy. Yosef’s boxes and boats capture Gikandi’s paradox of globalisation in their promise of escape to the American dream, but also the reality of entrapment and the constant reminder, as Yosef learns, that space is not neutral – that it can be taken away. By the time she joins her husband in the US, Mariam fnds that the burden of ‘layoffs, failed spelling tests and the soaring costs of heating oil’40 has burnt out the fre, radical energy and passion that made declarations of love so possible, so powerful, so binding. Yosef Woldemariam has been dreaming of boxes since coming to America; and he hopes that a road-trip to Nashville – the hearth of country music, as his boss advises – would end these dreams. Still feeling like a stranger, after years of attempting to assimilate, and often mocked at work for his accent, he decides that mastery of an obscure fragment of American history would not only result in a feeling that America ‘belonged to him as well’,41 but also that it would be an important step towards ‘becom(ing) the kind of man he dreamed of’.42 Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

But Yosef fails to attain the dream of assimilation or becoming the man he dreams of, as, in the end, his dreams continue to be haunted by boxes. The dream of freedom and affuence that brings him to America fails to materialise, as he remains scarred by both the trauma of the revolution and his stowaway experience in the belly of cargo ships. He no longer trusts spaces that ‘grant the body too much permission’;43 which explains his puzzling habit of leaving his matrimonial bed to curl up on the worn-out couch in his living room. In the daytime, his demeanor solidifes into a crumpled posture: always ‘crouching, curling, trying to reduce himself into a smaller package than the one he was made of’.44 Yosef’s failure to fully assimilate into both America and the promise of the American dream is a familiar prototype of African migrancy in the global north. Like Okonkwo and Ezeulu, Yosef’s attempts to navigate the transition into being a success story in America, and assimilating successfully is undermined by the false promise of globality of the migrant experience, which, in reality, remains burdened by the baggage of economic migrancy. Although Yosef does not physically return to Ethiopia, unlike Kweku Sai who returns to Accra, his intense attachment to paper boxes and boats until the end of his life signal preoccupation with the journey that brought him to the US. His son interprets this perceptively: ‘he had never ceased to try to recapture the moment everything in his Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air life seemed to go wrong. (His) life had been made and unmade by boxes and what he felt toward them could only be called a guilty obligation, one that hung hard and heavy around his neck like a debt that however much he tried, could never be fully repaid’.45 While boats and boxes form the spine of Yosef Woldemariam’s migrant experience in How to Read the Air, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go features scarred feet, houses and fowers as the core metaphors of Kweku Sai’s migrant experience. As a successful surgeon, young husband and father in the US, Kweku has a fascination with feet – both his own feet and the feet of all his guests. He keeps an assortment of slippers in a basket by the door, from which he offers guests a pair, as he shows them into the house when they visit. He also regularly soaks his feet in salty water and rubs them with peppermint oil. One night, his daughter, Taiwo, unable to sleep, en route from having a snack in the kitchen, discovers her father, slumped on the living room couch from fatigue, still in his doctor’s coat, his slippers fallen off his feet. She realises that, if he wakes up, she will be in trouble: Not for sneaking, for not sleeping, but for seeing him like this. Collapsed on the couch with his mouth hanging open, his coat on the foor, his head slumped to his chest. She’d never seen her father so – loose. Without tension. He was always so rigid, so upright, strung taut. Now he looked like a marionette abandoned by its manipulator, puddled in a jumble of wood, limbs and string. She knew he’d be furious to know he’d been seen so.46

However, what shocks Taiwo most is the sight of his bruised feet, which, she now realises, she had never seen before now: ‘She had only ever seen the one side of his feet, the smooth. The soles, by sharp contrast, were chaffed, calloused, raw, the skin black in some Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

places, puffed up at the toes. It was as if he’d quite literally crossed burning sands barefoot … she didn’t know this father’.47 Taiwo reads her father’s exposed feet, his vulnerable look, to mean that something terrible has happened, that he is hiding something from them – just as he had hidden his feet (as far as she is concerned) for twelve years.48 Taiwo is right about this, as the reader soon learns: Kweku, the best surgeon in the regional hospital, has just lost his job, unfairly, after a wealthy family insists that he operate on their patient, against his advice about the risk involved – only to sue the hospital for negligence, blaming him for the patient’s death. Confronted by the choice between a wealthy family, whose patronage and infuence the hospital enjoys, and the best surgeon at the hospital – a black, Ghanaian doctor – the hospital chooses the money. And thus ends a sterling career, built on hard work and sweat. Kweku Sai does not know how to break this news to his wife. When his son witnesses his humiliating fall-out with the hospital manager, this is more than he can bear. He walks out on his family, leaving his wife, Fola, to raise the family of six children on her modest forist’s earnings, in the US. It is instructive that the exposure of Kweku’s feet, which tell a story of an unshod childhood and exposure to the elements, coupled with his body lying loose and out of

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control, indeed coincides with the undoing of Kweku. The next time we see those feet, he has collapsed of a heart attack, outside his house in Accra. Two strands of Kweku’s narrative are central to my reading of him as embodying an imprint of Achebe’s tragic men – Okonkwo and Ezeulu: the idea of poor people’s laughter at the world and the notion of women who can be satisfed, as embodied by his second wife, Ama. Kweku frst encounters the laughter of the poor when he goes to meet the eccentric carpenter, Mr Lamptey – the only man in Accra willing to build his house according to his specifcations – and meets a young boy, Kof, whose cheerfulness reminds him of his late younger sister’s laughter: The boy was smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty near the equator: an instinct to laugh at the world as they found it, to fnd things to laugh at, to know where to look. Excitement at nothing and at everything, inextinguishable. Inexplicable under the circumstances. Amusement with the circumstances. He had seen it in the village, in … his youngest sister … As a younger man himself, he’d mistaken it for silliness … a kind of blindness to things. To be that happy, that often, in that village … one would have had to have been blind or dumb, he’d thought, but he was wrong (…) she’d seen through them. Laughing at death … the calm eyes of a child who has lived and died destitute and knows it, both accepting and defying the fact. Not with formal education, his preferred mode of defance. Not with blindness as he’d imagined his sister until then. But with precisely the same heedlessness the world had shown her, and him, all dirt-poor children. The same disregard. Her eyes were still laughing. Disregarding of everything … . Looking back at a world that considered her irrelevant with a look that said she considered the world irrelevant, too. She’d seen everything he had – all the indignities Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

of their poverty; the seeming unimportance of their being to and in the wider world; the maddening smallness of an existence that didn’t extend past a beach they could walk the whole length of in half a day – without seeing herself undignifed, unimportant, or small.49

Unlike these two young people, Kweku lacks the resilience to survive the intersection between America’s capitalist racism that underpins his patient’s family’s neglect of his advice; their subsequent demand that he be fred for negligence; and society’s expectations of hegemonic fatherhood, which includes providing for his family. Unable to face his family, he walks out on them in a moment of rage, before fnally moving to Accra. By the time he is ready to face his wife and children and explain his situation, he cannot trace them, as they have moved house and moved on with their lives, while nursing a bitter anger at him for the rest of his life. Having grown up in a poor family, with an absent father and a destitute mother forced to raise six children on her own, Kweku knows the indignity of poverty. When he gets to medical school in the US, in his third year of residency, at the age of thirty-one, he makes a drawing of his dream house on a paper napkin at a cafeteria. In the drawing, he envisions himself returning to Accra and building this unique house, with a simple courtyard in

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Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air the middle and ‘a door at each corner to the Living, Dining, Master and (Guest) Bedroom Wings’:50 a family home to be shared with his wife, Fola, and their children. In his drawing, he has a swimming pool and a porch of white pebbles. The drawing features Fola swimming in the pool, as he sits in the sun-room, reading a newspaper. At forty-eight, having lost his job, Fola and the children, he buys the plot in Accra to build the house, but it takes him a year to fnd a carpenter willing to build it, ‘the only Ghanaian who didn’t balk at putting a hole in a house’51 – an eccentric carpenter named Mr Lamptey. While remarkably different from Unoka in Things Fall Apart, Mr Lamptey embodies aspects of the Unoka spirit, particularly in his eccentricity, his love for artistic beauty, and his scorn of modern capitalist sensibilities. Interestingly, he also reminds Kweku Sai of his own father, the eccentric artist fgure, who built his childhood home, before walking away, never to be seen again. When they frst meet – in Mr Lamptey’s tree-house on a deserted beach in Accra – Mr Lamptey is surprised that Kweku went to medical school and is a doctor: ‘But why would you do that? You are an artist’.52 Mr Lamptey’s sense of humour, his eccentricity and artistic touch, remind Kweku of his own father. Standing in Mr Lamptey’s tree-house in a moment of irritation at the old man, who sits there ‘cross-legged, look(ing) like some bizarre sort of African Gandhi. With ganja’.53 The thatch pattern brings back memories of a similar thatch in the house of his childhood, ‘conceived by an eccentric not so different from Mr Lamptey’.54 The two men eventually reach an agreement and Mr Lamptey builds Kweku Sai’s dream house, single-handedly, ‘arriving each morning at four, not a moment before or after, while the sky was still dark, to do sun salutations on the then-empty plot, sixty minutes more or less, until sunrise’.55 Mr Lamptey, however, refuses to cut down an old mango tree that is growing in the space where Kweku’s dream swimming pool should be. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

That by the time he builds his house the romantic vision of his family surrounding him has collapsed, would seem to be Selasi’s critique of the globalisation narrative of a world that is homely to Africans. In his case though, Kweku links Mr Lamptey’s refusal to replace the old mango tree in the yard with the pool and white pebbles of his dream house, to his loss of control over his vision. He ‘felt his vision slipping slowly from his grasp. No children sleeping peacefully, no Fola swimming glistening, and if the mango remained standing, no beach of bleached white. The tree had to go’.56 Kweku threatens to hire someone else, but Mr Lamptey frmly tells him no, and goes on a hunger strike, ‘cross-legged and cloth-clad at the base of the mango for three days, two nights, smoking hash, keeping guard, rising at dawn for the yoga, otherwise immobile and smug’, eating nothing but the mangos that drop to his side, perfectly ripe.57 Eventually, Kweku gives in to Mr Lamptey’s vision of the sunroom. Instead of a yard with a pool and white pebbles, he sets up a garden: ‘Everything lush, soft, too verdant, nothing orderly or sterile, jagged love grass and fan palms the size of a child and scattered-around banana plants like palm trees without trunks and hibiscus on bushes and gloriosa in fames and those magentapink blossoms … fowering wildly on crawlers overgrowing the gate. A commotion of

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colour. Rebel uprising of green. And a fountain’,58 which Mr Lamptey explains as being necessary for the layout of a sacred space – to Kweku’s total baffement. Kweku Sai’s resignation to Mr Lamptey’s vision of the house embodies the new sensibility he has come to embrace since returning to Accra; a sensibility that somewhat mirrors the afore-cited laughter at the world. This is exemplifed in his relationship with his new wife, Ama, who is his nurse in Accra. In thinking about whether – and why – he loves his second wife, Ama, with whom he settles down in Accra (to everyone’s deep shock, as they believe he is ‘marrying down’) Kweku realises that, with his second wife, he is a softer, kinder, more indulgent man. He aligns himself to her cinematic tastes (Nollywood), culinary tastes (spicy-hot food) and even climatic preferences (no air-conditioning in Accra’s humid heat) – all of which he otherwise detests – because he wants her to be satisfed: because, as he puts it, ‘she is a woman who can be satisfed’.59 I cite Kweku’s thoughts here in detail because they are suggestive of the root of his failure to face his family when a hard-earned career collapses under the weight of racial prejudice and power: She is like no woman he’s known. Or like no woman he’s loved. He isn’t sure he ever knew them, or could. That a man can know a woman in the end. So, the women he’s loved. Who knew nothing of satisfaction. Who having gotten what they wanted always promptly wanted more. Not greedy. Never greedy. He’d never call his mother greedy, neither Fola nor his daughters. They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all. They were dreamer-women. Very dangerous women. (Women) who looked at the world through their wide dreamer-eyes and saw it not as it was, brutal, senseless, but worse, as it might be, or might yet become. So, insatiable women. Un-pleasable Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

women. Who wanted above all things what could not be had. Not what they could not have – no such thing for such women – but what wasn’t there to be had in the frst place. And worst: (they) looked at him and saw what he might yet become. More beautiful than he believes he could possibly be.60

Through his relationship with his second wife, Kweku Sai embodies a different masculinity: one that is able to give, precisely because the expectations of him are minimal.

CONCLUSION Refecting on his father’s life and death, and their strained relationship, James Baldwin captures the dilemmas that marked his father’s life and that are now his heritage. Acknowledging that hatred ‘never failed to destroy the man who hated,61 Baldwin writes: It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The frst idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally, without rancor, of

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Unoka’s, Okonkwo’s and Ezeulu’s Grandsons in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fght them with all one’s strength.62

It is possible to read these four men’s tragic lives – Okonkwo, Baldwin’s father’s, Yosef Woldemariam’s and Kweku Sai’s – as variously marked by their varying degrees of success in embodying the balance required by Baldwin’s opposing ideas: the need to acknowledge and accept, without bitterness, that the world is what it is – and by extension, history, capitalist injustice and racist violence are what they are – while simultaneously fghting these forces in one’s life.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. 2 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann. 3 Onuekwusi, J., 2004. Archetypes and the Quest for Excellence in Chinua Achebe’s Early Novels. In E. N. Emenyonu, and I. I. Iko, (eds), Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe Vol II, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 71–80. 4 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, p. 43. 5 Lindsay, L. and Miescher, S., 2003. Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Portsmouth: Heinemann. 6 Chinua Achebe Interviewed by Brooks, J., The Art of Fiction no. 139. Available at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe [Accessed 17 November 2013]. 7 Baldwin, J., 1953. Go Tell it on the Mountain. New York: Knopf. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

8 Baldwin, J., 1965. Notes of a Native Son. London: Corgi, p. 86. 9 Ibid., p. 87. 10 Ibid., p. 86. 11 Mengestu, D., 2010. How to Read the Air. New York: Penguin, p. 267. 12 Mengestu, D., 2010. How to Read the Air. p. 44. 13 Ibid., p. 44. 14 Ibid., p. 44. 15 Achebe, C., 1974. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann. 16 Ola, V., 2004. The Tragic Muse and the Cultural Hero: Achebe’s Art in Arrow of God. In E. Emenyonu (ed.), Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe Vol I. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 217–228. 17 Fanon, F., 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 18 Ibid., p. 119. 19 Gikandi, S., 2001. Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(3), pp. 627–658. 20 Ibid., p. 98. 21 Achebe, C., 2003 (2001). Home and Exile. Edinburgh: Canongate, p. 98.

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Chapter 8 22 Ibid., p. 79. 23 Ibid., p. 79. 24 Ibid., p. 91. 25 Ibid., p. 92. 26 Gikandi, S., 2001. Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality. p. 629. 27 Mengestu, D., 2010. How to Read the Air. pp. 66–67. 28 Ibid., p. 6. 29 Ibid., p. 3. 30 Ibid., p. 152. 31 Ibid., p. 4 32 Ibid., p. 5. 33 Ibid., p. 8. 34 Ibid., p. 8. 35 Ibid., p. 9. 36 Ibid., pp. 39–40 37 Ibid., p. 150. 38 Ibid., p. 151. 39 Ibid., p. 151. 40 Ibid,. p. 66. 41 Ibid., p. 87. 42 Ibid., p. 88. 43 Ibid., p. 40. 44 Ibid., p. 40. 45 Ibid., p. 151, p. 39.

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46 Selasi, T., 2013. Ghana Must Go. London: Penguin, p. 44. 47 Ibid., p. 44–45. 48 Ibid., p. 44. 49 Ibid., p. 27. 50 Ibid., p. 4. 51 Ibid., p. 4. 52 Ibid., p. 31. 53 Ibid., p. 31. 54 Ibid., p. 31. 55 Ibid., p. 33. 56 Ibid., p. 33. 57 Ibid., p. 33. 58 Ibid., p. 34. 59 Ibid., p. 38. 60 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 61 Baldwin, J., 1965. Notes of a Native Son. p. 109. 62 Ibid., pp. 108–109.

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Things Fall Apart On Screen Re-thinking Closure in Achebe’s Narrative Innocent Ebere Uwah

Introduction The success of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is seen in the number of critics, theorists and commentators who apply it to different discourses. It is also evident when considering the number of translations it attracts in many languages of the world. The same applies when considering its stage and screen adaptations. While scholars like Chidi Amuta valorise it in line with Arrow of God (also written by Achebe) as ‘axiomatic reference points for diverse interests and opinions intent on rediscovering and commenting on traditional African society’,1 Abiola Irele sees it as a ‘deeply refective engagement with the particular order of life that provides a reference for its narrative scheme and development.’2 Others, like Eustace Palmer (1972), Diana Akers (1993), Richard Begam (1997) and Nnoromele Patrick (2000), also consider it a text laden with key signifcant underpinnings as far as African culture is concerned. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

It was in 1986 that the mainstream television channel in Nigeria, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) joined this league of creative commentators to adapt Achebe’s work into a television mini-series, because of its resonance with people’s life experiences. This was fourteen years after the Indigenisation Act 3 was enacted in the country with the sole aim of making media houses patronise local artistic productions more than they do imported programmes. Looking at the closeness of the ‘new’ Nigerian flm industry, popularly called Nollywood, to this indigenisation policy makes one think that it really paid off. But whether it actually led to Nollywood’s emergence or not depends on how one looks at the industry, since it does not receive any offcial statutory fnancial boost from the government and is left in the hands of the private sector of the economy. Thus, the successful adaptation and serialisation of Achebe’s story was a work in creativity and a not a propaganda tool for cultural emancipation in the hands of the government. The production is therefore a precursory move in favour of present day video-flm entertainment culture in Nigeria especially because its storyline resonates with people’s experiences. Signifcantly

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it helped to assauge the hunger of Nigerians who longed to consume their own stories on television at a time when cinema houses had become moribund in the country. Recalling the time and context of this serialisation is Obari Gomba who speaks thus of his experience and joy at watching the screen adaptation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the 1980s: (T)he Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) brought the book to most of us. The adaptation entralled me at the time. There were only a few black-and-white television sets around ... . On each telecast schedule, the neighbourhood would gather at those few sites where we could watch it. With other children in my neighbourhood, I sat with adults to watch the dramatisation of Achebe’s great novel. It was always a solemn event. The adults did not give room to childish behaviour. It was as if a communal rite was on course, and the soul of the community was at stake.4

Instructively, this is the same kind of fascination that this writer had in the 1980s with the mini-series when, in the midst of family members, he sat glued to the television set because Ebubedike (i.e. Okonkwo acted by Nollywood’s Pete Edochie) was on screen. It was a glorious moment in the history of television entertainment in Nigeria, especially as the ritual of watching the Things Fall Apart mini-series brought extended family members together and ignited some kind of commentary or storytelling afterwards. With the same title as the novel, the television mini-series, directed by David Orere and produced by Adiela Onyedibia, became widely acclaimed as successful and, like the novel, continues to be referenced as speaking to the culture of the people: their identity, values and social structures. Even though it was a low-key production in comparison Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

with present-day digital productions in Nollywood, this electronic version of Things Fall Apart constructively takes Achebe’s story on culture to a level that raises fundamental questions about Africa’s post-colonial context. The thrust of the argument here is in looking at Achebe’s style of ending his narrative with the hero’s death by suicide. It is a probe regarding the signifcance of ‘suicide’ in terms of the culture that Okonkwo protected and fostered. In other words, the aim is to critically look at the television mini-series, especially its end sequence, to theorise its implications for communalism as the culture of the people in Africa’s post-colonial context, given the different cultural shocks it encountered at the hands of ‘the white man’. What, therefore, can be said of Achebe’s narrative style, especially in the end sequence and how has its adaptation into a television mini-series impacted on the understanding of post-colonial African culture? First, let us look at the historical context of Achebe’s epic narrative in Things Fall Apart.

