Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe [1 ed.] 0914478451, 9780914478454, 091447846X

Table of contents :
Introduction -- General essays. The tragic conflict in the novels of Chinua Achebe / Abiola Irele -- Cultural norms and modes of perception in Achebe's fiction / Lloyd W. Brown -- Politics and the African writer / Kolawole Ogungbesan -- The palm-oil with which Achebe's words are eaten / Bernth Lindfors -- Language and action in the novels of Chinua Achebe / Gareth Griffiths -- Things fall apart. Yeats and Achebe / A.G. Stock -- Narrative techniques in Things fall apart / Solomon O. Iyasere -- Language, poetry and doctrine in Things fall apart / C.L. Innes -- Symbolic structure in Things fall apart / Donald J. Weinstock and Cathy Ramadan -- Fire and transition in Things fall apart / Bu-Buakei Jabbi -- No longer at ease. Language as a theme in No longer at ease / Felicity Riddy -- Eliot and Achebe : an analysis of some formal and philosophical qualities of No longer at ease / Roderick Wilson --Arrow of God. The human dimension of history in Arrow of God / Emmanuel Obiechina -- Idols of the den / M.M. Mahood -- Mister Johnson and the complexity of Arrow of God / Robert M. Wren -- A source for Arrow of God / Charles Nnolim -- A source for Arrow of God : a response / C.L. Innes -- A man of the people. Achebe's African parable / Bernth Lindfors -- A man of the people / David Carroll -- Chinua Achebe : a man of the people / Ngugi wa Thiong'o -- Poetry. Chinua Achebe's Poems of regeneration / Philip Rogers

Citation preview

v^KI 11LAL

PERSPECTIVES ON

CHINUA ACHEBE Edited by C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES The purpose of the works in this series is to provide the teacher and student with the most important critical and historic commentary on major authors, themes, and national literatures of the non-western world. In a period when vast realignments of power and long overdue reassessments of the cultures of the third world are occurring, the documents and polemics reflecting and often speeding these changes should be readily available. Senior Editors of the Series: Donald Herdeck, Georgetown University, Washington, D. C. and Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas, Austin. Subjects of the first works in the Series: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Amos Tutuola (B. Lindfors, ed.) V. S. Naipaul (R. D. Hamner, ed.) Nigerian Literatures (B. Lindfors, ed.) Chinua Achebe (C. L. Innes and B. Lindfors, eds.) Wole Soyinka (J. Gibbs, ed.) Lusophone Literature from Africa (D. Burness, ed.) Aime Cesaire (T. Hale, ed.) Leon Gontran Damas (K. Q. Warner, ed.) Modern Arabic Literature (I. Boullata, ed.)

Future Volumes: 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Wilson Harris (K. Ramchand) Modern Persian Literature (T. Ricks) Algerian Literature (A. Lippert) (James) Ngugi wa Thiong’o (G. D. Killam) Jean Rhys (H. Tiffin) Saint-John Perse (D. Racine) Goan Literature: Five Centuries (P. Nazareth) Cuba South: Caribbean Writing (D. Herdeck) West African Writing, excl. of Ghana & Nigeria (J. Peters)

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Ghana (R. Priebe) Thomas Mofolo Christopher Okigbo Sembene Ousmane Okot p’Bitek East African Literatures South African Writing by South Africans Derek Walcott George Lamming Naguib Mahfouz Contemporary Arabic Women Writers Contemporary African Women Writers Contemporary Anglo-Indian Writers Twentieth Century Latin-American Writers Caribbean Fiction dealing with U. S. Presence

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CHINUA ACHEBE

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CHINUA ACHEBE

Edited by

C. L. Innes

& Bernth Lindfors

Three Continents Press Washington, D. C.

FIRST EDITION

Copyright ® 1978 by Three Continents Press ISBN 0-914478-45-1 0-914478-46-X pbk. LC No: 77-9163.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission ex¬ cept for brief quotations in reviews or articles.

Three Continents Press 1346 Connecticut Avenue, N. W. Washington, D. C. 20036

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the following individuals, publications and publishers for permission to reprint the essays which appear in this book. Heinemann Educational Books, Anchor/Doubleday, and NwankwoIfejika for permission to quote from Achebe’s works. Heinemann Educational Books, African Literature Today, and Africana Publishing Corp. for “The Palm-Oil with Which Achebe’s Words are Eaten,” and “Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Abiola Irele for “The Tragic Conflict in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Kolawole Ogungbesan and African Studies Review for “Politics and the African Writer.” Heinemann Educational Books and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature for “Yeats and Achebe.” Solomon Iyasere and New Letters for “Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart.” Bu-Buakei Jabbi, Christopher Heywood, the University of Sheffield, The University of Texas Press, and Obsidian for “Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart.” Felicity Riddy, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Oxford University Press for “Language as Theme in No Longer at Ease.” Roderick Wilson and English Studies in Africa for “Eliot and Achebe: An Analysis of Some Formal and Philosophic Qualities in No Longer at Ease” Emmanuel Obiechina and Cambridge University Press for permission to quote from Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Presence Africaine for “Achebe’s African Parable.” Twayne Publishers for permission to quote from David Carroll’s Chinua Achebe. Heinemann Educational Books for permission to quote from Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Homecoming. Philip Rogers, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Oxford University Press for “Chinua Achebe’s Poems of Regeneration.” Research in African Literatures and The University of Texas Press for “Cultural Norms and Modes of Perception in Achebe’s Fiction,” “A Source for Arrow of God,” and “A Source for Arrow of God: A Response.” Robert Wren for “Mister Johnson and the Complexity of Arrow of God. ” Donald J. Weinstock, Cathy Ramadan, and Critique for “Symbolic Structure in Things Fall Apart.” M. M. Mahood and Rex Collings Ltd. for “Idols of the Den.” We also wish to thank Christian Njimma for assistance in proofreading.

CONTENTS Introduction

1

General Essays The Tragic Conflict in the Novels of Chinua Achebe Abiola Irele Cultural Norms and Modes of Perception in Achebe’s Fiction Lloyd W. Brown

10 22

Politics and the African Writer Kolawole Ogungbesan

37

The Palm-Oil with Which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten Bernth Lindfors

47

Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe Gareth Griffiths

67

Things Fall Apart Yeats and Achebe A. G. Stock

86

Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart Solomon O. Iyasere

92

Language, Poetry and Doctrine in Things Fall Apart C. L. Innes

111

Symbolic Structure in Things Fall Apart Donald J. Weinstock and Cathy Ramadan

126

Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart Bu-Buakei Jabbi

135

No Longer at Ease Language as a Theme in No Longer at Ease Felicity Riddy

150

Eliot and Achebe: An Analysis of Some Formal and Philosophical Qualities of No Longer at Ease Roderick Wilson

160

Arrow of God The Human Dimension of History in Arrow of God Emmanuel Obiechina Idols of the Den M. M. Mahood

170 180

Mister Johnson and the Complexity of Arrow of God Robert M. Wren

207

A Source for Arrow of God Charles Nnolim

219

A Source for Arrow of God: A Response C. L. Innes

244

A Man of the People Achebe’s African Parable Bernth Lindfors

248

A Man of the People David Carroll

255

Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People Ngugi wa Thiong’o

279

Poetry Chinua Achebe’s Poems of Regeneration Philip Rogers

284

Bibliography

294

Index

311

Notes on Contributors

314

Introduction

Chinua Achebe is probably the most widely read of contempo¬ rary African writers, both on the African continent and abroad. His reputation was quickly established with his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which won him the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize as well as scholarships and grants. After the publication of his second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), he was awarded the Nigerian National Trophy for Literature, and for his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), he received the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award. His last novel, A Man of the People (1966), aroused immediate interest because of its seemingly prophetic insight into subsequent political events in Nigeria. In 1972 he was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry prize for his volume entitled Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (enlarged, revised and republished as Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems in 1973). Over the last decade, Achebe’s lectures and essays have provoked much debate about the criteria for assessing African writers, and his influence on younger novelists has been considerable. His novels have been translated into some thirty languages, he has been awarded honorary doctorates by universities in North America and Britain, he has been elected an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association, has in recent years been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, and of course, has been the subject of numerous critical essays published in journals throughout the world. It seems timely, therefore, to bring together the best and most illuminating of these articles so that interested readers, students and teachers might have easy access to them and become aware of the variety of perspectives and approaches that critics have brought to Achebe’s works. Born in Ogidi, in the eastern part of Nigeria in 1930, Achebe was, as he informs us in the autobiographical essay, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,”1 originally christened Albert Chinualumogu. His father was an evangelist and church teacher, although many of his relatives and neighbors adhered to the Ibo religion and customs. Thus, Achebe writes, he grew up “at the crossroads of cultures.”

2

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

On one arm of the cross we sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. On the other my father’s brother and his family, blinded by heathenism, offered food to idols. That was how it was supposed to be anyhow. But I knew, without knowing why, that it was too simple a way to describe what was going on .. .What I do remember was a fascination for the ritual and the life on the other arm of the crossroads. And I believe two things were in my favour—that curiosity, and the little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth. The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully.2 Since so much of Achebe’s writing is devoted to filling in and animating that canvas, many readers might find some knowledge of traditional Ibo society helpful. Perhaps the most significant fact about the Ibos was that although they were a single people speaking a number of related dialects and inhabiting southeastern Nigeria, they had no centralized institutions or powerful kings or chiefs, as had the Yoruba and Hausa peoples to the west and north of them. Authority was dispersed amongst the numerous small hamlets which made up the basic social unit and which were then grouped to make up a village with a marketplace, shrine and central meeting place where villagers were able to participate in the making of rules and the passing of judgments affecting them. Decisions concerning the community were reached by consensus and were subject to constant re-examination and change. Although villages and groups of villages had their own local deities, the Ibos shared a common belief in a supreme God, Chukwu, the creator, for whom the lesser deities are intermediaries. He also gives to each person at birth a chi, which most Ibos would define as a kind of personal god or spiritual double, although there is much debate about the precise significance of the term.3 Achebe summarizes his understanding of the chi thus: “Every person has an individual chi who created him, its natural home is somewhere in the region of the sun but it may be induced to visit an earthly shrine; a person’s fortunes in life are controlled more or less completely by his chi.’’ 4 Among the lesser gods, Ala, the earth-goddess, is generally considered the most important. She governs the code of morality and also has the ancestors in her power as agents who help control morality among the living. There is constant interaction between the living and the dead, and between the material and the spiritual,

