The Life and Times of Chinua Achebe

Kalu Ogbaa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Life and Times of Chinua Achebe introduces readers to the life, literary works, and times of arguably the most widely-read African novelist of recent times, an icon, both in continental Africa and abroad.

The book weaves together the story of Chinua Achebe, a young Igboman whose novel Things Fall Apart opened the eyes of the world to a more realistic image of Africa that waswarped by generations of European travelers, colonists, and writers. Whilst continuing to write further influential novels and essays, Achebe also taught other African writers to use their skills to help their national leaders to fight for their freedoms in the post-colonial era, as internal warfare compounded the damage caused by European powers during the colonial era. In this book Kalu Ogbaa, an esteemed expert on Achebe and his works, draws on extensive research and personal interviews with the great man and his colleagues and friends, to tell the story of Achebe and his work.

This intimate and powerful new biography will be essential reading for students and scholars of Chinua Achebe, and to anyone with an interest in the literature and post-colonial politics of Africa.

1
The Life and Education of Chinua Achebe

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184133-1

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, poet, literary critic, and social activist, is considered by many to be the most influential African fiction writer of his times. He occupies a unique position in modern African literary development and celebration. Other novelists, such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Nadine Gordimer, dramatists such Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard, and poets such as Christopher Okigbo and Dennis Brutus, have transcended national boundaries in continental Africa as well. Yet no African writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Achebe, whose first four novels: Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), and A Man of the People (1966)¹ appeared within the eight critical years when most African countries resumed their sovereignty after a century of European rule. Hence, the novels can be aptly interpreted as realizations in fiction of the same spirit that expressed itself politically in the struggle for independence. Like Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Okot p’Bitek, and Kofi Awoonor, Achebe often pictured contemporary Africans as cultural mestizos who must first find out the secret of their blood before they could come to their inheritance. Speaking at the conference on Commonwealth Literature held in Leeds University in September 1964, Achebe saw his initial achievements then in terms of the cultural reeducation of his contemporaries:

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind. And I don’t see that the two need be mutually exclusive.²

The pronouncement Achebe made in this quoted passage glimpses the overall agenda and task of Achebe the novelist as teacher. He went on to reemphasize the same idea in another but similar article, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” this time at home in Lagos, Nigeria:

For me, at any rate there is a clear need to make a statement. This is my answer to those who say that a writer should be writing about contemporary issues – about politics in 1964, about city life, about the last coup d’état. Of course, these are all legitimate themes for the writer but as far as I am concerned the fundamental theme must first be disposed of. The theme – put quite simply – is the African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African peoples all but lost during the colonial period and it is this that they must now regain.³

Achebe would go on to carry out his self-imposed writer-teacher role as a mantle of honor as well as a life of service to Africa particularly and humanity in general, right from the time he made the public declaration until his demise in 2013.

His Informal Christian and Igbo Cultural Education at Home

For Chinua Achebe to be able to carry out the burdensome role of the writer as teacher, he must have been thoroughly exposed to a life full of both influential formal and informal education before his writing career began. So as we explore his life in this chapter of the book, we must first go back to where it all began: his informal Christian and Igbo cultural educations, which he received first at home, when the Achebe family lived outside of his native town of Ogidi in Eastern Nigeria, followed by his formal education when they returned to the town.

Achebe’s informal Christian and Igbo cultural educations began at home because both of his parents, from whom he acquired the two types of education which laid the foundation for his formal education, were devout Christians. According to him, in the 1800s, when the CMS came to the West African territory that the British later named Eastern Nigeria, they established their operational headquarters in Onitsha from whence they extended their area of influence to Ogidi Town. As was customary for the missionaries, they responded to the Igbo tradition that strangers must first pay their respects to prominent local personalities who included Chinua Achebe’s great-grandfather, Udo Osinyi:

The first missionaries who came to my village went to Udo Osinyi to pay their respects and seek support for their work. For a short while my great-grandfather allowed them to operate from his compound. He probably thought it was some kind of circus whose strange presence added luster to his household. But after a few days he sent them packing again. Not, as you might think, on account of the crazy theology they had begun to propound, but on the much more serious ground of musical aesthetics. Said the old man: “Your singing is too sad to come from a man’s house. My neighbors might think it was my funeral dirge.”

