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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, 2d Rev. Ed. Chinua Achebe Born: Ogidi, Nigeria; November 16, 1930 Principal Long Fiction Things Fall Apart, 1958 No Longer at Ease, 1960 Arrow of God, 1964 A Man of the People, 1966 Anthills of the Savannah, 1987 Other Literary Forms The short stories of Chinua Achebe, written over a period of twenty years, were first published in England by Heinemann under the title Girls at War (1972), though most of them had already appeared in various periodicals and in a Nigerian publication, The Sacrificial Egg and Other Short Stories (1962). Achebe's poems, most of them written during the Biafran crisis (1967-1970), came out soon after the war as Beware: Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971), and a year later in an enlarged edition. Doubleday then published this Heinemann collection in America as Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems (1973). Additional poems and an essay by Achebe were combined with photographs by Robert Lyons in a full-color coffee-table book, Another Africa (1998), an overview of the beauty and complexity of modern Africa. Achebe has gathered together various autobiographical, political, literary, and cultural essays under the intriguingly optimistic title, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), published by both Doubleday and Heinemann. In 1983, Heinemann published his short book, The Trouble with Nigeria, challenging his contemporaries to overcome their growing resignation. Hopes and Impediments (Doubleday, 1988) brings together some fifteen essays, mainly on literature and the writer's role and covering a twenty- three-year period, some of them previously published, including five from Morning Yet on Creation Day. Achebe has also written the children's stories Chike and the River (1966) and, jointly with John Iroaganachi, How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972). Achebe helped edit a collection of short stories, African Short Stories (1985). Achievements From the beginning of his literary career, with the publication of Things Fall Apart, Achebe recognized and accepted his role as that of spokesman for black Africa. The primary function of that role was to reinterpret the African past from an African's point of view. This he successfully does in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, which correct the imperialist myth of African primitivism and savagery by re-creating the Igbo culture of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, its daily routines, its rituals, its customs, and especially its people dealing with one another in a highly civilized fashion within a complex society. The reinterpretation necessitated, as well, a look at the invading culture; Achebe tilted the balance in the Africans’ favor by depicting individuals in the British administration as prejudiced, imperceptive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and emotionally impotent. Since his main subject was the African crisis, he did not go to great pains to explore the private lives of the British or to mollify the British public. He needed to show that white civilization and white people were not intrinsically superior, and to restore to the African a respect for his own culture and his own person. Achebe did not conceive his role as that of a mere propagandist, however, as any reader of the novels would acknowledge. His interpretation paid due respect to Western civilization and seriously criticized aspects of his own. In spite of certain fictional shortcuts - which some critics regard as crucial flaws - Achebe's attempt was to arrive at an objective appraisal of the conflict between Africa and the West. In fact, the central focus of his three other novels - No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah - set in contemporary times, is on the failure of Africans to meet challenges in the modern world. Of these, the first two are satirical attacks, the third a subtle blend of irony, compassion, and traditional wisdom, and a sane perspective on the chaotic Nigerian scene. Achebe's importance as a spokesman for and to his own people has drawn criticism from some Western readers who are more interested in the quality of a novel than in its social function. Achebe has had several angry words to say to such aesthetically minded critics. His defense is that literature is a human and humane endeavor, not primarily a formal one. Still, one can easily defend his novels on aesthetic grounds, even arguing, as Charles Larson has done, that Achebe is actually an innovative writer who has transformed the novel to suit the African setting. Certainly, the most remarkable thing that Achebe has done, especially in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, is to transform the English language itself into an African idiom. Bernth Lindfors and others have demonstrated the skill with which Achebe uses imagery, allusions, figures of speech, proverbs, sentence patterns, standard English, and various forms of substandard English to capture a particular historical moment as well as the African mentality, but just as important to unify the novels around major motifs and themes. Achebe has not written mere social documents or social manifestos, but creditable works of literature that can stand the test of critical analysis; his contribution to the African world goes far beyond his five novels, but they are his major literary achievement. As a consequence of his eight-year achievement as a novelist, Achebe was named chairman of the Society of Nigerian Authors and became a Member of Council at the University of Lagos. He also received the New Statesman Award for his third novel, Arrow of God. Among other honors were a Rockefeller Travel Fellowship to East and Central Africa (1960) and a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Travel Fellowship to the United States and Brazil (1963). In 1989 Achebe was elected the first president of the Nigerian chapter of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), although he was living in the United States at the time. Some twenty American, European, and African institutions, including Dartmouth College, Stanford University, the Open University of Great Britain, and the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, have granted him honorary degrees. He holds the influential position of founding editor of the African Writers Series, which, more than any other publisher, is responsible for the worldwide recognition of literary talent from Africa. The London Times included Achebe among its 1993 list of one thousand "Makers of the Twentieth Century." In 1996 he was awarded the Campion Award, sponsored by the Catholic Book Club to honor a "Christian person of letters" who combines faith and literary talent. Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than forty-five languages and has sold millions of copies, making it the most widely read and influential African novel ever written. Biography Chinua Achebe was born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, in the Eastern Region of Nigeria. He gives some details about his family and his early life in an essay, "Named for Victoria, Queen of England" (1973, in Morning Yet on Creation Day). His parents, Isaiah and Janet Achebe, were both Christian, his father an evangelist and church teacher. His maternal grandfather, like Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, was a wealthy and distinguished community leader. He was not Christian but exercised tolerance when Achebe was converted. Achebe was baptized Albert Chinualumogu after Queen Victoria's consort, but dropped the Albert while at his university, evidently as a reaction against the British and his Christian heritage. He explains, however, that he was never really torn between the two cultures. There was none of the agony that is often found in African writers such as Cheikh Hamidou Kane. Achebe enjoyed the rituals of both religions. He did come to wonder if the apostates were not the Christians rather than the pagans, but he cites advantages brought in by Christianity: education, certain humane reforms, paid jobs. There seems to have been a pragmatic and tolerant strain in Achebe from the beginning. For his secondary education, Achebe attended Government College, Umuahia (1944-1947), and he received his B.A. degree from University College, Ibadan, in 1953. During the next twelve years he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, first as producer in Lagos (1954-1958), then as controller in Enugu (1959-1961), and finally as Director of External Broadcasting in Lagos (1961-1966). In 1961, he married Christiana Chinwe Okoli, and they had two sons and two daughters. Also during these years Achebe wrote his first four novels, beginning with his most famous, Things Fall Apart, in 1958, and ending with A Man of the People in 1966. Achebe explains his novelistic career as the result of a revolution in his thinking during the nationalist movement after World War II. He decided that foreigners really could not tell the Nigerian story adequately. Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson (1939) was a prime example of this failure. Achebe regarded Things Fall Apart as an atonement for his apostasy, a ritual return to his homeland. By 1966 Achebe was a distinguished member of the international literary community. In 1967, however, his career was interrupted by the outbreak of the war in Biafra, Achebe's Igbo homeland in the Eastern Region of Nigeria. It came to be essentially a civil war. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and played a diplomatic role in raising money for the Biafran cause. Bound as he was by emotional ties and personal commitment to his country's fate, Achebe had no time to write novels. All he could manage were short poems, which were published a year after the war was over (1971). Achebe's career after the war was taken up primarily by the academic world. In 1972, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. From 1972 to 1975, he was a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and in 1975-1976 at the University of Connecticut. He then became professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and ten years later was again at the University of Massachusetts. Three of his publications during that time were a collection of short stories, Girls at War, written over a period of years going back to his university days; a collection of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day, which give his views on a number of issues from the Biafran War to the problems of African literature in the Western world; and a book-length essay on the Nigerian situation, The Trouble with Nigeria. When it seemed that Achebe had left his career as a novelist behind him, twenty-one years after A Man of the People, he produced the carefully crafted Anthills of the Savannah, bringing up to date the apparently futile attempts to end the vicious cycles of corruption and coups in Nigeria. In March, 1990, while en route to the airport in Lagos, Nigeria, Achebe was involved in a serious car accident and suffered a spinal injury that left him confined to a wheelchair. After nearly six months of recovery in various hospitals, he accepted an endowed professorship at Bard College in New York. For the next several years he turned his energies increasingly to the academic world, teaching, editing, and writing political and critical nonfiction. Analysis Chinua Achebe is probably the best-known and, at the same time, the most representative African novelist. He may very well have written the first African novel of real literary merit - such at least is the opinion of Charles Larson - and he deals with what one can call the classic issue that preoccupies his fellow novelists, the clash between the indigenous cultures of black Africa and a white, European civilization. He avoids the emotionally charged subject of slavery and concentrates his attention on the political and cultural confrontation. His five novels offer, in a sense, a paradigm of it. He begins in Things Fall Apart with the first incursion of the British into the Igbo region of what became the Eastern Region of Nigeria, and his subsequent novels trace (with some gaps) the spread of British influence into the 1950’s, and beyond that into the post-independence period of the 1960’s. The one period he slights, as he himself admits, is the generation in transition from traditional village life to the new Westernized Africa. He had difficulty imagining the psychological conflict of the man caught between two cultures. There is no example in Achebe of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's "ambiguous adventure." He does, however, share with Kane and with most other African novelists the idea that his function as a writer is a social one. Achebe insists repeatedly on this social function in response to Western critics who tend to give priority to aesthetic values. He seems to suggest, in fact, that the communal responsibility and the communal tie are more fundamental than artistic merit for any writer, but certainly for the African writer and for himself personally at the present stage in African affairs. He describes himself specifically as a teacher. His purpose is to dispel the colonial myth of the primitive African and to establish a true image of the people and their culture. This message is intended, to some extent, for a Western audience, but especially for the Africans themselves, since they have come to believe the myth and have internalized the feeling of inferiority: Achebe's aim is to help them regain their self-respect, recognize the beauty of their own cultural past, and deal capably with the dilemmas of contemporary society. It is important, however, that Achebe is not fulfilling this role as an outsider. He returns to the traditional Igbo concept of the master craftsman and to the Mbare ceremony to explain the functional role of art in traditional society. He insists that creativity itself derives from a spiritual bond, the inspiration of a shared past and a shared destiny with a particular people: The alienated writer such as Ayi Kwei Armah cannot be in tune with himself and is therefore likely to be imitative rather than truly creative. It would appear, then, that Achebe values originality and freshness in the management of literary form, but considers these attributes dependent on the sensitivity of the writer to his native setting. Whereas Achebe's motivation in writing