/ 5 February 2010

Dandy child of fortune

Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s greatest writers, has received very little recognition from those who grant the world’s prestigious literary awards. The Man Booker’s lifetime award, its International Prize for fiction, was conferred on him as recently as 2007 but the grand acknowledgement, the Nobel Prize, eludes him still.

Yet, if world acclaim has been restrained, in Africa adulation has come in simple yet complete ways. In his native Nigeria Achebe (80) is affectionately known as the Eagle on Iroko. Two potent images: the majestic eagle, king of the birds of prey, and the iroko, a giant tree native to West Africa and considered to be sacred.

The Education of a British-Protected Child (Penguin), his new collection of essays, confirms his cultural and political importance to Africa and the rest of the world. Achebe’s oeuvre, comprising poetry, short stories, children’s books, essays and fiction, includes the much-adored Things Fall Apart, the majestic Arrow of God and the essay collection Hopes and Impediments.

I have wondered over the years whether the qualified adulation was a result of the middle ground that his work occupies, the quiet compromise at which his work gestures. Achebe has little of that percussive intellectual intensity that characterises his compatriot, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.

This thesis of the middle ground is contained in an Igbo proverb. To paraphrase: In a procession of three people walking in a fearsome forest, the one in front “encounters spirits”, the one in the middle is the “dandy child of fortune” and the one at the end has “twisted fingers”.

What may not be immediately clear is the quiet celebration of “the middle ground as the most fortunate”.

“The middle ground is neither the origin of things nor the last of things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision …” writes Achebe in the title essay.

Indeed, his works occupy and celebrate that middle ground; his oeuvre is unrelenting in its exposition of European aggression yet honest enough in its self-reflection, pointing at flaws in Africa, for instance, The Trouble with Nigeria, a piece of angry and pointed brevity.

“I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it. But I am also fascinated by that middle ground I spoke about, where the human spirit resists an abridgment of its humanity,” Achebe writes.

Now wheelchair-bound after a car accident, Achebe says he inherited this way of looking at the world from his father, Isaiah, who, in turn, received it from Udoh, the uncle who raised him. In a proselytising moment Isaiah once tried to convert his uncle. Udoh waved the young preacher away, asking: “What shall I do to these?” while pointing at the three tribal titles his Igbo peers had awarded him. “Was he to throw all that away now because some strangers from afar came and said so?” Achebe asks. Yet the beauty of Udoh lies in the fact that he didn’t stop his nephew from converting and following the new religion.

In the essay, “What Is Nigeria to Me?”, Achebe, who has lived and worked in the United States for decades, continues his quarrel with his homeland. “Nigerian nationality was for me and my generation an acquired taste — like cheese,” he says of the country that a few years ago the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States predicted would break up by 2015.

Small wonder then that more than two million people perished when Biafra seceded from federal Nigeria in 1967. The war against the Biafrans was notorious for its brutality, Achebe found it difficult to “forgive Nigeria and my countrymen and women”. This tragedy resulted in a protracted period of soul-searching and a realisation that Nigeria is “neither my mother nor my father”, but rather “a child”.

His other project and obsession is the representation of Africa. The object of his sustained attack over the years has been Joseph Conrad; other writers Achebe singles out are Graham Greene and EM Forster. “The story of the black man told by the white man has generally been told to serve political and economic ends,” he says of the work of these famous novelists. The project of these men, Achebe argues, has found novel forms of expression in modern forms of media such as film and journalism.

His eagle eye is trained on all forms of racism, benign or otherwise. On saint-like German-French doctor and theologian, Albert Schweitzer, he notes: “… can give one a lot more trouble than a King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother.”

The middle ground is neither the origin of things nor the last of things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision …

The example of the recent catastrophe in Haiti perhaps will illustrate Achebe’s point. Most news reports invariably mention that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. What is not explained is how the country, once the richest island in the Caribbean, has come to be the televised face of the miserable black condition.

The Democratic Republic of Congo — potentially the richest country in Africa — is Haiti’s alter ego in Africa. Achebe has trawled through colonial archives in his accustomed role of the novelist as teacher.

The Congo’s king, Nzinga Mbemba, later baptised as Dom Afonso, in 1511 exchanged correspondence with his “royal brother”, the king of Portugal, Achebe notes. Dom Afonso once observed to his “royal brother” that Portugal’s legal code was too harsh. “Can we imagine a situation in which an African ruler is giving, rather than receiving, admonition on law and civilisation?” Achebe asks.
He also looks at the language debate that has burned for decades. “I write in English. English is a world language. But I do not write in English because it is a world language.” If Nigeria “wishes to exist as a nation, it has no choice … but to hold its more than two hundred component nationalities together through an alien language, English”, Achebe argues.

I conclude with an anecdote involving Achebe’s seminal novel, Things Fall Apart. In the middle of last year I lent out my copy to a South African friend. She brought back the book and said she liked it, in a polite way, without showing much enthusiasm.
Then earlier this year, while we were talking about Achebe with another friend, the borrower blurted out: “The character of [the stubborn, single-minded] Okonkwo reminds me of my father.” It was exactly the reaction that the text elicited from Achebe’s friend, the late Afro-American writer, James Baldwin. In the essay “Teaching Things Fall Apart” Achebe records Baldwin as saying: “I recognised everybody in it. That book was about my father …”

The Education of a British-Protected Child is a delightful book, an exhibition of lucid thought; it is touched with righteous anger and yet written with grace. It shows Achebe’s acute awareness of the world at large — he even quotes the Zulu proverb “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (a human being is human because of other humans).

Achebe truly is like the eagle that soars high above, observing and recording minute movements on the savanna, knowledge it will use when it swoops down on its prey. The works of the Eagle on Iroko have enriched not only his home continent, but also all of humanity.