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AFRICAN CULTURE AND THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF Things Fall Apart Using Okonkwo (Pete Edochie) as the protagonist of the story and Umuofa as his traditional community or fatherland, Achebe tells the story of Africa and the subjugation of her cultural values at the behest of western colonialism. By introducing new systems of religion, law and western civilisation, he creatively indicts the West for igniting the fre of frictions between Africa and Europe; and by so doing he raises questions regarding Africa’s identity and cultural values. He uses the practical experiences of the people to tell their stories of joys and woes, while suggestively worrying about their future. Some historical parrallels in the life of the Igbo people of Nigeria (represented in Achebe’s novel by the community of Umuofa) make his storyline realistic and well contextualised. Thus, even though Achebe’s Umuofa and Abame in the novel and the mini-series can be said to be fctionalised, the experience of an Igbo community in a real life situation is what gives it a seal of authenticity that underlies its resonance with the people. For instance, in articulating the history of his native town and people called Ahiara-Ofo-Iri, in the Imo State of Nigeria, Nnawuihe recalls how a supposedly ‘white’ immigrant was killed on an expedition tour into the hinterland for which reprisal attacks were launched by the colonial masters in the area. This is similar to the extermination of the people of Abame by the ‘white man’ in Achebe’s novel for killing a ‘white’ missionary. Here, Nnawuihe argues that when the District Commissioner (DC) over-turned the traditional mode of adjudicating justice in the town, it brought about aggressive protests with devastating effect, culminating in a fght between his community and the colonisers.

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

This state of disarray in an Igbo community is what he reports here: The council elders ... were no longer recognised by the colonial government and their powers were shifted to mere warrant chiefs who neither had the knowledge of the tradition nor respected the titled men. The people were not happy at such enslavement in their own land. Hence, in their attempt to resist the injustice and man’s inhumanity to man demonstrated by the colonialists, the Ahiara people made landmarks in 1902 when a white man, Dr. Stewart, a civil engineer by profession, was killed and his bicycle, which was a symbol of his superiority, was buried. Investigations into the death of Dr. Stewart by the British authority came with the subsequent military expedition into Ahiara with the aim of disarming the natives and curbing what they termed barbaric tendencies.5

It was with the idea of curbing these apparent ‘barbaric’ tendencies among the people that the West ignited the fre of discontent in the community of Umuofa in the narrative and in the South-Eastern Nigeria in reality. This discontent was activated by the colonialists who invoked the governance of the Queen of England like a seal for committing criminal acts with impunity in foreign lands in what they considered their wholesome ‘attempts at bringing civilisation to a people’s primitive way of life’.

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Both in the novel and its adapted television mini-series is this understanding of discontent well illustrated when, in a meeting to settle disputes between the ‘white’ missionary and the elders of Umuofa, the District Commissioner reveals their ideological mind-set by stating the reason for their coming to Umuofa as follows: ‘(W)e are here to preserve the faith and the law of the Queen of this land.’ Thus, this mentality, among other things, is what leads to tension in Umuofa in the context of colonialism (in Africa) since the elders were no longer recognised as the adjudicators of justice and the ‘white’ man’s religion challenged and changed their belief system and age-old assumptions. The community of Umuofa, like most places in the south-eastern part of Nigeria during the colonial era, became a site of much discontent and confict not only because of the high-handedness of the colonisers, but also because of the resilient struggle of the natives against subjugation and domination by foreign powers. The discontent was mainly due to the following reasons: – Confict of interests since converts to the new ‘white’ man’s religion were considered traitors and saboteurs by their families and neighbours. – Confict of ideology since the District Commissioner and elders of Umuofa were never on the same page as far as cultural values were concerned.

In all of these cultural conficts, in effect, became symbolic of the crisis of communalism in the wake of colonialism in Umuofa, nay Igbo land and Africa in general. It was in reaction to them that Okonkwo, one of the warriors of his community, decided to fght for his people and his culture, in order to stop the white man from continuing to denigrate their values. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Feeling that things were no longer the way they used to be and that their cultural values were being over-turned, he felt terribly perplexed and when his people do not stand by him after he kills one of the ‘white’ man’s messengers he laments thus: ‘(T)he white man has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart’. It is particularly in Okonkwo’s statement that the title of the novel and the television mini-series is thematically contextualised in terms of African communalism. Thus, it is the dramatisation of the last scenes of Okonkwo’s life, especially as captured on screen in the mini-series that this paper examines. Among the questions it raises are: what does Okonkwo’s death by suicide imply for the African culture that he served as its main custodian and defender in the face of colonial upheavals? Again, how does adapting the novel into a television mini-series impact on the understanding of its closure with its hero’s death?

ADAPTATION AND DRAMATISATION OF Things Fall Apart Adaptations can make or mar storylines. While they bring the meaning of stories closer to audiences in different modes, they can also corrupt the taste of what they convey.

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Underlying this impression is the debate between scholars of literature and flm studies on adaptation. Frances Smith is one who considers literature-flm adaptation as something that revolves largely around the ‘fdelity paradigm’.6 Adaptation in the main is something that involves creative translation of works into modes outside of its original form. What is done in the case of Things Fall Apart, for instance, is that some conventional traits of Igbo traditional thought and culture are represented with visuals in order to give depth to the novel’s literary story. In other words, dialogue and movements from literature to screen is not done in a strict jacketed form. It is technically achieved by creating sets and costumes to make the meaning of realities clear, that is, tying aesthetics to props by means of symbolic elements to achieve believability. Historically, Things Fall Apart as an adapted work is often presented in different fashions. Apart from several stage adaptations of the novel, mainly by university students, the frst motion picture attempt on it was produced by Oladele Francis and directed by a German, Hans Jurgen Pohland, in 1971. This version of Things Fall Apart one would argue may not have succeeded as did the 1986 version that emerged as a television mini-series, due to a few factors. Not only did it fade away, like many other celluloid flms of the era in Nigeria, it was also not seen by many Nigerians, since its circulation followed the Euro-American circulation routes. This is unlike what happens in present day Nollywood, where flms are circulated internally in Nigeria without obstacles. It must be said that the 1986 version, which is being discussed here, tried following the trajectory of the ‘fdelity path’ in a number of issues. Even though its makers did not depart signifcantly from the mindset of its original author by the nature of its linear mode of telling the story and secondly resorted to using traditional conventions and socio-cultural themes like patriarchy, polygamy, respect for valour, egalitarianism, etc. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

as key motifs in underpinning realism, the screen text nevertheless has some apparently needful deviations from the novel. For instance, whereas the novel records its closure in chapters twenty-four and twenty-fve, its dramatised version of closure was not anchored solely on these chapters but also on some other features that build up into the overall story-line. For example, the speech attributed to Okika at the market square in the novel is spoken by Okonkwo in the mini-series. This is, arguably, not intended to belittle the character of Okika, but to enhance the integrity and mission of Okonkwo ideologically as a hero fghting for his community, especially in light of the audio-visual adaptation. There is also the scene showing Okonkwo’s choreographed movement from the market square to his house (soon after killing one of the ‘white’ man’s messengers) which is not graphically detailed in the novel but which is profoundly dramatised in the mini-series and in such a way that the music score that accompanies Okonkwo’s jaded steps communicates his state of mind much better than mere written words could ever do. He was lost in thought but made to be psychologically more eloquent without words than his community members, who took to their heels and wondered at his missteps in condemnation. The same is the case when he worships at his family shrine before going to commit

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suicide, which the novel does not comment upon, but which is also dramatised in the mini-series to affrm once again the ideological religious inclination of Africans. Obviously the adaptation of Things Fall Apart is understandable on the basis of its being a very good storyline that resonates with the Igbo speaking people of Nigeria and, to a large extent, with most Africans. In a way it was done with the intention of extending the storyline across many other platforms, especially in Nigeria where only a few, at the time, could afford to engage themselves with reading literature outside the school system, compared to how many could listen to the radio or watch television. While the dramatisation of its storyline to a large extent follows the mindset of the author expressed in the novel, what the mini-series adds is a visual amplifcation of its ideological approach with African environmental aesthetics and cultural politics. Its adaptation is understood in the conviction that audiovisual representation as an expressive medium has a unique way of relating to audiences, including children, compared to the novel. Scholars like Jenkins highlight that the signifcance of adaptations lies on bringing ‘good stuff’ to people even in their comfort zones. He uses the term ‘convergence’ to describe this scenario as a system that aids message extension using different media modes and platforms. Describing it as where both old and new media converge to engage the audience’s pleasure, he argues that: By convergence I mean the fow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.7

What this implies is, that by means of adaptation as done with Things Fall Apart, everyCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

body can actually be reached across one or two platforms they are prone to use in sharing or consuming messages. For instance, Obari Gomba, as said earlier in this work, was able to watch Things Fall Apart on television long before reading the novel. Thus, when a particular message is translated into different modes, there is a chance that individuals can discover it in many different forms. As part of a Third World flm culture which, according to Teshome, ‘relies more on an appeal to social and political conficts as the prime rhetorical strategy’8 in communicating messages, the television mini-series which is a precursor to Nollywood, the present day flm industry in Nigeria, engages its viewers with the make-up of a culture constructed from the grassroots around the dynamics of egalitarianism and the transcendental sense of justice that guides values and choices. Its adaptation privileges its representations in a more practical way that propels realism. In other words, it does not only showcase the socio-cultural upheaval in African society during colonial times, but also highlights Achebe’s concerns regarding the post-colonial nature of the culture beyond colonialism, that is, long after the colonial masters have gone. The dramatisation of Things Fall Apart shares a lot of things with present day Nollywood flms both in narrative style and thematic contents. Like other productions Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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shot with ordinary video-flm camera, it is characteristically fashioned to be consumed on a television screen. It is also a production that, while using environmental aesthetics characteristic of cultural realism to tell stories, recasts the experiences of the people of Africa in a way that is historically and ideologically fore-grounded. By this is meant that, even though history is not its focus, it nevertheless presents it as part of its narrative style. This is substantially validated by Mahir Saul’s assertion that, while the director of a flm may not be overtly attempting to do ‘history’ in the academic sense, it is possible for him or her to express an attitude about the past.9 Thus, discussing Things Fall Apart on screen is, in a way, about the representations and interrogations it makes of the culture of the south-eastern people of Nigeria, in particular, and Africa, in general, especially in the context of her colonial challenges. In a way this is the guiding principle in looking at Things Fall Apart from an audiovisual perspective. In other words, if one is aware of the challenges of incorporating some extraneous aspects in the text, it is reasonable to believe that the makers of the miniseries chose key moments in Achebe’s story to frame its narrative contextually. Thus, like Giannetti would argue, the best approach to an adapted work is to know that ‘the real problem of the adapter is not how to reproduce the content of a literary work (an impossibility), but how close he or she should remain to the raw data of the subject matter’.10 Thus, it is in interpreting the iconographic elements and moments shrouding the adapted television mini-series of Achebe’s story that this paper probes into African culture in order to sift the signifcance of the story’s closure with the hero’s death by suicide.

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CLOSURE WITH OKONKWO’S SUICIDE Narrative endings, especially of screen productions, are like fnal statements – the valedictory speeches of directors and the signature tunes of flmmakers on important issues of their productions. They are signifcant because of the roles they play in flms and other screen adaptations. In this instance, without endings, there are no resolutions achieved in narratives. They come in styles that summarily make impressions and create meanings by means of their construction patterns: narrative sequence, editing skill, effects and music scores. As Josh Gross highlights, ‘(A) movie’s last scene is, of course, the fnal opportunity a flmmaker has to get his point across and as such, it is often the most powerful and unforgettable part of movie’.11 The ending of every flm, therefore, is where the seal of a flmmaker is appended. It is the site of his or her critical judgment on resolution after the intrigue of narrative heights. Hence, exploring it here is done with the view that interpretations have to be drawn from it in connection to the ideological mindset of the entire audio-visual (re)presentation. Fundamentally the tragic vision of Things Fall Apart is seen in various fashions such as in the open hostility between the colonialists and the Umuofa community, and more importantly, in the signifcance of Okonkwo’s death at the end of the narrative. These are Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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well captured in the dramatisation of events in the television mini-series, which marshalls the combat scenes of discontent in the land effectively. Foremostly it is where it presents new converts as fghting village masquerades, which to their kith and kin is an abomination, while the other areas of discontent range from the arrest of the elders by the District Commissioner to the killing of one of the District Commissioner’s messengers by Ogbuef Okonkwo. The angst with which the people of Umuofa resisted the white man’s encroachment on their community is buttressed, particularly in the scene of Umuofa’s last communal meeting in the public square. Importantly, this is the scene that leads to Okonkwo’s screen death. Here, the people gather to strategise, as a community, on how to confront their common enemy – the colonialists. Different speakers state how annoying it is to watch the ingressions by the ‘white man’ in their own time. Okonkwo, who speaks in his capacity as a warrior and leader, challenges all to step up their (re)actions against colonial suppression. Like a bemused personality who is psychologically unwell, given the scene he has witnessed in Umuofa, he raises more questions than others on how and when to confront the white man openly in this session. He elegantly makes all see why they should fght, as he tells them in the mini-series: You all know why we are here, instead of mending our huts, attending to our barns and keeping our compounds in order. My father used to say: (I)f you see a toad running in the morning, something is after its life. When I saw all of you drawing into this arena so early in the morning, I said “Aha, something must be after your life”. And indeed something is after our life … Egwugwu is weeping. Agbala is weeping. Even our ancestors are turning in their graves and weeping because of the sacrilege they are seeing; because of the abomination Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

they are suffering in our land… .

Signifcantly, this last public speech of Okonkwo, framed in juxtaposed long and wide angle shots, is as symbolic as it is ideological. First, it solicits viewers’ empathy with his emotional situation, which, at the same time, implies identifcation with his community’s entrapped situation. Next, it raises the stage for reactions from his listeners (and the mini-series viewers) in defence of Umuofa’s cultural integrity and independence. Importantly, as an empowering speech, the reference Okonkwo makes to the gods of the land, by naming them one after another, is a spiritual appeal to higher forces to help fght for their liberation. It is also a signifcant example of the infuence of orality in African cinema. In this context, both speaker and listeners seem to adjudge whatever the colonialists are doing as taboo behaviour that can no longer be allowed to continue, even by the gods. This instance in the mini-series is signalled not only by the psychological uneasiness of Okonkwo as a person but also that of Umuofa in general. Thus, being charged for action, the next scene portrays his display of brazen power in killing one of the messengers of the District Commissioner. The camera zooms into a close-up shot, emphasizing his facially-expressed emotion of being unhappy with the situation

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and inter-cuts this with a very wide angle shot of a squad of young men in paramilitary uniform approaching the arena. Narrative tension is created with the hero swiftly leaving his position and ferociously moving to confront this group with a machete before they can even approach the square. Like a historiographer ready to report every detail of events, in a point-of-view (POV) shot, the camera reveals what he sees and tilts in accompaniment with his footsteps, as he speedily walks to confront the messengers. He stammers when telling them to leave and inadvertently kills one of them who unluckily does not move as quickly as the others, when he charges them to go. Killing this messenger is, for Okonkwo, a statement of the seriousness of the fght against colonialism. It is also a signifcant indication of his commitment to the collective struggle of Africans for their cultural emancipation. Even though tradition forbids killing one’s kinsman, by this act, Okonkwo shows that sacrifcing human blood to salvage the sanctity of Umuofa seemingly desecrated by the colonialists, is a thing worth doing. Thus, with cleverly inserted motifs, the flm sequence propels some worrying questions in the psyche of viewers regarding its resolution. Methodically, the sequence utilises camera angles to trace Okonkwo’s dejected steps as he contemplates his next line of action. As he solemnly walks back to the arena and sees only the empty space surrounded by nearby trees – he is (re)presented as flled with deep emotional misgivings. With heartfelt lamentation and regrets depicted through interchanged canted shots and close-ups of his face and moving feet, his disgust presents him as one dancing naked and alone in the market place. He feels betrayed by his people. Hence, looking up and down dramatically, he soliloquises emphatically while speaking to camera like one aware of viewers monitoring his actions, thus: ‘(T)hings have fallen apart indeed!’ As heightened as the story-line of this section is, the viewer’s attention is systematiCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

cally held for a while in weighing the implication of Okonkwo’s statement as he walks home. Three important issues easily emerge from this scene regarding the concluding sequence of this adapted mini-series: the camera shots of Okonkwo’s movement back to his compound; the tonality of his voice in expressing disappointment with the situation; and fnally, the montage used to summarise his end. Primarily, his steps are paced softly and no longer swiftly as he walks back home, indicating inner weakness and depression, unlike the sturdier way he heavily stamped on the ground in the heydays of pure communalism in his community. The use of poor outdoor lighting coupled with a music score that serves to comment on his inner struggles, helps to showcase how closure here is technically portrayed. Like a warrior groomed in patriarchal society, Okonkwo’s voice, formerly known to be electrifying in communal actions, especially in summoning Umuofa to mutual duties, is suddenly brought to a whisper and used in submissive prayer to the gods. He approaches his compound tentatively and, discovering no one there, walks into his hut and brings out some pieces of ‘white chalks’ and a cup of palm wine, which he uses to pour libation before his shrine, as he reports his case in a kneeling position, thus:

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They will never get me, for rather than die at the hands of the white man and his gang of thieves, let the vultures eat me … let my corpse remain alive. Let Umuofa remain alive. Let my people be allowed to live in their own way. Ogwugwu (pours libation), Idemili (pours libation), Agbala (pours libation), defend yourselves and defend your son. What crime have we committed? We only asked to be left on our own.

