Sola Osofisan
08-21-2009, 01:12 AM
By David Kaiza
Nairobi — GOING BY THE preparations taking place, one might think the celebrations have something to do with a beloved monarch: Events have been lined up for the whole of 2008; a commemoration scheduled for April has been sponsored by the New York City Hall; Western universities are vying to host speakers as the media jostle for interviews; and Postsecondary Education Network International is selling lecture tickets online.
How things change. When Chinua Achebe sent the handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart to a typing agency in London in 1957, the agency appeared in no hurry to work on the document. It did not bother to respond to Achebe's numerous letters enquiring about the progress of the document, and it was not until an Englishwoman who was then his boss at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation travelled to London and threatened the agency that it quickly typed and sent back the manuscript.
But that was just the first hurdle. At the time Achebe sent the document to Heinemann for publication, there were few novels on Africa by Africans, so they could not find a specialist in African literature to evaluate it.
Luckily, someone at Heinemann knew a London School of Economics professor who had been "over there."
His verdict: "The best first novel since the war."
On the strength of this recommendation, Heinemann editor Allan Hills took a risk and printed a handful of copies in what many saw as a crazy move that could bankrupt him. However, to everyone's surprise, the copies sold out.
Emboldened, Hills took an even greater gamble and printed the novel in paperback.
Years later, hills was to receive a knighthood for starting the African Writers' Series. And that long-suffering manuscript, now in book form, was to sell 11 million copies.
Something had gone right. A void had been identified, and once Achebe took a step to fill it, a torrent of talent flooded the Heinemann offices - Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Okot p'Bitek, Ayi Kwei Armah.
For the publishing world in general, it was as if a new world had been discovered and colonised. African literature introduced an entirely new, exciting language and narrative to world literature.
Professor Ernest Emenyonu, Chair of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, wrote that "Chinua Achebe's remarkable influence on contemporary African literature is as much in the establishment of the art of the African novel in his fiction as it is in the articulation of African poetics and aesthetics in his extra-fictional pronouncements."
Achebe has been called the father of African literature, while later writers have been described as the "sons of Achebe."
TO DATE, HE HAS RECEIVED some 25 honorary doctorates and was recently named as one of the 100 most influential writers of the 20th Century.
As the Igbo praise-singers in his novels say, this man went to the land of spirits and wrestled the hydra-headed spirit to the ground and returned home unscathed!
It is not that he wrote great books - although they are not bad - but it is the historical context within which his writing appeared that makes him important. It is important to separate Achebe's achievement from his literature.
His achievement: For millennia after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, the land of black people had occupied a permanent place in the written word of the Judeo-Christian world.
But it was a place of disgrace, an impression created by some interpretations of the Bible. Black skin became associated with evil, underachievement, laziness and lack of self-will. It justified slavery and colonialism. In literature, the past 500 years have seen the condemnation of the black man, from Shakespeare's Othello, Emile Bronte's Heathcliff and in the work of Joseph Conrad, who compared the black man to an animal.
In less totalitarian terms, Africans have been mocked in the books of Heminway, in Joyce Cary's infamous novel, Mr Johnson and defamed in the books of V.S. Naipaul.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's Review wrote of the times in which Achebe's novel appeared: "Literary conceptions of the continent were still steeped in reductive romance, primitivism, and colonial sentiment. Providing an expansive alternative to those conceptions was, to say the least, a mighty accomplishment for an author still in his 20s."
Until then, black people everywhere were under white control. This attack on personal freedom also came with attack on the African body: the hair, shape of the nose, size of lips, the caricatures of wide-eyed whites set in black skin.
The assertion of a black point of view needed to be a massive counter-attack. The urgency for a return to colonialism has been a constant threat. Achebe came to be associated with this call to arms. In 1975, at a lecture, when he launched an attack on the legacy of Conrad in a lecture, he was also raising an alternative literary point of view. Since then, serious discussions of Achebe have also been serious discussions of Conrad, and this says something about the stature of Achebe himself: for decades, Conrad was venerated for telling "the truth." Essentially, this truth is asserted in Heart of Darkness. It says that "?all that Africa has? is screaming, shrieking, howling and animal sounds?"
Achebe himself has been rather cool about this, telling an interviewer in the Paris Review that, "?if you don't like someone's story, you write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, you say what it is you don't like." By the time his book came out, some of this Conradian truth, which was itself Darwinian cynicism, had been somewhat toned down by the two wars. There was confusion and humble soul-searching among Western intellectuals about what had gone wrong. New points of view were needed.
So, had it appeared before the Second World War, Things Fall Apart might have been ignored.
It would be too much to call a man like wa Thiongo, a "son of Achebe" because, although his book came out later, books take long to take shape in writers' minds, and Ngugi appears to have formed his ideas long before he heard of Achebe. Writers like Wole Soyinka and Okot p'Bitek achieved more in terms of creativity.