CHINUA ACHEBE

3

and the Ibos strive to maintain an order in which there is an equilibrium between these forces. As David Carroll writes, “The persistent features of this system are clearly related to the qualities traditionally associated with the Ibo—his individualism, and ambi¬ tion, his tolerance and egalitarianism, his down-to-earth practicality and mistrust of authority.”5 When the British assumed control of Nigeria in the late nineteenth century, they assumed, as other colonial powers have conveniently assumed, that they brought “history” and enlighten¬ ment and progress to a people which had no valid social, political and religious traditions of its own. Those religious beliefs which differed from their own they called superstition or fetishism, the differences in political and social structure they called chaos. In 1900, the British imposed a system of direct rule over the Ibos by dividing their territory into areas ruled by District Commissioners and appointing Ibos to act as warrant chiefs, clerks and messengers to assist them, a system resented by the Ibos not only because it was an alien imposition violating their own democratic structure, but also because those who accepted the appointments were men with¬ out status and without allegiance to their own communities. In modern terms, they were considered collaborators. In 1918, Lord Lugard introduced “indirect rule” as a policy for the whole of Nigeria, the District Commissioners were removed, and the warrant chiefs were given greater power, often resulting in greater abuse of power. These abuses led to further reorganization in 1930 to comply more closely with traditional Ibo groupings and institutions. This system survived until Independence in 1960. The literature written about Africa during this time generally tended to reinforce those assumptions of the British and helped them defend colonial rule as an agent of enlightenment to primitive peoples without a valid civilization of their own. Hence Africa was seen as a dark continent, a symbol of the irrational, nourishing undifferentiated and childlike peoples governed by fear and superstition rather than reason, a people only too ready to welcome and, indeed, worship, the white man. Such is the picture sketched by Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Cary in Mister Johnson, whatever their doubts about the actual effectiveness of the colonial administrators. And such a picture is painted even more luridly and simplistically by Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace, and a multitude of movie directors. Chinua Achebe grew up at a time when Africans were not only opposing European rule through political action, but also beginning to question with increasing vigor and clarity the cultural assump¬ tions used to justify that rule. Like many other young people of his generation, Achebe was given a British education, first at the local

4

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

mission school, then at Government College in Umuahia, and finally at University College, Ibadan, where he had planned to study medicine. He soon switched to literature, however, and encountered a syllabus which included not only Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and others, but also the novels of Conrad, Greene and Cary on Africa. Although at Ibadan Achebe had written some short stories, essays and sketches for The University Herald, it was not until after his graduation in 1953 that he began his first novel, a novel whose impetus was the desire to “set the rec¬ ord straight” and to paint an African portrait of Mister Johnson. In an interview with Lewis Nkosi, Achebe said:

I know around ’51, ’52,1 was quite certain that I was going to try my hand at writing, and one of the things that set me thinking was Joyce Cary’s novel, set in Ni¬ geria, Mister Johnson, which was praised so much, and it was clear to me that it was a most superficial picture of—not only of the country—but even of the Nigerian character, and so I thought if this was famous, then per¬ haps someone ought to try and look at this from the in¬ side. 6 Originally, Achebe had planned the story of Okonkwo and his grandson, Obi Okonkwo, who like Mr. Johnson worked for the colonial administration and was convicted of taking bribes, as one novel. But in the end, two novels emerged, Things Fall Apart, set at the turn of the century when the British first came to Iboland, and No Longer at Ease, set in the fifties as the British administration reluctantly prepared to hand over the running of the bureaucratic institutions it had established. Arrow of God returned to the past and to the early interaction between the Ibo and British cultures, while A Man of the People is set in contemporary Nigeria a few years after independence. As several critics have remarked, the novels can be seen as a tetralogy, documenting Nigerian history between 1890 and 1965. While writing these novels, Achebe worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, first as a Talks Producer and then, from 1961, as Director of External Broadcasting. He studied with the B.B.C. in London in 1956, travelled in East Africa on a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1960-61, and in 1963 went to Brazil, North America and Britain on a UNESCO Fellowship. In 1966, the massacre of Ibos in the North of Nigeria and their persecution in other areas forced Achebe to leave Lagos and take his family back to the East. With the declaration of Biafra as a separate republic, Achebe

CHINUA ACHEBE

5

became an official spokesman for the Biafran cause and was sent on several political missions to Europe and North America. His political involvement, as well as the intensity of his experience during the Civil War, meant that Achebe found the writing of poetry, short stories, essays and lectures more appropriate and more feasible than the writing of novels. Many of the poems published in the volume Christmas in Biafra are responses to the scenes, experiences and attitudes he encountered during the Civil War. So too are the children’s book, How the Leopard Got Its Claws, written with John Iroaganachi and published in 1972, and the collection of short fiction entitled Girls at War and Other Stories, also published in 1972. In addition to stories about the war and its effects, this collection contains selections from Achebe’s prose ranging from student sketches to more sophisticated pieces published in various journals in the late fifties and early sixties. Achebe has written one other children’s book, Chike and the River (1966). A collection of his essays and lectures, Morning Yet on Creation Day, was published in 1975. That collection of essays, from his early “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” (1964) to his later “Africa and Her Writers” (1973), expresses Achebe’s continuing concern with the writer’s social responsibility and the need to establish criteria—and specifi¬ cally African criteria—for writing in Africa. His concern is also reflected in the attempt with Christopher Okigbo to establish a publishing house in Nigeria, an attempt which foundered with the Civil War and Okigbo’s death, and in the magazine Okike (An African Journal of New Writing) which Achebe founded in 1971 in Nsukka, and continued to edit during his four year residence in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Okike has now returned to its original home in Nsukka, where Achebe is Professor of Literature at the University. Both as a creative writer and as a critic, Achebe has had a great influence, particularly on younger African writers. His novels have made an especially powerful impression upon young Ibo writers who first became acquainted with his works as high school or university students. By the early sixties many educational institu¬ tions in West Africa had adopted his first novel as a prescribed text in English courses, leading the Times Literary Supplement to suggest in 1965 that “Already Things Fall Apart is probably as big a factor in the formation of a young West African’s picture of his past, and of his relation to it, as any of the still rather distorted teachings of the pulpit and the primary school.” 7 Young Ibo readers who had grown up in villages and cities resembling those described in Achebe’s novels were very excited to find their own world reflected in fiction; when they themselves turned to writing

6

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

stories and novels they naturally tried to emulate what Achebe had done. By 1968 many new Ibo novelists—Nkem Nwankwo, Flora Nwapa, E.C.C. Uzodinma, John Munonye, Clement Agunwa— had broken into print, and it was no longer premature to generalize about the emergence of a “School of Achebe” in Nigerian fiction. The master’s influence was apparent in both theme and technique. Only one of the five writers set his novel in an Ibo city. The rest dealt with traditional Ibo society, two of them describing it as it was before the coming of the white man. Three, including the urban novelist, concerned themselves with aspects of the conflict between old and new values in Iboland, Achebe’s favorite subject. And all five attempted to simulate vernacular expression by incorporating into dialogue and narration many proverbs, idioms and metaphors translated from their mother tongue. They were not slavish imitators. Each contributed something personal and unique to Nigerian fiction. But it is quite clear that they would not have written what they did or as they did had it not been for Achebe’s example. Even some of the older, more established Nigerian novelists display unmistakable signs of having profited from reading Achebe. Onuora Nzekwu, an Ibo whose first two novels had been written in a stiff, formal prose occasionally spiced with quotations from Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey and Shakespeare, suddenly discov¬ ered how to write in an African vernacular style in his third novel, Highlife for Lizards (1965). So did T.M. Aluko, a veteran Yoruba novelist who had started his literary career in the early 1940’s. Chukwuemeka Ike, one of Achebe’s close friends in secondary school and at the University of Ibadan, has frankly admitted that his own writing was greatly influenced by the themes and techniques he found in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease.8 Writers new and old were learning from Achebe how to Africanize their fiction. Just as it is the two novels set in traditional rural Ibo communities which have had the greatest impact on other novelists, so too it is they which have aroused the greatest interest among academic critics, as the proportion of essays republished in this volume indicates. Early reviews tended to stress the “simplicity,” the plots, and the so-called “anthropological detail” in these novels, finding such detail either the center of interest or much too peripheral.9 Many of the early critical articles did not go much beyond these views, adding sketchy plot summaries to give readers, and particu¬ larly Western readers, a general introduction to Achebe as an African writer. But later critics have shown that the apparent simplicity of Achebe’s novels is deceptive and that the discerning reader may discover beneath their surface a complex and subtle

CHINUA ACHEBE

7

interplay of values and attitudes. Critics have used varying approaches to reveal the complexity and richness of Achebe’s vision and artistry: some have focussed on narrative technique (Iyasere, Carroll), some on particular images and symbols (Jabbi, Ramadan and Weinstock), some on the historical and cultural context (Brown, Obiechina, Wren, Lindfors), some on the comparisons with English poets suggested by the titles (Stock, Wilson). Character, and especially the character of Ezeulu, has been a recurring topic for debate in critical discussions. Point of view and the problem of judging Achebe’s attitude toward his narrator have been the central concerns for readers and critics of the two novels set in contempo¬ rary Nigeria. Although early reviews and commentaries tended to identify Achebe with Obi and Odili and take their statements at face value, the need to see them ironically has been shown convincingly by such critics as Felicity Riddy, Arthur Ravenscroft, Gareth Griffiths and David Carroll. Language, style and Achebe’s use of proverbs are topics which have engaged critics of all four novels. Many commentators have also used Achebe’s essays, lectures and statements in interviews as means to a better understanding of his fiction and poetry. His assertions that he writes to teach, that the African writer should be concerned with the welfare of his community, that the English language can be made African, have, in addition to providing ways of evaluating his work, provoked much debate, particularly among writers and critics from Africa. Kolawole Ogungbesan’s “Politics and the African Writer” (reprinted in this collection) represents those who have argued against Achebe’s critical theory and for the separation of literature and politics. A more sympathetic view of the interrelationship between literature and politics, as manifested in Achebe’s poetry, is expressed in the article by Philip Rogers.

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The editors hope that the publication of the essays in this volume will provide a basis for the continuation of such debates. This collection should not only give readers an increased awareness of the richness and complexity of Achebe’s work, but should also suggest to them the areas which remain problematic, the issues which need further definition and exploration.

Notes 'Published originally in New Letters, 40,1 (1973), 15-22, and reprinted in Achebe’s Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975) pp. 65-70. 2Ibid., pp. 18-19 and 68.

8

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

3 See, for example, the exchange between Austin Shelton, “The Offended Chi in Achebe’s Novels,” Transition, 13 (1964), 36-37; Donatus I. Nwoga, “The Chi Offended,” Transition, 15 (1964), 5; and B.C. Ekwem, “The Offended ‘Chi’ in Achebe’s Novels—A Reply,” Horizon, 3, 3 (1965), 34-36. 4Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 98. sChinua Achebe (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 30. 6African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews, ed. Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 4. ’“Finding Their Voices,” TLS, 16 September 1965, p. 791. informal interview with Bemth Lindfors in Los Angeles, May 13, 1966. 9 For further information on reviews of Achebe’s works, see Ebele Eko, “Chinua Achebe and His Critics: reception of His Novels in English and American Reviews,” Studies in Black Literature, 6, 3(1975), 14-20.

