The conference opened on the day Nelson Mandela was liberated from prison, and the day was declared a national holiday. There was a festive mood during the weeklong activities of scholarly papers, traditional drama, dancing, and banquets.
The iroko is the tallest tree in that part of Africa and the eagle soars to its height. Scarcely a month later, while on his way to the airport in Lagos to resume a teaching post at Dartmouth, Achebe was severely injured in a car accident. He was flown to a London hospital where he underwent surgery and spent many months in painful recuperation. Although confined to a wheelchair, he has made a remarkable recovery in the past three years and, to the surprise of his family and many friends throughout the world, is beginning to look and sound like his old self.
Would you tell us something about the Achebe family and growing up in an Igbo village, your early education, and whether there was anything there that pointed you that early in the direction of writing? I think the thing that clearly pointed me there was my interest in stories. Not necessarily writing stories, because at that point, writing stories was not really viable. But I knew I loved stories, stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder sister—such as the story of the tortoise—whatever scraps of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging around, sitting around when my father had visitors.
When I began going to school, I loved the stories I read. They were different, but I loved them too. My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel. I was the fifth of their six children. By the time I was growing up, my father had retired, and had returned with his family to his ancestral village.
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp. Fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.
I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.
You were among the first graduates of the great University of Ibadan. What was it like in the early years of that university, and what did you study there? Has it stuck with you in your writing? Ibadan was, in retrospect, a great institution. In a way, it revealed the paradox of the colonial situation, because this university college was founded towards the end of British colonial rule in Nigeria.
If they did any good things, Ibadan was one of them. You start off as an appendage of somebody else. You go through a period of tutelage. We were the University College of Ibadan of London. So I took a degree from London University. That was the way it was organized in those days. One of the signs of independence, when it came, was for Ibadan to become a full-fledged university. I began with science, then English, history, and religion. I found these subjects exciting and very useful.
My teacher there, Dr. Parrinder, now an emeritus professor of London University, was a pioneer in the area. He had done extensive research in West Africa, in Dahomey. For the first time, I was able to see the systems—including my own—compared and placed side by side, which was really exciting. I also encountered a professor, James Welch, in that department, an extraordinary man, who had been chaplain to King George VI, chaplain to the BBC, and all kinds of high powered things before he came to us.
He was a very eloquent preacher. On one occasion, he said to me, We may not be able to teach you what you need or what you want. We can only teach you what we know. I thought that was wonderful. That was really the best education I had. I have had to go out on my own.
The English department was a very good example of what I mean. The people there would have laughed at the idea that any of us would become a writer. I remember on one occasion a departmental prize was offered. They put up a notice—write a short story over the long vacation for the departmental prize. So I wrote one and submitted it. Months passed; then finally one day there was a notice on the board announcing the result.
It said that no prize was awarded because no entry was up to the standard. They named me, said that my story deserved mention. Ibadan in those days was not a dance you danced with snuff in one palm. It was a dance you danced with all your body. He does not understand that Umuofia is a living culture that has always adapted in order to meet new challenges.
His effort to deny the reality of history condemns him while making a sad comment on the limitations of human endeavor. The novel dramatizes the situation of modern men and modern societies that are forced to adapt and compromise if they wish to survive. Its central theme, and the central theme of all of Achebe's novels, is the tragedy of the man or society that refuses or is unable to accommodate change.
In Things Fall Apart , Achebe effectively counters the persistent and self-serving European stereotypes of African culture, particularly the notion that traditional African cultures are authoritarian, amoral, and unsophisticated. In refutation of this stereotype, Achebe carefully describes the complexity and fluidity of Igbo culture, disclosing its essential pluralism.
It is, however, a society that cannot survive unaltered in a modern world. Like Yeats's "Second Coming," from which the novel takes its title, Things Fall Apart presents an ironic and apocalyptic vision of the failure to maintain order and balance. An idealistic, young Nigerian bureaucrat, trapped between his traditional background and his European education, succumbs to the corrupting influences of government service.
No Longer at Ease opens and closes at the bribery trial of Obi Okonkwo, a young civil servant in the colonial Nigerian government and the grandson of the Okonkwo of Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The novel provides a retrospective look at Obi's progress from the remote village of Umuofia to an English university and then to a position with the Nigerian Civil Service in Lagos, where he finally succumbs to the prevalent practice of bribery and is caught. Like a diminished version of his grandfather, Obi is crushed by cultural forces beyond his control, but the pettiness and ineptitude of his crime make him a paradoxical tragicomic hero.
