Chinua Achebe’s Unrelenting Feminist Critics

*Chinua Achebe

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 

Recently, I was at a forum put together to celebrate the work of Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s widely read authors who is universally regarded as the father and rallying point of African Literature. As the speeches flowed and the ovations sounded, I could feel the depth of admiration in the various speakers for Achebe and his work.  The whole thing was moving on well until one lady came up with elaborate praise for Achebe for the significant “improvement” his female characters achieved in Anthills Of the Savannah, unlike what obtained in Things Fall Apart, his first novel, which is globally acknowledged as a classic, and which now exists in more than fifty major languages.

 

 Now, I would easily have ignored and quickly forgotten this comment as “one of those things” one was bound to hear in a “mixed crowd” if I had not also heard similar thoughts brazenly expressed by some female scholars whom I thought should be better informed. 

For instance, I was at a lecture in Port Harcourt some years ago when a female professor of literature announced with the excitement of someone who had just discovered another earth: When Achebe created his earlier female characters, she said,  they complained; then he responded by giving them Clara (in No Longer At Ease), they still complained; then he gave them Eunice (in A Man Of The People) and they still asked for more; and then he gave them Beatrice (in Anthills Of The Savannah)! 

Unfortunately, I have encountered thoughts even more pedestrian than this flaunted by several scholars and readers alike.

Honestly, I had thought that this matter had long been resolved and forgotten. It should be clear (and I should think that this has been sufficiently stressed) that whatever perceived differences in the various female characters created by Achebe are a function of the prevailing realities in the different settings and periods that produced them, and Achebe’s ability to record those realties so accurately should not be construed to mean that he also “celebrates” them (as some critics have wrongly imputed) or advocates their sustenance.

In his lecture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, specially slated to precede the very memorable Eagle On Iroko Symposium organized to mark Achebe’s sixtieth birthday in 1990, Prof Dan Izevbaye described Achebe as “history’s eyewitness,” and I easily agree with him.

Today Achebe is being widely hailed for using his first novel, Things Fall Apart, to change the distorted images of Africa celebrated in the heaps of mostly concocted historical and literary accounts about the continent and its people by mostly Western writers. But Achebe did not see any wisdom in countering these distortions with his own distortions. He merely presented reality with both its glowing and unedifying sides with exceptional insight, penetration and grasp of the real picture which the foreigner, whose impressions were mostly coloured by many years of deep-seated prejudices, was incapable of capturing.

It is a credit to Achebe’s mastery of his art that even though his readers might be shocked, for instance, at the bloodcurdling murder of Ikemefuna (which every sane person should find overly revolting), they would still find it nearly impossible to categorize the incident as  one more evidence of savage pleasure of the native in wanton bloodletting. The reader is able to see an Okonkwo with genuine human feelings that are even more appealing than those of the white man who was attempting to “civilize” him, but who would have no qualms wiping out an entire community, as happened in Abame!

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 

Indeed, no sane person would endorse any religious observances that prescribe human sacrifices, but the reader would most likely catch himself empathizing with a highly traumatized and sorrowful Okonkwo who had killed the boy as a national duty prescribed by the deity he and his people believed in and worshipped at that time. Our dilemma is compounded when we see that the same community that sacrificed Ikemefuna would later banish Okonkwo for accidentally killing a man with his gun during the funeral ceremony of a great, titled man. 

That is the reality of that era. And so, when Achebe also records reality as it pertained to gender placement in Okonkwo’s time, he is only playing effectively his role as “history’s eye-witness.” Maybe, the under-informed feminists and their naïve sympathizers would have been happier if he had recreated Okonkwo’s community to suit their notions and expectations, and in effect become guilty of the same charges of distortions that have trailed colonialist portrayals of Africa in many works. We seem to forget, at times, that Achebe was writing like someone who was part of that society and not some foreign observer desperate to ‘confirm’ some preconceived notions. Umuofia was a society in transition, and the author was able to capture the prevailing mood of the time, instead of imposing on it his own idea of how the society should be.  

I agree with Professor Ian Watts in his book, The Rise Of The Novel, that there must be “a correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates.” I wonder what kind of novel Achebe would have produced if he had made a couple of women sit with the elders of Umuofia to deliberate on the banishment of Okonkwo, or even the killing of Ikemefuna. Granted, that would have earned him the boundless admiration of certain feminists, but the novel would have been unrecognizable to anyone familiar with the subsisting features in the Igbo traditional environment in the periods that Things Fall Apart or Arrow Of God were set.

But despite the acclaimed “emancipation” and “empowerment” Chinua Achebe’s later female characters were even said to have achieved, some murmurs of dissatisfaction could still be heard in some feminized critical circles. 

In a review of Anthills Of The Savannah in the journal, OKIKE (No 30: 1990), for instance , Prof Ifi Amadiume blames Achebe and his novel for failing or refusing to give “women power” insisting that the female characters in the book are still existing to “service” the  men. But she appears to overstate her case when she alleges that Ikem, one of the principal characters in the novel, despite being a “great poet, great journalist and nationalist” could “at a personal level” still stoop so low to “sexually exploit a grassroots girl.”