General Essays

The Tragic Conflict in the Novels of Chinua Achebe

Abiola Irele

The immediate subject of Chinua Achebe’s novels is the tragic conse¬ quences of the African encounter with Europe—this is a theme he has made inimitably his own. His novels deal with the social and psychological conflicts created by the incursion of the white man and his culture into the hitherto self-contained world of African society, and the disarray in the African con¬ sciousness that has followed. But a novelist deals not only with situations but also, and above all, with individuals. And it is precisely the cycle created by the responses of men to the pressure of events, their evolutions at significant levels of feeling and thought, that makes the real world of the novel. The importance of Chinua Achebe’s novels derives not simply from his theme, but also from his com¬ plete presentation of men in action, in living reaction to their fate, as well as from his own perception that underlies his imaginative world and confers upon it relevance and truth. Achebe has chosen the tragic medium in handling his theme—as opposed to the comic treatment of the same or a similar theme in Oyono and Beti’s novels, though these two authors are in many ways no less serious than he. This involves a particular dramatic ordering of events, in which each of the situations is linked to another to reveal a tragic pattern, again, as opposed to the comic novel in which each situation has to contain an immediate interest for its comic effect. For tragedy implies the working out in men’s lives of a rigorous fatality that transcends the individual’s ability to compre¬ hend or to arrest its pre-ordained course of events. This approach demands the development of the individual characters as well as of the situations. In two of his novels, at least, Achebe succeeds in striking a profoundly tragic note at both levels. Things Fall Apart,1 as the title suggests, is concerned with the dislocation of the African society caused by impact with another way of life. The recon¬ struction of Ibo village life is directed at revealing the forces at work both inside and outside traditional society that prepared the way for its eventual disintegration. Achebe’s purpose is therefore not primarily to show its values—though this is an undoubtedly significant side line—but rather to show it as a living structure, as an organism animated with the life and movement of its members: and within this framework is contained the sphere of action which involves the personal drama of the characters them¬ selves. The double level of action is realised through the relationship that exists between Okonkwo, the principal character, and his society. In many ways, Okonkwo represents his society in so far as the society has made the man

1 London, Heinemann, 1958.

CHINUA ACHEBE

11

by proposing to him certain values and lines of conduct. On the other hand, the man’s personal disposition, his reaction to these social determinations stemming from his subjective perception of them, prepares his individual fate. In the case of Okonkwo, he is a man who has grown up in a community which, because of its passionate desire for survival, places its faith above all in the individual quality of ‘manliness’. And it is an irony of fate that makes Okonkwo start oft with a disadvantage on this score—the failure of his own father to satisfy this social norm, which adds an urgency to his own partic¬ ular position. It is the need for him to live down the shame of his father that compels him to an excessive adherence to the social code to an extent which in fact transforms a value into a weakness. Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength. Besides, in order to justify himself, he pursues distinction with an obses¬ sive single-mindedness that soon degenerates into egocentricity, until he comes to map out for himself very narrow limits of action or reflection: Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more inti¬ mate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion—to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness. It is clear from this passage that we are in fact dealing with a psycholog¬ ical case. Okonkwo’s way of shutting everything else out of his view, aware only of himself, is an indication that his ambition has become a blinding passion of a pathetic kind. The stage is set in the very mind of the charac¬ ter for a tragic career. Outside factors afford the accessories of this tragic movement. As a result of his own mental attitude, Okonkwo’s relationship with other people is thrown off balance. His own rigidity towards himself is reflected in his impa¬ tience with others, and in particular with his son, Nwoye:

12

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed. Okonkwo wanted his son to be a great farmer and a great man. He would stamp out the disquieting signs of laziness which he thought he already saw in him. In a way, Okonkwo’s way of conforming, besides being an inverted sort of nonconformity, is a perversion. The meaning he attaches to ‘manliness’ amounts to fierceness, violence. His insistence is such that he becomes a menace to his society even within the limits of its code. On one occasion he contravenes a sacred custom by beating his wife during a sacred week—he was ‘not the man to stop beating somebody halfway through, not even for fear of a goddess’. And one of the elders, commenting on his action, re¬ marks: ‘The evil you have done can ruin the whole clan. The earth goddess whom you have insulted may refuse to give us her increase, and we shall all perish.’ This incident looks forward to that in which he kills another villager at a feast (though accidentally) and has to be expelled and go into an exile preg¬ nant with consequences. But apart from the driving propulsion of his life and the consequent mental stress that this involves for him and for his immediate circle, his concern for a public image takes him to a point where his actions become a pure contradiction of the values they are meant to defend. His participation in the killing of Ikemefuna is one of the most sig¬ nificant events in the novel. As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’ as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak. Okonkwo has had to steel himself against ordinary human feelings, so that he becomes dehumanised. On a greater scale than his passion is the struggle of the man with his fate (symbolised by his chi). His ambition and impatience drive him on to calcu¬ late on a larger scale than others, to demand more of his fate and to force the pace. Ironically, the reversals begin with his own son, who is the very antithesis of his father. There is an CEdipus touch to the relationship of Nwoye with his father—further emphasised by the way Achebe portrays Okonkwo’s predilection for his daughter, Ezinma. In the immediate con¬ text of the novel, the conflict is created out of the gradual breakdown of a normal relationship between father and son, and Nwoye’s final alienation from his father which prevents a resolution. The final breaking of the filial bond is directly related to the killing of Ikemefuna: As soon as his father walked in, that night, Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow.

CHINUA ACHEBE

13

But this incident is not confined merely to the simple question of the son’s reaction to his father’s place in his own life and its consequences upon his sensibility, but is also related in the same passage to the wider issues of the boy’s reaction to his society. Nwoye is presented all along as a sensitive young man whose psychology turns against certain customs of the village, particularly the casting away of twins into the forest. In fact, Nwoye’s defection to Christianity later on has a double significance—it is at the same time an act of revolt against his father as well as a rejection of the society that he embodied; and it is essentially as such that Okonkwo him¬ self views his son’s gesture: Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation. Nwoye thus stands as a symbolic negation for his father, the living denial of all that Okonkwo accepts and stands for. The disaffection and the final defection of his son is only part of a general reversal of Okonkwo’s fortunes. His accidental killing of a villager and his subsequent exile from Umuofia are the workings of a blind fate crossing his path to his own conception of self-realisation. His exile, which he bears with bad grace, has not only brought him a setback, but has also added to his ambitious drive the sharp edge of frustration. But Okonkwo is a man who is prepared to grapple with his fate, to bend everything to his irrepressible will. Only at one stage, when the true propositions of his struggle appear to him, does he seem to relent: Clearly his personal god or chi was not made for great things. A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the elders was not true—that if a man said yea his chi also confirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation. His return to Umuofia when he comes back to meet new circumstances— the presence of the white man and his success in making converts—is the occasion for relaunching his struggle on a new footing. For the situation is to Okonkwo a personal issue. The fact that his son Nwoye is among the Christians is only symptomatic of the way in which the new religion strikes at his own heart, as it were; the real point is that he has to use the fight against the Christians to regain his lost place in the village. This is even easier than his inflamed passion makes him realise, and he is naturally in¬ volved in the attack on the Christian Church that leads to the arrest and humiliation of those responsible. The impact of this incident on Okonkwo’s mind prepares the last phase of his tragedy: As he lay on his bamboo bed he thought about the treatment he had received in the white man’s court, and he swore vengeance. If

14

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Umuofia decided on war, all would be well. But if they chose to be cowards he would go out and avenge himself. For, characteristically, he sums up the situation in terms of violence. His final action in killing the messenger of the colonial administration is in a sense his ‘revenge’. And his final defeat is the utter futility of his action, his final realisation that he has gone so far beyond reasonable limits in championing his society as to have lost touch with it: Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult. He heard voices asking: ‘Why did he do it?’ He wiped his matchet on the sand and went away.

Things Fall Apart is the tragedy of one man, worked out of his personal conflicts—his neurosis, almost—as well as out of the contrariness of his destiny. Yet the title is not without relevance, for the novel does have another dimension, that of social comment. Okonkwo’s suicide is a gesture that symbolises at the same time his personal refusal of a new order, as well as the collapse of the old order which he represents. For Okonkwo’s inflex¬ ibility, his tragic flaw, is a reflection of his society; his defect, though a deformation, derives from a corresponding trait in his society, an aspect of it pushed to its extreme logical frontiers. It is true, of course, that Achebe presents the society as one that has posi¬ tive qualities of its own. The coherence and order that make social life one long ceremonial, the intense warmth of personal relationships and the passionate energy of the religious life, all these reveal the other side of the coin. But if the social structure is carefully reconstructed—with a fondness that at least reveals, if it does not betray, the author’s attachment to his social background—so also is the suddenness of the final bolt that strikes it carefully prepared for the disastrous effect it is going to have, the cracks in the edifice where the falling apart begins being carefully shown up. It is thus significant that the earliest converts should include the outcasts and particularly the mothers of the unfortunate twins. A correlative theme is here attached to the whole portrayal of Umuofia—that of the liberating influence of the new religion. Consider for example the effect of Nwoye’s conversion upon the boy: It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in the dark¬ ness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.

Things Fall Apart turns out to present the whole tragic drama of a society, vividly and concretely enacted in the tragic destiny of a representative indi¬ vidual. This use of an individual character as a symbolic receptacle, the

CHINUA ACHEBE

15

living theatre, of a social dilemma, is what gives Achebe’s novels their real measure of strength—it explains what for me is the weakness of his second novel: No Longer at Ease,1 and the achievement of his third novel, Arrow of God.2 No Longer at Ease is a sequel to Things Fall Apart not only in the fact that a later generation of Okonkwo’s family is involved but also in the theme—it treats of the dislocation in the African psyche that followed the disintegration of a situation in which a meaningful social and moral orien¬ tation is made difficult. The first novel links up with the second much as the portent of Yeats’ poem looks forward to the implication of Eliot’s. It is also the story of an individual, Obi Okonkwo, who is caught up in this situation which demands from the individual that he create a firm moral order out of the flux of values in the world in which he lives—a situation that demands an exceptional moral and intellectual initiative. Obi’s dilem¬ ma is contained in the conflict between his developed intellectual insight and his lack of moral strength to sustain it. The whole novel is built up out of the profound gulf that exists between Obi’s Western education and its practical relevance to his individual place in the world. Obi is something of an aesthete, but his culture is manifest in an attachment to things that are of no real consequence. There is an uncon¬ scious irony in Achebe’s presentation of this character’s literary pretensions, as when he says to his girl friend, Clara: ‘You know you are a poet. ... To meet people you don’t want to meet, that’s pure T. S. Eliot.’ The hollow cleverness of a statement like that is made all the more devastatingly clear by contrast with the intense pulse of life around him; for instance by the overwhelming sincerity of the cyclist whom he nearly runs over— The cyclist looked back once and rode away, his ambition written for all to see on his big black bicycle-bag—FUTURE MINISTER. But there is a more conscious kind of irony in the description of the con¬ versation that Obi has with the happy-go-lucky Christopher: ‘The Civil Service is corrupt because of these so-called exper¬ ienced men at the top,’ said Obi. ‘You don’t believe in experience? You think that a chap straight from the university should be made a permanent secre¬ tary?’ ‘I didn’t say straight from the university, but even that would be better than filling our top posts with old men who have no intel¬ lectual foundations to support their experience.’ Further on, Obi explicitly links up his idea of ‘intellectual foundations’ with a moral stand: ‘To most of them bribery is no problem. They come straight to the top without bribing anyone. It’s not that they’re necessarily 1 Heinemann, 1960.