may be the restoration of pride in the African world, his theme, or rather the specific advice that he offers, albeit indirectly, is much more pragmatic. He does not advocate a return to the past or a rejection of Western culture. Like other African writers he decries the destructive consequences of colonial rule: alienation, frustration, and a loss of cohesiveness and a clear code of behavior. He recognizes as well, however, certain undesirable customs and superstitions that the foreign challenge exposed. His practical advice is to learn to cope with a changing world. He teaches the necessity of compromise: a loyalty to traditional wisdom and values, if not to tribal politics and outmoded customs, along with a suspicion of Western materialism but an openness to Western thought. He notes that in some cases the two cultures are not so far apart: Igbo republicanism goes even beyond the British-American concept of democracy, a view that the Ghanaian novelist, Armah, has developed as well. Unlike the Negritude writers of francophone Africa, Achebe, in his attempt to reinterpret the African past, does not paint an idyllic picture. He regrets the loss of mystery surrounding that past, but chooses knowledge, because he considers judgment, clarity of vision, and tolerance - virtues that he locates in his traditional society - to be the way out of the present confusion and corruption. This key idea of tolerance pervades Achebe's work. One of his favorite stories (Yoruba, not Igbo) illustrates the danger in dogmatism. The god Echu, who represents fate or confusion, mischievously decides to provoke a quarrel between two farmers who live on either side of a road. He paints himself black on one side and white on the other, then walks up the road between the two farmers. The ensuing argument is whether the stranger is black or white. When he walks back down the road, each farmer tries to outdo the other in apologizing for his mistake. Achebe's most pervasive vehicle for this idea of tolerance, however, is in the concept of the chi, which is central to Igbo cosmology. Achebe interprets it as the ultimate expression of individualism, the basic worth and independence of every person. Politically it means the rejection of any authoritarian rule. Morally it means the responsibility of every person for his or her own fate. The chi is his other self, his spiritual identity responsible for his birth and his future. Thus, while one's chi defines his uniqueness, it also defines his limitations. As Achebe frequently notes in his novels, no one can defeat his own chi, and the acceptance of one's limitations is the beginning of tolerance. It is the social purpose, this "message" of tolerance in Achebe's novels, that dictates the form. His plots tend to be analytic, static, or "situational," as Larson argues, rather than dynamic. Instead of narrative movement, there is juxtaposition of past and present, of the traditional and the modern. Achebe achieves balance through comparison and contrast. He uses exposition more than drama. His main characters tend to be representational. Their conflicts are the crucial ones of the society. The protagonists of the two novels set in the past, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, are strong men who lack wisdom, practical sense, an ability to accept change, and a tolerance for opposing views. The protagonists of No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People are weak and vacillating. They accept change but are blinded by vanity and have no satisfactory code of conduct to resist the unreasonable pressures of traditional ties or the corruption and attractions of the new age. The two male protagonists of Anthills of the Savannah, also hindered by vanity, prove inadequate idealists in a power-hungry environment and wake up too late to their lack of control over events. An even more predominant feature of the five novels is their style. Achebe makes the necessary compromise and writes in English, a foreign tongue, but manipulates it to capture the flavor of the native Igbo expression. He does this through dialect, idiom, and figurative language, and through proverbs that reflect traditional Igbo wisdom, comment ironically on the inadequacies of the characters, and state the central theme. Thus Achebe manages, through the authorial voice, to establish a steady control over every novel. To some extent one senses the voice in the proverbs. They represent the assessment of the elders in the clan, yet the wisdom of the proverb is itself sometimes called into question, and the reader is invited to make the judgment. In general, it is Achebe's juxtaposing of character, incident, proverb, and tone that creates the total assessment. Against this background voice one measures the pride, vanity, or prejudice of the individuals who, caught in the stressful times of colonial or postcolonial Nigeria, fail to respond adequately. The voice does not judge or condemn; it describes. It reminds the Nigerian of the danger of self-deception. It also recognizes the danger of failing to communicate with others. Achebe keeps ever in mind the tale (found in numerous versions all over Africa) of humankind whose message to Chukwa (the Supreme Deity) requesting immortality is distorted by the messenger and thus fails in its purpose. The voice he adopts to avoid the distortion is one of self-knowledge, practical sense, pragmatism, and detachment, but also of faith, conviction, and humor. The voice is, in a sense, the message itself, moderating the confrontation between Africa and the West. Things Fall Apart Significantly, Achebe takes the title of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, from W. B. Yeats's 1920 apocalyptic poem "The Second Coming," which prophesies the end of the present era and the entrance on the world's stage of another that is radically different. Things Fall Apart treats the early moments of that transition in an Igbo village. For those people the intrusion of the British is as revolutionary as the coming of a second Messiah, Yeats's terrible "rough beast." To some extent, Achebe creates a mythic village whose history stretches back to a legendary past. Chapters are devoted to the daily routines of the people, their family life, their customs, games, and rituals, their ancient wisdom, their social order, and legal practices. Achebe remains a realist, however, as he identifies also certain flaws in the customs and in the people. Superstition leads them to unnecessary cruelties. The protagonist, Okonkwo, reflects a basic conflict within the society. He is, on the one hand, a respected member of the society who has risen through hard work to a position of wealth and authority. He conscientiously accepts the responsibilities that the elders lay on him. At the same time, he is such an individualist that his behavior runs counter to the spirit of traditional wisdom. His shame over his father's weak character provokes him to be excessive in proving his own manhood. There is a defensiveness and uncertainty behind his outward assertiveness. It is true that the clan has its mechanisms to reprimand and punish the Okonkwos for their errant behavior. Nevertheless, even before the British influence begins to disturb the region, the cohesiveness of the clan is