His innocence makes him a criminal; his coveted education does not provide him with wisdom; the support of his clansmen increases his sense of loneliness. Obi is the first from his village to receive a European education, and his expenses are paid by clansmen who hope to enhance the status of their village and to reap future economic dividends. Obi's life, however, is complicated by idealistic romance and his failure to manage his finances.
He falls in love with a woman who is osu, marked by a traditional, hereditary taboo. Obi rejects the taboo as primitive superstition, but his naive determination to be thoroughly modern places him in direct conflict with his family and his clan. At first he eschews the customary practice of accepting bribes, self-righteously viewing it as an anachronistic behavior that the new generation of educated and idealistic civil servants will eradicate, but his obligation to repay the clan and his determination to maintain a lifestyle commensurate with his position as a civil servant eventually lead him to accept payments.
When he does give in to custom, he handles the bribery so amateurishly that he is caught and convicted. Obi has been shaped by the traditional lgbo culture of Umuofia, the Christianity of his father, the idealism of English literature, and the corrupt sophistication of Lagos, but he is at ease nowhere.
As a child in Umuofia, he dreams of the sparkling lights of Lagos. In England, he writes pastoral visions of an idealized Nigeria. Disillusioned by the corruption of Lagos, he returns to his home village only to witness a lorry driver attempting to bribe a policeman and to be greeted by his parents's rejection of his proposed marriage. Obi naively tries to maintain the idea of his own integrity as a detribalized, rational, thoroughly modern man, but his reintegration into Nigeria is a failure because he is unable to assimilate successfully any of the competing cultures he passes through.
He finds it impossible to mediate the conflicting duties that are thrust upon him, and his steady progress in the novel is toward despair and withdrawal. No Longer at Ease is set on the verge of Nigeria's independence in Lagos, an urban jungle which combines the worst of European and African cultures.
Centralization has led to inefficiency and corruption; traditional Igbo communalism has devolved to the narrow pursuit of advantage. Having learned the western desire for material goods without having sufficient income to satisfy them, the nation, like Obi, must choose between corruption and bankruptcy.
It is therefore fitting that Achebe's title is drawn from Yeats"'Sailing to Byzantium," for like the wise men in Eliot's poem, Obi and the nation are trapped between two eras.
In many ways Chinua Achebe's early fiction defined modern African literature, and it is not possible to underestimate the importance of his example. More than any other African author writing in English, Achebe has Helped the world understand the value of African culture without ignoring the difficult problems that African nations face in the post-colonialist era.
At about eight, he began learning English. His relatively late introduction to English allowed Achebe to develop a sense of cultural pride and an appreciation of his native tongue — values that may not have been cultivated had he been raised and taught exclusively in English.
Achebe's home fostered his understanding of both cultures: He read books in English in his father's library, and he spent hours listening to his mother and sister tell traditional Igbo stories. At fourteen, Achebe was selected to attend the Government College in Umuahia, the equivalent of a university preparatory school and considered the best in West Africa.
Achebe excelled at his studies, and after graduating at eighteen, he was accepted to study medicine at the new University College at Ibadan, a member college of London University at the time. The demand for educated Nigerians in the government was heightened because Nigeria was preparing for self-rule and independence. Only with a college degree was a Nigerian likely to enter the higher ranks of the civil service. The growing nationalism in Nigeria was not lost on Achebe.
At the university, he dropped his English name "Albert" in favor of the Igbo name "Chinua," short for Chinualumogo. Just as Igbo names in Things Fall Apart have literal meanings, Chinualumogo is translated as "My spirit come fight for me. At University College, Achebe switched his studies to liberal arts, including history, religion, and English. His first published stories appeared in the student publication the University Herald.
These stories have been reprinted in the collection Girls at War and Other Stories , which was published in Of his student writings, only a few are significantly relative to his more mature works; short stories such as "Marriage is a Private Affair" and "Dead Man's Path" explore the conflicts that arise when Western culture meets African society.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in , Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a producer of radio talks. While in London, he submitted the manuscript for Things Fall Apart to a publisher, with the encouragement and support of one of his BBC instructors, a writer and literary critic.
The novel was published in by Heinemann, a publishing firm that began a long relationship with Achebe and his work. Fame came almost instantly. Achebe has said that he never experienced the life of a struggling writer.
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