I first met Chinua Achebe fifty-seven years ago when I was teaching English and History at a boys’ boarding school in Western Kenya. I did not meet him in person. He was then not really a person but only a name on a book that I had managed to borrow by post from the library of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, which had an enlightened and very generous lending policy available to anyone in East Africa who had some connection, however slight, with the university. I had participated in a six-week orientation program there before going out to my school, so I was eligible for this kind of academic philanthropy, and I took full advantage of it, borrowing at least two books a month from 1961 to 1963. Fortunately, I had picked up a copy of Janheinz Jahn’s Muntu, which had been published just before I left the United States, so I could use his chapter on literature as a shopping guide to the African holdings at Makerere.
What I found in those books during that rather leisurely reading period changed my plans for the future. I had been intending to apply for admission to a PhD program in English somewhere in America, but now I started looking for a program where, after jumping the usual hurdles requiring an adequate knowledge of British and American literatures, I could go on to write a dissertation on some aspect of African literature written in English. I found consent to do so at the University of California at Los Angeles, which at that time was in the midst of building a dynamic Center for African Studies, where I could take courses in a variety of disciplines outside the Department of English. I wrote my dissertation on Nigerian fiction, a study that placed Achebe and his predecessors and contemporaries as pace-setting pioneers in the African literary efflorescence that was to follow.
Much to my surprise, I found a job afterward teaching African literature in the English Department as well as the Department of African Languages and Literature (whose acronym incidentally and ironically was DOALL) at the University of Texas at Austin, which up to that point had done nothing at all about offering instruction in any of the many African literatures. Therefore, in a sense I owe my entire career and livelihood to Chinua Achebe and his interesting compeers. Needless to say, I am extremely grateful that Things Fall Apart and all his other books got written, alongside others by talented African authors there and elsewhere.
My focus here is going to be on what I learned from my interactions with Achebe over the years when we actually met in the flesh. I intend to quote a number of his memorable statements on those occasions which no doubt will be familiar to those who are speaking at this symposium, but may not be known quite so well by others who have not yet found an opportunity to study his works in some depth.
I first shook Achebe’s hand in November 1969, when he came as a spokesperson for Biafra to the University of Texas at Austin. Biafra, the Eastern Region where the Igbo were the dominant ethnic group, had broken away from Nigeria and declared its independence as a separate nation state. I was in my first term of teaching at the university at that time, and he was the first African writer to be invited to speak on campus. Having accepted the responsibility to organize his program for the day, I tried to schedule as many events as possible, with not only university students, faculty, and visitors, but also with the local press, who were eager to question him about Biafra. He had one interview with reporters and another with the host of an Austin television station. In addition, he spoke with students in two African literature classes and gave a formal lecture on “The Writer and the African Revolution.” It was a very busy day indeed, but he was in top form and approached these interactions with energy and characteristic intelligence and grace.
He was particularly effective when talking with students, for he seemed to intuit from the nature of the questions he was asked just how much or how little the questioners knew about Africa, and he would respond with answers that would educate them about African realities. Take, for example, this series of exchanges on the issue of political commitment:
Do you believe literature should carry a social or political message?Yes, I believe it is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest. Even those early novels that look like very gentle recreations of the past—what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past. That was protest, because there were people who thought we did not have a past. What we were doing was to say politely that we did—here it is, so commitment is nothing new. Commitment runs right through our work. In fact, I should say that all our writers, whether they are aware of it or not, are committed writers. The whole pattern of life demanded that you should protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your traditions, your religion, and so on.One big message, of the many that I try to put across, is that Africa was not a vacuum before the coming of Europe, that culture was not unknown in Africa, that culture was not brought to Africa by the white world. You would have thought it was obvious that everybody had a past, but there were people who came to Africa and said, “You have no history, you have no civilization, you have no culture, you have no religion. You are lucky we are here. Now you are hearing about these things from us for the first time.” Well, you know, we didn’t just drop from the sky. We too had our own history, traditions, cultures, civilizations. It is not possible for one culture to come to another and say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; there is nothing else but me.” If you say this, you are guilty of irreverence or arrogance. You are also stupid. And this is really my concern…But you don’t picture the Europeans who came to Iboland as black-hearted villains. No, I don’t think that is necessary. I think they were very ignorant. And that’s very bad, you know, when you are trying to civilize other people. But you don’t really need to be black-hearted to do all kinds of wrong things. Those who have the best intentions sometimes commit the worst crimes. I think it’s not my business to present villains without any redeeming features. This would be untrue. I think what’s more likely to be true is somebody coming with the best of intentions, really believing that there is nothing here, and that he is bringing civilization. He’s wrong, of course. He’s completely wrong and misguided. But that’s the man that interests me because he has potentialities for doing great harm.1