What happened was that Achebe crossed the line first. When you read his books outside the colonial context, Achebe comes across as a small-scale entrepreneur of the novel. He was no literary industrialist like Soyinka. He was a retailer of proverbs, bucolic wisdom and anecdotes. It is his presentation of his indictment of colonialism that made him. This may have prevented him, as well as writers like the late Senegalese Sembčne Ousmane and Ugandan Okot p'Bitek, from seeing narrative possibilities after colonialism. This is where the criticism that Achebe had little talent beyond fighting colonialism appears to stick.
In contrast, his compatriot, Wole Soyinka, went beyond plays such as Death and the King's Horseman, a work with thematic similarities to Arrow of God, and works such as Ake: The years of Childhood and Set Forth at Dawn.
Telling purely human tales - of men as individuals rather than as spokespersons for an age - was not among Achebe's talents. There is a leanness of narrative in his work. Of course, there is gripping passion and a serious scholarliness, which explain his popularity. But there is also a crippling lack of strength in his voice.
He has constantly been compared with Soyinka as the two vie for top position in African literature in the same manner Fyodor Dostoevsky has been measured against Leo Tolstoy for the world's greatest novelist. It is silly, for the moon is not the sun; Achebe is a man of intense feeling who walks the night rescuing the soul of a condemned race where Soyinka basks in the glare of his own genius.
He went for a single subject. Real literary genius was not his forte. He goes at a subject in a monotone that can dull the mind. His characters are carved out in two dimensions. That third dimension- of characters coming outside the book's themes to act in a world of senses rather than of social change - is tragically missing.
But if he sold his literary potatoes by the kilo or salted groundnuts by the spoonful, then at least, he was no McDonald's, inflating his customer's waistlines with dubious fat concentrates.
And this is the truth about books: towering literary works, like war and peace, are admired for the brilliance of the authors. But the power to change society, to transform a world-view, belongs to simplicity: simplicity of delivery, style, language, and even ideas.
The directness with which Achebe wrote and the singularity of his narrative structure fudged with little. His committed novels depicting a convalescent continent connected so directly with readers that he is one of the very few novelists to sell 11 million copies of a single book.
Achebe is the common man's author. Barring ideological and theoretical interpretations, he is something of a folk hero who operated on the ground where cultural revolutions are fought. His books are simple; village folksingers come to the literary metropolis with drum and flute and plain-speaking poets sing about village girls, about clever eneke birds and evoke the smell of yams and palm wine.
But African literature has moved on as a new generation of writers continues struggling to find a voice to describe the new millennium. It is unfortunate that Achebe is being commemorated in the West, but little is being done in Africa to recognise him.
AllAfrica (http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200802251873.html)
Nairobi — GOING BY THE preparations taking place, one might think the celebrations have something to do with a beloved monarch: Events have been lined up for the whole of 2008; a commemoration scheduled for April has been sponsored by the New York City Hall; Western universities are vying to host speakers as the media jostle for interviews; and Postsecondary Education Network International is selling lecture tickets online.
How things change. When Chinua Achebe sent the handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart to a typing agency in London in 1957, the agency appeared in no hurry to work on the document. It did not bother to respond to Achebe's numerous letters enquiring about the progress of the document, and it was not until an Englishwoman who was then his boss at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation travelled to London and threatened the agency that it quickly typed and sent back the manuscript.
But that was just the first hurdle. At the time Achebe sent the document to Heinemann for publication, there were few novels on Africa by Africans, so they could not find a specialist in African literature to evaluate it.
Luckily, someone at Heinemann knew a London School of Economics professor who had been "over there."
His verdict: "The best first novel since the war."
On the strength of this recommendation, Heinemann editor Allan Hills took a risk and printed a handful of copies in what many saw as a crazy move that could bankrupt him. However, to everyone's surprise, the copies sold out.
Emboldened, Hills took an even greater gamble and printed the novel in paperback.
Years later, hills was to receive a knighthood for starting the African Writers' Series. And that long-suffering manuscript, now in book form, was to sell 11 million copies.
Something had gone right. A void had been identified, and once Achebe took a step to fill it, a torrent of talent flooded the Heinemann offices - Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Okot p'Bitek, Ayi Kwei Armah.
For the publishing world in general, it was as if a new world had been discovered and colonised. African literature introduced an entirely new, exciting language and narrative to world literature.
Professor Ernest Emenyonu, Chair of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, wrote that "Chinua Achebe's remarkable influence on contemporary African literature is as much in the establishment of the art of the African novel in his fiction as it is in the articulation of African poetics and aesthetics in his extra-fictional pronouncements."
Achebe has been called the father of African literature, while later writers have been described as the "sons of Achebe."
TO DATE, HE HAS RECEIVED some 25 honorary doctorates and was recently named as one of the 100 most influential writers of the 20th Century.
As the Igbo praise-singers in his novels say, this man went to the land of spirits and wrestled the hydra-headed spirit to the ground and returned home unscathed!
It is not that he wrote great books - although they are not bad - but it is the historical context within which his writing appeared that makes him important. It is important to separate Achebe's achievement from his literature.