Both this speech and its actions are not detailed in the novel; instead they are dramatised in the mini-series as a service to the underlying ideology of the story. Like his calculated speech at the public square, these closing words of Okonkwo with well-composed artistry in projecting them aptly, cast the entire narrative of Things Fall Apart as shrouded in the battle for cultural identity and self-preservation. They do not only betray the psychological state of a man who is helpless, but also buttress the wishes of a dying hero for his people and culture. Importantly, Okonkwo’s prayer validates religion as a key tenet of communalism, while highlighting the place of the gods in the African world view. Given situations like this, Teshome argues that the issue of inter-relationships between the spirit-world and the human-world in African cosmology is one that entails protection by supernatural powers. He argues that ‘(T)o the Third World, spirits, magic, masquerades and rituals, however fawed they may be, still constitute knowledge and provide collective security and protection from forces of evil’.12 Even though Okonkwo’s death by suicide, after praying to the gods, signifes an onward movement to the land of the ancestors, it more or less stands out as a sacrifce of higher value on two accounts. Firstly, it does not allow the ‘white man’ the prospect of punishing him for killing the District Commissioner’s messenger. Secondly, it serves as a mobilisation tool for his viewers to support his struggle for Africa’s identity affrmation Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

and the preservation of cultural values for which he is to lose his life. Granted, therefore, that suicide in African communalism is considered an abomination, one thinks that it is ideologically appropriated in this narrative by Achebe as a ploy to save the hero from worse torture at the hands of his enemies. This, too, is the unspoken message communicated by not extending the storyline to his funeral ceremony as is usually the case for warriors in Africa. Thus, the makers of the adapted mini-series could be said to follow Achebe’s original concept of not mourning Okonkwo’s death, so as to celebrate in a positive light. Okonkwo’s death by this standard, therefore, is not a mere closure of his story, but a disclosure of the reality of the dawn of a war on cultural preservation, especially in the post-colonial context. Although Begam ‘equates his demise with the collapse of Igbo culture’13 perhaps his death actually ‘cheated his enemies, the European colonisers of their revenge’14 as argued by Nnoromele – and should be judged for what it semiotically implies: summon to carry on the fght for identity and cultural preservation of African values beyond his era. Alan Freisen offers a deep religious interpretation to this understanding, by arguing that ‘... in the language of the church, Okonkwo has become a martyr for his belief’15 meaning that he did not die in vain, since his heroic deeds, done on behalf of his community, will Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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continue to be remembered, as with martyrs of the church. Thus, in so far as Okonkwo’s death is remembered, what he died for is a value so sacred and inviolable that it could be sealed with his blood.

CONCLUSION Both the novel and the audio-visual version of Things Fall Apart will remain celebrated amidst other Nigerian masterpieces that narrativises ideal African cultural struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism. As a pre–Nollywood production, the television mini-series charts the road for other texts in using contextual story-lines to discuss Africa’s affairs. While it essentialises pure communalism, it nevertheless signals contradictions in its post-colonial circumstances that warrants nuanced interpretations as done here. Especially the dramatisation of its closure portends the need to understand the culture and identity16 of, not only the people of South-Eastern Nigeria, where the novel is set, but that of Africa as a continent where colonialism originally disenfranchised people of their cultural values and heritage. Thus, given its dual settings, that is, the precolonial and colonial times, the possible hybridising nature of this culture calls for engagement with its losses and gains even in newer situations. Even though the mini-series thematically decries cultural subjugations of Africa’s indigenous values, its signifcance is providing a voice that resists crude westernisation while calling for a deeper appreciation of Africa’s core values. The death of Okonkwo therefore cannot be read as a defeat of African culture by colonialism, but as an unfinching statement on how serious was his community’s cultural struggle against injustice. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Thus, his death is an ideological response to colonial ethnocentrisms, as well as an invitation to review identity construction from a bottom-up paradigm in Africa. The struggle it engages with is not that of pure rejection of change or civilisation in society, but that of rejecting the harsh imposition of unbending westernisation on Africa without recourse to her original value system.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank the organisers of the Chinua Achebe Memorial Symposium at the University of Pretoria, South Africa (2013); and the organisers of the All Africa House Fellowship, University of Cape Town, South Africa (2013); and the staff and management of the Centre for African Cinema Unit at UCT for their hospitality and sponsorship of the programmes that afforded him the opportunity to write this paper.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Amuta, C., 1989. The theory of African literature: Implications for practical criticism. London and New Jersey: Zed Books Limited. 2 Irele, A., 2001. The African imagination: literature in Africa and the black diaspora. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 3 The Indigenisation Act refers to the decree put in place by the Nigerian military government in 1972. It charged media houses in the country to devote more airtime to internally generated media works in order to reduce the hegemony of foreign productions on Nigerian screens at the time. 4 Gomba, O., 2013. Things still apart: Chinua Achebe’s whetstone. Journal of African Literature 50(2), pp. 152–157. 5 Nnawuihe, G., 2005. Ahiara ofo iri: The origin, history, culture and tradition (1800–1900s). Owerri: Ihem Davis Press Ltd. 6 Smith, F., 2012. Beyond adaptations: Essays on radical transformations of original works. FilmPhilosophy, 16(1), pp. 281–286. 7 Jenkins, H., 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York and London: New York University Press. 8 Teshome, G., 1989. Towards a critical theory of third world films. Pines, J. and Willemen, P. (eds) Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI, pp. 30–52. 9 Mahir, S., 2007. History as cultural redemption in Gaston Kabore’s precolonial-era films. Smith, V. and Mendelsohn, R. (eds). Black and white in colour: African history on screen. Oxford: James Curry, pp. 11–27. 10 Giannetti, L., 2005. Understanding movies. (Tenth Edition). New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. 11 Josh, G., 1992. The last word: Final scenes from motion pictures. New York: Vintage Books.

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12 Teshome, G., 1989. Towards a critical theory of third world films. Pines, J. and Willemen, P. (eds) Questions of Third Cinema. London: BFI, pp. 30–52. 13 Begam, R., 1997. Achebe’s sense of an ending: History and tragedy in Things Fall Apart. Studies in the novel, 29(3). Texas: University of North Texas Press, pp. 396–411. 14 Nnoromele, P., 2000. The plight of a hero in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. College Literature, 27(2), pp. 146–156. 15 Freisen, A., 2006. Okonkwo’s suicide as an affirmative act: Do things really fall apart? Postcolonial Text, 2(4), pp. 1–11. 16 As I have argued elsewhere, it is unthinkable not to reflect on culture and identity when discussing people’s values and communication systems which they underlie. See: Uwah, I. E., 2012. Identity and culture in theorising African perspectives of communication: The case of an African cinematic model. Communication: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research. 38(2), pp. 181–194, DOI: 10.1080/02500167.2012.717347

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The Paradox of Exile beyond the Tropes of Migrancy Senayon Olaoluwa

Introduction Conceptual engagement with exile since the turn of the twenty-frst century has assumed a generally monotonous dimension. This is precisely because of the way it affrms a fragmentation of conceptualisation, whereby home is no longer conceived to be part of the organic whole of exile. In tracking the trajectory of exile, there is, for that matter, a staging of double disarticulation, which results in a forced ‘rift’ between, not just a homeland and a country of destination, as Said1 would put it, but an additional rift between the otherwise stable notion of exile and home(land) as two ends of a spectrum. It is indeed a form of denialism which constructs home in permanent undesirability as a justifcation for a new form of endless migration across spaces. The denial of home is often staged in a way that seems to advocate and demand conformity with contemporary globalism. This way, a rift is forced between home and exile, and exile is let loose into a Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

virtually indeterminate space. Disarticulated from home, exile adopts and is adopted by various terms, whose compatibility with one another is defned, basically, by the commonality of endless travel, usually in a ‘forward-looking’ way that attempts to deny any link with any known homeland. This is because the idea and location of home is not only ‘backward’, but threatens to draw back the ever-forward-looking traveller. Among such terms that have sought to adopt and overwhelm exile are nomadism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, diaspora, etc. These terms, collectively or individually, espouse a way of living that undermines the otherwise frm line between humans and other inanimate categories, like materials, ideas and commodities. They affrm a form of fuidity that blurs the line between us and these other categories in a way that does not only undermine human agency, but denies it. Perhaps the most controversial of these terms is nomadism, whose discursive explication does not only yield to some kind of endless, continual movement, but is also conceived to be thoroughly implicated in what is meant to be sedentary in the discourse of ‘settledness’. The paradox it represents as a term most fetishised in Literature and Cultural Studies is best captured in its relationship to scholars and professors who think

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highly of its practice in academes in the global north, without any thought for its inherent ambivalence: The aporia that appears here is quite complex: Most of the scholars who attend conferences on nomadism, hybridism, translation, transcription, migration, space, and so on, are university professors who hold a chair in a more or less well-endowed department, sign their names to books and articles, and accept invitations to receive academic distinctions. Thus, if they voice criticism toward academic settledness – related to concepts such as identity, center, homogeneity, stability, territory, and so on – it happens from an interior position, and the applause that they receive is somewhat paradoxical: either their discourse exceeds or falls short of the sedentary academic standards: it runs the risk of becoming incomprehensible and of being only acceptable because it comes from a distinguished professor; or they meet the established academic standards and the discourse yielding a subversive nomadic content, refers paradoxically to a traditional sedentary form.2

As concept, nomadism was originally derived from pastoral farming as one of the earliest professions of humans. It is normally associated with having to move continually from place to place in search of fertile sources and biodiversity.3 However, it has now been adopted in cultural studies to designate a form of continual movement for which the notion of the past no longer matters, especially when such notion is to be associated with nation (state) as home(land). The condition explains the ambivalence of professors in the global north, who have reinvented, for academia in the social sciences and humanities, new ways of grappling with the concept. A better understanding of nomadism and its sug-

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gestive radical break with a sense of home is facilitated by Marcus Verhagen.4 Focussing on the attitude of contemporary artists in the twenty-frst century, whose nomadism is instigated by the denial between place and art, Verhagen argues that such an attitude deemphasises spaces as specifc categories but instead plays up the traffc between them. Drawing on the art of George Shaw, Verhagen argues that, even when the work affrms grounding in localism, its pitfalls are evident in the ways the images ‘edit the signs of globalisation and so repress the processes that underlie their nostalgia’.5 The critique is instructive, seeing that the agency of nostalgia is germane to the processes of return and reconciliation with home(land) in the discourse of exile. Through the repression of the processes of nostalgia, home is construed as increasingly unattractive and irrelevant to nation and nationhood. The nuanced sophistication of staging the aforementioned rift between home and exile is thus illuminated through the attitude of those engaged in the espousal of nomadism as a form of elite concept. They also demonstrate their fascination with nomadism as a lived experience in a way that betrays a false sense of representation. Transnationalism – another term related to exile – is characterised by innate ambivalence and duplicity. It denotes an even greater level of ambivalence, in which the double or multiple allegiances to places as nations are ultimately demonstrated by a Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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‘forward-looking’ aspiration that constructs homeland as a site of neglect. Nationalism, at this point, is represented in fragmentation with a negligible fraction conserved for home(land) as last resort. It implies that the priority of spaces becomes what is of the essence. In some cases, it calls for a gradation, which places little premium on where the transnational has set forth from. The ultimate concern in such an instance is integration into other spaces while still claiming to belong to an original space or nation. At this point, Bivandy Erdal and Cen Oeppen’s views will be helpful. This is because transnationalism is, moreover, about ‘migrants’ agency in straddling two societies – as a balancing act’.6 In matters of integration into new spaces as transnationals, they further contend this must be ‘understood in relation both to particular places and contexts and to the human beings involved and their functional, emotional and pragmatic considerations’.7 The pressure for survival is thus on the transnational migrant. His quest for acceptance in a new space implies the involvement and investment of his whole being and dissipation of enormous energy towards the achievement of integration. In so doing, the socio-economic, cultural and political values of an original homeland are repressed in a desperate moment that represents new values of a new space as wholly tantalising and desirable. An additional illustration fnds eloquence in the desperation of Ugandan migrants in the United Kingdom. They set out from home with the mindset of raising ‘new homes’ through Western education, without which life would be miserable8. In this sense, an original home is nothing but a make-shift site for facilitating transition into a dream space in the United Kingdom. This, again, is another way in which homeland is estranged from exile. Inevitably, transnationalism leaves us with a problematic equation between original homelands and new homelands, as what is meant to be ‘a balancing act’ translates into a disequilibrium defcit on the home(land) tilt. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Celebrated as a concept and practice predisposed to a borderless world enabled by dynamics of boundless fows of all kinds,9 cosmopolitanism appears to be the fulflment of the fundamental human right of movement. From the standpoint of postcolonial theorising, borders are dismissed as immaterial and unfavourable to the conceptualisation of cosmopolitanism. This is because of the interconnection and inter-changeability of other terms, such as diaspora and hybridity.10 Nevertheless, there still remains the challenge of the limits of the interconnection between mobility and cosmopolitanism, precisely because the linkage ‘does not suffciently explain what happens “‘at the border” when movement is stopped, fltered and halted’.11 This, in itself, underscores that cosmopolitanism as the envisaged liberty of movement without borders is a shattered myth. Yet the original aspiration towards a lived experience of cosmopolitanism in the postcolonial world is such that everything is risked to traverse the world of the metropolitan capitals of the western hemisphere. The imbalance between concept and practice only becomes evident when citizens of the global south attempt to live a cosmopolitan life comparable to that of citizens of the global north. At such instance, cosmopolitanism manifests as an aspiration towards an impenetrable border, where movement is not only ‘fltered’, but also ‘halted’ and stopped. There abound narratives of deportation, repatriation, social Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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and economic exclusion, to say nothing of the various forms of border stoppages that prevent initial entry to envisaged countries of destination. Borders, for that matter, are taken to be both literal and metaphorical. While some are real physical structures that forbid passage, others are organised exclusionary structures of the social sphere, which result, as Loic Wacquant puts it, in all manner of dispossessions, ‘stigma and division’ that are palpable everywhere in the global north ‘from the Core of Chicago to the Margins of Paris’.12 Beyond the border challenges, post-colonial aspiration towards a lived experience of cosmopolitanism, are also refracted by normative requirements that feature prominently in the mainstream understanding of the term. High qualifcation in education, elitism, wealth and pleasure tend to form the core of the requirements and these, in a sense, constitute some of the ways in which cosmopolitans from the global south tend to be excluded. Yet there is a sort of desperation to relocate from home in a bid to share in the captivating world of the global north. This desperation often leaves citizens from the global south traversing endless spaces of the western hemisphere in search of not so much pleasure. This is because survival as an aspiration towards attainment of wealth underpins their cosmopolitan practice. It is one way in which what is read as cosmopolitanism of the global south stands in contrast to the normative understanding in the north. As a postcolonial phenomenon, it seeks a subversion of the normative dynamics, as conceived in the north, in order to foreground an indictment of colonial legacy. However, the West, through its practice of cosmopolitanism, seeks to repress and, to that extent, proves the point of alternative cosmopolitanism.13 Therefore, where postcolonial citizens succeed, in spite of the challenge to engage in the endless fow from space to space in the global north, it is the homeland that is neglected, as survival in the countries of destination take Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

precedence over homeland. In the case of diaspora, it belongs in the group of terms that ‘designate a state of being “not home” (or of being “everywhere at home” – the fip-side of the same coin)’.14 In Africa, the enormity of the level of severance from home(land) that diaspora instigates has compelled the African Union (AU) to declare its diaspora as its sixth region. This is because the discussion of African Diaspora has assumed a complicated dimension: on account of centuries of severance from the primordial homeland, the acknowledgment of connection is not only becoming repressed, but is also being completely denied. Perhaps most categorical in this credo of denial is the frontal conception of the Black Atlantic as designating a ‘circum-Atlantic’ movement of people of African descent, without any look back at Africa. The view, led by Paul Gilroy, makes the notion of continental Africa pale beside the desperate efforts to prove the point about an exclusively western hemisphere travel in which all that matters for the Black diaspora is the pop culture metaphor of ‘looking forward’ as sung by Funki Dreds.15 There are now attempts to track the trajectory of the African diaspora in the western hemisphere through a distinction between its various layers, especially the slavery-instigated diaspora and recent diasporas that sprang up towards the end of the twentieth century.16 Ultimately, the suggestive ‘absence’ Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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from home in the notion of diaspora explains why homelands like Africa continue to make efforts in the reclamation of their diasporas. The notion of transnation responds to this condition of homeland, when Bill Ashcroft defnes it as ‘the fuid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation’.17 In this case, there is the tendency to consciously or unconsciously fossilize history and memory in a way that forestalls the permanent severance that diaspora may want to initiate and perpetuate against homeland. Inevitably, there is a form of spatial indeterminacy associated with the notion of in-betweenness, as often canvassed by proponents of the Black Atlantic, who foreground the Middle Passage without thought for the take-off point of the journey. But this can serve as another way by which ‘an escape from tropes of national belonging (only) serves to contain, defne, and compartmentalize identity’.18 Yet there is a re-ordering that literature brings to bear on the collective memory of nation as homeland. This is what Ashcroft contends translates into the ‘potentiality of return’.19 Viewed from this angle, diaspora, like others in this category of ambulant concepts and practices, undermines the place of the homeland and the important discourse of development, especially as it relates to Africa as a space of the global south. The above categories and other similarly conceived concepts come together in the naming of what I term, tropes of migrancy in this discussion. In Said’s view, exile and migrancy designate a ‘discontinuous state of being’,20 which results in the breaking of barriers and boundaries. But it is with Ian Chambers’ twinning of the terms that the implication of journey in the associated experiences strikes us more categorically. The journey begins with ‘picking a quarrel with where you come from’21; thereafter, ‘such a journey acquires the form of a restless interrogation, undoing its very terms of reference as the point of departure is lost along the way’.22 Beginning on a note of disagreement and ‘quarrel’ with homeland, migrants are let loose, carrying with them the sediments of their agitated/embittered feelCopyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

ings, which prompt an original decision to embark on a quest for other spaces. It is indeed a feeling that fnds expression in a tendency to indict at the slightest provocation and express a perpetual dissatisfaction with every present spatial condition. The perpetuity of ‘quarrel’ instigates a permanence of border crossing. And because it is so frequently done, it then becomes understandable why an original ‘point of departure’ is lost. The present condition of drift often ensures that the perpetual quarrel in transit is without end, precisely because migrancy assigns an ignoble condition to exile and ‘forces the individual to negotiate identity from a position of tactical weakness if not desperate impotence’,23 which was not originally so. If at all an original point of departure is acknowledged, it is more often than not through distancing that mostly manifests as a critique of dystopia – an attitude common with many postcolonial artists and intellectuals. Yet by way of ‘thinking at the limit’,24 even where a return is eventually staged by the migrant, it is not usually with a sense of satisfaction that he returns to the point of departure. Upon return, things may have gone from bad to worse, a condition that may instigate another round of implosive quarrels, as a number of Nollywood cosmopolitan flms have demonstrated, especially ‘Games Women Play’25 and ‘In the Line of Fire.’26

