The death in a Boston hospital of Chinua Achebe, on 21 March 2013, the Nigerian novelist about whom it was said that his writings were \u201cconcerned with universal human communication across racial and cultural boundaries as a means of fostering respect for all people\u201d came just at the start of the UN-sponsored 2013-2022 International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures.<\/p>\n
Chinua Achebe \u00a0as a novelist, professor of African literature in US universities and editor of cultural journals was an important figure in the efforts to share African culture with others and to advance the multiple currents of contemporary African life.<\/p>\n
His quartet of major novels Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease,<\/i> and A Man of the People<\/i> were largely planned as a reflection of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial life in the Ibo (now more usually written as Igbo) area of southern Nigeria.\u00a0 The novels, however, were to reflect wider African trends, and the novels have been widely appreciated in other parts of Africa, especially in East Africa where Achebe taught at the University of Kenya.<\/p>\n
As is common in much modern African writing, the source of his novels is autobiographic.\u00a0 He was born of Christian parents whose paternal family had held important village posts both political and religious \u2014 the two functions often combined. For \u00a0Things Fall Apart <\/i>\u00a0the title is taken for W.B. Yeats\u2019 poem Second Coming <\/i>\u201cThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold\u2026the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity\u201d.<\/p>\n
The novel is a picture of pre-colonial village society on the eve of colonization and the introduction of Christianity.\u00a0 Achebe paints an over-idealized picture, underplaying the tensions, struggles for power, and family conflicts that existed in southern Nigerian society.\u00a0 There is no mention of the impact of either the Atlantic or Saharan slave trade on the society.\u00a0 However, the picture of a stable, largely harmonious village society is to serve as a sharp contrast to the changes \u2014 largely seen as disintegration of what is to follow. Achebe\u2019s basic view is one of a society (which also represents the whole world) steadily disintegrating, falling apart by the impact of centrifugal forces in the political-economic world.<\/p>\n
The Arrow of God <\/i>reflects the early years of British colonialism in southern Nigeria.\u00a0 Following the First World War, Lord Lugard was the chief theorist of colonial policy in Nigeria as expressed in his book The Dual Mandate.<\/i> Lugard who knew well northern Nigeria where there were strong Islamic chiefs who controlled the population suggested the extension of \u201cIndirect Rule\u201d with chiefs who would be responsible for order and thus made responsible for colonial administration.\u00a0 The problem with \u201cindirect rule\u201d arose in southern Nigeria where there were no powerful chiefs, especially among the Ibo, a highly independent people, with only clanic chiefs.\u00a0 Thus the British had to create chiefs. The villagers often proposed \u201cstraw men\u201d as chiefs, people who held no local power, but since the English wanted a chief, they would be given a village chief even if he had no authority.\u00a0 However, some of the straw chiefs took their new role seriously and wanted to have authority.\u00a0 Arrow of God <\/i>paints the portrait of a man who had been a religious leader without political power and who is suddenly appointed village chief.\u00a0 The novel deals with the predictable conflict between the village members, its new chief, and the local British administration \u2014 all of whom fail to communicate.<\/p>\n
No Longer at Ease <\/i>takes its title from T.S. Eliot\u2019s poem Journey of the Magi <\/i>\u201cWe returned to our places,\u2026but no longer at ease here\u2026with an alien people clutching their gods.\u201d\u00a0 The Magi, the sages of a passing world and the harbingers of a new, feel themselves torn by the conflicting pulls of both.\u00a0 Likewise in Africa, Achebe notes, there will be no new golden age but no return either to an age of traditional empires and kingdoms symbolized by the newly chosen names of the states of Ghana and Mali, names of 11th<\/sup> and 12th<\/sup> century African empires.<\/p>\n The last of the quartet, A Man of the People,<\/i> is the weakest from a literary point of view. It is a satire of the Chief, the Honorable M.A.Nanga, M.P., a school teacher become minister of an unnamed African state with official residences each having seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms, one for each day of the week.<\/p>\n At the end of the novel, there is a change of government. \u201cOvernight everyone begins to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government; newspapers, the radio, the hitherto silent intellectuals and civil servants \u2014 everybody said what a terrible lot,\u00a0 \u2014 and it became public opinion the next morning.\u201d\u00a0 Manga, M.P. is both corrupt and unprepared for the highly complex obligations in a modern State.<\/p>\n Achebe\u2019s own participation in politics and its tragic complexities came with the May 1967 \u2013January 1970 Biafra-Nigeria civil war. Achebe was both the editor of the cultural journal of Biafra with some ill-defined responsibilities for cultural activities within the break-away state and an informal ambassador-spokesperson for Biafra in the USA and Western Europe where his novels were known.<\/p>\n At the end of the war, he reintegrated academic life in Nigeria but spent more and more time abroad.\u00a0 After 1990, he was permanently in the USA as professor first at Bard in New York and later at Brown in Rhode Island \u2014 thus his final days in a Boston hospital.\u00a0 Achebe knew the value of \u201cspeaking truth to power\u201d but also the value of not pushing too hard.\u00a0 As one of his characters says to his son \u201cIt is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, my son, but sometimes it is better to be a coward.\u00a0 We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.\u201d\u00a0 Achebe waited until nearly the end of his life to write his account of his experiences during the Biafra war: There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.<\/i><\/p>\n His work as a novelist, a writer of books for children and as an editor made him an important agent of understanding between Africa and the USA and Europe.\u00a0 His writing was innovative, drawing upon traditions of myth, song and proverbs as well as on oral history of his area and his personal experiences. He has set out a path which others can follow creatively.<\/p>\n ____________________________<\/p>\n Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The death in a Boston hospital of Chinua Achebe, on 21 March 2013, the Nigerian novelist about whom it was said that his writings were \u201cconcerned with universal human communication across racial and cultural boundaries as a means of fostering respect for all people\u201d came just at the start of the UN-sponsored 2013-2022 International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,127,167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members","category-africa","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}