Chinua Achebe: The Novelist As Revolutionary By Ogaga Ifowodo

Chinua Achebe’s stoic and gradualist
approach to life was evident not only
in his unhurried diction and surgically
measured prose but also in the kind
of solutions he proffered to the vexing
questions of the post-colonial world.
Particularly, in Nigeria, the country
that vexed him the most — to the
point of death in exile. If Arrow of
God is the novel that Achebe admitted
he was “most likely to be caught
sitting down to read again,” the one
essay of his that I might be caught
re-reading and quoting from with
gusto is “The Novelist as Teacher.”
Achebe was no revolutionary in the
ordinary sense. Such that while
delivering the 1998 McMillan-Stewart
Lecture at Harvard University, he felt
the need to apologise for never
having “held a gun” in his life —
something, curiously enough, he
considered “shameful” — even though
his hosts could hardly be expected to
hold that against him. As keen as he
was to contest the West’s monopoly
of discursive power for over four
centuries to represent and constitute
non-White people according to their
imperialist whims and fantasies, he
“did not really want to see the score
of narratives … settled by recourse to
power,” unless it be “the innate
power of stories themselves.” His
“choice of weapons,” he said, was
determined for him by his
“temperament.”
Why then the audacity of my title?
Because a revolution, as every careful
student of history knows, is never
prompt or sudden. The cataclysmic
moment when the dam bursts and
sweeps away the old order is a
culmination of a process long in the
making and not a beginning that is
also an end. Then there is the other
sense of the term that accords
perfectly with Achebe’s temperament:
revolution as any undertaking whose
goal is fundamental change in socio-
economic conditions, attitudes, or
mode of operation. This, precisely, is
what Achebe meant by the novelist as
teacher. Colonialism, together with
the centuries of slavery that preceded
it, defined our contact with Europe,
resulting in our internalisation of the
ideology of racial inferiority fabricated
to justify conquest.
It had convinced us that we were
inferior to Europeans; that we had no
worthy history or culture; that our
languages, gods, religious systems
and moral codes were damning
evidence of our sub-humanity. If the
“postcolonial” novelist or writer was
to matter to her society, she would
have, necessarily, to assume the role
of teacher. And her lesson would be
nothing but revolutionary, seeking as
it would to wipe out the self-
abnegating consciousness of the
colonised man and woman and return
them to their font of being; to “where
the rain began to beat” them, as
Achebe memorably put it. And to
make them see that “their past — with
all its imperfections — was not one
long night of savagery from which the
first European acting on God’s behalf
delivered them.”
Achebe makes the case for the
novelist as revolutionary most
eloquently. “Here then,” he says, “is
an adequate revolution for me to
espouse — to help my society regain
belief in itself and put away the
complexes of the years of denigration
and self-abasement.” The
revolutionary import of this mission
is what made it possible for me to
cite Achebe in the same breath as
Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney,
Mandela, Che Guevara, Karl Marx,
among other certified “reds,” at
rallies back in my days as a student
leader. And it is what makes me read
him with renewed delight now when I
am more and more convinced of a
related revolution: the urgent need to
examine the unquantifiable damage
done by colonialism to our psyche.
As Achebe rightly observes, we have
yet to overcome the “disaster brought
upon the African psyche in the period
of subjection” despite independence.
I would add that independence, as the
hasty and persisting denial of the
trauma of the colonial voiding of our
will to self-determination, repeats and
exacerbates that original catastrophe.
The result is the unbroken cycle of
“acting-out,” of puzzling behaviour,
in the political sphere clearly defined
today by shocking impunity and
corruption. “Today, things have
changed a lot,” Achebe says, “but it
would be foolish to pretend that we
have fully recovered from the
traumatic effects of our first
confrontation with Europe.”
The real tragedy of Okonkwo in
Things Fall Apart, then, is the failure
to acknowledge the trauma of his
subjugation. “The white man whose
power you know so well has ordered
this meeting to stop,” a colonial
messenger, one of his own, barks at
him. So if democracy, the process of
ascertaining the people’s will for
popular action, has failed so
miserably to take root in our land, we
should know one good reason why:
we are yet to recover our brutally
truncated will. Okonkwo would be as
perplexed today by our leaders’
mindboggling thefts as he was by the
defection of his fellow Umuofians to
the white man’s church, that more
insidious means of our subjection. “I
cannot understand these things you
tell me,” he says to Obierika. “What is
it that has happened to our people?
Why have they lost the power to
fight?” And we may ask: What has
happened to us? Why have our
leaders no desire whatsoever to
respect and improve the land; to
serve and lead by example? On 21
March 2013, the world lost a
revolutionary novelist and essayist.