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The situation of the ‘quarrel’ can even be more poignant where the decision for the ‘discontinuous state of being’ is instigated by a third party. This could be in terms of individuals or institutions that instigate the dislocation of others in demonstration of their capacity to dispossess, as was the case with the Atlantic slavery and the history of other forms of slavery and conquest all over the world. The ‘restless interrogation’ that ensues is largely responsible for the denial of connection to Africa that we witness today in the western hemisphere, where there is a festering persuasion among certain groups and individuals of the African diaspora that their present location was informed by a primordial dispossession of their grandsires. For these groups and individuals, much as the western institution of slavery is to blame, Africa must also be apportioned her share of the blame, and to that extent, must be construed as undesirable to her Diaspora. The conceptual assumption of the Black Atlantic is against this background of the interrogation of Africa as original homeland. The view provides the basis for the denialism that the concept represents. Therefore, it instead fetishises an exclusive, if contrived movement of people of African descent in the western hemisphere as symbolically bounded in the main by the Atlantic. It additionally affrms new forms of circum-Atlantic cultural practices that are in tandem with the logic of transculturality and boast a certain form of suffciency forbidding an acknowledgment of an African point of departure.27 Both instances above prove the point of what Hoffmann-Nowotny refers to as ‘anomic tensions’, which instigate exile and migrancy in search of an imagined transformation and ‘power surplus’.28 This is the metaphor of ‘unsettled settlers’29 that we witness in the present age as restless traversing of spaces. And because the life and times of Achebe, especially the latter part of his life, fell into this category, I argue that there was a subsisting paradox in the concluding phases of his existence. It was a paradox informed by the Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

complexity of his life as exile and migrant and which prevented his return to Nigeria from the United States before his death. This thus calls for a critical unpacking of the forbidding conditions which forced a permanent physical ‘rift’ between him and Nigeria as an original point of departure. The intersection of this condition with the dystopian condition of homeland, especially after the 1990 accident, will also be discussed. Inevitably, a ground for engagement with the paradox of Achebe’s life and times can only begin with a foray into his world of imagination as a writer and thinker. The ignoble condition of exile is so well apprehended by Achebe that he demonstrates its undesirability in his works, no matter the attractive hues in which it is branded in the west by fellow artists and thinkers of the modernist persuasion. Convinced that Achebe’s writing transcends the reductionism of European categorisation of romance, nostalgia and primitivism, Simon Gikandi asserts that the writing is constitutive of an ‘affrmative culture’.30 This is in the way it displays the sophistication associated with the notion of modernity as a constitutive category of progressive epistemology. Beyond its earliest understanding, exile is especially associated with modernity as a sophisticated trope with which to make sense of the complexity of existence in the age of industrialism which instigated the recession of communalism.31 The assumption Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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leaves us with the impression that exilic imaginative exploration was an exclusive preserve of the western world. Contrary to such an impression, in his cultural novels Achebe demonstrates a far more sophisticated understanding of this concept, beginning with Things Fall Apart. He does so in a way that shows how the composite dynamics of exile, together with its transformative capability at return, can be frustrated to the point of engendering devastating consequences for individual exiles and their communities. In this case, the conception of exile in Things Fall Apart takes seriously the understanding that there must be an acknowledgment of its structure as a spectrum, which has journey and return at each end. It also takes into account the extremism of certain acts that can forbid return, as in the case of intentional murder, which is described as ‘male’ in Things Fall Apart.32 Okonkwo’s predicament comes in handy here. By accidentally shooting and killing Ezeudu’s son at Ezeudu’s funeral, Okonkwo is deemed to have committed the ‘female’ murder, which requires him to immediately leave Umofa for another land.33He opts for Mbanta, his mother’s land for seven years, after which he is free to return home. Accepted by his mother’s relations and advised by his maternal uncle to feel at home, Okonkwo tries as much as possible to key into the philosophical refection about the supremacy of motherhood. For when a child is rejected in his fatherland, as in the case of Okonkwo, it is in his motherland that he fnds refuge.34 But in spite of all this, Okonkwo is not persuaded that he belongs to Mbanta completely, though he allows himself to be integrated into the Mbanta society by participating in their various communal activities and meetings. Something nevertheless tells him he belongs more to Umofa, on account of which, ‘even in his frst year in exile he had begun to plan for his return’.35 The awareness about the necessity of return throws up the question of double Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

consciousness in the discourse of exile, which theorists from Said to Bhabha, Rushdie and Quayson assert complicates the life of an exile as he is torn between, among other things, allure and longing for home and allegiance to a new space of destination.36 Okonkwo’s exile in Mbanta provides a fecund ground for both validation and interrogation of the notion of such consciousness. This is because even when Okonkwo heeds his uncle’s advice to feel at home in Mbanta and subsequently names one of his children (born in exile) Nneka (Mother is Supreme), his further refection in validation of the double vision of exile compels him to name another child Nwofa (Begotten in the Wilderness).37 This is a testimony to his lack of fulflment in exile and an abiding longing for return to Umofa. As his uncle Uchendu puts it, in spite of his advice, ‘This is not his clan. We are only his mother’s kinsmen’.38 The declaration underscores the limits of exile; it also constructs the idea of double vision as problematic, turning the exile into an embodiment of contradictions. What is more, Okonkwo’s longing for Umofa and his ultimate return demonstrate that the iconic notion of double vision needs to be destabilised in order to privilege the discourse of what I term ‘essential vision’ in the unpacking of exile. Essential vision addresses the challenge posed by exile, especially when construed as an experience which

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forces a dilemma between attitudes to a country of destination and a space of national homeland.39 Essential vision, therefore, prioritises return over an endless drift of migrancy and constructs Umofa as a metaphorical space of national homeland. In this sense, Okonkwo’s determination to return to Umofa serves to crystallise the essential vision as one that is anchored in development beyond the ordinary frame and imagination of nationalism. The developmental angle is particularly of the essence in this discussion and I plan to return to it in the concluding part of the essay. But for now, Okonkwo’s tilt towards Umofa in the ‘balancing act’ gives validation to the assertion that migrancy, of whatever kind, is ‘above all else a temporal maladjustment’.40 Home, it goes without saying, offers a condition of stability, which migrancy cannot afford, let alone offer. This explains why the double vision that designates all forms of instability associated with migrancy cannot provide a sense of fulflment for as long as nostalgia continues to food the mind of the migrant. The place of home in the animation of return and the essential vision call to question assumptions that canvass for the decentering of nation for the agency of migrancy.41 This is especially so in modern times, defned by the privileging of western ontology. Invariably, there is a tendency to foreground the free fow of ideas and other forms of cultural and material categories in a manner that involves the remotest, most marginal and most inconspicuous spaces in the world as consumers of various kinds.42 However, it is important to reinforce the necessity for such local formations and spaces to remain focused on their essential vision. To that extent, caution must be exercised so as not to confuse the mobility of commodities and ideas and the gains associated with them with the pervasive pains when the human agency, especially post-colonial human Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

agency of migrancy, is invoked. In other words, the essential vision of homeland can be compromised and de-railed when migrancy is divested of nationalism, as is often the case. This happens when migrancy is pursued with uncritical fervour as a way of keying into a western mainstream paradigm, which leaves those involved with devastating consequences. This may then explain why we cannot blame young men who, with the advent of western colonialism in Umofa and other clans, cut down on their cosmopolitanism to the chagrin of Uchendu.43 The foregoing raises the question about whose interest is served when the dynamics have changed from what they used to be before the advent of colonialism. As seen in Things Fall Apart, here is a new dispensation in which, for all its vulnerability, home as a form of national space requires that some measure of resistance be put up against a new foreign culture of domination. As will be discussed later, colonialism’s capacity for instigating migrancy is evident in the life of Nwoye. His conversion to Christianity is predicated on a restless movement across spaces for mission and schooling. This returns us to the wisdom of the young men who have reviewed their cosmopolitanism with the advent of colonialism. In the new dispensation, the motivation for migrancy is to be directed by the new colonial structure, which is determined to sever them from their Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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homeland, as is the case with Nwoye and the court messengers. The grave consequences of being uprooted from home nevertheless fnds explication in Okonkwo’s sojourn in Mbanta, where his exile generates another round of exile with even greater enormity in Nwoye, to say nothing of Obi Okonkwo’s exile in No Longer at Ease.44 For all its associated transformation, exile remains an ‘inglorious sojourn’45 and Okonkwo’s sojourn and refections in Mbanta prove this point, which is why he cannot wait to return to Umofa ‘with a fourish’.46 In No Longer at Ease, where the representation of exile takes a more nuanced dimension, the concept is sustained as a trope that has inter-generational implications. Nwoye’s drift and the rift this forces between him and Okonkwo is, in itself, an exile that is layered on his father’s exile in Mbanta. It is indeed arguable that, as an exile, Okonkwo’s marginality in Mbanta has also translated into loss of grip on his household. It is especially so in respect of Nwoye who must have reasoned that there are limits to Okonkwo’s performance of patriarchy in a new place that is not quite home. To that extent, the devastating consequences of exile for Okonkwo does not only consist in his exclusion from participation in various clan activities in Umofa for seven years. The consequences are also to be seen in Nwoye’s conversion to Christianity, for which both father and son disown each other. Thereafter, Nwoye’s life is no more than a migrant existence, as he goes from one community to the other in search of colonial education – frst from Mbanta to other places and, fnally, to Umuru, where he is to train as teacher, all for the purpose of joining the long list of ‘labourers in the vineyard of the Lord’.47 The culmination of that life is the institution of a modern family in which his son Obi Okonkwo is raised and exiled, like his father, from the indigenous ontology and epistemology of his clan.

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

According to Philip Rogers: Obi Okonkwo, the antihero of No Longer at Ease, is pre-eminently a man of words and books, a product of mission-house upbringing and European education. Throughout the book, Okonkwo is presented both in terms of his relation to particular books, especially the canon of literary modernism he studied in England and to which, as antihero of an ironic and allusive novel, he himself belongs. Achebe’s literary allusions and Okonkwo’s literary sensibility combine to provide a counterpoint of subtle and invariably ironic commentary on Okonkwo’s behaviour.48

But as we probe the inter-generational background and the recurrence of exile in Obi Okonkwo’s genealogy further, it is not surprising to realise that the corruption charges against him, and on which he is found guilty, are a direct consequence of a trajectory of exile begun by his father, Nwoye. It is begun when he opts to join a new culture that has no regard for equity in social justice and retribution. While the indigenous mode of justice system is well articulated in Things Fall Apart through the intervention of the nine ancestral masquerades in the disagreement between Uzowulu and his wife Mgbafo,49 a comparison of the western colonial mode proves the contrary. This is so from the wiping

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out of a whole clan in Abame to the detention of Umofa elders when the initial impression was that they would be allowed to state their side of the story that warrants the invitation to the colonial offce of the District Offcer.50 That corruption would subsequently engulf Africa’s world, with the advent of colonialism, is seen in the dishonest practices of the court messengers, who ask for 50 bags of cowries over and above the 200 bags demanded by the colonial District Offcer in order for the Umofa elders to be released.51 It is in this sense that the undesirability of ‘double consciousness’ of exile fnds illustration in the complicated life of Obi Okonkwo. For it is arguable that the corrupt African court messengers in Things Fall Apart are also Obi Okonkwo’s precursors in the postcolonial dispensation. This much is so when tracking the trajectory of corruption in his genealogy. It is in this sense that his life is an embodiment of a complex exilic existence: from the original exile of his father, Nwoye, from his grandfather, Okonkwo, to his exile from an indigenous world view of social justice, to the fascination and obsession with western literary canon, and his long sojourn in England to obtain university qualifcations. This then should explain why he can only be sent on another exile through imprisonment. Obi Okonkwo’s life in this case illustrates what Dan Izevbaye refers to as the predicament of the ‘survivors of pacifcation waiting at the threshold of a new dispensation’.52 In Izevbaye’s reckoning, the survivors are represented by the Obierikas and the Nwoyes. It is in this sense that we are compelled to read Obi Okonkwo’s predicament as a hold-over from Nwoye. Nevertheless, the tragedy of Obi Okonkwo’s life is demonstrated, not by the prospects of imprisonment, as much as by the knowledge that the redemptive value of punishment of this kind is of no consequence. This is because the entire system is a product of a colonial order that produced (in Things Fall Apart) the court messengers who are Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Obi Okonkwo’s precursors. Equally devastating for Obi Okonkwo, is the knowledge that after all is said and done regarding his obsession with western culture, there are certain things in the home context concerning tradition that cannot be compromised. For all his Christian background, he is shocked to know that even his father, Nwoye, a frst generation convert, would not support his marriage to an Osu, because it is forbidden by tradition. In this sense, it has taken two generations to be reconciled to the same tradition that was originally spurned at the advent of Christianity, when something ‘snapped’ in Nwoye, because he feels something is not right with the killing of Ikemefuna and the practice of abandoning the twins to die in the evil forest. The belated realisation that the osu caste system is a hard line that cannot be crossed, which Nwoye drives into Obi Okonkwo’s consciousness, is one sure way by which tradition gets even with Christian modernity in Achebe’s trilogy. For both father and son, this is an ‘inglorious’ metaphoric home-coming of two generations after Obi Okonkwo has returned from England. Put differently, there is a sense in which the migrancy commenced by Nwoye (in Things Fall Apart) comes to full circle in Obi Okonkwo’s sojourn in England. To that extent, Obi Okonkwo is read as an extended embodiment of Nwoye’s exile, both physical and cultural. Therefore his return and the hard truth of tradition to which they Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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both have to address themselves over the prohibition of marriage to an osu become for both a painful reconciliation of exile with home(land). The tragic realisation becomes, for both father and son, the point of the metaphoric home-coming and ends two generations of exile on an ‘ignoble’ note. Achebe’s approach to the representation of exile in Arrow of God further shows the possibility of various dimensions to the understanding of the term. Here the agency of prison/detention is fore-grounded in the ordeal of Ezeulu, whose exile by colonial incarceration forces a ‘rift’ not only between him and his shrine, but also between him and the people. His critical stance on the colonial suggestion for him to assume the additional role of Warrant Chief over the people of Umuaro and his outright rejection of the offer provide an alibi for his incarceration by the colonial authority. If today there is the tendency to affrm the discursive intersection of exile and prison in postcolonial Africa with respect to the persecution of writers and intellectuals of other categories, it is arguable that it all begins with Ezeulu.53 The collective capacity of prison and exile to set a society adrift is shown in the narrative thread of the trilogy. While Okonkwo’s exile lasts seven years, his sorrows are compounded by a return for which he also suffers detention alongside other Umofa elders for their critical response to the excesses of Christian converts. Arguably, the humiliation of the detention contributes to his resolve to put up a lone resistance, which leads to his suicide in the wake of his decapitation of the colonial court messenger. Another serious issue that often escapes scholars about Okonkwo’s tragedy, is that he dies with an unhealed wound from the lashing he received from the corrupt prison guards. In the case of Ezeulu, being a priest installed in response to external aggression from Abam,54 his duties are revered and considered germane to communal cohesion and peace. His imprisonment by the colonial authority, however, causes time loss for which Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

the monthly yam-eating rites of the priest cannot be performed at the appropriate time. With this happening at a crucial time of the season, when the community cannot wait for the priestly declaration of the commencement of the new yam harvest and the symbolic consumption by Ezeulu, the anxiety drives most people to seek the alternative blessing of the colonial church. It leads to devastating consequences, not only for Ezeulu, but also for the community. For while home-coming results in trauma and loss of mind for Ezeulu upon return from prison, it eventuates in a collapse of the symbol of traditional authority in the community in such a manner that is so radical as to precipitate anarchy. As the narrative puts it, the controversy over the eating of the monthly sacred yam also becomes an opportunity for the colonial establishment to persuade the people to forfeit their allegiance to traditional authority and belief system by promising parallel/ alternative new yam rites in the church which also has a dimension of ‘immunity’ to it. This way, the agency of the church is interpreted to mean subversion of the perceived tyranny of Ezeulu in refusing to accept that the yearly full circle of the ritual has been orbited. The traditional order is thus discarded for the declaration of the commencement of another year when all will be free to commence eating their new yams and prevent communal starvation in Umuaro. The logic of the church intervention is, however, at Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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best, warped, because it results in the institution of confusion in a manner that returns us to the unity of exilic representation in Achebe’s trilogy. Here the confusion and the implosive estrangement logic instigates in the Umuaro community are symbolically reminiscent of the exile of Okonkwo and Nwoye from each other. It becomes an even more poignant tragedy precisely because it explodes the situation from a private domain into a public sphere, in which the entire Umuaro community is swept along: In his extremity many a man sent his son with a yam or two to offer to the new religion and to bring back the promised immunity. Thereafter any yam harvested in his felds was harvested in the name of the son.55

There is, for that matter, a sense in which the fgure of the father is symbolically analogous to the priestly fgure of Ezeulu, who should be at the center of the sacrifce and rites, but who has now been abandoned in a way that emasculates the fathers. Their sons are now considered active agents in the performance of rites of renewal and cohesion. Again, the transfer of the site of the ritual from the shrine or village square to the church creates a new site of power, in which fathers are totally exiled from their sons. According to Christopher Ouma: Through Christianity’s redefnition of world views, sonhood gains legitimacy by its provision of an alternative myth of identity in which traditional logic is overturned, with the “Holy Trinity’s” fgurative blurring of the hierarchy between “the father” and “the son”. In this particular Umuaro scenario, there is an expansion and proliferation of myths of belief and supposedly customary ways of doing things, which challenges the wisdom historically Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

embodied in the fgure of the father. There follows a crisis of recognition of the legitimacy of the father as the symbolic progenitor and as the embodiment of a discourse of knowledge, power and identity. The idea that the father represents a “false” genealogy becomes apparent, and – crucially – allows the son to seek alternative sources that enable him to forge his own identity.56

The ambiguity of ‘sonship’ in the new social order invites us to consider the various interpretations to which this yields itself, particularly with respect to the nuances of exile in the trilogy. Ezeulu has himself given an indication of the impending loss of agency when he sends his son to school to be his ‘eyes’. The community only takes a cue from this later, when fathers send their sons to church to offer yams and bring back ‘immunity’ for them. In seeking immunity through the agency of sonship, the Umuaro community makes fathers complicit in the plot for their own abdication/displacement. Like Nwoye, the sons now seek new forms of identity. Inevitably, the aim of sending a son to school in order for the son to be the ‘eyes’ of the father becomes counter-productive. While in Things Fall Apart Nwoye’s decision to join the church is against Okonkwo’s will, in Arrow of God, it has become what fathers willingly seek by sending their children to church with

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tubers of yam. The loss of patriarchal performance of power, which Ezeulu vicariously represents, ultimately spreads to other fathers. On this score, Ezeulu’s exile from his people, on account of his incarceration, yields a ripple effect in which other fathers too lose their authority over their sons, leading to an ignoble social condition of anarchy, which draws strength from a foreign religion that affrms the superiority of sons over fathers. The tragic exilic implication of the rift that results manifests as the estrangement of Ezeulu from Umuaro people. The situation also speaks to the falsehood of the promised immunity, particularly seeing that the death of Obika (the son) leaves Ezeulu vulnerable and traumatised to the point of lunacy. What follows is the loss of social cohesion, which is again embodied in Ezeulu, whose loss of mind is symbolic of the disintegration in Umuaro, all pointing to the scary consequences of exile. Beyond the unity of exilic representation in his trilogy, Achebe engages the concept in even clearer terms in his critical refections. This, in itself, should not come as a surprise, given the depth of representation that we encounter in the trilogy. Therefore, examining his position on exile in the collection of critical essays ‘Home and Exile’ will be helpful. While the work offers perceptive insight on the differential understandings of home and exile, Achebe’s refusal to affrm and celebrate a permanent rupture between them is one of the most seminal statements ever made on the condition of African migrancy in contemporary times. In particular, his refection on the Western modernist attitude to exile is instructive: The notion of the restlessness of the artist-in-exile has been very attractive to the western mind. The list of European and American painters and writers who have left home for some other country in this century and the one before is very impressive indeed. Let me mention Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

an arbitrary half-dozen that come frst to mind – Picasso leaving Spain for Paris; Rimbaud leaving France for Abyssinia; Rilke changing homes twenty times in two years; even James Baldwin returning to America from France in a casket and W.E.B. Du Bois fnding a resting place in Ghana. Diverse as their individual situations or predicaments were, these children of the West roamed the world with the confdence of the authority of their homeland behind them. The purchasing power of even very little real money in their pocket set against the funny money all around them might often be enough to validate their authority without any effort on their part.57

