Showing posts with label Sara Constantakis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sara Constantakis. Show all posts

Friday, June 23, 2017

Swan Song Of The Iroko: The Life, Time And Works Of Chinua Achebe: The Lessons For Nigeria

By Professor Umelo Ojinmah

(Paper presented at the Memorial Symposium in Honour of Professor Chinua Achebe by Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) on 20 May 2013 at International Conference Centre, Abuja)
*Chinua Achebe 

 Preamble
There are few writers that their lives and works have been studied as much as Achebe’s. His novels, especially, Things Fall Apart is standard reading in many high schools in America and Europe, including Germany, and all over Africa and Asia. I know that my work on Achebe was excerpted and is used in a text, Novels for Students Vol. 33 Ed. Sara Constantakis (2010) for high school students in America

Most of us here have critiqued one of Achebe’s work or the other.  Achebe has influenced writers from all over the world – Europe, America, Australia, and Asia. The New Zealand Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera, acknowledges that he was influenced by Chinua Achebe. He became one of the most famous indigenous writers of the Maori nation and has, himself, influenced a new generation of Maori writers. As editor of the African Writers Series, Achebe edited and mentored a host of African Writers including Ngugi Wa Thiong’0.  Elechi Amadi in a recent interview accepted as much, that they all were influenced by Achebe, which is one of the reasons he is seen as the father of African Literature. Growing up, many of us never knew how books are made. For us, Shakespeare was that nebulous but wonderful writer who weaved magic with words that our teachers asked us to memorise. It was Achebe that made us realise that writers were flesh and blood like us; that is what Achebe did for so many people, bringing literature to life and kindling our interest in writing.

 I: Life and Time 
When  Karl Maier’s This House has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis was published in 2000 there was the usual hue and cry by Nigeria’s elites and politicians on what they saw as the denigration of the Nigerian state. Coming seventeen years after the publication of Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria  (1983) it was amazing that despite the obvious kleptocracies of those at  leadership positions at both state and national levels that have stunted development of the Nigerian state, people still shouted themselves hoarse about the conclusion of Karl Maier’s This House has Fallen. A conclusion that Chinua Achebe had drawn and foretold seventeen years earlier. 

Although this paper celebrates the life and achievements of Chinua Achebe, as a writer and social critic, in the light of the furore generated by There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra and the level of discourse that it has precipitated, I was tempted to jump into the fray, but I quickly realised that what was happening was, in fact, what Chinua Achebe wanted. To draw attention to those issues raised, debate them, criticize them, but definitely not ignore them or sweep them under the carpet). Chinedu Aroh writes that “Achebe … feels the forty-two years the book took him to release shows the seriousness therein. According to Pourhamrang Achebe ‘had to find the right vehicle that could “carry our anguish, our sorrow ... the scale of dislocation and destruction ... our collective pain’’’ (cited in NewsRays, 2012, 40). 

The only sad note, particularly for Achebe scholars, is that the people who should be debating these issues are not; the leaders and government functionaries whose actions impact on the lives of the citizens. For it is for such people that There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra was written, so that we do not continue to play the ostrich as a nation. Achebe’s death has brought out all manner of critics and pseudo-critics. Recently, Odia Ofeimun, in his interview with Ademola Adegbamigbe and Nehru Odeh, under the guise of reacting to Chinua  Achebe’s  There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra took a hefty swipe at The Trouble with Nigeria thirty years after its publication claiming that:
We loved him so much for what he wrote that we hardly ever challenged some of the most contentious positions in his novels and in his non-fiction writings. Achebe said many things that are thoroughly wrong and that we ought to have contested very sharply and strongly.

Ofeimun states that “The trouble with Nigeria is not just bad leadership. That is the first bad point” yet by the time he had summed up Awolowo’s credentials he said “Now, it is good never to forget that what saved Awolowo was not just leadership….” Basic English lesson teaches us that when you use expressions such as “…was not just…” it presupposes that leadership is NOT excluded but included. Of course, it also means that there are other things that make up the qualities being advocated but the important thing is the acknowledgement that leadership is included.