Achebe further describes how that missionary encounter with his great-grandfather specifically impacted his father:

My father had joined the new faith as a young man and risen rapidly in its ranks to become an evangelist and church leader. His maternal grandfather, who had brought him up (his own parents having died early), was a man of note in the village. He had taken the highest but one title that a man of wealth and honor might aspire to, and the feast he gave the town on his initiation became a byword for openhandedness bordering on prodigality. The grateful and approving community called him henceforth Udo Osinyi – Udo who cooks more than the whole people can eat.⁴

Achebe began the article containing both quoted passages by saying, “I was born in Ogidi in Eastern Nigeria of devout Christian parents. The line between Christian and non-Christian was much more defined in my village forty years ago.” Achebe first made this speech in 1973. However, from what he later told his audience in a series of three lectures he gave at Harvard University in December 1998, he recollected that he and his parents did not live in Ogidi until he was five years old, when they returned to their homeland in Ogidi:

One of the earliest memories I can summon from the realm of childhood was a home-coming that was extraordinary even for such recollections. I was returning to my ancestral home for the first time. The paradox of returning for the first time need not detain us now because there are more engaging things at hand. I was five years old and riding in a motor vehicle also for the first time. I had looked forward very much to this experience, but it was not working right. Sitting in the back of the truck and facing what seemed the wrong way, I could not see where we were going, only where we were coming from. The dust and the smell and the speed and the roadside trees rushing forward as we rushed back finally overcame me with fear and dizziness. I was glad when it all finally came to a halt at my home and my town.⁵

Embodied in the last sentence of the quote is the feeling of being in exile and losing his ancestral home culture. That loss is further explained in the following sentences:

Of all our family, only my father had ever lived in Ogidi, to which he now brought us, and he had not lived there since he first began teaching for the Anglican Mission in 1904; it was now 1935. My mother, who had served beside him since their marriage five years into his career, had grown up in her own town, twenty-odd miles away.⁶

Although Achebe never lived in Ogidi before the family’s return, his mother and his elder sister, Zinobia Uzoma, regularly narrated to him stories about Ogidi and Awka, his mother’s hometown, coupled with stories from the Bible; for his father was a catechist and teacher, whose young family upbringing was based on Anglican Mission principles. At that point, both kinds of story served as preschool education for the young Chinua. According to Achebe’s biographer Ezenwa-Ohaeto,

When Chinua Achebe was a child, entertainment for children, especially if designed to quieten them or keep them busy, was conducted through games and narration of stories. Each mother or older child found it necessary to garner several stories for such purposes. Zinobia Uzoma, who had the responsibility for taking care of Chinua and Grace, was a very good mimic and would dramatize the characters in her stories. One of the tales she narrated was about a man known as Amanile who bought a “goat” not knowing it was a tortoise. Amanile would get up each day to procure grass for the “goat,” but it would not eat. Whenever the man went out, however, tortoise ate his alibo, a local delicacy made of cassava flour. Other stories were narrated by Chinua’s mother, whose experience of a different but related Igbo culture at Awka gave her access to myths, legends, folktales and stories centered on events and people. These storytelling sessions were part of Igbo tradition and fired the imaginations of gifted children. In later life Zinobia recollected that her younger brother Chinua had a retentive memory and would remind her of the stories he wanted to hear once more.⁷

Apart from this wellspring of his early education, Achebe told Ezenwa-Ohaeto about the walls of his father’s house, which were filled with educational material, which aroused his curiosity and imagination to read and learn about other people and a variety of issues and places:

My father filled our walls with a variety of educational material. There were Church Missionary Society yearly almanacs with pictures of bishops and other dignitaries. But the most interesting hangings were the large paste-ups which my father created himself. He had one of the village carpenters make him large but light wooden frames onto which he then gummed brown or black paper backing. On this paper he pasted colored and glossy pictures and illustrations of all kinds from an old magazine he had acquired somehow. I remember a most impressive picture of King George V in red and gold, wearing a sword. There was also a funny-looking man with an enormous stride. He was called Johnnie Walker. He was born in 1820 according to the picture and was still going strong. When I learned many years later that this extraordinary fellow was only an advertisement for whisky, I felt a great sense of personal loss.⁸

Upon his arrival in his ancestral home in the company of his family, Chinua was immediately thrust into another aspect of his Igbo childhood education and cultural experience: the effects of the clash of culture between the British missionaries, who were making a great effort to establish churches and schools in Igboland, and the Igbo elders, who were vehemently resisting the missionary effort in their communities, before Chinua was born. While the religious warfare was very acute in other parts of Igboland, it was less so initially in Ogidi because of the initial cordial relationship between the missionaries and Igbo leaders who were involved at the time.

On the part of the Igbo elders, for example, Achebe’s great-grandfather was a powerful but tolerant man who initially welcomed the missionaries when they first came to Ogidi. With his approval, Achebe’s father Okafor Achebe, described as “a young man [who] had acquired an enviable reputation as an excellent masquerader, an accomplishment that was valued highly in the community,” became one of the early converts of the CMS in Ogidi, and was baptized in 1904 by Rev. Sidney R. Smith and given the name Isaiah Achebe.

On the part of the missionaries, it should be noted as well that some of them, for example Rev. George T. Basden, learned to respect some Igbo institutions which made it possible for them to win the souls of some Igbo people as early converts. The CMS established Awka College for the training of teachers and catechists, which Achebe’s father attended. There he came into contact with Basden, a missionary, amateur anthropologist, and teacher, who was so sensitive that he not only made some Igbo acquaintances but also accorded recognition to the culture of the people, which was why he attracted respect wherever he visited. The respect was mutual, for he confessed:

A missionary has the unique opportunity of becoming acquainted with village life, for from the very nature of things the soundest policy is for him to live in the closest communion with the people whom he seeks to influence. So it comes about that he enters freely into the life of the natives, their huts are always open to him and he goes in and out more or less as one of themselves. In like manner they expect the missionary’s house to be free to them and to come and go as they please.⁹

That kind of friendly interaction between the missionaries and the Igbo people that Basden espoused made it possible for the missionaries to learn the Igbo language, which enabled them to preach directly to the people in their own language. According to Augustine S. O. Okwu,

the Protestant white missionaries such as Thomas J. Dennis, George Basden, Sidney Smith, and the lay missionary workers E. A. Homby, R. Chollet, Frances M. Dennis and Edith Warner visited the Igbo in their homes, preached and taught the people in the vernacular, and as a result were all given Igbo popular names.¹⁰

Ezenwa-Ohaeto emphasizes the same point as follows:

Appreciation of Basden’s political role was commemorated in the various titles he was awarded by Igbo communities. Onitsha conferred the title of Omesilincha which means “the one who accomplishes his duties or tasks completely”; the Ogidi community gave him the title of Onu nekwulu ora – “the mouth that speaks on behalf of the people”; and the Awka community called him Omezuluoke, “the one who fulfills his responsibility satisfactorily.” The Nkwelle Ogidi community honored him with the gift of an elephant tusk and a staff, items expressing great respect. These titles and gifts emphasized Basden’s roles as advocate, hard worker and responsible pioneer, clearly illustrating his personal dynamism and enterprise, and especially his willingness to use dialog rather than force or intimidation in his dealings with the people.¹¹

That was the nature of interactions between some sensitive missionaries and the Igbo people in Ogidi before Isaiah Okafor Achebe and his young family came back to their ancestral home. However, once the missionaries found a foothold in various parts of Igboland, including Ogidi, they started to preach boldly against many aspects of Igbo customs and traditions, including their rituals and ceremonies, which partly constituted their traditional religion and worldview. That is why at most of their public ceremonies, there were dancing masquerades who represented symbolically the sprits of their dead-living ancestors. Unfortunately, however, s...