Chris Dunton Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe (Oxford University Press) Novels such as Things Fall Apart and A Man of the People have been so successful worldwide they have tended to overshadow Chinua Achebe’s non-fictional works. For over 30 years, though, the Nigerian has been demonstrating he is a master essayist. His new book, gathering together three recent Harvard lectures, adds to that legacy -retracing, it’s true, some familiar ground, but also offering extensions to old arguments and, especially, providing fresh and gleaming autobiographical insights of a kind Achebe has tended to decline before. The theme that binds the three essays together is central to Achebe’s life’s work: the reclamation of Africa’s story. In the first piece he remembers how, when he was five, his father retired from 30 years of missionary work to take his family back to their ancestral home. From this autobiographical starting-point Achebe opens out to give an account of his Igbo heritage: asking of his people, are they tribe or nation, exploring their religion and their institutions of democracy (he notes a father proclaiming his egalitarianism by naming his child Ezebuilo -“A king is an enemy”). From here Achebe moves on to his undergraduate years and his first commitment to anti-imperialism. His approach here is both nationalist and broadly humanist: when he speaks of the disinterestedness and integrity he seeks in accounts of Africa he echoes -though he might be bemused at the suggestion -the principles of the Victorian essayist Matthew Arnold. In the second piece he looks in more detail at writings on Africa, focusing on “The colonisation of one people’s story by another”. He scrutinises Amos Tutuola’s 1952 work The Palmwine Drinkard and its reception by Dylan Thomas (enthusiastic) and by Nigerian students then living in London (hostile). He gives a fair bit of space to an analysis of the drivellings of Elspeth Huxley (important we don’t forget how grotesque these were). And he accounts for what all this meant for him and his growing: “My home was under attack and… my home was not merely a house or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story in whose ambience my own existence had first began to assemble its fragments into a coherence and meaning.” The last section begins with a proverb: “Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.” The idea this proverb carries Achebe first applauds, then problematises: “I [do] not really want to see the score of narratives between me and my detractor settled by recourses to power, other than the innate power of stories themselves.”
And on those stories themselves: he returns to his own life history (his arrival in London, in 1957) and, finally, though he says little about his current situation, to the meaning of exile -of one kind or another – for the African writer today. As I said, some of this ground Achebe has covered before, but the revisiting, reworking, of old themes is surely welcome when it’s done with such eloquence and assurance, and with a wit that manages to be quiet and sensitive and yet quite devastating at one and the same time. That’s Achebe, then, but what about his publisher? I don’t want to seem to be counting every grain of rice in the bag, but: this is what used to be called a slim volume, with wide margins, not much text per page, and only 105 pages to boot (excluding notes and index). The price per page of this hardback edition is R1,50. Maybe a paperback follows, or a Nigerian edition. I hope so, otherwise this book is hardly likely to be bought even by African libraries (cash-strapped as they are), nor is Achebe likely to reach his most significant audience – that is, African readers.