already in question. One particular chink in Okonkwo's armor, which identifies a weakness also in the clan as it faces the foreign threat, is his inflexibility, his inability to adapt or to accept human limitations. Since he, in his youth, overcame adversity (familial disadvantages, natural forces such as drought and excessive rains, challenges of strength as a wrestler), he comes to believe that he has the individual strength to resist all challenges to his personal ambition. He cannot accept the presence of forces beyond his control, including the forces of his own personal destiny. It is this and the other aspects of Okonkwo's character that Achebe develops in the first section of the novel against the background of the tribe to which he belongs. Part 1 ends with the symbolic act of Okonkwo's accidentally killing a young man during a funeral ceremony. Like death, the act is beyond his control and unexplainable, yet it is punishable. The elders exile him for seven years to the village of his mother's family. This separation from his village is itself symbolic, since in a way Okonkwo has never belonged to it. While he is away, the village changes. With the coming of the missionaries, traditional religious practices begin to lose their sanction, their absoluteness. In part 3, Okonkwo returns from exile but finds that his exile continues. Nothing is as it was. Open hostility exists between the new religion and the traditional one. The British government has begun to take over authority from the elders. The novel ends with Okonkwo's irrational killing of a messenger from the British District Officer and with his subsequent suicide. Okonkwo rightly assumes, it would seem, that no authority now exists to judge him: The old sanctions are dead, and he refuses to accept the new ones. He must be his own judge. There is, however, if not a judge, a voice of reason and compassion, detached from the action but controlling its effects, that assures Okonkwo of a fair hearing. The voice is heard in the proverbs, warning Okonkwo not to challenge his own chi (his own spiritual identity and destiny), even though another proverb insists that if he says yes his chi will say yes too. It is heard in the decisions of the elders, the complaints of the wives, and the rebellion of Okonkwo's own son, Noye, who turns to Christianity in defiance against his father's unreasonableness. It is found in the tragic sense of life of Okonkwo's uncle, Uchendu, who advises this man in exile to bear his punishment stoically, for his sufferings are mild in comparison to those of many others. Achebe locates his voice in one particular character, Obierika, Okonkwo's closest friend and a man of thought rather than, like his friend, a man of action. In the important eighth chapter, Achebe measures his protagonist against this man of moderation, reflection, and humor, who can observe the white invader with tolerance, his own society's laws with skepticism, and, at the end of the novel, his dead friend with respect and compassion. Achebe's voice can even be seen in the ironically insensitive judgment of the District Commissioner as the novel closes. As superficial and uninformed as that voice might be in itself, Achebe recognizes that the voice nevertheless exists, is therefore real, and must be acknowledged. The final view of Okonkwo and of the village that he both reflects and rejects is a composite of all these voices. It is the composite also of Okonkwo's own complex and unpredictable behavior, and of his fate which is the result of his own reckless acts and of forces that he does not comprehend. Amid the growing chaos one senses still the stable influence of the calm authorial voice, controlling and balancing everything. No Longer at Ease From the early 1900's of Things Fall Apart, Achebe turns in his second novel, No Longer at Ease, to the mid-1950's just before independence. The protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the tragic victim who lashed out against British insolence, resembles to some extent his grandfather in his inadequacy to deal with the pressures of his society, but has far different loyalties. The novel begins after things have already fallen apart; Nigeria is between societies. Obi no longer belongs to the old society. His father is the rebellious son of Okonkwo who left home for the Christian church and was educated in mission schools. Obi received a similar education and was selected by his community to study in England. This financial and personal obligation to Umuoria plagues Obi throughout the novel, for after his Western education he no longer shares the old customs and the old sense of loyalty. He considers himself an independent young man of the city, with a Western concept of government and administration. After his return from England he receives a civil service job and has visions of reforming the bureaucracy. The story is thus about the practical difficulties (it is not really a psychological study) of an ordinary individual separating himself cleanly from the past while adapting to the glitter and temptations of the new. Obi faces two particular problems. He has chosen to marry a woman, Clara, who belongs to a family considered taboo by the traditional community. He attempts to resist family and community pressure, but eventually succumbs. Meanwhile, Clara has become pregnant and must go through a costly and embarrassing abortion. Obi essentially abandons his responsibility toward her in his weak, halfhearted respect for his family's wishes. He likewise fails at his job, as he resists self-righteously various bribes until his financial situation and morals finally collapse. Unfortunately, he is as clumsy here as in his personal relations. He is arrested and sentenced to prison. As in his first novel, Achebe's subject is the individual (and the society) inadequate to the changing times. His main concern is again a balanced appraisal of Nigerian society at a crucial stage in its recent history, because the greatest danger, as Achebe himself observes, is self-deception. He presents a careful selection of characters whose vanity, prejudice, or misplaced values allow them only a partial view of reality. Obi is, of course, the main example. He leaves his home village as a hero, is one of the few Nigerians to receive a foreign education, and, as a civil servant and proud possessor of a car, is a member of the elite. His vanity blinds him to such an extent that he cannot assess his proper relationship to his family, to Clara, or to his social role. His father, caught between his Christian faith and tribal customs, cannot allow Obi his independence. Mr. Green, Obi's British superior at the office, is trapped by stereotypical prejudices against Africans. There is no one individual such as Obierika within the novel to provide a reasonable interpretation of events. One nevertheless feels the constant presence of Achebe as he balances these various voices against one another. Achebe also assures perspective by maintaining a detached tone through irony, wit, and humor. The narrator possesses the maturity and the wisdom that the characters lack. This novel also shows Achebe experimenting with structure as a means of expressing the authorial voice. The novel opens (like Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, 