In real terms, the location of home is on the front burner of this Achebean contestation, because when home(land) is located in the west, this already confers privileges on its citizens. As a result, citizens of the west tend to relate with others usually with a condescension that fnds expression in dictating the terms of relations. It is on account of this that an unprecedented glamour is brought to bear on the discourse and practice of migrancy by intellectuals of the western hemisphere. Their disengagement from commitment of the homeland still translates into homeland endorsement, which subtly extracts compliance from citizens of their countries of destination. From the purchasing power,

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to the display of unapologetic nationalism hinged on some claims to advancement in technology for which others should ‘bow down and worship’, disconnection from home in the West – as fragmentation – even fnds its way into the canvass of aesthetics and the representation of modernism.58 It becomes a process through which exile is affrmed as being at the core of modernism. It is thus for the economic advantage, to say nothing of the political and cultural, that even within the western hemisphere Martin Halliwell seeks, for instance, to scrutinise American exiles’ status in Paris between the twenties and ffties, seeing they carried on more as ‘tourists’ than as exiles.59 Their purchasing power as American exiles, coupled with America’s place as the default First World during the Cold War, conferred more privileges on the self-styled American exiles. It goes without saying that the experience of the colonised people in other spaces was not in any way comparable to the above. The alibi of the civilising mission which found literary endorsement in Kipling, was all that was needed to transform the migrancy of the West into the dignifed lingo of colonisation.60 An earlier epoch in slavery was no less poignant for its notoriety in dehumanisation of the black African race. These two epochs laid the foundation for the privileges that today accompany the migrancy of the west. Because the west had the privilege of traversing Africa for slavery and colonialism, Africa was placed at a disadvantage. Even now that the tide of restless movement has meant more migrancy by Africans to the west, in a reverse order, the equation of dispossession remains the same for Africa. Knowing this, and having written so much about it as a life-long engagement, the question is why then did Achebe die in exile, and in what way can we track the trajectory of this irony? The grand paradox, it is arguable, begins in knowing that, as of the time of the publication of the critical essays, ‘Home and Exile’, Achebe was already in exile. If the privileges Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

he enjoyed appeared to be comparable to those of modernist artists, his reaction to this way of life clearly indicated he was not comfortable with the rift that was forced between him and the Nigerian homeland. If his constant critique of the dystopian condition of the Nigerian social sphere instantiated the typical narrative of exiles ‘picking up a quarrel with homeland’, his not doing so with an air of satisfaction with exile in the western hemisphere showed that he was quite aware that ‘exile is a way of dwelling in space with a constant awareness that one is not now at home’.61 Achebe was unlike other fgures of postcolonial exiles, who offered explications on why they were fed up with home, in order to lay claim to the extenuating insulation that comes with the ‘compensatory or consoling meaning of their experience’.62 He deplored the ostentation of such privileged condition of living, overwhelmed as he was with the ostentation of his literary fame in the West. By publishing his refections on home and exile about a decade into his exilic life in the US, and going by the texture of the refection, it is clear that he was hopeful that he would – not long afterward – be able to return home, not dead, but alive. Otherwise, what could have prompted Achebe to include the extremity of Baldwin’s exilic life that culminated in ‘returning to America from France in a casket’? Defnitely were Achebe to have a premonition of the semblance of his fnal home-coming to Baldwin’s, he probably Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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would not have put him in the list of his ‘an arbitrary half-dozen’. Year 2000 was about thirteen years away from his death and he must have hoped that in no time he would be able to return home, not in a casket, but alive and as reconciliation with home(land). Yet Achebe cannot be blamed for his lack of premonition about the affnity of his death with Baldwin’s, or for his witty critique of Baldwin’s exilic life. His certitude about his exilic life as time-bound, after which, like Okonkwo, he would return home, must have been hinged on those ‘hopes’ that radiated and appeared to be too bright to be overwhelmed by the ‘impediments’ of the dystopian condition of the Nigerian homeland. But again, in his engagement with The Trouble with Nigeria, the uncertainty of the ‘climate of fear’, to borrow a phrase from Soyinka,63 was already such that, in the very frst chapter, which, in a sense, sums up Achebe’s objective in the work, he raises a number of issues. He outlines hopes and impediments, but his questions on the issues that could lead to absolute loss of hope ended with an emphatic wish for the better when he declaimed ‘God forbid!’ The theistic dimension to his hopes, however, failed to endorse Achebe’s wish for a better Nigeria, and shortly thereafter he must have resigned to fate and yielded to the transformative mutation of exile into diaspora. For, when exiles’ hope of return continues to dim with the passage of time, they tend to yield to the allure of diaspora for which they unpack their baggage from home to seek integration into the new homeland. There is another level of paradox, which consists in knowing that, unlike a number of his trilogy’s heroes, who are subjected to the ignominy of exile for wrong-doing, Achebe’s exile, which began in the 1990s, was not on account of any wrong-doing. Yet neither was it of free volition. It was instead a direct consequence of what he refers to, in The Trouble with Nigeria, as the years between 1972 and 1982, in which the Nigerian leadership squandered billions of naira meant for the development of the economy and social Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

infrastructure.64 This was clearly an indictment of the military regimes that mostly presided over political affairs in the country during the decade in question, and even in the succeeding decade leading to the turn of the twenty-frst century. When a road accident left him seriously injured in the spine, he could not get the right treatment in Nigeria, resulting in his being fown to the United Kingdom for treatment. Yet it would probably not have resulted in outright exile if other sectors of the social infrastructure had been intact. In other words, the exile resulted from a total collapse of social infrastructure through which all hope of his survival in Nigeria in the wake of the accident was lost. Flown to the United Kingdom by the then Anambra State government for medical treatment, survival in the wake of discharge from hospital had to be pragmatically thought out. For, besides the lingering malady of bad roads, constant medical check-ups would still pose a problem, as the hospitals at home were not getting any better. What is more, the home architectural culture still had and still has more to do in terms of factoring human disability into designs and as a way of consolidating an ethos of social inclusion of the disabled. Even in the global north, there continue to be instances of social exclusion, making people with disability and those relations affected by their condition to be overwhelmed by anxieties, not only in terms of where to live, but also in terms of survival and Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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social reception.65 In comparison with Nigeria, however, the global north condition is still far more tolerant of people with disabilities. For instance, discourses of social inclusion with respect to the conception of nationhood in certain climes also fnd strong eloquence in the structural expression of the ‘built form’.66 Additionally, student project exhibitions in architecture can sometimes provide occasions for the articulation of the national ethos of inclusion targeted at raising the hopes and aspirations of the disabled.67 Most often, such expression of symbolic disposition towards social inclusion of the disabled through the built environment is another way of gauging the level of national development of the countries involved. No wonder then that the Bard College could go as far as designing and building a custom-made residence, just for Achebe, on account of his disability, a feat that generated huge media response and interest at the time. The discussion leads us at this point to a direct engagement with the condition of development in Africa. Here development is conceived as the transformation of extractive productivity into the production of fnished goods. It is anchored in manufacturing for the ultimate enhancement of quality of life comparable to what may be obtained in advanced nations of the global north.68 In framing development against this backdrop, we cannot but return an unfavourable verdict on how post-colonial Africa has fared so far. The capacity to facilitate the transformation that lies ‘squarely’ with ‘leadership’, as Achebe would like to put it, has never been put to any decisive demonstration. This has meant a reduction of the continent to an extractive base. Yet the situation is worrisome, because with hindsight the various development models championed at different stages, through western agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could not translate into sustainable development for Africa, much as this was part of the argument for the espousal of the structural adjustment programmes for the most part of the 1980s and Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

1990s.69Even where the informal sector operators as individuals have been known to have taken the initiative to mediate manufacturing, the question of state neglect continues to be a major issue in the way experts account for ‘developmental failures’ on the continent.70 Closely tied to the question of manufacturing for development is infrastructure, as the failure of local manufacturing can be hinged on the failure of infrastructure. Because African countries fail in this area, they continue to rank at the bottom of the economic development ladder, which results in a generally poor standard of living.71 Where infrastructure collapses, social services also crumble, leaving citizens to the whims and caprices of a dystopian homeland. But is it impossible to discuss the failure of infrastructure without touching on the question of corruption, which has, for the most part, accounted for the various developmental challenges of Africa? The institution of corruption in different guises not only defates the morale of citizens, the dystopian condition it creates initiates thoughts of exile in them, ultimately turning them into economic exiles. This fnds clearer conception in the framework which constructs a strong link between corruption and the loss of confdence in institutions. As Bianca Clausen et al. explain, when citizens’ confdence in public institutions wanes on account of corruption, the responses that are Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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generated in them are of varying degrees. While some become disposed to violent means of political change, others simply ‘vote with their feet through emigration’.72 Yet the prognosis for Africa’s development on account of these indices indicates that, even with the seeming alternative intervention of China in matters of investment and development, nothing is likely to change signifcantly. This is because the local institutional dynamics are still the same. All this is worsened by the less scrutinising terms and condition of China’s participation in African development, which casts shadows of scepticism mostly on such perceived interventions.73 To that extent, just as the collusion of former western colonial partners with postcolonial African leaders has only resulted in the repression of development, owing to the selfsh interests of the parties involved, the so-called Chinese interventions may not yield any better result.74 Nevertheless, the question of development and its inter-connection to homeland dystopian conditions and their capacity to instigate ‘voting with feet’, a metaphor for exile, require that we review the aura of celebration that comes with the discourse of migrancy as an iconic post-colonial trope. As in the case of Achebe, many Africans, for whom the paradox of his existence is representative, have ‘voted with their feet’, because homeland has not proven to be worthwhile. Even when they opt to visit home in the hope of seeing signs that will moderate their decision and provide hope of return someday, they only realise how things have deteriorated further than when they had left. For instance, when Achebe returned for the frst time after many years of exile in the wake of the accident, he was faced with the embarrassment of being left in the aircraft for several hours, because the airport authorities could not immediately fnd suitable equipment for him to disembark. No wonder then that, in spite of his unquenchable optimism about Nigeria, and despite his staunch opposition to the celebration of migrancy, he could only live the latter Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

part of his life exhibiting a migrant tendency of a ‘restless movement’. This, it is painful to recall, saw him moving from Bard College in 2009, after about 19 years and at the age of 79, to Brown University, where he breathed his last far from the shores of the Nigerian homeland, returning home against his wishes in a casket and sharing Baldwin’s fate. There is thus a presupposition of paradox in knowing that, much as he would have loved to return home and help with developmental programmes,75 Achebe could not. What is more, there is ultimately an irreconcilable tension between Achebe’s construction of exile as time-bound in his creative work and his last years as an exile that could not return home alive. If this in itself reinforces the limits of imaginative agency against the reality of lived experience, it also underscores the tragedy subsisting in the ignominy of living away from home against one’s own wish in spite of the enviable status that one’s creative ingenuity may mediate. It is in this sense that the celebration of post-colonial migrancy calls for review. This is because of the very sense in which it undermines development, as the best of human resources from the global south proceed on exile only to be left with the option of giving their best to countries of the global north. They die there and only the remains of the few fortunate ones, among them Achebe, have the privilege of being brought back home for burial, at which point their value is reduced to loss. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Said, E., 2001. Reflections on exile. London: Granta Books, p. 173. 2 Kaluweit, R., 2008. Postmodern nomadism and the beginnings of a global village. Flusser Studies, 7, pp. 1–18. 3 Phillips, J., 2011. The archaeology of mobility: old world and new world nomadism. Near Eastern Archaeology, 74(3), pp. 189–191.  4 Verhagen, M., 2006. Nomadism. Art Monthly, 300 (October), pp. 7–10. 5 Ibid., p. 7. 6 Erdal, M. B. and Oeppen, C., 2013. Migrant balancing acts: Understanding the interactions between integration and transnationalism. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(6), pp. 867–884. 7 Ibid., p. 867. 8 Binaisa, N., 2013. Ugandans in Britain making ‘new’ homes: Transnationalism, place and identity within narratives of integration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(6), pp. 885–902. 9 Kosnick in Rovisco, M., 2012. Towards a cosmopolitan cinema: Understanding the connection between borders, mobility and cosmopolitanism in the fiction film. Mobilities, 7, pp. 1–18. 10 Ibid., p.4. 11 Ibid., p.2. 12 Wacquant, L., 2008. Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge: Polity, p. 163. 13 Go, J., 2012. Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism. European Journal of Social Theory, 16(2), pp. 208–225. 14 Suleiman, S. (ed.), 1998. Exile and creativity: Signposts, travellers, outsiders, backward glances. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 1.

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15 Gilroy, P., 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso, p. 16. 16 Okpewho, I. et al., (eds) 1999. The African diaspora: African origins and new world identities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Okpewho, I. and Nzegwu, N., (eds) 2009. The new African diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 17 Ashcroft, B. 2007. Rerouting the Postcolonial Conference Toward the literary transnation. Lecture. 3–5 July 2007, University of Northampton, p. 2. 18 Ellis, D., 2013. They are us: Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and the British transnation. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 48 (3), pp. 411–423. 19 Ibid., p. 421. 20 Chambers, I., 1994. Migrancy, culture, identity. London: Routledge, p.2. 21 Ibid., p.2. 22 Ibid., p.2. 23 Boltwood, S., 2002. An emperor or something: Brian Friel’s Columba, migrancy and postcolonial theory. Irish Studies Review, 10(1), pp. 51–61. 24 Hall, S., 1996. When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit. In Chambers, I. and Curti, L. (eds), The postcolonial question: Common skies, divided horizons. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 242–259. 25 Imasuen, L., 2005. Games Women Play. Reemmy Jes Production. 26 Opeoluwa, S., 2006. In the line of fire. Lagos: Danga Movie Production. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Chinua Achebe: The Paradox of Exile beyond the Tropes of Migrancy 27 Gilroy, P., 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. p. 5. 28 Huggan, G., 2007. Unsettled settlers: Postcolonialism, travelling theory and the new migrant aesthetics. Thamyris/Intersecting, 17, pp. 129–144. 29 Ibid., p. 129. 30 Gikandi, S., 2001. Chinua Achebe and the invention of African culture. Research in African Literatures, 32(3), pp. 3–8. 31 Pattison, F. 2002. The word and the flesh in A Place to Come To: The postmodern exile and alienation from community. Studies in the Literary Imagination, 35(1), pp. 87–103. 32 Achebe, C., 1958. Things fall apart. Oxford: Heinemann, p. 99. 33 Ibid., p. 99. 34 Achebe, C., 1958. Things fall apart. p. 107. 35 Ibid., p. 137. 36 T. Jansen, I. and Dimitriu, I., 2011. A ‘spirit’ of home and exile: A re-evaluation of Breyten Breytenbach’s Memory of Snow and of Dust’. Literator, 32(3), pp. 1–16. 37 Achebe, C., 1958. Things fall apart. p. 130. 38 Ibid., p. 106. 39 Confino, A., 2005.  Intellectuals and the lure of exile: Home and exile in the autobiographies of Edward Said and George Steiner. Hedgehog Review, 7(3), pp. 20–28. 40 Gandhi, L, et al., 1998. Editors’ Introduction. Postcolonial Studies, 1(2), pp. 151–152. 41 Harney, N.D. and Baldassar, L., 2007. Tracking Transnationalism: Migrancy and its future. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33(2), pp. 189–198. 42 Wilding, R., 2007. Transnational ethnographies and anthropological imaginings of migrancy. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33(2), pp. 331–348. 43 Achebe, C., 1958. Things fall apart. p. 109. 44 Achebe, C., 1960. No longer at ease. Oxford: Heinemann. 45 Boltwood, S., An emperor or something: Brian Friel’s Columba, migrancy and postcolonial theory. p. 52. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

46 Ibid., p. 137. 47 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. p. 145. 48 Pestell, A., 2013. Modernisms. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 21, pp. 256–273. 49 Achebe, C., 1958. Things Fall Apart. pp. 70–75. 50 Ibid., p. 154. 51 Ibid., p. 157. 52 Izevbaye, D., 2012. Untold stories: Things Fall apart at the turn of the century. In Chima, A. and Kehinde, A. (eds.), 2012. Blazing the path: Fifty years of Things fall apart. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers, pp. 60–84. 53 Anyidoho, K. (ed.), 1997. The Word behind bars and the paradox of exile. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 3. See also Roux, D., 2012. Writing the prison in: Attwell, D and Attridge, D. (eds), 2012. The Cambridge History of South African Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 545–563. 54 Achebe, C., 1964. Arrow of god. Oxford: Heinemann. 55 Ibid., p. 230. 56 Ouma, C., 2011. ‘In the name of the son’: Fatherhood’s critical legitimacy, sonhood and masculinities in Chris Abani’s Graceland and The virgin of flames. English in Africa, 38(2), pp. 77–93. 57 Achebe, C., 2000. Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, p. 92.

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Chapter 10 58 Pestell, A., 2013. Modernisms. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 21(1), pp. 256–273. 59 Halliwell, M., 2005. Tourists or exiles? American modernists in Paris in the 1920s and 1950s. Nottingham French Studies, 44(3), pp. 54-68. 60 Hollindale, P., 2005. A review of The Man Who Would Be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. The Review of English Studies, 56, (223), pp. 159–160. 61 Barbour, J., 2011. The consolations and compensations of exile: Memoirs by Said, Ahmed and Eire. Journal of the American Academy Religion, 79(3), pp. 706–734. 62 Ibid., p. 706. 63 Soyinka, W., 2004. Climate of fear. London: Profile Books. 64 Achebe, C., 1984. The trouble with Nigeria. London: Putman. 65 Iarskaia-Smirnova, E. 1999. ‘What the future will bring I do not know’. Mothering children with disabilities in Russia and the politics of exclusion. Frontiers, 20(2), pp. 68–86. 66 C’houinard, V., 2009. ‘Like Alice through the looking glass’ II: The struggle for accommodation continues. Resources for Feminist Research, 33(3/4), pp. 161–178. 67 Hastings, J. and Thomas, H., 2005. Accessing the nation: Disability, political inclusion and built form. Urban Studies, 42(3), pp. 527–544. 68 McKee, B., 2009. Utilitas, truly. Architect, 98(12), pp. 22–25. 69 Ebomoyi, W. and Akwawua, S. 2006. A new model for developing technology and manufacturing initiatives for sub-Saharan Africa. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 30(1), pp. 15–24. 70 Scarritt, J., 1995. Institutional reforms as the key to sustainable development. Mershon International Studies Review, 39, pp. 126–129. 71 Meagher, K., 2006. Social capital, social liabilities, and political capital: Social networks and informal manufacturing in Nigeria. African Affairs, 105(421), pp. 553–582. 72 Calderón, C. and Servén, L., 2010. Infrastructure and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. Journal of African Economies 19. AERC Supplement, 1, pp. i13–i87.