Now, what my reading of the novel showed, however (that is, if we read the same book – Achebe’s Anthills Of The Savannah), is that Ikem was very proud of Elewa and his relationship with her, taking her to social meetings with his highly placed and educated friends, including an expatriate administrator of the nation’s General Hospital and a visiting British editor of a poetry journal. In fact, during a lecture he gave at the University of Bassa, Ikem proudly announced Elewa’s mother as his future mother-in-law. He also did not forget to inform his audience that his fiancée’s mother was a market woman, a petty trader at Gelegele Market.

Now, while not endorsing Ikem’s lifestyle (since I strongly disapprove of pre-marital sex, which I would like to call by its proper name, sexual immorality), I fail to see a case of sexual exploitation here. Ikem was genuinely in a flourishing relationship with a lady he wanted to settle down with. How they eventually choose to spend the night — in the same or in different rooms — should not be the concern of any nosey feminist. 

From all indications, Elewa and Ikem were happy in that relationship, and that was all that mattered. There is never ever a perfect union, but people have been able by sacrifices, forbearance and accommodations of each other’s faults and weaknesses, where love is alive and well, to make the best of many relationships and live happily ever after. So, the little matter of Ikem insisting that they would not spend the night together (which, by the way, was the only point of disagreement between them) is something that can be resolved in the life of the relationship, and I wonder why that should be the headache of any third party?

And what is all this noise about “servicing the men” in actions that are purely consensual and mutually pleasurable to both parties who are also adults? Now, even if His Excellency were removed from office and replaced with a Beatrice (BB) as President of the Republic of Kangan, would that have automatically excused her from or elevated her above whatever obligations she had discharged to Chris (and vice-versa) before her status changed? Can it be said in all honesty that BB was subjugated in the novel? Is her character not real?  Assuming the nation was not under military rule, which was an aberration, were there any impediments before BB barring her from aspiring to very high political offices?

Again, wasn’t a strong point also made by the fact that Elewa, despite her poor background and almost no education had no complexes whatsoever socializing with the society’s elite, whether she was able to follow in the discussions or not? No doubt, Achebe could have just changed his story and made Elewa possess a doctorate degree, but can anyone say that the status the author gave her in the novel made her less than real? Are there no uneducated men in the book, like Briamoh and the taxi drivers? Certainly, the creative enterprise would yield only boring works if all novels and plays are stampeded into adopting one predictable, feminized pattern.

Now, it is all this insistence by feminists on prescribing strict codes of conducts to govern couples in the privacy of their homes that most people find very unacceptable, if not exasperating. Many women who had uncritically swallowed those ‘great rules and regulations’, and had attempted to implement them in their homes, mainly to underline the fact that they have now been “liberated and empowered,” even when there were no situations in their homes that called for such brazen show of ‘girl-power,’ are today without even any stable homes from where to flaunt their wonderful empowerment. Their marriages have since crashed, leaving them out in the cold, sad and lonely.

Only the truthful among them (like the ‘liberated’ Nigerian actress who not long ago was screaming all over the place when her husband left her) would confess that their daily menu ever since have remained regrets and more regrets. This is the point late Professor Zulu Sofola most brilliantly underlined in her play, Sweet Trap.  

If Ikem was battering Elewa or sneaking her into his house only when his friends would not observe, then Ms. Amadiume would have had a point. But instead of praising Ikem, a nationally celebrated journalist, upper drawer writer and poet, for proposing to marry a barely literate girl like Elewa, Prof Amadiume, would rather ‘batter’ him, having found him guilty of an offence he did not even dream of committing. Men then do not hold the monopoly on battering, after all! 

Now, let’s return to the issue of “giving women power”. I doubt if any novel, or indeed, any book, can boast of the capacity to just take hold of power — political, social or economic — and hand it over to women? That seems to be what female critics are asking for, but as would be seen later, their attempts to compel their own books to do this with indecent haste have unleashed on all of us grotesque creative works, with characters, settings and incidents that are so gratuitously padded with several outlandish details and extreme exaggerations, that their stories simply lose their abilities to be true. As a result, many of them have served us with excellent demonstrations of how fiction should not be written.

But a writer can choose to make some projections, depending on his thrust, and point the way forward. In Anthills Of The Savannah, Beatrice was the only character who was able to look the dreaded His Excellency, the very maximum ruler before whom all the men cringed, in the face and tell him some home truth. While not in any way endorsing what she chose to do to get His Excellency to listen to her, but she has taken the first step forward and dared the tiger. Others can now improve on her effort and tactics. 

So, whatever power women (or anyone for that matter) would acquire would largely be the outcome of their own conscious effort. And this would clearly be reflected in the literary works that would appear at that period. But care must be taken to ensure that art is not sacrificed on the altar of advocacy. Propaganda is important, but so also is art.  And like Achebe has warned, virtually all art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.