1886) with the final act, the trial and judgment of Obi for accepting a bribe. Achebe thus invites the reader to take a critical view of Obi from the very beginning. There is no question of getting romantically involved in his young life and career. This distancing continues in the first three chapters as Achebe juxtaposes present and past, scenes of reality and scenes of expectation. The real Lagos is juxtaposed directly against the idyllic one in Obi's mind. A picture of the later, strained relationship between Obi and Clara precedes the romantic scenes after they meet on board ship returning from England. Through this kind of plotting by juxtaposition, Achebe turns what might have been a melodramatic story of young love, abortion, betrayal, and corruption into a realistic commentary on Nigerian society in transition. In Things Fall Apart he rejects a paradisal view of the African past; in No Longer at Ease he warns against selfish, irresponsible, and naïve expectations in the present. Arrow of God In his third novel, Arrow of God, Achebe returns to the past, taking up the era of British colonization a few years after the events of Things Fall Apart. The old society is still intact, but the Christian religion and the British administration are more firmly entrenched than before. Achebe again tries to re-create the former Igbo environment, with an even more elaborate account of the daily life, the customs, and the rituals, and with the scattering throughout of traditional idioms and proverbs. The foreigners, too, receive more detailed attention, though even the two main personalities, Winterbottom and Clarke, hardly achieve more than stereotyped status. Rather than work them late into the story, this time Achebe runs the two opposing forces alongside each other almost from the very beginning in order to emphasize the British presence. Now it is the political, not the religious, power that is in the foreground, suggesting historically the second stage of foreign conquest, but the Church also takes full advantage of local political and religious controversy to increase its control over the people. Achebe continues to be realistic in his treatment of traditional society. It is not an idyllic Eden corrupted by satanic foreign power. In spite of the attractive pictures of local customs, the six villages of Umuaro are divided and belligerent, and, in two instances at least, it is ironically the British government or the Christian church that ensures peace and continuity in the communal life. By this stage in the colonization, of course, it is difficult (and Achebe does not try) to untangle the causes of internal disorder among the Igbo. Like Okonkwo, the protagonist in Arrow of God is representative of the social disorder. In him Achebe represents the confidence in traditional roles and beliefs challenged not only by the new British worldview, but also by forces within. Personal pride, egotism, and intolerance sometimes obscure his obligation to the welfare of the community. Whereas Okonkwo is one among several wealthy members of the clan, Ezeulu occupies a key position as the priest of Ulu, chief god of the six villages. Thus the central cohesive force in the society is localized in this one man. In another way, too, Ezeulu differs from Okonkwo. Whereas Okonkwo stubbornly resists the new Western culture, Ezeulu makes such gestures of accommodation that his clan actually accuses him of being the white man's friend. Instead of disowning his son for adopting Christianity, he sends Oduche to the mission school to be his spy in the Western camp. Ezeulu's personality, however, is complex, as are his motives. Accommodation is his pragmatic way of preserving the clan and his own power. When the opportunity arises for him to become the political representative of his people to the British government, he refuses out of a sense of loyalty to his local god. This complexity is, however, contradictory and confusing, thus reflecting again the transitional state of affairs during the early colonial period. Ezeulu does not always seem to know what his motives are as he jockeys for power with Winterbottom and with the priest Idemili. In trying to save the community he sets up himself and his god as the sole sources of wisdom. As priest - and thus considered half man and half spirit - he may, as Achebe seems to suggest, confuse his sacred role with his human vanity. It is in the midst of this confusion that Achebe again questions the existence of absolutes and advises tolerance. The central concept of the chi reappears. Does it say yes if humanity says yes? If so, humankind controls its own destiny. If not, it is severely limited. In any case, the concept itself suggests duality rather than absoluteness. Even Ezeulu, while challenging the new power, advises his son, Oduche, that one "must dance the dance prevalent in his time." Chapter 16, in which this statement appears, contains the key thematic passages. In it one of Ezeulu's wives tells her children a traditional tale about a people's relation with the spirit world. It turns upon the importance of character - the proper attitude one must have toward oneself and toward the gods. A boy accidentally leaves his flute in the field where he and his family had been farming. He persuades his parents to let him return to fetch it. An encounter with the spirits, during which he demonstrates his good manners, temperance, and reverence, leads to material reward. The envious senior wife in the family sends her son on a similar mission, but his rudeness and greed lead only to the visitation of evils on human society. The intended message is obvious, but the implied one, in the context of this novel, is that traditional values appear to be childhood fancies in the face of contemporary realities. At the end of the chapter, Ezeulu puts those realities into focus. He describes himself as an arrow of god, whose very defense of religious forms threatens the survival of his religion, but he goes on to suggest the (for him) terrifying speculation that Oduche, his Christian son, and also Christianity and the whites themselves, are arrows of god. At the end of his career, Ezeulu is opening his mind to a wide range of possibilities. This tolerance, however, is double-edged, for as Achebe seems to suggest, humanity must be not only receptive to unfamiliar conceptions, but also tough enough to "tolerate" the pain of ambiguity and alienation. Ezeulu is too old and too exhausted to endure that pain. The final blow is his son's death while performing a ritual dance. Ezeulu interprets it as a sign that Ulu has deserted him. Indeed, the voice in Arrow of God is even more ambiguous than that in the first two novels. There is no Obierika to correct Ezeulu's aberrations. Akueke, his friend and adviser, is not a sure guide to the truth. Achebe works through dialogue even more than in Things Fall Apart, and the debates between these two men do not lead to a clear answer. Akueke cannot decipher the priest's motives or anticipate his actions. Ezeulu, as a strange compound of spirit and man, is to him "unknowable." Nor does Achebe make the task any easier for the reader. Ezeulu does not seem to understand his own motives. He considers himself under the spiritual influence of his