2 Heinemann, 1964.

16

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

better than others, it’s simply that they can afford to be virtuous. But even that kind of virtue can become a habit.’ But Obi turns out in fact to be a man with a narrow sense of values. Just as his Western education is limited to a superficial aesthetic orientation, so his application is restricted to specific delimitations, rather than to the total field, of his social situation. This constitutes his major liability in dealing with the complex problems with which he is faced. His weakness of character is reflected in his inept handling of his human relationships and of his material problems; he is an individual with no sense of order, whose incapacity is contrasted to the strength of character of his hardly literate ‘fellow Umuofians’ which permits them to make sacrifices on behalf of a man who turns out to be weaker than they. Achebe indicates at one point the essential trait in Obi’s character — He was not in the mood for consecutive reasoning. His mind was impatient to roam in a more pleasant atmosphere. Obi is never really prepared to engage in any sort of sustained effort, with the result that he flounders through his life. Such is his mental make-up that minor problems, instead of strengthening him, carry him irresistibly to a point of dissolution. The crisis is afforded by his disagreement with his family over his choice of Clara, an Osu, for a wife. Against an irrational caste system that demands of him a firm rational stand, against the pressure of a moral problem that calls for individual resolution, Obi has nothing to offer but abdication. The conflict that opposes him to his father provokes from him anger and resentment, and the unsoundness of his position does not escape him. In one of his rare moments of introspection, he manages to grasp the nature of his problem: His mind was troubled not only by what had happened, but by the discovery that there was nothing in him with which to challenge it honestly. His submission on the issue of Clara, and his subsequent betrayal of her (and the cause involved in her problem) opens the wide road to his moral decline. He knows what is right, but is unable to stand up for it. Obi’s fall, then, is the result of a practical dissociation between the intel¬ lectual and the moral poles of his awareness. The events and outside factors in his situation furnish the framework in which the conflict between the two evolves, and it is the nature of the effect of these two factors upon his individual consciousness which constitutes his tragedy. Achebe makes it clear that Obi is a man torn between two sets of values. The result is his spiritual disintegration. No Longer at Ease is in this sense a comment on the modern situation in Nigeria (and even in Africa): on the plight of the Westernised elite as well as on the human problems posed by the fast tempo of social change which causes a parallel instability in the spiritual framework—a picture of ‘a world turned upside down’. Yet, though the theme is potentially a tragic one, it is not given an

CHINUA ACHEBE

17

adequately tragic treatment. The main shortcoming of the novel is the in¬ adequate stature of the hero. Obi as he is portrayed is simply not the stuff of which a tragic character is made. He is a pathetic figure without any grain of nobility. Unlike his grandfather, he is a passive sufferer of his fate and the emotion that he inspires is not pity but antipathy. Another reason for the failure of the novel to achieve a tragic height is Achebe’s treatment of the situation. It is by all accounts too sketchy—the economy of style in the previous novel tends towards a perfunctoriness in this one. Besides, the events are not related significantly enough to each other to show their compulsion on the individual that tragedy demands. For example, Obi’s bribe-taking, though foreshadowed in his psycholog¬ ical development, is not altogether convincing. The other characters contribute to the weakening of the tragic effect of the novel. They are presented as individuals who are flung around and tossed about on a choppy surface, but not pulled into the vortex of a whirl¬ pool. Their dilemma is of a comic as well as of tragic kind: they are involved in a situation that provokes absurd behaviour, not a futile reaction against an absurd fate. It is Obi himself who sums up the situation: If one didn’t laugh, one would have to cry. It seemed that was the way Nigeria was built. In other words, the colonial situation is essentially a tragicomic one. Mongo Beti’s understanding of this accounts for the success of his novels, particularly Mission to Kala. Whereas Beti paints a vast fresco of absurdity, letting the tragedy reveal itself in the degradation of human behaviour, Achebe presents degraded human behaviour in a tragic cast, but what we get rather is a picture of human misery. For all that, No Longer at Ease remains an excellent novel, written with the same technical mastery as the previous novel, fashioned out of the same art that finds a triumphant vindication in Arrow of God. The theme of his third novel takes up where Things Fall Apart leaves off. It is indeed appropriate that this should be so, for this novel is a devel¬ opment not only from the point of view of the human interest but also of the style. Achebe has elaborated on the previous theme in such a way as to give it a more sustained character. Consequently in this novel we have a more profound and significant treatment of character and situations than in the two previous novels. Achebe has woven the two movements of the individual and social drama into such unity that it would be artificial to separate them: the lives of individuals meet with a combination of events to force a tragic issue. Yet the tensions at the heart of this pattern are clearly schematised. On the one hand, the internal division in the village of Umuaro is polarised around the person of Ezeulu, the chief priest of Ulu, and that of his ambitious rival, Nwaka; and on the other hand, the conflict of cultures represented by the misunderstanding that opposes Ezeulu to the colonial administration in the person of Captain Winterbottom.

18

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Ezeulu, the principal character, is a memorable creation—he is a truly impressive figure, cast in a mould that is at once forceful and noble. Unlike Okonkwo, whose exterior demonstration of strength is a compensation for an internal weakness, Ezeulu’s external stature reposes upon the firm foundations of a stable coherent mental structure. The strength of his moral frame is early demonstrated in his forthright stand against the ‘war of blame’ that his villagers plan against their neighbours. He is also a man of superior intelligence, whose understanding of things surpasses that of his followers. He alone in Umuaro understands the nature of the dilemma posed by the presence of the white man in their midst, ushering in an age of new adjustments— ‘The world is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in the same place.’ He towers above the other characters with such an eminent force of per¬ sonality that he is set apart in a noble solitude, which circumstances and an understandably arrogant contempt of lesser men first impose upon, then emphasise. The only other figure that is on anything like the same scale is Winterbottom. He is more of a conventional figure, though his force of character rescues him from being a caricature. But his dominant quality is not strength but nervous energy, something not innate but acquired out of stubborn application. Around these two figures are paired off two other characters who play an important part in Ezeulu’s fate—Nwaka, his jealous rival, whose moral obtuseness is a foil to the bold outlines of Ezeulu, and the diffident, sensitive Clarke, Winterbottom’s subaltern, whose psycho¬ logical development is of great significance in the context of the novel. The characters themselves are symbolic vehicles of the tragic movement. The uneasy rivalry between Ezeulu and Nwaka runs like a brooding disson¬ ance through the even flow of Umuaro’s history, brilliantly reconstructed —the marriages, the births, the deaths, and the other petty vicissitudes of a regular train of life. Achebe presents the picture of a total universe over which the gods Ulu and Idemili are pitched in a deadly conflict against each other through their protagonists: He [i.e. Ezeulu] knew that the priests of Idemili and Ogwugwu and Eru and Odo had never been happy with their secondary roles since the villages got together and made Ulu and put him over the older deities. But he would not have thought that one of them would go so far as to set someone to challenge Ulu. And when later he decides to carry the struggle against his rivals to avenge humiliation at the hands of the white man, it is possible for him to see the struggle as something larger than a personal issue: ‘It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god.’ But the Christians are at hand, whose God is also making a bid for the loyalties of the people of Umuaro. The moral of the situation is brought home with the attempt of Oduche, Ezeulu’s Christianised son, to kill the

CHINUA ACHEBE

19

sacred python. In the same way as the python is imprisoned, struggling for life, so are the gods of the land in reality circumscribed by a new order. Achebe’s symbolism is skilfully sustained throughout, from the overt dramatisation of the internal conflict to the children’s innocent commen¬ tary on the situation, until the final moment in Ezeulu’s divination hut: As Ezeulu cast his strings of cowries, the bell of Oduche’s people began to ring. For one brief moment Ezeulu was dis¬ tracted by its sad measured monotone, and he thought how strange it was that it should sound so near—much nearer than it did in his compound. The new order is represented by the white man, who has brought his administration, his civilisation and his God—‘The white man, the new religion, the soldiers, the new road, they are all one and the same thing,’ observes one of the men. On the purely secular level, the novel represents a critique of colonisation: the overbearing attitude of Wright, the road manager, is a relevant example of its early approach. But more important than this is the emotional tangle created by the meeting of two different sets of values, the friction between two ways of thought. The incident in which Obika, another son of Ezeulu, is whipped by Wright affords an occasion for drawing out the elements of the situation—the hostile, humiliated incomprehension of the Africans, the haughty insensitiveness of the Europeans. It is precisely because of his ranting prejudices that Winterbottom is unable to see Ezeulu as a person rather than as a ‘fetish priest’ who happens to be exceptional, and thus a convenient tool in the hands of the admini¬ stration. His impersonal attitude to Ezeulu is contrasted to the warm con¬ fidence of the latter—‘The white man and we are friends’. One source of Ezeulu’s tragedy is that this is an illusion. It is moreover a situation which has its own logic that makes no room for individual options. For it is a deliberate irony of fate that leaves Clarke, whose personal disposition is against the falsity of things, to deal with Ezeulu in Winterbottom’s absence and to propose the offer of a chief¬ taincy warrant to the priest. ‘Tell the white man that Ezeulu will not be anybody’s chief, except Ulu’s.’ ‘What!’ shouted Clarke, ‘Is the fellow mad?’ ‘I tink so, Sali,’ said the interpreter. ‘In that case, he goes back to prison.’Clarke was really angry. What cheek! A witch-doctor making a fool of the British Admin¬ istration in public! It is, properly speaking, an ambivalent position in which the people of Umuaro find themselves. Loyalties are shifted back and forth, compromises are made and unmade. The story of Nwodika and the behaviour of the messengers sent to arrest Ezeulu reveal the ludicrous aspect of their dilem-

20

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

ma. More serious is the milling about of men trapped in an intolerable situation that turns them in upon themselves in violent reaction: ‘It was so much easier to deal with an old quarrel than with a new unprecedented incident.’ As a result of their frustration, they are left confounded in their social and spiritual awareness. Achebe has painted with remarkable in¬ sight the picture of a traumatic situation: ‘We must grope about until what must happen does happen,’ says one of the characters in a particular con¬ text, unconsciously summing up their total position. And the pity of it all is that the conflict should be resolved in such tragic circumstances by Ezeulu, the only man who has tried to deal with it in an honest and intelligent way. It is a poignant moment when he realises that his foresight in sending Oduche to school —‘to be my eyes and my ears’ among the Christians—has resulted in his loss of the boy’s loyalty. And yet this is only a minor aspect of his tragedy. For when he turns his resentment for his humiliation at the hand of the white man against his own people, he commits a serious error of judge¬ ment. For once, he lets his personal feelings interfere with his usual lucidity. And yet, one cannot help feeling that he is right in considering himself‘the arrow of his god’. For indeed, Ezeulu has been all along an instrument of fate—the blind accessory of a monumental process that culminates not only in his own undoing, but in the fall of the gods of the land. Again, Achebe patently introduces the theme of the liberation of souls from the grip of the old order. The triumph of the Christian God is prepared and brought about by the internal weakness of the old order. In a sense, there¬ fore, the victory of the white man is a passive one: It looked as though the gods and the power of events finding Winterbottom handy had used him and left him again in order as they found him. Meanwhile, they have destroyed Ezeulu and forever deviated the course of Umuaro’s history. Achebe’s three novels1 form one continuous stream—they amount in fact to a trilogy. They are also unified by a common purpose revealed in the very nature of his narrative method. The distinctive quality of his style is sobriety—not the simplicity of limi¬ ted talent, but the disciplined economy of an assured artist. Within the framework of a conventional medium, Achebe creates the complexity of human situations with the slightest of means. His prose is rigorously utili¬ tarian, and what appears as as elaborate evocation of social customs (‘exoticism’ to some, ‘padding’ to others) simply serves as a realistic support for the human drama, relevant to the cultural context of his novels. He is concerned primarily with individuals. His narrative method is de¬ tached, almost impassive, made of objective formulations through which the human drama is unfolded. Yet it is not impersonal, for instead of the 1 Since this essay was written, the following novel has been published : Achebe: A Man of the People, Heinemann, 1966.