His achievement: For millennia after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, the land of black people had occupied a permanent place in the written word of the Judeo-Christian world.
But it was a place of disgrace, an impression created by some interpretations of the Bible. Black skin became associated with evil, underachievement, laziness and lack of self-will. It justified slavery and colonialism. In literature, the past 500 years have seen the condemnation of the black man, from Shakespeare's Othello, Emile Bronte's Heathcliff and in the work of Joseph Conrad, who compared the black man to an animal.
In less totalitarian terms, Africans have been mocked in the books of Heminway, in Joyce Cary's infamous novel, Mr Johnson and defamed in the books of V.S. Naipaul.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's Review wrote of the times in which Achebe's novel appeared: "Literary conceptions of the continent were still steeped in reductive romance, primitivism, and colonial sentiment. Providing an expansive alternative to those conceptions was, to say the least, a mighty accomplishment for an author still in his 20s."
Until then, black people everywhere were under white control. This attack on personal freedom also came with attack on the African body: the hair, shape of the nose, size of lips, the caricatures of wide-eyed whites set in black skin.
The assertion of a black point of view needed to be a massive counter-attack. The urgency for a return to colonialism has been a constant threat. Achebe came to be associated with this call to arms. In 1975, at a lecture, when he launched an attack on the legacy of Conrad in a lecture, he was also raising an alternative literary point of view. Since then, serious discussions of Achebe have also been serious discussions of Conrad, and this says something about the stature of Achebe himself: for decades, Conrad was venerated for telling "the truth." Essentially, this truth is asserted in Heart of Darkness. It says that "?all that Africa has? is screaming, shrieking, howling and animal sounds?"
Achebe himself has been rather cool about this, telling an interviewer in the Paris Review that, "?if you don't like someone's story, you write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, you say what it is you don't like." By the time his book came out, some of this Conradian truth, which was itself Darwinian cynicism, had been somewhat toned down by the two wars. There was confusion and humble soul-searching among Western intellectuals about what had gone wrong. New points of view were needed.
So, had it appeared before the Second World War, Things Fall Apart might have been ignored.
It would be too much to call a man like wa Thiongo, a "son of Achebe" because, although his book came out later, books take long to take shape in writers' minds, and Ngugi appears to have formed his ideas long before he heard of Achebe. Writers like Wole Soyinka and Okot p'Bitek achieved more in terms of creativity.
What happened was that Achebe crossed the line first. When you read his books outside the colonial context, Achebe comes across as a small-scale entrepreneur of the novel. He was no literary industrialist like Soyinka. He was a retailer of proverbs, bucolic wisdom and anecdotes. It is his presentation of his indictment of colonialism that made him. This may have prevented him, as well as writers like the late Senegalese Sembčne Ousmane and Ugandan Okot p'Bitek, from seeing narrative possibilities after colonialism. This is where the criticism that Achebe had little talent beyond fighting colonialism appears to stick.
In contrast, his compatriot, Wole Soyinka, went beyond plays such as Death and the King's Horseman, a work with thematic similarities to Arrow of God, and works such as Ake: The years of Childhood and Set Forth at Dawn.
Telling purely human tales - of men as individuals rather than as spokespersons for an age - was not among Achebe's talents. There is a leanness of narrative in his work. Of course, there is gripping passion and a serious scholarliness, which explain his popularity. But there is also a crippling lack of strength in his voice.
He has constantly been compared with Soyinka as the two vie for top position in African literature in the same manner Fyodor Dostoevsky has been measured against Leo Tolstoy for the world's greatest novelist. It is silly, for the moon is not the sun; Achebe is a man of intense feeling who walks the night rescuing the soul of a condemned race where Soyinka basks in the glare of his own genius.
He went for a single subject. Real literary genius was not his forte. He goes at a subject in a monotone that can dull the mind. His characters are carved out in two dimensions. That third dimension- of characters coming outside the book's themes to act in a world of senses rather than of social change - is tragically missing.
But if he sold his literary potatoes by the kilo or salted groundnuts by the spoonful, then at least, he was no McDonald's, inflating his customer's waistlines with dubious fat concentrates.
And this is the truth about books: towering literary works, like war and peace, are admired for the brilliance of the authors. But the power to change society, to transform a world-view, belongs to simplicity: simplicity of delivery, style, language, and even ideas.
The directness with which Achebe wrote and the singularity of his narrative structure fudged with little. His committed novels depicting a convalescent continent connected so directly with readers that he is one of the very few novelists to sell 11 million copies of a single book.
Achebe is the common man's author. Barring ideological and theoretical interpretations, he is something of a folk hero who operated on the ground where cultural revolutions are fought. His books are simple; village folksingers come to the literary metropolis with drum and flute and plain-speaking poets sing about village girls, about clever eneke birds and evoke the smell of yams and palm wine.
But African literature has moved on as a new generation of writers continues struggling to find a voice to describe the new millennium. It is unfortunate that Achebe is being commemorated in the West, but little is being done in Africa to recognise him.
AllAfrica (http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200802251873.html)