god. His sudden, final decision not to seek a reconciliation with his people he imagines as the voice of Ulu. He thus sacrifices himself and his people (as well as the god himself) to the will of the god. Achebe remains silent on the issue of whether the voice is the god's or Ezeulu’s. One can only speculate that since the society created the god in the first place (or so the legend went), it could also destroy him. A Man of the People Like No Longer at Ease, Achebe's fourth novel, A Man of the People, seems rather lightweight in comparison with the two historical novels. It takes place not in Nigeria but in an imaginary African country, a few years after independence. Achebe seems to be playing with some of the popular situations in contemporary African literature, as though he were parodying them. The main character, Odili, has relationships with three different women: Elsie, a friend from the university who functions as a sort of mistress, but who remains a shadowy figure in the background; Jean, a white American with whom he has a brief sexual relationship; and Edna, a beautiful and innocent young woman with whom he "falls in love" in a rather conventional Western sense. There is also the typical estrangement of the university-educated son from his traditionally oriented father. Achebe contrives a somewhat romantic reconciliation during the last third of the novel. Finally, while all of Achebe's novels are essentially political, this one pits two candidates for public office against each other, with all the paraphernalia of personal grudges, dirty tricks, campaign rhetoric, and even a military coup at the end that ironically makes the election meaningless. (In fact, it was already meaningless because the incumbent, Nanga, had arranged that Odili's name not be officially registered.) Furthermore, the contest is a stock romantic confrontation between the idealism of youth and the corrupt opportunism of an older generation. While the story might at first glance appear to be a melodramatic rendering of the romantic world of love and politics, it so exaggerates situations that one must assume Achebe is writing rather in the comic mode. Along with this choice of mode, Achebe also creates a more conventional plot line. The rising action deals with the first meeting after sixteen years between Odili, a grammer school teacher, and Nanga, the "man of the people," Odili's former teacher, local representative to Parliament, and Minister of Culture. In spite of his skepticism toward national politics, Odili succumbs to Nanga's charm and accepts an invitation to stay at his home in the city. The turning point comes when Odili's girl friend, Elsie, shamelessly spends the night with Nanga. Odili sees this as a betrayal by Elsie, even though he himself feels no special commitment to her. More important, Odili feels betrayed and humiliated by Nanga, who does not take such incidents with women at all seriously. His vanity touched by this rather trivial incident, Odili suddenly reactivates his conscience over political corruption and vows to seek revenge. The attack is twofold: to steal Edna, Nanga's young fiancée, who is to be his second wife, and to defeat Nanga in the next elections. Odili's motives are obviously suspect. The rest of the novel recounts his gradual initiation into love and politics. The revenge motive drops as the relationship with Edna becomes serious. The political campaign fails, and Odili ends up in the hospital after a pointless attempt to spy on one of Nanga's campaign rallies. Again, it is tempting to treat this as a conventional initiation story, except that Odili's experiences do not really cure him of his romantic notions of love and politics. For the first time, Achebe elects to use the first-person point of view: Odili tells his own story. This may be the reason that the balancing of effects through juxtaposition of scenes and characters does not operate as in the earlier works. The tone is obviously affected as well: Odili is vain and pompous, blind to his own flaws while critical of others. Hence, Achebe has to manipulate a subjective narrative to express the objective authorial voice, as Mark Twain does in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or (to use an African example) Mongo Beti in Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956; The Poor Christ of Bomba). The primary means is through Odili's own partial vision. Odili frequently makes criticisms of contemporary politics that appear to be just, and therefore do represent the judgment of Achebe as well. At the same time, Odili's affected tone invites criticism and provides Achebe with an occasion to satirize the self-deception of the young intellectuals whom Odili represents. Achebe also expresses himself through the plot, in which he parodies romantic perceptions of the contemporary world. In addition, he continues to include proverbs in the mouths of provincial characters as guides to moral evaluation. Achebe emphasizes one proverb in particular to describe the political corruption in which Nanga participates. After a local merchant, Josiah, steals a blind beggar's stick to make his customers (according to a figurative twist of reasoning) blindly purchase whatever he sells, the public reacts indignantly with the proverb: "He has taken away enough for the owner to notice." Unlike Achebe's narrator in the first three novels, Odili cannot allow the proverb to do its own work. He must, as an academic, analyze it and proudly expand on its meaning. He had done this before when he became the "hero" of Jean's party as the resident expert on African behavior and African art. He may very well be correct about the political implications of the proverb, that the people (the owners of the country) are now being blatantly robbed by the politicians, but he fails to identify emotionally with the local situation. Nor is he objective enough to admit fully to himself his own immoral, hypocritical behavior, which he has maintained throughout the novel. He is an egotist, more enchanted with his own cleverness than concerned about the society he has pretended to serve. In like manner, at the close of the story Odili turns the real death of his political colleague, Max, into a romantic fantasy of the ideal sacrifice. Totally pessimistic about the reliability of the people, he returns once again to the proverb to illustrate their fickle behavior as the melodramatic villains: They always return the Josiahs to power. Achebe may to some extent share Odili's view of the public and the national leadership it chooses, but he is skeptical of the Odilis as well; and hence he positions the reader outside both the political structure and Odili as an observer of the society. Achebe, then, even in this first-person narrative did not abandon his authorial voice, nor the role of social spokesman that he had maintained in all his other novels. Anthills of the Savannah Achebe's fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, written twenty-one years after his fourth, shares some of its interests. Achebe once again makes the situation political and the setting contemporary. As in A Man of the People, the country, Kangan, is fictitious (though the resemblance to Nigeria is again hardly disguised), but somewhat later in the independence