CHINUA ACHEBE

21

flamboyant colours of a heated imagination, we have rather the clear lines that compose a picture by a dispassionate observer of human destiny, who constructs a vision out of his awareness of an inexorable order. Achebe has justly been called a chronicler, for in the last resort he is not dealing simply with the collapse of African society, but with its transforma¬ tion. He is examining from the inside the historical evolution of African society at its moments of crisis, and the inevitable tensions attendant upon this process. In the final analysis, his novels reveal the intimate circum¬ stances of the African Becoming.

CULTURAL NORMS AND MODES OF PERCEPTION IN ACHEBE’S FICTION

Lloyd W. Brown

As Frantz Fanon has reminded us, the colonial experience has invested definitions of culture with a special significance. Generally, the exploita¬ tion of language "means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” And whenever any colonized people faces the language of the "civilizing nation” it is confronted with the "culture of the mother country.” The colonized man is "elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural stand¬ ards.”1 More recently, the West Indian novelist George Lamming has examined the cultural significance of language within the context of Shakespeare’s well-known colonial archetypes: Caliban is Prospero’s con¬ vert to "civilization,” after having been "colonized by language, and excluded by language.” Language is only Caliban’s way of serving Prospero, and the latter’s instruction in a "civilized” tongue is his way of measuring the distance which separates him from Caliban.2 Of course these findings are not really new. The European’s ethno¬ centric definitions of "language” and "civilization” have always been fairly self-evident. In presenting Caliban as a brutish savage without a language (and civilization) of his own, The Tempest remains faithful to the philosophical assumptions of Shakespeare’s culture. And Bernard Mandeville is a representative spokesman for that myth-making process which served the causes of eighteenth century slavery and colonization: on the one hand, the mindless savage in the "wild State of Nature” is de¬ fined by his lack of even rudimentary language skills; and on the other hand, "civilization” par excellence is embodied by the language of Eu¬ rope’s courtly beau monde.3 However, reminders like Fanon’s or Lamming’s are timely; for they do underline those cultural and emotional tensions which are inherent in the ex-colonial’s use of the metropolitan language, but which are often ob¬ scured or ignored by a paternalistic preoccupation with the African’s European grammar. The syntax of the African who writes in English has

CHINUA ACHEBE

23

been the object of exhaustive studies—with the usual ethnocentric caveats against the African’s possible, or actual, liberties with the mother coun¬ try’s tongue.4 And in a less prescriptive, more useful, vein both Western and African critics have repeatedly demonstrated the techniques whereby the African novelist has modified his English in order to "translate” the characteristic patterns of his native culture.5 But European languages in African literature also function in a highly dramatic sense that results from their old colonizing roles. The ex-colonial writer is consistently ambivalent towards the metropolitan tongue. On the one hand, it is the historical tool with which his colonial status was shaped and the indige¬ nous traditions of his "jungle” distorted. And, on the other hand, this alien tongue is the useful lingua franca through which he reaches his discrete readership in Europe and Africa. But above all, English, French, or Portuguese is the old colonial badge which simultaneously recalls the exclusivism of Prospero the colonist, and gives voice to Caliban’s cultural revolution. The ex-colonial transforms the cultural "burden” of the mother country’s language into the means of expressing a sense of human identity, and of liberating his modes of self-perception. On the archetypal level, George Lamming’s interpreta¬ tion of Caliban’s revolt in The Tempest projects Shakespeare’s character as an unintended symbol of the ex-colonial. The gift of Prospero’s lan¬ guage has made Caliban "aware of possibilities.”6 And in the day-to-day tactics of political revolution, the metropolitan language continues to en¬ joy this dramatic ambiguity. As Fanon has demonstrated, the Algerian rebels transmuted French from "a vehicle of the oppressing power” into "an instrument of liberation.” In psychopathological terms, the Algerians exorcised the "automatic character of insult and malediction” from French: "Under these conditions, the French language, the language of the occupier, was given the role of Logos, with ontological implications within Algerian society.”7 Finally, contemporary studies have generalized on the literary signifi¬ cance of the tensions created by the historical relationship between the ex-colonial and his European language. According to Mercer Cook, "Tak¬ ing the white man’s language, dislocating his syntax, recharging his words with new strength and sometimes with new meaning before hurling them back in his teeth, while upsetting his self-righteous complacency and cliches, our poets rehabilitate such terms as Africa and blackness, beauty and peace.”8 And in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre notes the fundamental irony of the ex-colonial’s litera¬ ture: "An ex-native, French-speaking, bends that language to new re¬ quirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only.”9

24

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

However, useful as these generalizations are, they do not exhaust the implications, for each writer, of the relationship between African litera¬ ture and the psychopathology of language. It now remains to investigate the precise effects of that relationship upon the characteristic themes and individual development of specific authors. Chinua Achebe is an apt choice in this regard, for the Nigerian’s fiction demonstrates his preoccu¬ pation with language, not simply as a communicative device, but as a total cultural experience. At this level, language is not merely technique. It is the embodiment of its civilization and therefore represents or drama¬ tizes modes of perception within its cultural grouping. Accordingly, the white man’s failure to understand African customs in Things Tall Apart is bound up with his ignorance of the African’s language.10 In other words, Achebe seizes upon the perceptual values represented by an alien European culture and its language, then exploits these criteria to portray external conflicts between the African and the white colonialist, or to project the internal crises of African society. On the whole, therefore, the familiar tensions generated by the Afri¬ can’s use of his European language do not only dramatize the cultural conflicts represented by Caliban’s archetypal rebellion. They also empha¬ size the underlying problems of cultural perceptions (ethnocentric or otherwise) which are inherent in the colonial functions of the metropoli¬ tan tongue, and which are a paradigm of the universal problems of human insight and judgement. Or, as Jamaica’s Andrew Salkey has pointed out, the ex-colonial’s heritage of language is bound up with his total percep¬ tion of self and humanity. It embodies his Weltanschauung. Hence Catul¬ lus Kelly, the hero of Salkey’s latest novel, has a "two-way Weltan¬ schauung: his Kingston-dialect mood, and his Standard English mood.” The former allows Kelly to detach himself completely from Western standards as he uses his Jamaican Negro dialect to ridicule the sterile austerity of Euro-American "progress.” And in the latter mood he dons the serious-mindedness of the Westerner’s scientific rationalism in order to subvert this civilization from within.11 Achebe’s interest in the relationship between cultural norms and per¬ ceptual values is also comparable with yet another ex-colonial novelist— Ferdinand Oyono of the French Cameroons. In Houseboy, for example, Oyono s hero, Toundi Onduoa, embodies a fundamental irony. He grows into self-awareness and human self-identification in direct proportion to his initiation into the colonial language—into cultural norms which do not recognize his humanity, and which are geared to stifle his selfconsciousness. Thus the literacy which he acquires from the French mis¬ sionaries provides Toundi with the literary and morphological keys to the

CHINUA ACHEBE

25

white colonist’s modes of perception and behavior. Father Gilbert’s diary is a "grain-store for memories.” It preserves and re-enacts the sadistic impulses of the colonist who is incapable of apprehending his victims as human beings: "These white men can preserve everything. In Father Gilbert’s diary I found the kick he gave me when he caught me mimicking him in the sacristry. I felt my bottom burning all over again.”12 And when Toundi demonstrates his mastery of European customs by keeping his own diary (in the Ewondo dialect), he has, in effect, transformed the self-serving literacy of the egocentric colonist into a legitimate tool for the expression of his maturing personality. For Toundi’s fictional diary serves as the narrative of Houseboy itself. In transferring the literary norms of the colonist’s language to his own writing, in using this medium to sub¬ vert white ethnocentrism in favor of the African’s self-perception, Oyono’s Toundi symbolizes the creative imagination of the ex-colonial writer. Neither is It difficult to trace the links between Achebe and Oyono’s literary archetype. Like Toundi, the Nigerian novelist consciously expro¬ priates the European’s literary techniques, and related perceptual values, in order to postulate an African, or even anti-European, point of view. Hence he consistently borrows European historiography in order to ex¬ plode the notorious Western myth that Africans have no history. The title of the first novel, Things Fall Apart, announces Achebe’s fairly ob¬ vious debt to Yeats’s poem, "The Second Coming” (1921). In Yeats’s work the vision of human history projects a succession of gyres, of epochal cycles in which the pre-Christian era gives way to the age ushered in by Christ’s first coming, and the Christian phase must be followed in turn by a new and terrifyingly unknown cycle—by the new "cradle” and the new "Bethlehem” of another era or "coming.” Achebe’s nineteenth cen¬ tury Africa witnesses the end of an era and the beginning of twentieth century Europeanization, with all its implied consequences for i mother stage—the future history of postcolonial Africa. But these very parallels between Yeats and Achebe are a source of irony, for they touch upon those characteristic tensions which govern the relationship between the ex-colonial writer and the metropolitan culture. Yeats’s subject, history, and the rich associations of past events which the poet evokes through the Judaeo-Christian symbols of the "first” coming— all these belong to that area of human experience and understanding from which the myths of Christian Europe have always excluded the African. Namely, in evoking Yeats’s themes, Achebe implies that the sense of his¬ tory and tradition, the burdens of cultural continuity, decay, and rebirth, have all been the African’s lot as well as the Westerner’s. And in the process the novelist has exploited the European’s cultural criteria—his