Achebe returned to this theme later in the afternoon when he gave his formal lecture on “The Writer and the African Revolution,” in which he began by repeating some of the same points, but then moved on to addressing new problems that African writers now faced and urgently needed to address:
The culture of a people is their cooperative effort; it is their cooperative will to make a clearing in the jungle and build on it a place of human habitation. If this place is disturbed or destroyed, as long as these people are alive, they will move to another spot, they will make a new clearing, and they will begin to build on it another home. While the African intellectuals were busy displaying the past culture of their people, the past culture of Africa, the peoples of Africa themselves, people caught in new emergencies, in new predicaments, were already creating new revolutionary cultures, which take into account their present condition, because, as long as the people are alive, their culture is alive. As long as the people are changing, their culture will be changing…This has been the problem of the African intellectuals and the African artists: The people who make culture have left them behind, and they must hurry. The must now hurry to catch up with the people, catch up with them in that zone—to borrow the beautiful expression of Fanon—that zone of occult instability where people dwell. It is there, at that zone, that customs die and cultures are born. It is there that the regenerative powers of the people are most potent. These powers are manifest today in the African revolution, a revolution that aims towards true independence, as opposed to phony independence; a revolution that moves toward the creation of modern states in place of the neocolonial enclaves we have today, a revolution that is informed with African ideologies.What is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is right in the middle of it, in the thick of it—if possible, at the head of it. Some of my friends say, “No, it isn’t, it is too rough there. A writer has no business being where it is so rough. He should be at the sidelines with his note-paper and pencil, where he can observe with objectivity.” I say that the writer in the African revolution who steps aside on the sidewalk can only write footnotes; he can only write a glossary when the event is over. He will become like the intellectual of today in many other places, the intellectual of futility asking many questions like: “Who am I? What’s the meaning of my existence?” … questions that no one can answer.2
So here he was, in a single day, expounding on the two major themes that had emerged so far in colonial and postcolonial African writing. And in his remarks to the press he was articulating a third theme—civil war—that he had already explored to some extent three years earlier in his fourth novel, A Man of the People, which ends with a military coup and a descent into the kind of social instability and national incoherence that leads to civil strife. This was not an instance of fortuitous clairvoyance on Achebe’s part. It was rather just another example of his uncanny ability to discern with remarkable accuracy how things were now falling further apart on the African continent. Civil war, sometimes with a focus on child soldiers, subsequently became a major theme in African literature during and after the Biafran conflict.
In the years that followed, Achebe was invited to the Austin campus on a number of occasions, once in 1974 as a participant in an international poetry festival organized by the Comparative Literature program that featured poets reading in their native language while English translations of their poems were projected on a screen above them. Achebe joined in by producing some of his own poetry in both Igbo and English.
But his next lecture occurred a year later when he served as a contributor representing West Africa in a panel on “Literature and Commitment” in a Symposium on Contemporary Black South African Literature, an exciting weekend that culminated in the founding of the African Literature Association. Achebe took his turn after hearing two South African keynoters—Keorapetse William Kgositsile and Dennis Brutus—make their presentations. He started by saying “there is really little to add to what Willy and Dennis have said,” but then he suddenly took exception to a remark by Kgositsile.
I don’t agree with Willy that art for art’s sake is fanciful. It’s not fanciful; it’s a very deeply political position. To say that art for art’s sake is fanciful is to misunderstand the nature of the argument. A writer who says that art is for art’s sake is clearly saying, “The political situation is all right as it is. Don’t upset it.” That is what you are saying. And those in power will say, of course, “This is real writing; he knows his job, you see. He’s not disturbing us.” And so it is a deeply political, a highly committed stance to take…Now, having said that, I must now mention what I think is a danger. The danger is to begin to use the word commitment like a cliché. “Committed, I am committed.” I’ll give you an example. Last year at the Writer’s Conference in Kampala we were talking about Ayi Kwei Armah (incidentally, I object to being classified with Armah and Ouologuem on the matter of commitment, because we are committed to different things, completely.) The argument was on Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and the whole generation of young people at the conference said, “Oh, he is committed, he is a committed writer.” This was going on for some time, so I asked, “What is he committed to?” And then there was a silence, for about two seconds—it completely threw them, as you would say. Then somebody with presence of mind thought very quickly while the others were still confused and said, “He is committed to social change.” And I said, “Ah yes, he is committed to social change. He is committed to social change.”Well, ...