By Farooq A. Kperogi
(This article was first published in 2007...)
The recent international recognition of the literary excellence of our peerless literary icon, Chinua Achebe, and the equally richly deserved crowing of the prodigious literary prowess of U.S.-based, up-and-coming novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have been such comforting news especially for those of us living outside Nigeria who have had the unpleasant burden of explaining (actually, in most cases, explaining away) to our friends all the bad international press we’ve had in the last couple of months.
Since May this year, every well-informed American I have met has asked me about our outrageously fraudulent elections and, of course, about the kidnappings of foreigners in the Niger Delta. These two issues seem to be the only topics people here know about Nigeria when they strike up a conversation with you. I don’t blame them, though. Their news media has had a rather unhealthy fixation with these stories these past few months.
Then first came the cheering news that one pulchritudinous and immensely talented 29-year-old Nigerian lady called Adichie has won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her book, Half of a Yellow Sun. (Incidentally, Chinua Achebe was also only 28 years old when he wrote his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart). She trounced many better known and more established women writers to win the prize. Although news of her win didn’t do much to divert attention from the negative publicity of Nigeria in the Western media, it did provide a comforting alternative subject matter to discuss with people about Nigeria here.
Perhaps the greatest boost to Nigeria’s image this week is the
news of the award of the over 15-million-naira-worth Booker Man International
Prize to Chinua Achebe. He beat such well-known writers as the controversial
Indian-born British writer Ahmed Salman Rushdie, the eminent Jewish-American
writer Philip Roth and the equally outstanding Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes,
among many others. It is a well-merited but long overdue acknowledgement
of Achebe’s pioneering contribution to African fiction writing, a reason he has
been rightly dubbed the father of modern African prose.
However, this award, significant and praiseworthy as it is, does
more good to the hitherto little-known, two-year-old foundation that conferred
it than it does to Achebe himself. We are talking about a man who is easily one
of the world’s most accomplished authors of all time, a man whose legendary,
irreproducible Things
Fall Apart has sold over 10 million copies and is translated into
over 50 languages (except in his own native Igbo—unfortunately); a man whose
book has been recognized as one the world’s 100 greatest classics in the
pantheon of literature. What more can anybody hope for? Achebe has reached the
mountaintop of literary achievement— and still sits there with admirable grace
and elegance.
So why should we celebrate Achebe’s “little” award, an award
that actually needs him more than he needs it, an award that could use his
awe-inspiring, larger-than-life image to inscribe itself in global literary
consciousness? I think it is precisely because this award also bestows
more honor on Nigeria as a corporate entity than it does on Achebe as a person.
Because of Achebe’s towering international stature, the award is generating
fairly robust news coverage and editorial commentaries in the international
media. Invariably, Nigeria gets mentioned in some positive light—even if this
might end up being a mere flash in the pan.
Achebe is one writer whose literary charm has won him as much
affection and popularity at home as it has won him abroad. Call him a prophet
who is honored both at home and abroad, if you like. I got my first
experiential taste of his popularity here in 2005. One day I was having a
conversation with an American professor. In the course of our conversation, he
made an allegorical reference to Okonkwo, the protagonist in Things
Fall Apart. At first I didn’t get what he said both because I didn’t
expect him to know an Okonkwo—any Okonkwo— and because his white American
accent did some phonological violence to the name. Sensing that I was a bit
confused, he said, “I am referring to Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart.” I was amazed. He knew the storyline, the plot, the
setting, etc of Things Fall Apart with such
effortless ease that you would think he was Nigerian, or at least that he had
lived in Nigeria.
He told me that the book was a recommended text in his high
school English literature class. I later discovered that many Americans that
have at least a high school diploma have encountered Achebe’s works, especially
his Things
Fall Apart. His works, I have found out, are also widely studied in the
English departments of many universities here.
This broad popularity and acceptability of Achebe’s literary
creations is not limited to America; it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, most
of the Chinese students I’ve had the pleasure to relate with here have told me
that Things
Fall Apart was a compulsory reading for them. I recall a Chinese
friend of mine telling me one day that many Chinese students, especially at the
height of the Cold War, often felt depressed after reading the book because
“Achebe allowed those damn imperialists to triumph over the revolutionary
Okonkwo.” Achebe’s classic response to that criticism is that he wasn’t writing
political propaganda but an imaginative recapitulation of the pre-colonial and
early colonial socio-historical experiences of his people.