period, perhaps in the 1970's or the early 1980’s. Also, once again, the main actors in the drama knew one another under different circumstances in the past. Whereas the former relationship between Nanga and Odili was teacher and student, the three male protagonists of Anthills of the Savannah are of the same generation and first knew one another as fellow students at Lord Lugard College when they were thirteen years old. The novel deals with their lives during twenty-seven years, including their experiences in England at the University of London, their adventures in love, and their choice of careers. These years are shown only through flashbacks, however, for the focus is on a two-week period in the present, on the edge of a political crisis, when they are forty years old. Achebe does not present his narrative in a straight chronological line; not only are there flashbacks, but even during the two-week present he recounts, or has his characters recount, events out of chronological order - a technique Achebe used in his other novels as well to control reader response. The events of this two-week period begin, as the novel does, on a Thursday morning as Sam, now His Excellency, President of Kangan, presides over his weekly cabinet meeting. Sam had decided long before, following the advice of his headmaster at Lord Luggard, to choose the army over a medical career because it would turn him into a "gentleman." His choice proved to be a good one when, after a military coup two years earlier, he was named president of the new government. A fellow student at Lord Luggard, Christopher Oriko, became his minister of information. Chris used his influence over Sam to name five of the twelve cabinet members and to appoint another old school friend, Ikem Osodi, editor of the National Gazette. The political conflict in the novel focuses on these three men, though Sam as a character remains largely in the background. The relationship between Chris and Sam has become increasingly strained over the two-year period, as Sam has expanded his drive for status into an ambition to be president for life with total authority. He is now highly suspicious of Chris and has appointed the tough, ruthless Major Johnson Ossai as his chief of staff and head of intelligence. Chris, meanwhile, as he himself admits in the opening chapter, has become an amused spectator and recorder of events, almost indifferent to the official drama before him. Such an attitude has also driven a wedge between him and Ikem, who, as a crusading journalist, has continued to attack government incompetence and to represent and fight for the hapless public, while Chris has counseled patience and diplomacy in dealing with Sam. The inciting force on this Thursday is a delegation from Abazon - the northern province of Kangan devastated, like Nigeria's own northern regions, by drought - that has come to the capital city of Bassa to seek relief. Ikem has only recently written an editorial, his allegorical Hymn to the Sun that dries up the savannah, accusing the president (the sun) of responsibility and promoting the delegation's cause. Sam at first feels threatened by the loud demonstrations outside his office, but when he learns that the delegation consists of only six elders and that the rest of the demonstrators are Bassa locals, he decides to use the situation to rid himself of his old school buddies and to entrench himself in power surrounded by loyal henchmen such as Ossai. Chris and Ikem do not realize what is going on behind the scenes - nor does the reader - until events get beyond their control. Within hours, Sam has Ikem arrested and murdered (though the official version is shot while resisting arrest for plotting "regicide"), the Abazon delegation put in prison, and Chris declared an accomplice of both. Chris himself has managed to escape, hiding out with friends and sympathizers and eventually in disguise traveling by bus past roadblocks to the Abazon province. There he learns that a military coup has toppled Sam from his throne and that Sam has mysteriously disappeared. Ironically, at this very moment, in the midst of riotous celebration at a roadblock, Chris is shot by a police sergeant while trying to prevent him from abducting and raping a girl. The novel leaves no hope that the next regime will offer Kangan any better leadership. The men in this modern African state consistently fail to bring the persistent political incompetence under control. Sam is a variation on the Nanga type, the amoral, self-serving servant of power who does not foresee the consequences of his ruthless treatment of others. This naïveté of the tyrant is matched by the naïve idealism of the moral crusader, Ikem, and the naïve detachment of the philosophical observer, Chris. While most of the novel is an omniscient third-person narrative, with Achebe providing a clear, balanced perspective, five of the first seven chapters are told in first person, with Chris and Ikem being two of the three narrators. Inside their minds, the reader sees a false self-confidence that Achebe eventually parleys into a chauvinism, apparently characteristic of the African male. For the first time in his novels, Achebe takes up the feminist theme, stating flatly that women need to be a major part of the solution to Africa's woes. Sam, as perceived by the third character-narrator, Beatrice, Chris's fiancée, treats women as sex objects, as he invites Beatrice to a dinner party at his lake retreat, assuming that she will be honored to serve her president. The two male protagonists, Ikem and Chris, innocent carriers of long-held assumptions, treat the women they love too lightly, and neither understands until only days before their deaths the wisdom and spiritual power of Beatrice, the central female character in the novel. In fact, Beatrice herself seems only half aware of her strength until the crisis in Kangan puts it to the test. In chapters 6 and 7, which she narrates, she reveals the change that takes place in her. Chapter 6 is her account of the visit to Sam's retreat, where her defensiveness and vanity obscure her actual superiority over the other guests, including a young American female reporter who uses her sexuality to gain access to Sam. Beatrice sees herself, rather vaingloriously at this point, as a sacrificial shield to protect Sam - a symbol for her of the African leader - from the white temptress. Still, she rebuffs Sam's sexual advances, and he, insulted and humiliated, sends her home in ignominy. Beatrice sees dimly, however, the role that she must play. In chapter 7, she receives help from Ikem, who visits her for the last time before his death. With her help he has made a great discovery, for she had long accused him of male chauvinism, and he reads to her the "love letter" that she has inspired. It is a feminist recantation of his chauvinism, a rejection of the two traditional images of women, both found in biblical and in African sources: the woman as scapegoat, the cause of evil and men's suffering, and the woman idealized as the mother of the male god, called upon to save the world when men fail. His final word on the insight she had given him, however, is that the women themselves must decide their role; men cannot know. Beatrice tells this story of Ikem's last