26

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

literature and historiography—in order to reverse the white man s exclusivist definitions of history and culture. In his second novel, No Longer At Ease, Achebe establishes an equally ironic relationship with T. S. Eliot’s "The Journey of the Magi. The poem is among several (including The Waste Land) in which Eliot bases his themes and structure on what he called the "historical sense — the sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together.” This involves "a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”13 Accordingly, "The Journey of the Magi” dramatizes the successive epochs of Christian history which seem to coalesce in the Wise Men’s recollection of the Nativity. The birth of the Christ-child is the death of the pagan, pre-Christian order. Moreover, His crucifixion heralds the birth of a new morality. And the personal con¬ version of the magi implies that the transitions and conflicts represented by this Birth and Death will be repeated in future confrontations between the new faith and the old dispensation: this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. Obi Okonkwo, the hero of No Longer At Ease, is a twentieth century magus. As the graduate of a British university he has been sufficiently Westernized to feel alienated from the old dispensation of his Nigerian background. But Obi’s self-conflicts are not an isolated individual ex¬ perience. Achebe requires us to view his hero through the sense of simub taneity which Eliot attributes to historical perception. Hence Obi’s story reincarnates the tragedy of his grandfather Okonkwo. Obi’s individualism has alienated him from family and tribe, just as Okonkwo’s fierce pride frequently brought him into conflict with his fellow villagers in Umuofia. Obi is destroyed by simultaneous pressures from two incompatible worlds —the old Africa of his Umuofia village and the Westernized milieu of urban Africa. And before him, Okonkwo had succumbed to both the internal tensions of his own society and the external impact of the grow¬ ing British presence. The parallels between Obi and Okonkwo are implied by Nwoye (Obi’s father) in his story of the old Umuofia warrior. But these implications go beyond the immediate context of No Longer At Ease-, for in recalling Okonkwo’s life, Nwoye has really recapitulated the narrative of the pre-

CHINUA ACHEBE

27

ceding novel, Things Fall Apart. On the whole, therefore, the themes of No Longer At Ease exploit that sense of simultaneity which Eliot derives from historical perception in "The Journey of the Magi”: the historical cycles of Christendom’s own history are evoked by the titular reference to Eliot’s magi; they are linked to, and made contemporaneous with, succes¬ sive conflicts between Christianity and paganism in Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease; and finally, these recurrent cycles coalesce and are internalized in Obi’s personal conflicts as an African magus. But in exploiting Eliot’s poetic archetypes and philosophy, Achebe subjects these European models to the same kind of ironic manipulation which marks his relationship with Yeats’s work in Things Fall Apart. For he uses the perceptual implications of Eliot’s "historical sense” in order to invest paganism with a sympathetic identity. Whereas Eliot, the orthodox Christian, sees the conflict between the old paganism and the new Christianity in clear moral terms, Achebe the African insists that the "old dispensation,” as well as Christianity, had its own beauty and human dignity. Consequently, traditionalist Africans in Obi’s world are the vic¬ tims of cultural unease and disintegration, just as much as the African magus himself. They are unable to make the communal ideals of African humanism effective in what is now an alien society based on the divisive individualism of Western modernity. In keeping with the old ways they expect to share the prestige and advantages of Obi’s Civil Service post be¬ cause they underwrote the cost of his education. But the very life-style which they have opened to him has destroyed this communal link with their protege. And their failure with Obi demonstrates their unease with the "new” dispensation. To sum up, Achebe accepts the historiographic principle which allows Eliot to telescope multiple cycles of history into one moment, to compress repetitive conflicts between Christendom and paganism, or between hos¬ tile cultures, into a single event or personal experience. But Achebe also exploits this material in order to assert the validity of pagan values which the Christian feels impelled to minimize or deny. And on an ethnological level, the operation of the historical sense in No Longer At Ease is in¬ vested with the same irony that influences the handling of Yeats’s "Sec¬ ond Coming” in Things Fall Apart. Once again, European historiography has been used to articulate that sense of tradition and history which, ac¬ cording to Western myths, is alien to the "dark” continent. And, particu¬ larly in his second novel, the irony with which Achebe manipulates the Westerner’s historical perception is intensified by the dynamics of Afri¬ can society itself. For when we have cleared away the cobwebs with which Western "experts” have obscured the very existence of African history,

28

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

it is clear that the kind of historical sense which Eliot applies to Western culture and literature has a special appeal to the African. The structure and functions of African society define the individual’s identity within a cosmic context which approximates Eliot’s synthesis of the "timeless” and the "temporal,” the past and the present. Hence the simultaneous existence which Eliot imparts to different eras through the historical sense is comparable with that "logic of love” which Leopold Senghor attributes to the old traditions of African society: "The feeling of communion in the family and the community is projected backwards into time, and also into the transcendental world, to the ancestors, to the spirits and, unconsciously, to God.” The supernatural and the temporal, the past and the present, all unite in the African’s self-awareness. He is "held in a tight network of vertical and horizontal communities, which bind and at the same time support him.”14 Generally, therefore, when¬ ever Achebe draws upon English literature for his titles and themes, he adheres to the familiar strategy of the ex-colonial’s cultural revolution: he uses the literary traditions of the English tongue to liberate the Afri¬ can’s identity and history from the ethnocentric images that have been enshrined in the psychopathology of the colonizer’s language. The ironic manipulation of Prospero’s culture has reversed the colonist’s modes of perception. Apart from Achebe’s titles, this ironic relationship with his English medium is seldom obtrusive in the first two novels. But, especially in Things Fall Apart, there are occasional episodes which leave no doubt about the ambivalence with which the novelist regards the cultural stand¬ ards and literary traditions embodied by the English language. The most notable of these incidents is the concluding scene of the novel when the white District Commissioner plans a book about his colonial experi¬ ence—The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. Okonkwo’s suicide has attracted the Commissioner’s literary genius. "Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting read¬ ing. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much to in¬ clude, and one must be firm in cutting out details” (p. 187). The District Commissioner is an archetype of those numerous Euro¬ peans, particularly missionaries and administrators, whose instant exper¬ tise on Africa has contributed to the Westerner’s profound ignorance of the continent. And the ethnocentric bias of the Commissioner’s imperial handbook underlines the historical inability of the Western scholar to emancipate himself from the usual perspectives on African "primitives.”

CHINUA ACHEBE

29

But here, too, Achebe’s handling of the colonizer’s viewpoint is influ¬ enced by the ironic ambiguity with which the African novelist invests his European tools. The white colonist lacks the capacity to perceive the hu¬ man dimensions of Okonkwo’s tragedy. Thus the anthropological ma¬ chinery of the Commissioner’s book will reduce the Ibo warrior to a sensational paragraph on the irrational violence of the "savage.” But Achebe’s historical novel has used this same machinery to present the "primitive” as a complex human being who reflects, and is a part of, Africa’s history. Thus the anthropological framework of Achebe’s narrative clarifies the moral and cultural significance of Okonkwo’s suicide: "It is an offence against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it” (p. 186). Okonkwo’s death dramatizes the dominant impulses of his life: it is the culmination of a self-destructive pride, but it is also the inevitable out¬ come of the demoralizing effects of the new order. In effect, the anthro¬ pological background of Okonkwo’s death projects the tragedy as an apocalypse: the old Africa with all its beauty and power is crumbling under the simultaneous pressures of white imperialism from without, and self-destructive forces from within. But when these social data and cul¬ tural judgements are presented to the white anthropologist, he distorts them because of his narrow perspectives. The tragedy and the taboos sur¬ rounding the dead Okonkwo can therefore be seen only on the basis of some self-serving point of colonial etiquette: "a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book he planned to write he would stress that point” (p.

i87)Altogether then, the episode of Okonkwo’s death dramatizes the de¬ gree to which Achebe heightens our awareness of perceptual conflicts between two civilizations by exploiting the literary and cultural media of one group. The ethnocentric criteria of the European and the complex humanity of the African’s past are both illuminated through the once self-serving methods of Western historiography and anthropology. Fur¬ thermore, Achebe’s religious themes emphasize this relationship be¬ tween conflicting viewpoints and cultural standards, especially when the latter are embodied by differences in language. Hence, in Things Fall Apart, the hostile judgements of an alien Christianity are brought to Umuofia through African interpreters whose strange dialect becomes sym¬ bolic of their role. Like the French missionaries in Oyono’s Houseboy, Achebe’s African Christians are embarrassed by unintended vulgarities

30

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

or obscenities whenever they use the dialect of the pagan and the uncon¬ verted: "Many people laughed at his dialect and the way he used words strangely. Instead of saying 'myself’ he always said 'my buttocks’. . . . He told them that they worshipped false gods of wood and stone” (p. 131). And when the white missionary debates religion with Umuofia’s Akunna the absurdities of the interpreter’s earlier malapropisms merge into a tragicomic impasse—into an exercise in non-communication over which the suggestive figure of the interpreter presides: ''You say that there is one supreme God who made heaven and earth,” said Akunna on one of Mr. Brown’s visits. "We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods.” "There are no other gods,” said Mr. Brown. "Chukwu is the only God and all others are false. You carve a piece of wood—like that one” (he pointed at the rafters from which Akunna’s carved lkenga hung), "and you call it a god. But it is still a piece of wood.” "Yes,” said Akunna. "It is indeed a piece of wood. The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. It is like yourself. You are the head of your church.” No,” protested Mr. Brown. "The head of my church is God Him¬ self.” "... We appear to pay greater attention to the little gods but that is not so. We worry them more because we are afraid to worry their Master. Our fathers knew that Chukwu was the Overlord and that is why many of them gave their children the name Chukwuka—'Chukwu is Supreme.’ ” "You said one interesting thing,” said Mr. Brown. "You are afraid of Chukwu. In my religion Chukwu is a loving Father and need not be feared by those who do His will.” ' But we must fear Him when we are not doing His will,” said Akunna. "And who is to tell His will? It is too great to be known.” In this way Mr. Brown learnt a good deal about the religion of the clan (pp. 162-163). Achebe s footnote to the discussion is ironic, for Mr. Brown’s grasp of the Ibo religion does not include real understanding or a sympathetic recognition of the African’s morality. The missionary’s "lesson” is merely an intellectual insight into the dynamics of a culture that he is determined to destroy. The European’s ignorance of African languages (and culture) therefore complements the ethnocentric bias of his Christianity. And this connection between white religion and cultural perception is demon-