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73 Clausen, B., et al., 2011. Corruption and confidence in public institutions: Evidence from a global survey. The World Bank Economic Review, 25(2), pp. 212–249. 74 Mohan, G., 2013. ‘The Chinese just come and do it’: China in Africa and the prospects for development planning. International Development Planning Review, 35(3), pp. v–xii. 75 Boateng, O., 2012. Britain needs Africa’s help. New Statesman, 16 (July), pp. 13–14. At the Chinua Achebe Colloquium held at the University of Pretoria in November 2013, Prof Veronique Tadjo shared a stunning revelation by Achebe on how he received a letter from the municipal authority of his community on its wish to have him lead a project on the establishment of a municipal library in his hometown. But, being consigned to a wheelchair and unable to relocate to Nigeria on account of the dystopian conditions in the homeland, he could only express his frustration about his inability to help, particularly as he reckoned that he would not be given such a privilege in the United States, where he resided as an exile.

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11 Revisiting the African Archive CHAPTER

Chinua Achebe, Sol Plaatje and the Re-making of African History James Ogude

Any tribute to Achebe will inevitably force us to confront the place of the African archive with which many foundational African writers, including Chinua Achebe and Sol Plaatje, were deeply pre-occupied. And yet, this project of rebuilding an alternative African archive has been hugely under-played within the academy while a disproportionate emphasis continues to be placed on the colonial archive and its impact on post-colonial discourses. In paying tribute to Achebe, I turn to what Ato Quayson calls a cultural resource base that has been so fundamental in the literary imagination of African writers: foundational and post-foundational; contemporary and so-called third generation writers. Quayson argues that African writers have constantly and consciously sought to re-activate their cultural resource base in their writing as an instrument or vehicle of presencing – ‘a project in a will-to-identity’.1 By presencing, Quayson means the desire to fght off the absence of colonial history, for example, and internal exile imposed by colonialism and to project ‘a viable identity outwards into the global arena’.2 Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

The argument I seek to make in this paper, though, is that the strategic recourse to indigenous resources was also a deliberate project in archiving. I am using archiving here as a dynamic instrument of remembering and not simply preserving, although preservation also formed that aspect of constituting a library different from that received from the colonial library. The form of archiving I am writing about here, involved appropriation as much as it involved translation and transferring of indigenous genres on to new spaces – to speak to new and contemporary experience. In the process, these genres were transformed in as much as they transformed our received notions of the novel. The foundational writers were concerned with the layered relationship between literature, society and culture in general. Carrying the scars of colonial history with them, the foundational writers went about their task as pioneers, seeking the restoration of a community and to generate a new mythos that would challenge, while simultaneously entering into dialogue with colonial discourse. Sol Plaatje, in his publication Mhudi in 1930, was clear that he wanted to ‘interpret the back of the native mind’ – to present an African perspective of African history and to preserve Sechuana proverbs and oral traditions, which he felt, were fast

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disappearing under the tyranny of colonial culture. Plaatje was signalling the importance of recovery, voicing and the need for cultural repatriation of suppressed history, particularly in a context where the West, as Edward Said writes, ‘saw Africa polemically as a blank space when they took it’.3 It is for this reason, Said adds, that ‘decolonizing Africa found it necessary to re-imagine Africa stripped of its imperial past’.4 Writers like Sol Plaatje were quite clear in their mind that the foremost challenge confronting the African writer under colonialism was: to provide a narrative written from their perspective; and indeed to keep, for posterity, a record of a rich tradition that was threatened by extinction under the onslaught of colonialism. This idea of record-keeping – the archive – is one aspect of African knowledge-building that has been de-emphasised in African literature, and yet it was uppermost in the consciousness of pioneer writers like Achebe and Plaatje. It is not surprising that in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart5 written almost two decades after Plaatje’s classic novel, Mhudi, the similarities between his thematic concerns and those of Plaatje are striking. Apart from the fact that both of them were engaging with a traditional society at a crucial stage of transition, Achebe, like Plaatje, was also concerned with providing an alternative history to that which colonialism sought to impose on the African people. What enjoined these two writers is what Ato Quayson calls ‘The notion of a will-to-identity (which) yields a simultaneous concern with the African nation-state as an implicit horizon, the political unconscious of the literary enterprise as it were, as well as a concern with projecting outwards into the global arena’.6 The will-to-identity was really the desire to reconstitute a community of people out of historical ruins; to assert Africa’s presence and to fght off deletion and erasure of the African self. To do this, most writers turned to Africa’s indigenous resource base, not Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

as a return to the source, but more signifcantly as a strategic recourse, with particular attention given to the inter-discursive space within which the struggle for cultural and historical legitimacy was taking place. In other words, when Sol Plaatje, for example, sets out to document what he calls the rich Sechuana folk-tales, he is not only involved in a political symbolic act, but also in library-building for posterity. As a political act, he was pointing to a living tradition that the West would have preferred to suppress or simply ignore. Indeed, for Plaatje, the urge to collect Sechuana folk-tales was so intense that his motivation for writing Mhudi was, in part, to earn money that he could use to collect and publish Sechuana folk-tales for Bantu schools. Orality was being posited here as an instrument of memory, the means through which people remember and are therefore closely tied to important cultural forms of coding. During Plaatje’s time, the basic means of communication was largely oral, although this was beginning to change with the advent of mission education and the print media. Apparently, Plaatje had called Mhudi his ‘evening reader’; it was analogous to folk-tales, legends and oral history passed by word of mouth and from one generation to another when people gathered around the fre-place. It is not surprising that many critics have noted that the form of the novel is not so much that of a reader, but that of a spoken story Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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told to the writer by the narrator of the novel, Half-a-Crown – believed to be the son of Ra-Thaga. Mhudi was therefore very much part of a living history that Plaatje was told by the elders during his time and he felt duty-bound to keep this vital link with his past for posterity. This act of remembering is best captured in the story of Zungu, which is couched in the form of a fable. This is the story that Mzilikazi tells in a prophetic warning to the Baralong after the defeat of his army at the hands of the Boers and the Bechuana. He warns them that the Boers ‘will despoil them of the very lands they have rendered unsafe for us (the Matabele); they will entice the Bechuana youths to war and the chase, only to use them as pack-oxen; yea, they will refuse to share with them the spoils of victory’.7 The power of this fable resides in the manner in which an indigenous resource base is evoked, not simply as a predictive instrument to warn the Baralong, but equally to speak to the times and context of Plaatje’s life. In Mhudi, Plaatje turns history into a moral fable – indeed, an instrument of prophecy. By using this fable, Plaatje is drawing clear parallels between the events rooted in the 1830s and the problems that his people were grappling with in the early 1900s, especially with the introduction of the Native Land Act of 1913. But, perhaps more importantly, a local fable was entering into dialogue with contemporary history and fnding its revitalised legitimacy in the written form. What is critical here is the way Plaatje exploits the idea of prophecy by rooting it frmly in local geographies and history; and it is here where the authority of oral resources become a vital link that pulls together what Plaatje sees as a common human weakness that cuts across all cultures – tyranny and the inevitability of change and challenge to all forms of tyranny. This is the lesson of history and the moral of the new genre embodied in Mhudi. Failure to remember this leads to a repeat of history – Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

perhaps with more devastating consequences. And yet, in appropriating oral forms in his writing, Plaatje was also involved in the invention of a new tradition way beyond what the colonist had imagined. Indeed, he was initiating a complex inter-textuality that involved the translation, in its broadest sense, of both Western and African texts. He was, in fact, insisting that oral forms of discourse are texts in their own right; and it is precisely because they are texts that they could enter into dialogue with written texts. It was therefore wrong to privilege the received Western texts as the only legitimate source of knowledge and, by extension, reference. Signifcantly, in this strategic endeavour to preserve Sechuana folk-tales, Plaatje borrowed just as much from Western texts like the Bible and Shakespeare, that were increasingly getting domesticated through mission education, as he drew on a rich Sechuana indigenous resource base. The Bible, for one, as in many other African communities, was fast becoming part of the popular culture among the literate, and could therefore be used both in terms of its register and poetic style, to make visible some of the Sechuana cultural experiences.

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The point being made here is that even such a basic idea as the preservation of oral art forms was not possible without an understanding of how it interfaced with various forms of literacy. Plaatje’s perception and preservation of oral art forms could not be separated from the ideas that he gained about literature from colonial mission education. It is understandable why Shakespeare and the Bible became major imaginative resources that served to mediate his translation of Sechuana oral forms into English. For Plaatje, orality and literacy depended on each other and the two modes point to a dialectic of cross-referencing and complementarities that Plaatje exploited in his act of preservation. And precisely because the act of preservation often involved the writing down and translation of the folk-tales into English, Plaatje could be said to have been involved in the invention of Sechuana culture. The idea of stories as instruments of memory and historical testimony for posterity fnd a striking echo in Chinua Achebe’s narrative inscribed in his novel, Anthills of the Savannah, by the Old Man of Abazon – a character who has an excellent facility in both the use of proverbs and in the art of story-telling. Here, the Old Man awards the eagle feather to the story-teller, rather than the warrior or the beater of the battle-drum: The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the ferce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards – each important in its own way. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle feather I will say boldly: the story … Because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fghters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of a cactus fence. The

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story is our escort: without it, we are blind.8

What is signaled by the narrative of the Old Man of Abazon, which Achebe embeds in his novel, is the authority of the archive, of remembering and indeed, the way, the story like Plaatje’s fable is central in the construction of this memory. But the Old Man of Abazon goes further to underscore the importance of both archive and memory in storytelling, and that is to register a community’s history, its presence, rather than its absence, as colonial narratives and offcial narratives have tended to do. This is captured again in the fable of the leopard and the tortoise, in which the tortoise insists on leaving his mark for posterity. He tells a puzzled leopard, who cannot understand why the tortoise is scratching and throwing sand in all directions that ‘… even after I am dead I would want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here’.9 This is the message the Old Man leaves with his people when he says, ‘My people, that is all we are doing now. Struggling. Perhaps to no purpose except that those who come after us will be able to say: True, our fathers were defeated but they tried’.10 Achebe’s point here really is that the struggle is important, but it remains useless until it enters into narrative – until it becomes a story that can be passed on from one generation to another. The strategic inter-textuality between oral and the written texts here is

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instructive. In putting the contemporary narrative of the Old Man of Abazon alongside the animal folk-tale rooted in the local lore of his people, Achebe is re-activating an indigenous resource base and forcing it to enter into dialogue with contemporary experience. What enjoins the tale of the leopard and the tortoise and the narrative of the Old Man of Abazon, is the importance of memory, of presencing – of registering a historical presence. But in the simultaneous act of juxtaposing an oral narrative with the written, and of insisting on the supremacy of the story in ordering human society, Achebe is also underscoring the fact that oral forms of discourse are ultimately texts in their own right, as Abiola Irele has argued.11 What is evident too is that oral literature provided the African novelist with an ideological weapon – to assert Africa’s presence on a world stage that had threatened to delete its story completely. Achebe also seems to be suggesting that the mapping of a literary history in Africa, especially where a borrowed genre is concerned, is impossible without taking some strategic recourse to indigenous oral sources, because the space of enunciation is already inter-discursive. To talk about the inter-discursive space is to imply that taking recourse to an oral resource base is really about ‘imitating the totality of a general cultural discursivity’12 that embraces both past and contemporary nuances of that culture. And here one is reminded of how Achebe’s early narratives immersed themselves in the Igbo cultural universe. His pre-occupation was in fashioning the English language so that it mediates the peculiar reality of both historic and contemporary African experience. Achebe demonstrates the nature of this preoccupation in an early essay. He quotes a passage from his novel Arrow of God, in which the Chief Priest Ezeulu tells one of his sons

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why it is necessary to send him to the mission school: I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring my share. The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow.13

Beside the above, Achebe places another version of the same passage: I am sending you as my representative among these people – just to be on the safe side, just in case the new religion develops. One has to move with the times or else one is left behind. I have a hunch that those who fail to come to terms with the white man may well regret their lack of insight.14

Achebe then comments on the two passages: ‘The material is the same. But the form of one is in character and the other not. It is largely a matter of instinct, but judgment comes into it too’.15 By saying the former way of expressing the material is ‘in character’

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one understands Achebe to be pointing to the specifcally Igbo linguistic genius, which is making itself felt through the language of the frst passage by the importation of new images and idioms, and the imposition of new syntactic structures and new rhythms, with the result that the English language mediates the peculiar historic experience. Strikingly, this creative use of language in Achebe is most palpable when Achebe is evoking traditional life and values – the totality of a cultural system. But the Igbo cultural experience is also forced into a specifc discourse with contemporary experience embodied in modernity and the institutions through which it performs itself. And yet, to domesticate this new experience, Achebe has to fall back on metaphors – the symbols of encoding and decoding reality in the Igbo universe. Simon Gikandi has argued in Reading Chinua Achebe that ‘the fgure of the dancing mask, which characterises key moments of interpretation in the novel, marks Achebe’s deeper involvement with the Igbo aesthetic and its modes of interpretation’.16 What I understand Gikandi to be saying, in part, is that the fgure of the mask allows Achebe to capture that critical moment of transition – a situation of fux – and Achebe is able to demonstrate that the Igbo language has that capacity to capture, not simply the sheer moment of rapture, but equally the ambivalence of the moment – the tension generated by colonial modernity. The ideological war that Achebe wages here is about the use of grammar for framing new forces and the complexities of the time. If the Igbo have no immediate political answers for their predicament, at least they have the grammar for it; by evoking the mask, the fgure of duplicity, they can at least conceal their real motives, as they engage with colonial duplicity. What is evident is that the foundational African writers were not only adept at keeping the archive, but equally at enlisting African metaphors and lexicon to deal with the challenges that colonialism threw up. It is in drawing our attention to Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Africa’s rich heritage and to the authority of the story that those seeking to understand Achebe’s layered legacy must begin.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Quayson, A., 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 17. 2 Ibid., p. 17. 3 Said, E., 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, p. 253. 4 Ibid., p. 253. 5 Achebe, C., 1956. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. 6 Quayson, A., 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. p, 17. 7 Plaatje, S., 1978. (First published by Lovedale Press, 1930). Mhudi. London: Heinemann, p. 175. 8 Achebe, C., 1987. Anthills of the Savannah. London: Heinemann, p. 124. 9 Achebe, C., Anthills of the Savannah, p. 128. 10 Ibid., p. 128.

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Revisiting the African Archive 11 Irele, A., Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: D. O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka, in Irele. A., (ed.), The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 174–198. 12 Quayson, A., 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. p. 15. 13 Achebe. C., 1975. Interview in African Concord. October, 1987. London: Heinemann, pp. 42–45. 14 Achebe. C., Interview in African Concord, p. 62. 15 Ibid., p. 62.

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16 Gikandi, S., 1991. Reading Chinua Achebe. London: James Currey, p. 51.

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The Incredible Resonance of Achebe’s Work Véronique Tadjo

Chinua Achebe’s work has travelled so far and wide that it now doesn’t belong to Nigerian or even African literature alone. It belongs to the world of lierature. From the small village of Umofa, Okonkwo, the main character in Things Fall Apart which was published in 1958, has risen to acquire the status of a world hero. The book has been translated into more than 50 languages and has been read by several millions – making his author, arguably, the biggest man in African literature to date. Why did this book and the others that Achebe wrote fnd such resonance, not only with those on the African continent, but also with readers miles and miles away? The answer is simple: because, fundamentally, Achebe’s stories are about human nature – our human experience on this earth. His characters may be the product of Igbo culture, but this, in a way, is just about context – as if the writer merely wanted to give a specifc example by grounding his narrative in a particular reality. In putting the emphasis on

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context, he reinforced a well-known paradox in art: the more an artist locates himself or herself in a specifc culture, the more he or she is able to reach a universal dimension. The authenticity of the tale is what speaks to readers – to so many people. Achebe created complex characters – neither just good nor just bad, neither just strong nor just weak. He chose to highlight their human traits above all. For him, fction had a level of truth that was grounded in history, culture and humanism. He wasn’t just telling a story, he was tendering a view of the world and he had the ability to stay close to his readers. In this sense, his approach was very modern. Simon Gikandi seems to share this view, when he writes: I have never met Chinua Achebe in person, but every time I read his fction, his essays, or critical works, I feel as if I have known him for most of my life. For if the act of reading and re-reading establishes networks of connections between readers, writers, and context, and if texts are indeed crucial to the modes of knowledge we come to develop about subjects and objects and the images we associate with certain localities and institutions, then I can say without equivocation that I have known Achebe since I was thirteen years old. I can still

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vividly recall the day when, in my frst or second year of secondary school, I encountered Things Fall Apart. It was in the early 1970s.1

Gikandi was brought up in Kenya, but how many other young people all over the African continent have had the same experience. Although I come from the Francophone part of the continent, I too discovered Achebe’s writing when I was a schoolgirl. I read Le monde s’effondre, the French translation of Things Fall Apart, published by Présence Africaine, in 1966. I was in secondary school in Abidjan and it was part of our curriculum. The story of Okonkwo, the main protagonist, seemed familiar, as we could all feel the impact of the confict between tradition and modernity on Ivorian society. Finding a balance between the past and the present, between the preservation of our cultural heritage and the pressing need for change, was of prime importance. Achebe showed us the path by taking us to the heart of the problem. What makes Okonkwo such a fascinating character is his existentialist nature. He is at the same time part of his society and removed from it – internally exiled from it. In fact, his struggle against modernity and the violent change brought about by colonisation and Christian religion is also a struggle against his own demise. The world for Okonkwo has become an absurd place because it can only lead to degradation. What makes Okonkwo’s fght against colonialism an epic is the distance between what he can achieve and the near impossibility of his mission. His destiny is tragic because he is his own worst enemy. He is condemned by his society, whose new rules and norms he rejects, although he is alone in his anachronistic rebellion. Okonkwo’s weakness lies in his inability to understand the winds of change, which he mistakenly equates solely with colonial economic and political oppression. His tunnel Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

vision and his reverence for outdated traditional customs wreak havoc on him and his community. As a socially infuential man, had he been more open to forward thinking, he would have been able to lead others towards progress. But because of his failed relationship with his father, whom he considers as lacking in authority, Okonkwo adopts a violent and harsh manner towards people he perceives as being of a lower station than him. Consequently, he rejects anything that might appear too compassionate. Masculinity is linked with force and brutality. He beats his wives and even threatens to kill the youngest in a ft of rage, because she has been ‘unruly’. Worse, Okonkwo chooses to participate in the ritual killing of ‘Ikemefuna’ who, over time, has become like an adopted son to him. He insists on delivering the fatal blow to the boy, thus committing a crime that is taboo, because the boy calls him ‘father’. Then by committing suicide he seals his fate in the underworld as well, because it is forbidden to carry out such an act of self-destruction. In an interview in the Sunday Independent newspaper in 2002, Achebe pointed out that what mattered most for him then, as a writer, was: ... the fairness and the link between fairness and my story … It is my right to tell the story of my perception of the world. Even if it is not a great story in the history of the world, I Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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demand that my story stands, even when other stories are told. My innocence was that I believed until I was shown otherwise that everyone believed that everybody has a story and is entitled to tell the story.2