visit in her journal, written months after Ikem has died. Only then is she able to put the pieces of the tragedy together in her mind. Chris, too, begins to see a special power in Beatrice during the weeks of crisis. She becomes for him a priestess of sexual and spiritual resources who could, as a prophetess, tell the future. Indeed, it is Beatrice (a literary allusion to Dante's Beatrice which is only one of several whimsical allusions in the novel) who warns Chris and Ikem that they must mend their relationship, that tragedy is in store not only for them but also for Sam. They do not take her seriously enough, however, as they soon discover. Yet Achebe does not allow the elevation of Beatrice into the traditional Igbo role of half-woman, half-spirit (the Chielo of Things Fall Apart, as Beatrice herself notes), to be the work of the characters alone. In chapter 8, Achebe himself, as omniscient narrator, recounts the Igbo legend of the sun-god who sent his daughter to earth as a harbinger of peace. This legend suggests that henceforth women must stand as mediators between men and their desires, but this too is not Achebe's final word on the subject. As Ikem says in his confession to Beatrice in chapter 7, "all certitude must now be suspect." In the last chapter, Achebe tries to bring together his thoughts on women and numerous other themes throughout the novel. The scene is Beatrice's flat and the time is nine months after the tragedy. Those present are a family of friends, including among others Elewa, Ikem's fiancée; Agatha, Beatrice's housekeeper; and Abdul Medani, the army captain who secretly helped Chris escape from Bassa. The occasion is the naming ceremony for Elewa and Ikem's twenty-eight-day-old daughter. The women, along with the men present, are trying to put their lives and, symbolically, the lives of their countrymen in order. Beatrice fears, however, that they are all fated pawns of "an alienated history." They acknowledge the value of people and the living ideas that they leave behind, the importance of humor and the need to laugh at oneself, the "unbearable beauty" even of death, and the community of all religions that can dance the same dance. They learn that women can perform tasks usually reserved for men; since Ikem is not present, Beatrice, the priestess, names the child: Amaechina, the path of Ikem, a boy's name for a baby girl. Elewa's uncle, a male representative of traditional thinking, arrives to preside over the naming but instead pays homage to the young people in the room. "That is how to handle this world," he says, "give the girl a boy's name," make her "the daughter of all of us." It is important not to take oneself too seriously. Sam, Ikem, and Chris forgot, as Beatrice had to remind them, that their story is not "the story of this country," that "our story is only one of twenty million stories." That reminder may be the main message in Anthills of the Savannah, that the other millions of people are not ants caught in a drought, retreating from the sun into their holes, but people with their own stories. As the elder in the Abazon delegation reminds Ikem, the story is the nation's most valued treasure, the storyteller possessed by Agwu, the god of healers and the source of truth. Beatrice, like Ikem and Chris, is a writer, a teller of stories. Uchendu, in Things Fall Apart, warns that all stories are true; this fifth novel, itself full of proverbs, stories, legends, and political allegory of the sun shining on the anthills of the savannah, is an ambitious exposé and a compassionate vision of the future. Thomas Banks, updated by Cynthia A. Bily Other Major WorksSHORT FICTION: The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, 1962; Girls at War, 1972. POETRY: Beware: Soul Brother and Other Poems, 1971, 1972; Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, 1973. NONFICTION: Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975; The Trouble with Nigeria, 1983; Hopes and Impediments, 1988; Conversations with Chinua Achebe, 1997 (Bernth Lindfors, editor); Another Africa, 1998 (with Robert Lyons). CHILDREN's LITERATURE: Chike and the River, 1966; How the Leopard Got His Claws, 1972 (with John Iroaganachi); The Flute, 1977; The Drum, 1977. EDITED TEXTS: Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo, 1932-1967, 1978 (with Dubem Okafor); Aka Weta: An Anthology of Ibo Poetry, 1978; African Short Stories, 1985 (with C. L. Innes); Beyond Hunger in Africa, 1990 (with others). Bibliography Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. A full-length biography of Achebe, this book benefits from its author's insights as a former student of Achebe, a native of Nigeria, and a speaker of Igbo. Ezenwa-Ohaeto examines Achebe's life and literary contributions and places them within their social, historical, and cultural contexts. Written with the cooperation of Achebe and his family, the book includes several rare and revealing photographs. Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. In this first title in the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series, Innes gives a detailed analysis of each of Achebe's novels, showing how Achebe adapted what he found in Western fiction to create a new literary form - the Africanized novel. Innes also includes a chapter on the critical and political writings, demonstrating how the Nigerian Civil War changed Achebe's politics and his fiction. Innes, C. L., and Bernth Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1978. This collection of essays by twenty different critics offers a comprehensive overview of Achebe's work. Contains a brief introduction to Achebe's life and background, five general assessments of his fiction, commentaries on his first four novels and his poetry, and an extensive bibliography. Iyasere, Solomon O., ed. Understanding "Things Fall Apart": Selected Essays and Criticism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1998. Nine essays demonstrate the breadth of approaches taken by recent critics: They include a reading of Okonkwo as a tragic hero, a discussion of the rhythm of the novel's prose as it echoes African oral tradition, and a discussion of how Achebe successfully transformed the colonizers’ language to tell the story of the colonized. Muoneke, Romanus Okey. Art, Rebellion, and Redemption: A Reading of the Novels of Chinua Achebe. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Muoneke examines Achebe's role as a public chronicler of Nigeria's social, economic, and political problems, as a way of exploring the larger issues of the writer's redemptive role in society. Argues that Achebe's novels challenge colonialism and negritude, two forces that have distorted the African image. Wren, Robert M. Achebe's World: The Historical and Cultural Context of the Novels. D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980. The purpose of this seemingly authoritative and well-documented presentation is to clarify what might be confusing to a reader not familiar with the Nigerian context. Offers comforting evidence that Achebe's fiction (his first four novels) is an essentially truthful and reliable guide to the historical Nigeria. Includes an extensive glossary of terms and a helpful bibliography. |
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