However, in a sense, it might be argued—and with some
justification, I think—that the popularity of Things Fall Apart in
the West is not so much a consequence of the regard Westerners have for
the book’s literary qualities (even though it undoubtedly has matchless
literary qualities) as it is because it feeds their anthropological curiosity
about Africans. Scenes of human sacrifice, wife beating and other supposedly
atavistic practices that Westerners habitually ascribe to “less evolved”
Africans—which are actually only incidental to the core thematic preoccupation
of the book—are usually the main points of attraction. This was what motivated
me to argue in a paper I once wrote for my undergraduate class in African
literature that Things Fall Apart inadvertently
reinforces some of the “Conradian” stereotypes it purposively sets out to
subvert and destabilize. But this is no place for high-minded cerebration about
the literary choices of Achebe.
Interestingly, while Achebe is literally a household name in
both literary and popular circles worldwide, few people know Wole Soyinka
outside Nigeria—at least in comparison with Achebe. Even in Nigeria, we know
Soyinka more as a political activist (and a willfully turgid, self-indulgent
and impenetrable author whose books we grudgingly read only because of
curricular tyranny) than as a literary icon in the class of Achebe. In other
words, Soyinka is famous only because he is famous!
The same Americans and Chinese people I met who knew a lot about
Achebe and his works told me they had never even heard of the name Wole
Soyinka. Interestingly, Soyinka himself once famously remarked that while he
may be the best known writer to emerge from Nigeria on account of his Nobel
Prize (this is, of course, not true), Things Fall Apart is the best
known literary work to emerge from Nigeria. He also once pointed out in one
rare moment of self-deprecating candor that any time he is introduced as the
Nobel Laureate in Literature from Nigeria, he has always had to contend with
the embarrassment of explaining to people that he is not the author of Things
Fall Apart.
This reality, for me, dramatizes the tendentiousness of the
politics of the Nobel Prize committee, which Chinweizu once elegantly
characterized as a “gaggle of Swedes” who sit in a yearly conspiratorial
conclave to endorse people that reinforce and naturalize Western hegemony.
Underlying the decision to deny Achebe the Nobel Prize in Literature is a
subtle, unspoken, but nonetheless veridical racial (some would say racist)
politics. Achebe has been univocal—and, yes, unapologetic—in his denunciation
of the racism implicit in the works of many Western literary and political
icons. For instance, he once referred to Joseph Conrad, who is worshipped in
the English departments of many Western universities, as a “thoroughgoing
racist” for his invidious caricature of Africans in Heart of Darkness, a novel
that is still regarded as a classic in the West.
He is also on record as having criticized Albert Schweitzer, a
1952 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a well-regarded apotheosis of Western
liberalism. Schweitzer, a German-French theologian who spent a great deal of
his life evangelizing the gospel of Christianity in Gabon, died in 1965 at the
age of 90 and is well-known for saying that the Christianization of Africans
was a historical burden that Europeans must shoulder to atone for the sins of
slavery and colonialism. He was also once quoted as saying, “The African is indeed
my brother but my junior brother.” Achebe was piqued by all these, and accused
him of racist paternalism and condescension toward Africans. The Western power
structure was silently outraged.
But perhaps Achebe’s more obvious “sin” was that in 1985,
a year before Wole Soyinka was given the Nobel Prize in Literature, he
characterized the Indian-Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul as "a brilliant
writer who sold himself to the West.” Then he added: “And one day he'll
be 'rewarded' with maybe a Nobel Prize or something." Achebe was
prophetic. In 1990, Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and in 2001 he
was “rewarded” with a Nobel Prize in Literature. Many people say Achebe would
have been announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985 but
for this brutally frank barb at the West— and the Nobel Prize. There is no
reason to suppose that this as an idle conspiracy theory.
Thankfully, the Nobel Prize is not the only touchstone of
literary excellence in the world, as the recent recognition of Achebe has
shown. And Achebe is in good company, too. Such world-renowned writers as Leo
Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen and so on were also notably ignored by the
Nobel Prize committee because their political views were at variance with the
folk at the Nobel Committee.
So, for whatever it is worth, let us congratulate our dear
Professor Chinua Achebe— and Miss Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, too.
*Farooq
Kperogi sent this piece from Atlanta, GA, USA, and can be reached at farooqkperogi@yahoo.com
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