Achebe’s infuence on generations of African writers has been signifcant in the sense that he has given them a voice. For instance, the impact of his work on my own writing goes beyond any attempt to quantify it. I am thinking in particular of Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifce published in 2008, which I wrote many years after reading the French translation of Things Fall Apart. The novel stayed in my mind during my formative years, because I understood where Achebe came from when he conceived the narrative. It was obvious for me that his inspiration came from a deep respect for his culture, coupled with a desire to understand the profound impact that history played in shaping its destiny. In Morning Yet on Creation Day, one of his collections of essays, he writes: I would be quite satisfed if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the frst Europeans, acting on God’s behalf, delivered them.3

I emphasise the point: ‘with all its imperfections’. It illustrates Achebe’s endeavour to fnd fairness in his rendering of the African story: no idealisation of the past, but a lucid approach to the woes of Igbo traditional society and what weakened it, as it faced the onslaught of British colonial imperialism. At the heart of the tragic story of Okonkwo is the idea of ‘original sin’: the fault that brought everything down; the defning moment of the collapse of a whole system and set of values. Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Queen Pokou recounts the sacrifce of a child. According to oral Baoule tradition, the queen had to throw her only son into the Comoé River, in order to save her people. This tragic act – ordered by the diviners – is seen as the moment of collapse that sets in motion a whole range of terrible events. Although Pokou is considered a hero in the offcial legend, I gave multiple versions of the same narrative in an attempt to understand its place in our contemporary consciousness and to question the symbolic meaning of the killing of Pokou’s infant. Two other novels by Achebe also infuenced me in particular: No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People. As a student then, I was reading the books in their original version at the English Department of the Université Nationale de Côte d’Ivoire (National University of Ivory Coast). I was impressed by Achebe’s skill as a story-teller. It felt like I was seeing my environment through the eyes of the protagonists. Civil servants in lower ranks bowed down under the weight of corrupt offcials. And I recognised all too well the mentality that was causing havoc in Côte d’Ivoire, as well as the continuing legacy of underdevelopment captured eloquently in the phrase: ‘Yesterday it was the white man’s time to eat, so today it is the black man’s turn’. Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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This message was present in my mind when I wrote Far from my Father in 2014. It is the story of Nina, a woman who returns to Côte d’Ivoire after her father’s death. She confronts, not only unresolved family issues, but also the tensions between traditional and modern Africa. The father, Doctor Kouadio, an important man in his community and in government, falls into the trap of bad leadership, and the desire for control on a personal and social level. He betrays the dream of progress and loses himself in the process. There is no doubt that Achebe’s narrative resonated with me. More than ffty years after Achebe’s books were written, I was interested in understanding the extent to which the situation had changed in present-day Africa. I was struck by a realisation of how much of what the Nigerian author depicted was still being refected in daily life on the continent – and in Côte d’Ivoire in particular. What was also relevant for me was his portrayal of politicians. Modern politicians are elected to be intermediaries between the government and their constituencies; but in Achebe’s novels many of them become greedy and do not follow democratic processes. They abuse their position, because people put far too much trust in them. Furthermore, Achebe also looks at traditional power with critical eyes. These leaders, too, can lust for power and money and all the privileges that go with their position. Indeed, Achebe’s books left me with an important political message: What is the essence of a true leader? Is it someone who does what is expected of him or her, not hesitating to use demagogical tactics to win votes or blind followers? Alternatively, is it someone who is ready to go against the current, if need be? In other words, who deserves our full attention? Achebe’s novels raise all these questions and many more. As with all good works of

Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

literature, they enable us to: Encounter in the safe, manageable dimensions of make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real life; and at the same time providing through the self-discovery which it imparts a veritable weapon for coping with these threats whether they are found in problematic and incoherent selves or in the world around us.4

What is admirable in Achebe’s prolifc output is that, in addition to the wide range of his novels, he was equally engaged in writing essays. It was important for him to make sure that his message was heard, in works of fction and non-fction. His will to render the African experience in all its complexities demanded that he explore different literary genres. And in this instance, his essays were perhaps his strongest pieces, because they look at the African continent in more general terms. Without hyperbole or proverbs, they denounce corruption squarely, as well as the incompetence and governmental mismanagement experienced by so many West African nations in the post-colonial era. Even when he talks directly about Nigeria, as in his long essay, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, his observations are equally valid for most other nations.

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The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example, which are the hallmarks of true leadership.5

Achebe’s testament remains true today and shows the visionary quality of his thought. Indeed, taking into account Nigeria’s economic and political situation, one is compelled to agree with the writer. For a country with such potential – natural wealth and population – it is diffcult to understand why it still lags behind in terms of development. And now, with Boko Haram and rising Islamic extremism in the North, the country is in danger of becoming a failed state. It is a big threat to regional stability. When speaking to a critic, Chinua Achebe said the following: Basically, we’re still a very timid people. Not only timid, we wallow in self-deception. Somebody gets up and says things that everybody knows are not true. But they sound fne … so we applaud. Then we go back and say, “But you know, that was not saying the right thing”. I think we still need to nurture and develop the spirit of dissent, of disagreement and to be convinced that disagreement doesn’t mean treason, that because somebody says “No” doesn’t mean he is less patriotic than the “Yes” people.6

In the struggle to attain more democratic societies on the African continent, this is one

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important piece of advice that we cannot overlook.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Gikandi, S., 2001. Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture. Research in African Literatures, 32(3), pp. 3–8. 2 Isaacson, M., 2002. Young person’s guide to patronage and sycophancy. The Sunday Independent, 15 September, Sunday Books. 3 Achebe, C., 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann. 4 Achebe, C., 1988. Hopes and Impediments. New York: Doubleday, p. 170. 5 Achebe, C., 1983. The Trouble with Nigeria. Oxford: Heinemann. 6 Achebe, C., 2002. 3rd Annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture. Orchestrating the memory of Steve Biko 25 Years On, Lecture given at The University of Cape Town, 12 September 2002.

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Chinua Achebe

A Central Infuence on My Writing Susan Nalugwa Kiguli

INTRODUCTION My frst memory of a novel written by an African is Things Fall Apart. I read it rather late in life – I was 15 and had read many other books before that. But Things Fall Apart caused great excitement in me and my fellow students when it was given to us to read in class. It had such a fascinating beginning, the characters seemed familiar and there were some scenes that one never forgot; for example the description of Akueke’s marriage ceremony – it was so very recognisable. I remember too that this book caused a lot of debate and giggles in class. We were 15 and mischievous and we inevitably asked some questions about some of the incidents, such as Okonkwo taking Ekwef into his obi without saying a word. I remember the teacher being quite annoyed with us. I must say that there was a way the story of Okonkwo resonated with everybody in my class. All of us could fnd something we Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

thought we could associate with or tease each other about. I do not know if it was naïve for us to claim bits of this story and make it ours, but many of us did. It is amazing how many people in Uganda (who did not carry on studying Literature beyond the ordinary certifcate) remember quotes from Things Fall Apart. Some people have argued that Things Fall Apart has been praised well beyond what it deserves. I do not know about that: all I know is that I have found Achebe’s books memorable – particularly Things Fall Apart. Quotes from his novels and essays come very easily to me.

CHINUA ACHEBE: THE STORYTELLER My frm conviction is that Chinua Achebe knew how to bring a story to life, whether in novels, essays or children’s stories. In my estimation, this is one of his trademarks. In his essays, Achebe makes what could be just another story humorous and vivid. Take the story, for example, of Achebe’s recollection of the magazine cutting, in his parent’s home,

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of the picture of Johnnie Walker with a caption ‘Born in 1820 and still going strong’ and his later discovery that this was an advertisement and his humorously self-confessed sense of personal loss at this fnding. Achebe’s use of stories is layered and this has always captivated me. I think Achebe’s skilful use of stories is partly due to the fact that he wants people to tell their own stories, because he believes that they know themselves in more intimate ways than anybody else and that they bring their own perception to their stories. I would like to emphasise that, through reading Achebe’s novels, I learnt something that he repeats in various ways in his essays: the power of the storyteller. According to Achebe, the storyteller can compel one to see things in one’s own fashion and condition one to think in certain ways. The storyteller has the power to shape the destiny of people, nations and continents; and Achebe believed frmly that centuries of bizarre images of Africa have had severe consequences for the continent. Ever since this dawned on me, I have taken my role as a writer seriously and think that writing, especially creatively, carries great responsibility with it. At one time, brooding over Achebe’s point on the power of stories, I penned the Poem ‘Shifting Stories’. It may not be a particularly powerful poem, but it summarises my fears about not telling or owning one’s own story. Here is the poem, for what it is worth: SHIFTING STORIES Someone will re-write our life And interpret the bare huts We built to shelter our bones. Someone will pin together Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Our suffering telling Clever narratives about Why we bore and brought up These children giving them The stories of our survival. Someone will chant about Why our homesteads were Round like craters Why we were knit Together like the blankets Which keep our blood from Congealing. This life we have lived in earnest Will be twisted into gothic tales. These children we share Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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Will be numbered and separated. Strangers will strive to understand These souls melted into each other. My sister, Our life will stop meaning What it has meant to us Who have fought for sanity Who have combed for roots To charm hunger Who have hidden in jungles To evade the crush of boots. Our breath will become Someone else’s story It will scamper away To create other lives In distant places Unless we whistle the energy Of our melodies into our children For their children.

I think Achebe’s insistence on ‘the right of a people to take back their own narrative’1 has Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

been a prominent motivation for my own writing. I desire to write as if I am holding a conversation with my own kin in such a way that indicates that arguments and disagreements are permitted without anyone dubbing the other a traitor. I think of writing about my people as a way of life and as a growing up process where I may even be chastised, but never broken. I observed while growing up that people accept criticism more readily from people they regard as part of their community than from strangers, although that does not mean that strangers cannot criticise. My people have a saying: ‘The one who beats his own, beats while folding his hands’. This means that one who confronts his own kin will do so with some level of compassion. When I am writing about things I fnd disagreeable about my own folk, I remember one of my high school classmates, Allen. Allen was a little older than the rest of us and a lot bigger physically; she also had some obviously embarrassing shortcomings, but she would proudly say loudly: ‘The fact that I am ugly does not stop me from noticing and commenting on other ugly people’. I want to think that Allen was saying that her shortcomings did not take away her right to a voice, to an opinion and to a space. For example, I think that the fact that I had grown up during times of war in my country and that, in a way, I cannot deny being part of these experiences should not stop Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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me pointing out the ills of confict. The point is that having lived through the experience of war gives me deeper knowledge about it. I would, then, think I would not write about war in the same way as someone who has just heard about it and mythologises about it. I think this was Achebe’s point, an important point, in emphasising ownership of stories, as well as the humanity of the people inhabiting these stories. In another way, Achebe’s including shared stories such as folktales in his work and his giving them a new lease on life in unimagined ways, have left an indelible mark on me. For instance, I can never forget the story of ‘All of You’, in which tortoise’s greediness got him into trouble. I do not know if that story would stand out as sharply in my mind as it does if I had just come across it as an independent folktale and not as a story within the story of the novel Things Fall Apart. Because of Achebe’s use of stories in the oral communal psyche, I fnd that I am attracted to his style sometimes directly and sometimes not so directly. My love for and experiments in using stories from the oral literature of my people, are hugely infuenced by Achebe’s style. I have tried my hand at drawing on the myths, legends and stories told to me at home. One of my poems draws on the Kintu and Nambi myth of the Baganda. It is the story of the origins of the Baganda. I draw on this story in my poem: ‘Tongue Touch Nambi Myth’. TONGUE TOUCH NAMBI MYTH (For Bonnie Shullenberger) Nambi, daughter of God Unfolds the stairway of heaven For a glimpse of a world Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

Away from the elevation of the skies. On earth her eyes lie on a man Who eats dung for food Urine for wine Her eyes repose And the daughter of God lends Vision desire. She creates a language desire She says: There is a banquet in heaven Come my arms will support your fight. Come to where rivers wave waists And hills sit cross-legged Where trees swing yellow fruit Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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And mountains wear snow crowns Where cows have long conversations with swans And streams murmur to gesturing reeds. Come witness the laughter of waterfalls Laughter that dives into rocks And glides over space Spraying souls with dizziness Of freedom and shock of courage. Come, see the mirrors in the stream How they turn faces over Shaping unimaginable possibilities See how they tease you with what you know And make a mark on chances of discovery. The rolling stream is your seeing Your contradictions Like feathers foating in the midriff Of a slithering brook. Come, enter into our heaven And let your cow graze among ours Become part of our being Do not seek to understand our habits

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Venture to know them.

In the original Kintu and Nambi myth, the main point of view is that of the man, Kintu; in this poem I experiment with the main view point being that of the woman, Nambi. In Achebe’s writing, I feel his literary presence in his dexterity in language, his mastery of the mode of storytelling, his precision in imprinting images, in transferring images from the sphere of reality to imagination. The storyteller Achebe so inspires me and in my writing, I am inspired by stories and the use of stories of things I experience or hear about. I believe this is an infuence from Achebe.

ACHEBE’S SENSE OF THE PAST Our defnition of ourselves as African writers will in some inevitable way be infuenced by the wealth and burden of our history. I think Achebe as a writer was so deeply conscious of our pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence histories. He wrote vehemently about these events in his novels and also in his essays. I have been greatly moved by the vibrancy of the rendition of these histories and his struggle to defne what is ours. In a

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way I cannot help but always remember his famous interpretation of the Igbo saying that a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body. I am deeply conscious of Achebe’s consistent argument for a proper sense of history for writers in Africa. I know that some of this history is painful, but I think it is important for a writer to explore history and events of the past in different ways. I think exploration of history forces the writer to think sensitively about the craft of writing and the position and responsibility invested in the act of writing. I think that, as Achebe shows us, knowledge is one of our strongest weapons. I think that Achebe’s ability to reach out to many people is partly because he does not shy away from the events that inform our past. In tackling these issues, Achebe also then deals very delicately with issues of the human condition in a style that is familiar and highly accomplished. In this respect he is a master at humour and irony in his essays and all his work shows that he thinks deeply about things and is not afraid to question matters – even those that may render him vulnerable or unpopular.

ACHEBE AND HIS PROMOTION OF EXPERIMENTATION AND INNOVATION My impression as a young secondary student reading Achebe’s work was that he was a writer who was doing something different from what I was used to. In my view then, Achebe was injecting life into familiar stories by creating unforgettable characters. I thought and also our teacher made us think that Achebe was playing with the English language in a new way, bringing to the language his knowledge of Igbo and the African world view. This was very exciting to me as a young reader. It made me think that Achebe Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

was very powerful and could play linguistic games with ideas, which is something I admire greatly. Perhaps my main point in this refection on this iconic African writer is that he is inspirational and is very infuential in the way I view and see or conceptualise ideas. He has left his stamp on my way of thinking.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Achebe, C., 2000. Home and Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 44.

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TRIBUTE

Chinua Achebe as Literary Infuence A Writer’s Perspective

Nthikeng Mohlele

This is an abridged refection on my panel discussion of the work of Chinua Achebe, how it has moulded, contributed to and, in some ways, defned the African literature canon; and how that canon has a ripple effect on emerging and young writers, like me. My contributions were by no means ‘scholarly’ – in the classical sense of in-depth interrogation and problematising a subject and theoretical concepts that support or discredit it, or indeed deny it conclusive interpretation or autonomy. I cannot, however, ignore the fact that my academic training and exposure have been heavily tilted in favour of the arts – specifcally in performance art and African literature. It was within this framework that I encountered the works of Chinua Achebe as a novelist – most notably through titles such as Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and Anthills of the Savannah. This encounter can be summed up as follows: frst and foremost the discovery of Achebe as a writer, then an essayist, and much later, as a poet. Looking back and refecting on my early encounters with Achebe as a student of Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

literature, and later, a practitioner (as a writer classifed as ‘African’) interesting connections become apparent. Viewed from an artistic (and therefore creative) prism, my attempts at analytical engagement with Achebe demanded that I frame my interrogation and refection, namely how Achebe has infuenced me as a young writer concerned about post-apartheid South Africa narratives, through all Achebe’s multiple identities: as writer, critical thinker/social commentator, and poet. Fusing Achebe’s multiple personas produced interesting and sometimes unsettling conclusions. The conclusions I made, which are personal and evolving in nature, are channelled through the fact that I too currently interact with literature as a contributing writer. As much as some of Achebe’s much-repeated and studied concepts are buried in the creative sub-conscious, questions arise in terms of: (1) historical context and passage of time; (2) critical and interpretative tension inherent in scholarship; and (3) the immediacy of Chinua Achebe as a creative reference point. In brief, considerable time – both historical time and cultural production time – has elapsed since Achebe came to international attention. The passage of time has brought with it much commentary on Achebe’s views on issues such as the complexity of African identities and the colonial idiom or paradigm, as well as language and culture, and issues Chinua Achebe's Legacy : Illuminations from Africa, edited by James Ogude, Africa Institute of South Africa, 2015. ProQuest Ebook

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of governance and accountability in African post-colonial states. These have been in support of his views or seemingly contradictory. My view is that, what emerges from the combination of the passage of historical time and the growing body of scholarship around Achebe as a writer and theorist (including Achebe’s own growing and evolving body of work), has implications for him being seen as a creative reference point. The focus of my panel discussion was therefore guided by points one through three in the preceding paragraph. The thrust of my refection being that my primary reading on Achebe, essentially, what I think of his him as an artist and thinker, how he consciously or subconsciously infuences my thinking and creative writing, is in many ways a rediscovery of Achebe through his contemporaries. On my panel was such a kindred spirit to Achebe, Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s Poet Laureate – one of my literature mentors who had frsthand contact and literary refections with Chinua. Some of the most important lessons I learnt from Professor Kgositsile about the ideological and technical secrets to writing, are musings between Professor Kgositsile and Achebe. This speaks to the three earlier points, to do with passage of time, evolution of literary theories, and how immediate Achebe’s teachings are to a writer writing in the South Africa of 2014, as opposed to important Achebesque theoretical registers of the 1950s for instance – a pre-information age, totally at odds with my historical and cultural context. I imagine that the lessons I have learnt from Achebe via Professor Kgositsile, a respected scholar in his own right, have over time been undoubtedly recoined and reinterpreted, no doubt subjected to my own social context. How I pass them on to writers younger than I means two things: frstly, that the ideas will still have traces or roots of Achebe’s intellectual thoughts, and secondly, that these thoughts will be subjected to a rapidly changing cultural landscape, that is made up of Copyright © 2015. Africa Institute of South Africa. All rights reserved.

a culture, global in nature and less prejudiced (anti-colonial, anti- racism, intellectually inclusive) in temperament. What Achebe has done for African literature and the recalibration of how the West viewed Africa with its art, its belief systems, its contradictions, is immense. He has been part of those who have defned and carved out its space in the community of world cultures. And yet the ‘Father of African Literature’, as he is often referred to, only penetrated my creative axis in a more profound way because I became privy to informal anecdotes that humanised him – demystifed him as the high priest of African literature, as it were. The anecdotes also gave a comparative perspective between the Nigeria and world of 1958 and the South Africa of today. This was so deceptive in that, though Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, its subject matter pre-dates in publication timeframe – dealing with the pre-colonial virtues and contradictions of African (Igbo) societies. In closing, Achebe’s body of work, its interpretations by scholars and literary practitioners instruct a timeless, yet robust, perspective in writing and representation of the African continent and its peoples. More importantly though, its embrace of art from multiple social contexts, even from the former ‘colonial masters’ – if these have artistic integrity – produces an aesthetic resonance. Two small examples that illustrate this point 157

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are Achebe’s admiration of the poetry of Irishman William Yeats; and his irritation with racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This, for me, makes engagement with, and interpretation of, Achebe’s work as an art practioner, teacher and theorist, multi-pronged and multi-disciplinary, in that his views cannot be restricted to the literary sphere. Instead they echo the spaces of politics and governance, sociology, history, academia and

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draw from these depending on the thematic preoccupations of the artists.