In this vein, therefore, Katherine Frank has raised very important questions in her article, “Women Without Men: Feminist Novel in Africa,” (African Literature Today No 15):

“How are we to judge a work which we find politically admirable and true but aesthetically simplistic, empty or boring? What do we make of characters whose credos and pronouncements we endorse but whose human reality we find negligible? … If the writing is inferior, the book becomes a tract and there are far more efficient and effective ways of spreading an ideology than by novels…”

As the first published female novelist from Nigeria, Flora Nwapa’s objective was to hurriedly “empower” her female characters and place them above the male ones. But in doing this, as evident in her novel, Efuru and the others, she featured ‘liberated’, empowered and highly assertive female characters in a society peopled by mostly weak, grossly irresponsible, non-innovative, non-enterprising, in fact, emasculated men. Art and realism suffered so that ideology and advocacy might thrive. 

Is Nwapa saying in effect that women are incapable of competing with men that are equally endowed and so can only excel and attain some prominence in an environment inhabited by mostly emasculated men or, in fact, outright imbeciles? How then can success be celebrated when the supposed winner is spared any form of competition? Or like, she demonstrated in One Is Enough, must women become morally irresponsible and hawk their bodies (to the same men they intend to demonstrate they are superior to) to make it in society?  There is a huge irony here which neither Nwapa nor the majority of female writers that she inspired saw the need to resolve. Certainly, no decent person would embrace a “liberated” character like Amaka in Nwapa’s One Is Enough, who after a misunderstanding with her husband, abandons her home, and relocates to Lagos to “fully realize herself” by  excelling as men’s plaything in the city of Lagos.

Maybe, Nwapa wanted to use the character of Amaka to give full expression to the unwholesome doctrine so eloquently promoted by the Egyptian feminist writer, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, in her book, Woman At Point Zero. Said Saadawi:

“A woman’s life is always miserable.  A prostitute, however, is a little better off… All women are prostitutes of one kind or another… the lowest paid body is that of a wife…  A successful prostitute (is) better than a misled saint… Marriage [is] the system built on the most cruel suffering for women.”

(Woman At Point Zero, London &New York: Zed Books, 1983, pp.114, 117,111)

Ironically, this same Saadawi married her third partner in 1964 and for about forty years, they lived together.

Although some female scholars have made the case that feminism is not monolithic, I keep thinking that they have a responsibility to help us draw a clear boundary between female assertiveness and female extremism, because from what I can see out there, definitions of feminism are mostly situational, and most of the time solely dependent on the mood and peculiar cravings or experiences of the particular woman defining it at any given time. 

Indeed, whether as a struggle, ideology or movement, feminism appears to be an amorphous and an unnecessarily ambiguous phenomenon. The ever nagging, quarrelsome wife, for instance, announces herself as a feminist. The prostitute claims she is “making some kind of protest.”  The never-married, unmarriageable single mother is “driving home some point.”  The ever-wild nympho-maniac (who ought to have sought help) is “advancing the struggle.”

The lady out there with revolting obsession for luring small boys to her nest and cruelly deflowering them does not see herself as a callous child abuser but would always claim she is merely using them to “get back at the oppressor — man.” The habitually unfaithful wife would announce she is “sending out some message” with her adulterous life. Now, in the midst of this cacophony of voices, how can we know who is sane? Must otherwise sane women continue to endorse all these ruinous absurdities just to get back at men?

Many critics are agreed that the societies created in Nwapa’s novels are unrecognizable. But because of her popularity with women liberation diehards, several other female writers that came after her were easily seduced into adopting her art-murdering style.

In my article in The Guardian (Lagos), Sunday, June 1, 1997, p.B4, entitled, “Zainab Akali And Feminist Writers,” which provoked a year-long debate  and even (needless) name-calling by some female contributors, I was frank about my observation that the works of several of those female writers “are united by their possession of the same maladies:  they are blessed with all the features of fairy tales and myth; they unabashedly distort with indecency and uncanny bravado, sociology and gender images just to make some shallow feminist point; their heroines  are spared healthy competitions as they only thrive in outlandish communities peopled by only weak, emasculated, lazy, foolish and insane men.”

I appreciate, however, the fact that several among the younger generation of female writers have realized the mistakes of their pioneers and are trying to achieve some improvement, but more work still needs to be done. 

We must emphasize, as we conclude this discussion that the “unliberated” Beatrice in Anthills Of The Savannah, achieved all she had by dint of hard work in the midst of equally intelligent and hardworking men and not by “conquering” the men by sleeping around. Her only offence, may be, would be that she was not anti-men, but favoured an environment that promoted equal opportunities for both the male and female to excel. Maybe, she also sinned because she did her best to ensure her proposed marriage to Chris worked before tragedy struck to abort it.

All I am saying really is that when viewed within the particular environment and period in which they were set, Achebe’s female characters are very real. They are easily recognizable, and I would prefer them any day than the outlandish caricatures offered us as alternatives in many feminist novels. 

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye is a Nigerian journalist, syndicated  columnist and member, Editorial Board, Daily Independent, a national newspaper published in Lagos, Nigeria. His book, “Nigeria:Why Looting May Not Stop” is available on Amazon.com.

(scruples2006@yahoo.com; twitter: @ugowrite)