'CHINUA, A TRIBUTE' - CHXTA

"Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings."  - Things Fall Apart, pg 5.

It is not a surprise the amount of tributes that have poured in from around the world following the passing on of perhaps Nigeria's greatest ever writer. Chinualumogu Albert Achebe died a few hours ago aged 82. Why was Chinua Achebe so readable and Wole Soyinka is almost inscrutable? The former was a writer, a storyteller, the latter is a poet who just happens to write. 

Chinua's telling of stories and his command of the English language, was such that the moment you picked up a Chinua Achebe book, putting it down became almost an impossibility. His understanding of the culture of his Igbo people, my people, was also virtually unrivalled. A lot of the Igbo proverbs I learned first, I learned from his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart. However, when talking of a giant of literature such as Chinua Achebe, it is plain wrong to use the phrase magnum opus to describe his work. His craftsmanship as a story teller was such that he had a plethora of work that made up his magna opera.

As compared to a lot of people, Achebe was a man of character, who refused not one, but two national honours because he was not at peace with the way Nigeria is being run. Only if our government(s) had been reading. 

No Longer At Ease, his second novel, and in many ways more poignant than Things Fall Apart itself, is a book that peers deep into the Nigerian psyche and foretells in more ways than one, the emergence and eventual proliferation of Nigeria's current national malaise, corruption. 

"It is all lack of experience," said another man. "He should not have accepted the money himself. What others do is tell you to go and hand it to their houseboy. Obi tried to do what everyone does without finding out how it as done." He told the proverb of the house rat who went swimming with his friend the lizard and died from cold, for while the lizard's scales kept him dry the rat's hairy body remained wet. 

In that passage, describing the reaction of the Umuofia Progressive Union after Obi Okonkwo had been caught for bribery, Achebe tells us about our own complicity in this culture of corruption that is destroying our country. The truth was that the members of the Umuofia Progressive Union were not concerned about the fact that Obi accepted bribes. Rather, their grouse was that he accepted bribes without covering up his tracks. This, up until today, half a century after those words were set in stone, is the root of our disease today. 

The seer that he was, peered into our psyche even in such a "mundane" thing as our stamina as a people. In Arrow of God, Ezeulu, given the power to make decisions on behalf of the god Ulu, Ezeulu would not dare test that power. But his people, were quick to abandon him on his return from prison, because of the "small issue" of being unable to harvest their yams. The conversion of the people of Umuaro to Christianity because Ezeulu did not perform the New Yam Festival, foretold our inability to weather storms as a people, together. A failing talked about by another Nigerian great, Fela Kuti, in his Sorrows, Tears and Blood. 

But Chinua Achebe was not just a writer about culture, tradition and the contemporary. One of the first books I recall reading, was Chike and the River. Being ethnically from that region, but hailing from another part of the country, I began to, at that young age, appreciate the vital importance of the River Niger to commerce in our environment. 

Chinua, as he grew older, and especially after Nigeria's devastating Civil War, became more introspective, and tried to, in his own literary manner, warn us about the road we were taken. A warning that as a people, we have failed to heed. 

In yet another seminal piece, The Trouble With Nigeria, Chinua said, "In spite of conventional opinion Nigeria has been less than fortunate in its leadership. A basic element of this misfortune is the seminal absence of intellectual rigour in the political thought of our founding fathers - a tendency to pious materialistic woolliness and self-centred pedestrianism." 

There you have it. He was probably the first to identify something that a few Nigerians are beginning to come to terms with, that our founding fathers were not all that. Such was his genuine insight into the character of this country that he called home.

In his last book, There Was A Country, came for the first time since I started reading him, long passages that I disagreed with. However, one cannot fault what he wrote because he clearly stated from the beginning, that the book was a personal history. That personal history, was perhaps his greatest gift to Nigeria. Mistakes were made in those dark years between 1966 and 1970. Those mistakes are finally being documented by some of the people who went through those days. We MUST learn from it.

Regarding the man, it is simply impossible for an iroko tree to fall and the forest will remain quiet. The tributes and obituaries that have poured in from various parts of the world should be a pointer to the younger generation of Nigerians. Chinua Achebe was by no means a wealthy man. He was not a pauper either. But by using his God-given talents, he achieved global recognition. Now that the curtains have been drawn on his life, we can all sit back and see how the world treats a genuine icon. He lived to a grand old age. He was also an achiever. And the world has now shown, it is not only among ndi Igbo that achievement is revered. In publishing Things Fall Apart at age 28, Chinua washed his hands early. And Kings invited him to the table, such that he had the luxury of choosing what banquets to attend, and which to reject.

Iroko ada na! Dike eji aga mba na gbo. Prof, kachifo.

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'Things Fall Apart' author Chinua Achebe dies at 82

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, acclaimed in part for his 1958 novel "Things Fall Apart," has died, his British publisher Penguin Books said Friday.

He was 82.

 An author of more than 20 books, his honors included the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction, according to Penguin. Besides novels, Mr. Achebe’s works included powerful essays and poignant short stories and poems rooted in the countryside and cities of his native Nigeria, before and after independence from British colonial rule. His most memorable fictional characters were buffeted and bewildered by the conflicting pulls of traditional African culture and invasive Western values.

For inspiration, Mr. Achebe drew on his own family history as part of the Ibo nation of southeastern Nigeria, a people victimized by the racism of British colonial administrators and then by the brutality of military dictators from other Nigerian ethnic groups. Mr. Achebe burst onto the world literary scene with the publication in 1958 of his first novel, “Things Fall Apart,” which sold millions of copies and was translated into 45 different languages. Set in the Ibo countryside in the late 19th century, the novel tells the story of Okonkwo, who rises from poverty to become an affluent farmer and village leader. But with the advent of British colonial rule and cultural values, Okonkwo’s life is thrown into turmoil. In the end, unable to adapt to the new status quo, he explodes in frustration, killing an African in the employ of the British and then committing suicide. The novel, which is also compelling for its descriptions of traditional Ibo society and rituals, went on to become a classic of world literature and was often listed as required reading in university courses in Europe and the United States. But when it was first published, “Things Fall Apart” did not receive unanimous acclaim. Some British critics thought it idealized pre-colonial African culture at the expense of the former empire.

“An offended and highly critical English reviewer in a London Sunday paper titled her piece cleverly, I must admit Hurray to Mere Anarchy!” wrote Mr. Achebe in “Home and Exile,” a collection of autobiographical essays that appeared in 2000. A few other novels by Mr. Achebe early in his career were occasionally criticized by reviewers as being stronger on ideology than on narrative interest. But over the years, Mr. Achebe’s stature grew until he was considered a literary and political beacon. “In all Achebe’s writing there is an intense moral energy,” observed Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American studies and philosophy at Princeton, in a commentary written in 2000. “He speaks about the task of the writer in language that captures the sense of threat and loss that must have faced many Africans as empire invaded and disrupted their lives.”

In a 1998 New York Times book review, the novelist Nadine Gordimer hailed Mr. Achebe as “a novelist who makes you laugh and then catch your breath in horror — a writer who has no illusions but is not disillusioned.” Mr. Achebe’s political thinking evolved from blaming colonial rule for Africa’s woes to frank criticism of African rulers and of citizens who tolerated their corruption and violence. Forced abroad by Nigeria’s bloody civil war in the 1960s and then by military dictatorship in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Achebe had lived for many years in the United States, where he was a university professor. But he continued to believe that writers and storytellers ultimately held more power than army strongmen. “Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior,” an old soothsayer observes in Mr. Achebe’s 1988 novel, “Anthills of the Savannah.” “It is the story that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind.” Source: CNN and NY Times

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