CHINUA ACHEBE

31

strated by the pathological implications of the European’s language. Mr. Brown’s successor, the Rev. James Smith, "saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the chil¬ dren of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness” (p. 166). The description of the Rev. Smith is crucial to an understanding of Achebe’s ironic strategy. The deliberate emphasis on "black” and "white” as the familiar cornerstones of white religion demonstrates that the maladictive patterns of the English language are integrated with the Euro¬ pean’s racial bias and cultural perceptions. The Rev. Smith therefore con¬ forms with the perceptual values which the French scholar Mannoni has ascribed to the colonial traditions embodied by the Prospero-Caliban myth: "What the colonial in common with Prospero lacks, is awareness of the world of others, a world in which Others have to be respected.”15 Thus Europeans like Smith really reverse the perspectives which Senghor at¬ tributes to the African’s apprehension of reality: "Subjectively, at the end of his antennae, like an insect, he discovers the Other. He is moved to his bowels, going out in a centrifugal movement from the subject to the object on the waves sent out from the Other.”16 On the whole, therefore, Achebe links the ethnological implications of language to the perceptual conflicts between African and Western cul¬ tures. Smith’s maledictive English illuminates the colonizer’s white exclusivism. And the ironic manipulation of historiographic and literary traditions in the colonial language reverses the European’s ethnocentrism: the African’s "reason-by-embrace” (as Senghor describes it), his inclusive view of society and history, is articulated through media and cultural definitions which were once used to limit his humanity. At the same time, the external confrontation that is inherent in the cultural significance of language is analogous to the internal conflicts of Achebe’s fiction. In Things Fall Apart the ethnocentric European is a paradigm of the egocentricity which initiates a moral crisis within the African community. For, in addition to his power and integrity which reflect the beauty and strength of the old Africa, Okonkwo is fiercely, and destructively, proud. In his own society he lapses into that unawareness of "the world of others” which marks the colonizer’s cultural perception. The impending disin¬ tegration of the old ways is attributable to an egocentric strain in African heroism as well as to the European’s exclusivism. And this parallel be¬ tween two limited modes of perception is illustrated by Okonkwo’s re¬ lationship with his son Nwoye. The heavy hand with which Okonkwo rules his family is due to fear, the fear of resembling his father in "failure and weakness.” But in shun-

32

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

ning Unoka’s vice, idleness, Okonkwo’s pride rejects the old man’s virtue —gentleness (pp. 12—13). This fearful preoccupation with a certain image of manhood distorts Okonkwo’s view of his son’s real personality. The self-made man confuses Nwoye’s diffidence with "incipient laziness (p. 13). Nwoye is repelled by his father’s equation of masculinity with violence and bloodshed. But he displays his own kind of courage when he elects to join the strange religion of the white Christians, for his con¬ version is partly in response to the shortcomings of his own society: ’ It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not un¬ derstand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul— the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed” (p. 134). The "question of Ikemefuna” is crucial, for Ikemefuna’s death, at Okonkwo’s hands, is the crucial example of the destructive pride, the fear¬ ful egocentricity, which compels Okonkwo to prove his "courage” even at the cost of sacrificing a war hostage who had become a member of his own household. The corrosive effects of this sacrilegious act on the rela¬ tionship between Nwoye and his father is comparable with the impact of other forms of Ibo morality—including the superstitious exposure of newborn twins. In effect, Okonkwo’s egocentric failure to recognize or respect the humanity of Ikemefuna and Nwoye, is symptomatic of those weaknesses which have made his society vulnerable to the promises of Christianity. The problems of human perception which are dramatized by the colonial functions of language have been repeated, on an internal level, within African society itself. Altogether then, Achebe exploits the English language and its cultural norms in order to explore differences in modes of perception. The Euro¬ pean’s ethnocentric perceptions are exposed and ironically reversed in order to accommodate the African’s self-awareness. Or they are compared with the perceptual norms of divisive individualism in the African com¬ munity. And even in A Man of the People (1966) where there is less emphasis on the literary and pathological traditions of English, Achebe’s basic objective remains the same: cultural norms embody modes of per¬ ception which are intrinsic to the emotional and moral experiences in the novel. Indeed, in his fourth novel Achebe rejects European judgements even more explicitly than he does in the ironic manipulations of the earlier novels. The European’s ignorance of African customs has led to shallow and misleading generalizations. Some foreigners, for example, think "we are funny with figures.” Hence Odili’s father astonishes a British visitor

CHINUA ACHEBE

33

because the former seems to be unaware of the size of his own family: "My father grinned and talked about other things. Of course he knew how many children he had but people don’t go counting their children as they do animals or yams’ ’ (p. x 2 5) ,17 Neither does Odili trust the foreigner’s critical interpretation of Afri¬ can art. According to an Englishman, the old African, "quite an illiterate pagan,’’ who shakes her fist at the modern sculpture of a god is expressing annoyance at the "un-African” art of the European-trained sculptor. But as Odili points out, the gesture with the fist "is a sign of great honour and respect; it means that you attribute power to the person or object.” Moreover, this blunder is comparable with the faux pas by a French re¬ viewer of an African religious mask. The divine "detachment and dis¬ dain” depicted by the mask had been missed by the critic’s infatuation with the figure’s "half-closed eyes, sharply drawn and tense eyebrows, the ecstatic and passionate mouth.” The problem arises from differences in cultural perception: the critic has "transferred to an alien culture the same meanings and interpretation that his own people attach to certain gestures and facial expressions” (p. 56). The art of dancing is also pertinent, for the "foreign enthusiast of Afri¬ can rhythm” who tends to "overdo the waist wiggle” is simply respond¬ ing to stereotyped perceptions of the African: "It all goes back to what others have come to associate us with. And let it be said that we are not entirely blameless in this. I remember how we were outraged at the Uni¬ versity to see a film of breast-throwing, hip-jerking, young women which a neighbouring African state had made and was showing abroad as an African ballet” (pp. 57-58). Altogether, the perceptual problems created by the foreigner’s cultural norms have been compounded by those Afri¬ cans who accept or pander to the European’s irrelevant judgements. But above all, these problems are not limited to the relationship be¬ tween African and Western cultures. As in Things Fall Apart or No Longer At Ease, the kinds of perception which underlie the external con¬ flict are pertinent to the internal crises of the African community. When Odili resents an American for criticizing his country he implies a parallel between the incompetence of alien judgements on African art and the irrelevance of the outsider’s insights into African politics: "Who the hell did she think she was to laugh so self-righteously? Wasn’t there more than enough in her own country to keep her laughing all her days? Or crying if she preferred it?” (p. 61). And, as in the case of the pseudoAfrican ballet, Odili’s anger is also directed inwards—at those Africans who have glibly accepted, or prostituted themselves to shallow imitations of Western politics. Chief Nanga’s "democratic” politics, like his color-

34

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

ful English, are fraudulent externals which are unrelated to the socio¬ economic complexities of African culture and nationhood. But Nanga s charlatanism only partially accounts for the emptiness of his claim to be a man of the people. For the fact is that Achebe is not being chauvinistic in either the matter of art criticism or political systems. He is acutely aware of all those intransigent facts of modernity which compel the contempo¬ rary African to come to terms with, or accommodate, non-African values. Yet, at the same time, he is conscious that the outsider’s nonperception of the African’s culture and identity is counterbalanced by the fact that the majority of Africans do not always perceive of themselves within the con¬ text into which the twentieth century has inevitably thrust them. Hence, quite apart from his chicanery, Nanga fails to be a "man of the people’’ because the "people” do not exist—at least, not on the level of that demo¬ cratic nationhood which has been handed down by the Western colonial¬ ists. The "nation” over which Nanga presides is nonexistent because most of the individuals within its boundaries do not perceive themselves as components of an organized, national whole, but as members of specific communities described by the limits of village or tribe. This has nothing to do with the African’s allegedly inherent incapacity to view or verbalize his condition in Western terms. It results from the colonial experience in which the African acquired dual perspectives on government and poli¬ tics. The central authority was formerly an alien white power, operating on principles and within physical boundaries that conformed with the Westerner’s spatial and sociopolitical concepts of nationhood. But the social and political unit which related most directly to the African’s every¬ day experience and to his sense of tradition was defined by the village. This duality is dramatized by the public’s contrasting reactions to dis¬ honesty. Having been accustomed to think of a central authority in terms of powerful, alien exploiters, the people suspend moral judgements on those African leaders who have succeeded the white colonists: " 'Let them eat,’ was the people’s opinion, 'after all when white men used to do all the eating did we commit suicide?’ ” (pp. 161-162). On the other hand, when the shopkeeper in the village of Anata is caught cheating his customers, he is promptly and effectively ostracized, for the continuing traditions of village life make the people both able and willing to exercise their moral authority on this level. And the effectiveness of traditional African morality in this sphere is contrasted with the "people’s” im¬ potence in the ghostly milieu of nationhood: "The owner [of morality and goods] was the village, and the village had a mind; it could say no to sacrilege. But in the affairs of the nation there was no owner; the laws of the village became powerless” (p. 167). Hence, the "collective will”

CHINUA ACHEBE

35

of a people was not involved in Nanga’s eventual defeat, because the per¬ ceptual values which could have created such a will are absent or under¬ developed: "No, the people had nothing to do with the fall of our Gov¬ ernment. What happened was simply that unruly mobs and private armies having tasted blood and power during the election had got out of hand” (p. 162). Having exposed the narrowness or irrelevance of Western perceptions of African traditions, Achebe now underscores the limitations of tradi¬ tional African values vis-a-vis the Western criteria of twentieth century modernity. The external confrontations of the colonial era have given way to the internal conflicts of an independent, and hybrid, nationhood. And in the process, the familiar cultural differences have persisted, in a new internal setting, together with the related conflict between modes of perception.

FOOTNOTES

1Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), pp. 17-18. Originally published as Peau Noire Masques Blancs (1952). 2 The Pleasures of Exile (London, I960), pp. 15, 110. 3 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), II, 285-92. Originally published 1729. 4 Paul Edwards and David R. Carroll, "An Approach to the Novel in West Africa," Phylon XXIII (1962), 319-31; Alan Warner, "A New English in Africa?" Review of English Literature IV (April 1963), 45-54. 5 Ezekiel Mphahlele, "The Language of African Literature," Harvard Education Re¬ view XXXIV (1964), 298-305; Bernth Lindfors, "African Vernacular Styles in Ni¬ gerian Fiction,” College Language Association Journal, IX (1965-66), 265-738 The Pleasures of Exile, p. 1097 A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier, Evergreen ed. (New York, 1967), pp. 89-91. Originally published as L’ An Cinq de la Revolution Algerienne (1959). 8 "African Voices of Protest,” in The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States by Mercer Cook and Stephen E. Henderson (Madison, Wis., 1969), p. 52. 9 Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Evergreen ed. (New York, 1968), p. 10. Originally published as Les damnes de la terre (1961). 10 Things Fall Apart, African Writers Series (London, 1962), p. 160. References to the other two novels examined here, No Longer At Ease (1963) and A Man of the People (1966), are based on the African Writers Series editions. 11 The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (London, 1969), pp- 2-312 Houseboy, trans. John Reed, African Writers Series (London, 1966), p. 11. Orig¬ inally published as Un Vie de Boy (I960). 13 "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), in Selected Essays 1917-1932 (London, 1932), p. 14. References to "The Journey of the Magi” are based on Eliot's Later Poems 1925-1933 (London, 1941 ),pp. 29-31. 14 Leopold Sedar Senghor, Prose and Poetry, trans. John Reed (London, 1965), pp. 39, 43.

15 O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela

36

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Powesland (London, 1956), p. 108. Originally published as Psychologie de la Colonisa¬ tion (1950). 18 Senghor, p. 30. 17 Achebe’s Britisher is comparable with Canada’s contemporary Marshall McLuhan: "The most primitive tribes of Australia and Africa . . . have not yet reached finger¬ counting,” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill paper ed. (New York, 1966), pp. 110-11.

