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.