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Index 419 scam, 74, 81, 82, 84

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A Abani, Chris, 50, 56–57, 59 Song for Night, 56, 57 Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 75 Abrahams, Peter, 1 A Wreath for Udomo, 1 Achebe, Chinua, 51, 62, 96 accident and injury, 132 African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and The Arrow of God, 85 ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, 76 Anthills of the Savannah, ii, x, 8, 10, 61, 63, 64, 66, 70, 141, 156 Arrow of God, 11, 16, 20–22, 25, 26, 63, 85, 88, 92, 95, 106, 128–30, 142, 156 ‘Colonialist Criticism’, 3 death in exile, 131–32, 134 as editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, ii, viii, 52 The Education of a British-Protected Child, 16, 31, 43 as exile and migrant, 123, 131–34, 137n75 Girls at War and Other Stories, 36 Home and Exile, 96, 130, 131 Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987, 3 ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”’, 3 A Man of the People, 8, 10, 30, 95, 147 Le monde s’effondre (Things Fall Apart), 146 Morning Yet on Creation Day, 147 No Longer at Ease, ix, 8, 43, 126–28, 147 ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, ii, 3, 12, 18 objective, ii and patriotism, 8

as publisher of The Citadel Press, 40n35, 53 ‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’, 18 on the ‘savage’, 75 on story-telling, 70 There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, 9, 30, 32, 35, 38, 39n11, 50, 51–52, 54, 56 Things Fall Apart, ii, vii, ix, 1, 10, 16, 19–20, 32, 43, 51, 52, 74, 75, 77, 80, 92, 93, 95, 106, 124–27, 139, 145, 150, 153, 156, 157 1971 motion picture, 110 1986 screen adaptation of, 107, 110–16 The Trouble with Nigeria, 5, 12, 66, 132, 148-49 ‘The Truth of Fiction’, 4, 13 use of the English language, ix Adesanmi, Pius, 76 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 32, 36, 37, 50, 51, 56–59, 62, 74, 96 Half of a Yellow Sun, 56, 57–58 Purple Hibiscus, 74, 76–81 ‘We Remember Differently’, 58 Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (Dowden), 38 Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Chabal & Daloz), 84 African cosmopolitanism, 42, 43–44 African development, 133–34 China’s investment in, 134 The African Image (Mphahlele), 3 African National Congress, 1 African Renaissance, 5 African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and The Arrow of God (Achebe), 85 African Union (AU), 121 ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ (Achebe), 76 Ahiara Declaration, 37

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Index

Aidoo, Ama Ata, ii Akers, Diana, 106 Alison-Madueke, Diezani, 34 Amish, 43 Amuta, Chidi, 54, 106 Anderson, Benedict, ix, 55 Andrade, Susan, 58 Anthills of the Savannah (Achebe), ii, x, 8, 10, 61, 63, 64, 66, 70, 141, 156 apartheid, vii, 7, 8, 9 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 43 Aristotle, 82 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 62 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, 69 Arrow of God (Achebe), 11, 16, 20–22, 25, 26, 63, 85, 88, 92, 95, 106, 128–30, 142, 156 Arrows of Rain (Ndibe), 63–70, 71–72 Ashcroft, Bill, 122

B

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Babangida, Ibrahim, 77 Baker, Houston Jr., 55 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81 The Dialogical Imagination, 61 Baldwin, James, 93, 103–4, 131–32 ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown’, 3 Go Tell it on the Mountain, 93 ‘Notes of a Native Son’, 93 Bard College, 133, 134 The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Armah), 69 Begam, Richard, 106, 115 Benhabib, Seyla, 43 Bergson, Henri, 82 Bhabha, Homi, 87, 124 Biafran war, 31–32, 38n7, 39n13 memory of, 50, 53, 54–59 The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria (Gould), 31, 33, 36, 38 The Bible, 140–41 Bight of Biafra, 37 p’Bitek, Okot, Song of Lawino, ix Song of Ocol, ix Black Atlantic, 121, 122, 123 Boehmer, Elleke, 43

Boko Haram, 39n11, 50, 149 Booker, Keith, 52 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 18 Brown University, 134 Bryce, Jane, 56 Buhari, Muhammadu, 77 The Burden of Memory (Soyinka), 53 Burning Grass (Ekwesi), ix Busia, Abena, 51

C Caruth, Cathy, 53 Cary, Joyce Mister Johnson, 75 Chabal, Patrick, 84 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 27 ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifce of History’, 29n29 Chambers, Ian, 122 Chandaria, Manu, 34 Chinua Achebe (Innes), 52 Chinua Achebe Centre, Bard College, 37 Chinua Achebe Memorial Symposium, University of Pretoria, ii, vii, 116, 137n75 Chinua Achebe: Tributes and Refections (Ayebia Clarke & Currey), 58 Chinweizu, 4 Chirundu (Mphahlele), 1 Chukwumerije, Uche, 38 Clausen, Bianca, 133 colonialism, vii, viii, 3, 8, 17, 20, 26, 35, 44, 45, 46, 52, 75–77, 84, 85, 87, 108, 109, 116, 125, 127, 131, 138–39, 143, 147 ‘Colonialist Criticism’ (Achebe), 3 Comaroff, John and Jean, 32, 34 Conference of African Writers of English Expression, Makerere 1962, 76 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 158 Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Scott), 17 corruption, 6, 11, 62, 84, 127, 133 cosmopolitanism, 42–43, 118, 120–21 ‘The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’ (Irele), 22 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 35

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D Daloz, Jean-Pascal, 84 Dangote, Aliko, 34 Darker than Blue (Gilroy), 41 David Copperfeld (Dickens), ix Devil on the Cross (Ngugi), 83 The Dialogical Imagination (Bakhtin), 61 diaspora, 118, 121–22 African, 121, 123 Dickens, Charles David Copperfeld, ix Oliver Twist, ix Dirlik, Arif, 42 Dowden, Richard Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, 38 du Bois, W.E.B., 96 Dunton, Chris, 76 Durban International Film Festival, 6

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E East African Examination Council, ix Edochie, Pete, 107, 108 The Education of a British-Protected Child (Achebe), 16, 31, 43 Eghagha, Hope, 64 Ekeh, Peter, 26 Ekwesi, Cyprian Burning Grass, ix Equiano, Olaudah, 46 Erdal, Bivandy, 120 exile (see migration and exile) Ezenwa-Ohaeto, 52, 53 ‘Ezeulu as World Historical Figure: Preliminary Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God’ (Irele), 22

F Fabian, Johannes Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, 26 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 9, 62, 95 ‘On National Culture’, 17 ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, 7, 75 The Wretched of the Earth, 15n26, 15n38

Far from my Father (Tadjo), 148 ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown’ (Baldwin), 3 Fischer, Ernst The Necessity of Art, 13 Forsyth, Frederick, 30 Francis, Oladele, 110 Frassinelli, P., 42 Freisen, Alan, 115 Funki Dreds, 121

G Games Women Play (flm), 122 Ghana Must Go (Selasi), 92–96, 100–103 Giannetti, Louis, 112 Gikandi, Simon, viii, 20, 51, 52, 61, 70, 71, 72, 95, 96, 97, 123, 143, 145–46 ‘Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality’, 96 Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction, 143 Gilroy, Paul, 121 Darker than Blue, 41 Girls at War and Other Stories (Achebe), 36 Glissant, Édouard, 45 globalisation, 96–97 ‘Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality’ (Gikandi), 96, 97 Go Tell it on the Mountain (Baldwin), 93 Gomba, Obari, 107, 111 Gould, Michael, 36 The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria, 31, 33, 36, 38 Gowon, Yakubu, 36, 37, 62 Gqola, Pumla Dineo, 65 Gross, Josh, 112

H Habermas, Jürgen, 42 Habila, Helon, 59 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie), 56, 57–58 Halliwell, Martin, 131 Hawley, John, 56, 77 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 158 Heinemann African Writers Series, ii, viii, 52 Hirsch, Marianne, 50, 56 Hoffmann-Nowotny, Hans-Joachim, 123

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Hofmeyr, Isabel, 46 Holocaust, 55 Holquist, Michael, 61 Home and Exile (Achebe), 96, 130, 131 Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987 (Achebe), 3 The House of Hunger (Marechera), 67 How to Read the Air (Mengestu), 92– 96, 97–100 Hozaume, Paul, vii Hutcheon, Linda, 61

I

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I Do Not Come to You by Chance (Nwaubani), 74, 81–88 ICC (see International Criminal Court) Ifeajuna Manuscript, 40n35 Igbo culture, 11, 44, 143 marginalisation of, 38 massacre of, 32 ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”’ (Achebe), 3 In the Line of Fire (flm), 122 Indaba (newspaper), 3 Innes, Catherine Lynette Chinua Achebe, 52 International Criminal Court (ICC), 33, 34–35 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 133 Irele, Abiola, 106, 142 ‘The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’, 22 ‘Ezeulu as World Historical Figure: Preliminary Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God’, 22 Iweala, Uzodinma, 59 Izevbaye, Dan, 127

J James, C.L.R., 41, 43 Jenkins, Henry, 111 Jonathan, Goodluck, 34 Jordan, J.C., vii Jubilee coalition (Kenya), 33 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), ix

K Kenya 2013 elections, 33 Supreme Court judgement on, 33–34 oil and mineral wealth, 34–35 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 33 Kgositsile, Keorapetse, 157 Kibaki, Mwai, 33 Kiguli, Susan Nalugwa ‘Shifting Stories’ (poem), 151 ‘Tongue Touch Nambi Myth’ (poem), 153 King, Martin Luther Jr., 44 Kipling, Rudyard, 131 Kirk-Greene, Anthony, 36 Kittony, Kiprono, 34 Kongi’s Harvest (Soyinka), ix

L La Guma, Alex, ii Lamming, George, 9 Land Without Thunder (Ogots), ix Larkin, Brian, 84 laughter, 74, 81, 82, 84, 86, 89 Lazarus, Neil, 42 Nationalism and Culture in the Postcolonial World, 35 Li Keqiang, 35 Lindfors, Bernth, 52 Lindsay, Lisa A., 93 The Lion and the Jewel (Soyinka), ix local cosmopolitanism, 42–43 Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela), 5 Lugard, Frederick, 31, 50

M Madonsela, Thuli, 6 Mamdani, Mahmood, 26, 40n29 The Man Died (Soyinka), 62 A Man of the People (Achebe), 8, 10, 30, 95, 147 Mandela, Nelson, 5, 12 Long Walk to Freedom, 5 No Easy Walk to Freedom, ii Maran, René, vii Marechera, Dambudzo

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Index The House of Hunger, 67 Marx, Karl, 2 Maseko, Lindiwe, 7 Mau Mau war, 35 Mbachu, Dulue, 59 Mbeki, Thabo, 5, 7 Mbembe, Achille, 74, 83 ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, 82 McGlothlin, Erin, 56 McLuckie, Craig, 54 Mda, Zakes We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, 1 memory, 61, 65, 141 (see also Biafran war) Mengestu, Dinaw, 92 How to Read the Air, 92–96, 97–100 Mhudi (Plaatje), 2, 3, 138–40 Miescher, Stephan, 93 migrancy 95, 96, 97, 122–23, 125, 130–31, 134, (see also migration and exile) migration and exile, 118–24, 127, 130–31, 133–34 Mister Johnson (Cary), 75 Mofolo, Thomas, vii, 1 Le monde s’effondre (Things Fall Apart) (Achebe), 146 Morning Yet on Creation Day (Achebe), 147 Morrison, Toni, 65 Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), 37 Mphahlele, Es’kia, 1 The African Image, 3 Chirundu, 1 The Wanderers, 1 Mqhayi, S.E.K., 5 Mthetwa, Nathi, 7 Muholi, Zanele, 6 Murray, Bret, 6 Muthambi, Faith, 7 Mutua, Eric, 33

N The National Alliance (Kenya), 33 Nationalism and Culture in the Postcolonial World (Lazarus), 35 Native Land Act of 1913 (South Africa), 140 Ndebele, Njabulo, 3

Ndibe, Okey, 62, 64, 68 on Achebe, 73n15 Arrows of Rain, 63–70, 71–72 The Necessity of Art (Fischer), 13 neo-colonialism, 1, 8, 9, 96 Newell, Stephanie, 42, 43 Ngara, Emmanuel, 52 Ngate, Jonathan, 86 Ngugi revolution, ix Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ii, 62 Devil on the Cross, 83 Nichols, Charles H., 87 Nigeria dictatorship, 77 economic mismanagement by military regimes, 132 failure of leadership, 149 independence and end of British colonial rule, 31 Indigenisation Act, 106, 117n3 scamming in, 84 state violence and corruption in, 64 Supreme Court election decisions, 2003 and 2007, 34 Western education in, 31 Nigeria-Kenya Chamber of Commerce, 34 Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), 106, 107 Nkandla, 6 Nnawuihe, Gabriel, 108 Nnoromele, Patrick, 106, 115 No Easy Walk to Freedom (Mandela), ii No Longer at Ease (Achebe), ix, 8, 43, 126–28, 147 Nollywood, 106, 107, 110, 122 nomadism, 118–19 Nord, Deborah, 67 ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (Baldwin), 93 ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ (Achebe), ii, 3, 12, 18 Nussbaum, Martha, 42 Nwaubani, Adaobi Tricia, 74 I Do Not Come to You by Chance, 74, 81–88

O ‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection’ (Scott), 18

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Index

Odinga, Raila, 33 Oeppen, Cen, 120 Of Good Report (flm), 6 Ofeimun, Odia, 33, 36 Ogots, Grace Land Without Thunder, ix Ogude, James, 43 Oguibe, Olu, 40n30 Ojukwu, Emeka, 36, 37 Okigbo, Christopher, ii, 37 , 53, 54 Ola, Virginia, 95 Olaniyan, Tejumola, 86 Oliver Twist (Dickens), ix ‘On National Culture’ (Fanon), 17 Onuekwusi, Jasper, 92 Onyedibia, Adiela, 107 Orange Democratic Movement (Kenya), 33 Orere, David, 107 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 46 Osundare, Niyi, 69 Ouma, C.E.W., 78, 80, 129 Ousmane, Sembene, 62

P

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Palmer, Eustace, 106 Pan-Africanism, ix Party of National Unity (Kenya), 33 ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ (Fanon), 7, 75 Plaatje, Sol, vii, viii, 1, 4, 138–41 Mhudi (Plaatje), 2, 3, 138–40 Pohland, Hans Jurgen, 110 Premium Times, 58 Présence Africaine, 146 ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’ (Mbembe), 82 Purple Hibiscus (Adichie), 74, 76–81

Q Quayson, Ato, 86, 124, 138, 139 Qubeka, Jahmil X.T., 6 Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifce (Tadjo), 147

R Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and

Ideology in Fiction (Gikandi), 143 Red Terror (Ethiopia), 93 Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Scott), 18 Robert, Shaaban, vii Robertson, James, 31 Rogers, Philip, 126 ‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’ (Achebe), 18 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), ix Rose, Jacqueline, 2 Royal Niger Company, 39n18 Rushdie, Salman, 30, 124 Ruto, William, 33

S SABC (see South African Broadcasting Corporation) Said, Edward, 20, 71, 118, 122, 124, 139 Culture and Imperialism, 35 Saul, Mahir, 112 Scott, David Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 17 ‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection’, 18 Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, 18 Sechuana folk tales and oral tradition, 138–41 Selasi, Taiye, 92 Ghana Must Go, 92–96, 100–103 Shakespeare, William, 140–41 Julius Caesar, ix Romeo and Juliet, ix Shaw, George, 119 Shell Oil Company, 33 ‘Shifting Stories’ (poem) (Kiguli), 151 slavery, 3, 46, 52, 88, 123, 131 Smith, Frances, 110 Soga, Tiyo, 3 Song for Night (Abani), 56, 57 Song of Lawino (p’Bitek), ix Song of Ocol (p’Bitek), ix South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), 7 South African Native National Congress, 1, 5 Soyinka, Wole, 62, 132

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Index The Burden of Memory, 53 Kongi’s Harvest, ix The Lion and the Jewel, ix The Man Died, 62 Stewart, Susan, 55, 56 Stratton, Florence, 80 Sunday Independent, 146

U

T

V

Tadjo, Veronique, 137n75 Far from my Father, 148 Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifce, 147 Teshome, Gabriel, 111, 115 There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (Achebe), 9, 30, 32, 35, 38, 39n11, 50, 51–52, 54, 56 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), ii, vii, ix, 1, 10, 16, 19–20, 32, 43, 51, 52, 74, 75, 77, 80, 92, 93, 95, 106, 124–27, 139, 145, 150, 153, 156, 157 1971 motion picture, 110 1986 screen adaptation of, 107, 110–16 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (Fabian), 26 To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire (Whitman), 1 ‘Tongue Touch Nambi Myth’ (poem) (Kiguli), 153 transnationalism, 118, 119–20 The Trouble with Nigeria (Achebe), 5, 12, 66, 132, 148-49 ‘The Truth of Fiction’ (Achebe), 4, 13 Tunca, Daria, 77 Tutuola, Amos, vii, viii

United Nations (UN) Security Council, 35 United Republican Party (Kenya), 33 Université Nationale de Côte d’Ivoire (National University of Ivory Coast) , 147 University of Biafra, 57 University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 57

Verhagen, Marcus, 119 Voges, Jessica, 82

W Wacquant, Loic, 121 Wainaina, Binyavanga, 37 The Wanderers (Mphahlele), 1 Warah, Rasna, 34 Watson, D., 42 ‘We Remember Differently’ (Adichie), 58 We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (Mda), 1 West, Richard, 33 Whitman, Walt To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire, 1 A Wreath for Udomo (Abrahams), 1 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 15n26, 15n38

X Xingwana, Lulu, 6

Y Yeats, William, 158 Young, James E., 54

Z Zuma, Jacob, 6

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