Politics and the African Writer Kolawole Ogungbesan

The African writer has been very much influenced by politics, probably because the African intellectual is a part of the political elite. The writer is a sensitive point within his society. Thus, African literature has tended to reflect the political phases on the continent. Chinua Achebe is a very suitable example. Beginning during the colonial days his writing spans the succession of political crises which has beset Nigeria. Also, more than any other Nigerian writer, he has made statements on the role of the writer in his society. His conception of the writer’s duty has also tended to change with the political situation in his country. By examining both his creative writing and his pronouncements, we can obtain an interesting picture of how the quality of a literature can be directly influenced by the degree of the writer’s political commitment. Achebe’s first statement on the social responsibility of the African writer was made in a lecture entitled “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” delivered to the Nigerian Library Association in 1964. Although he had cast the title of his lecture in rather general terms, Achebe talked specifically about the role of the writer in what he called the new Nigeria. The major problem all over the world, he said, was the debate between white and black over black humanity, a subject which presented the African writer with a great challenge: It is inconceivable to me that a serious writer could stand aside from this debate, or be indifferent to this argument which calls his full humanity in question. For me, at any rate, there is a clear duty to make a statement. This is my answer to those who say that a writer should be writing about contemporary issues—about politics in 1964, about city life, about the last coup d’etat. Of course, these are legitimate themes for the writer but as far as I am concerned the fundamental theme must first be disposed of. This themeput quite simply—is that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this dignity that many African peoples all but lost in the colonial period, and it is this dignity that they must now regain. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and selfrespect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them,

38

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

what they lost. There is a saying in Ibo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. After all the novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history. 1 Thus, the African writer should be both a cultural nationalist, explaining the traditions of his people to a largely hostile world, and a teacher, instilling dignity into his own people. Achebe reaffirmed this position later the same year at the Conference on Commonwealth Literature held in Leeds. Although his paper, entitled, “The Novelist as Teacher,” was largely a restatement of his earlier stand, Achebe was more eloquent and more assertive, perhaps because he was arguing his case before an international audience. He refused to believe that an African writer could be alienated from his society. In spite of the fact that the education of Africans was largely Western-oriented, the relationship between European writers and their audience will not automatically reproduce itself in Africa. In Africa, Achebe said, society expects the writer to be its leader. He revealed that many people have asked him to bring out more forcefully the lessons to be learned from his stories. Not that Achebe writes to please his readers; indeed, he believes that no self-respecting writer will take direction from his audience and that he must remain free to disagree with his society if it becomes necessary. However, the writer’s duty is more fundamental than that of the journalist. The period of subjection to alien races has brought disaster upon the African psyche. In fact, all over the continent people still suffer from the traumatic effects of their confrontation with Europe: Here, then, is an adequate revolution for me to espouse— to help my society regain its belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of the denigration and selfabasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet. For no thinking African can escape the pain of the wound in our soul.. .The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re¬ education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front.. .1 for one would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind. And I don’t see that the two need be mutually exclusive. 1

CHINUA ACHEBE

39

Two years later Achebe published his fourth novel, A Man of the People. The tone of this book was foreshadowed by an article entitled “The Black Writer’s Burden,” which Achebe wrote for Presence Africaine in 1965, but which was not published until after the novel came out early in 1966. Presence Africaine was founded in 1947 by a group of African and West Indian blacks to propagate African culture. Achebe’s burning zeal in his article matches that of the founding fathers of that magazine. He opens on an avowedly militant tone: Without subscribing to the view that Africa gained nothing at all in her long encounter with Europe, one could still say, in all fairness, that she suffered many terrible and lasting misfortunes. In terms of human dignity and human relations the encounter was almost a complete disaster for the black races. It has warped the mental attitudes of both black and white. In giving expression to the plight of their people, black writers have shown again and again how strongly this traumatic experience can possess the sensibility. They have found themselves drawn irresistibly to writing about the fate of black people in a world progressively recreated by white men in their own image, to their glory and for their profit, in which the Negro became the poor motherless child of the spirituals and of so many Nigerian folk tales.3 Obviously, the need for the writer to lead his people to reclaim their dignity has become even more urgent. However, Achebe goes further, by saying that now the greatest task confronting the African writer is that he should “expose and attack injustice” all over the world, but particularly within his own society in Africa. African writers should be free to criticize their societies without being accused of supplying ammunition to the enemies of Africa. “We must seek the freedom to express ourselves, without the anxiety that what we say might be taken in evidence against our race. Africans have for too long behaved as criminals in a law court. We have stood in the dock too long pleading and protesting before ruffians and frauds masquerading as disinterested judges.” 4 Thus, Achebe has given the African writer a second duty, that of the social critic. As in 1964 it was the condition of his society that moved him to assume this second role. The situation in Nigeria in 1964-1965 can best be summed up in the words of a character in Wole Soyinka’s novel The Interpreters (1965): “Next to death, shit is the most vernacular atmosphere of our beloved country.” Achebe wrote A Man of the People under this disgusting atmosphere. Here he has forsaken his earlier duty to give back to his people their dignity; now he focuses his gaze on the evils inflicted on African societies, not by an alien race, but by Africans themselves. Yet the fundamental belief remains—that the writer can and must influence his society. This would explain the much-vaunted prophetic ending of the book: “But the Army obliged us by staging a coup at that point and locking up every member of the Government.” The point is not so much that in January 1966 this became a prophetic

40

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

statement, but that the writer, like a journalist, is so conscious of his role in his society, and his involvement in its fate, as to put forward solutions to the problems facing his people. Achebe may have foreseen the military coup of January 1966, but there is very little doubt that subsequent events caught him, like everyone else in the country, unaware. In May several hundred Ibo were killed in parts of the Northern Region. In July a counter-coup overthrew the government of General Ironsi; most of the military officers who were killed were Ibo, including Achebe’s brother. In September there was another massacre of Ibo in the North, and Colonel Ojukwu asked all Ibo people to return to their homes in the East. As events moved inexorably towards war, Achebe became an Ibo nationalist. When war actually broke out, he became a diplomat, acting as one of the roving ambassadors for the Republic of Biafra. Achebe now said that the role of the African writer should be that of a social transformer and revolutionary. In a paper presented at a political science seminar in Makerere in 1968, entitled “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause,” he said that a writer is only “a human being with heightened sensitivities” and, therefore “must be aware of the faintest nuances of injustice in human relations. The African writer cannot therefore be unaware of or indifferent to, the monumental injustice which his people suffer.” African writers are committed to a new society which will affirm their validity and accord them identity as Africans, as people; “they are all working actively in this cause for which Christopher Okigbo died. I believe that our cause is right and just. And this is what literature in Africa should be about today—right and just causes.” 5 In a period of conflict, priorities change, and people tend to reinterpret their lives and roles in new lights. In an interview at the University of Texas at Austin in November 1969, Achebe gave a new reading of his novels, calling himself a protest writer. Indeed, all African literature, he said, is protest writing. I believe it’s impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest ... In fact I should say all our writers, whether they are aware of it or not, are committed writers. The whole pattern of life demanded that you should protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your tradi¬ tions, your religion, and so on.6 Achebe has moved from criticizing his society to directly taking a hand in remolding it. He claimed that, in addition to recording the past and the current revolutions and changes that are going on, the African writer has a great influence in determining Africa’s future, for by recording what had gone on before, he is in a way helping to set the tone of what is going to happen. “This is important because at this stage it seems to me that the writer’s role is more in determining than merely in reporting. In other words, his role is to act rather than to react.” 7 Achebe is consistent in his belief that the writer has a function in his society, that he could and should influence his society. Yet some sort of

CHINUA ACHEBE

41

revolution has taken place in his view of his society. Whereas in A Man of the People Achebe had called the common people “the real culprits” of the social malaise in Nigeria, two years later he saw them as the vanguard of the revolution; if anything, it is now the turn of the artist to learn one or two things from his society: This has been the problem of the African artist: he has been left far behind by the people who make culture, and he must now hurry and catch up with them—to borrow the beautiful expression of Fanon—in that zone of occult instability where the people dwell. It is there that customs die and cultures are born. It is there that the regenerative powers of the people are most potent. These powers are manifest today in the African revolution, a revolution that aims toward true independence, that moves toward the creation of modern states in place of the new colonial enclaves we have today, a revolution that is informed with African ideologies. What is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is right in the thick of it—if possible, at the head of it. Some of my friends say: “No, it’s too rough there. A writer has no business being where it is so rough. He should be on the sidelines with his note-paper and pencil where he can observe with objectivity.” I say that a writer in the African revolution who steps aside can only write foot¬ notes or a glossary when the event is over. He will become like the contemporary intellectual of futility in many other places, asking questions like: “Who am I? What’s the mean¬ ing of my existence? Does this place belong to me or to some¬ body else? Does my life belong to me or to some other per¬ son?”—questions that no one can answer.8 Immediately after the war ended, Achebe was faced with the problem of reconciling his different positions. He sought to establish some sort of continuity in his ideas by viewing the civil war as only a crisis which has brought out more nakedly the dilemma between the African writer and his society. He attempted to adapt his latest position, that of the writer as a revolutionary, to the situation in postwar Nigeria. “I have come to the view that you cannot separate the creativity from the revolution that is inevitable in Africa. Not just the war, but the post-independence period in Africa is bound to create in the writer a new approach. This, maybe, was sharpened by the war, but in my case it was already there.” 9 African literature in its present form, he said, is really not sufficiently relevant to the issues of the day. “1 think what is meaningful is what takes into account the past and the present.” African writers cannot forget the past because the present comes out of it; but they should not be mesmerized or immobilized by their contemplation of the past to the exclusion of the contemporary scene. “The most meaningful work that African writers can do today will take into account our whole history: how we got here, and what it is today; and this will help us to map our plans for the future.” 10

42

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Nonetheless, Achebe has been chastened by the war. Now, he claims to understand the plight of South Africans who used to say that they could not afford to write novels—only poetry or short stories. During the war, he had found, like them, that there was no time, everything was too pressing, novel writing was a luxury, and poetry seemed to meet the demands of the time. Even two years after the end of the war, Achebe has not felt the urge to write a novel. “I’d like to try my hand at a play.” On the relationship between politics and the writer, he says that some measure of politics is bound to intrude into writing, especially in Africa. He himself could not abstain, although he would not deny the right of any writer to do so. For him, however, “one can only avoid commitment by pretending or by being insensitive.” 11 Achebe is correct that politics and social affairs cannot be kept out of literature in Africa, at least not for some time. Yet the writer s approach to these issues will be crucial to the quality of his work. In order to be objective, he must be detached, must not become emotionally involved. This is the case with Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, the two books on which Achebe’s reputation still rests. Achebe realized that the writer as a teacher must watch his attitudes very carefully. There would always be a strong temptation for him to idealize his past—“to extol its good points and pretend that the bad never existed.” This is where the writer’s objectivity comes in. If he becomes emotionally committed to the extent of selecting only those facts that flatter him, he will have branded himself an untrustworthy witness. More important, he would thereby flaw his art. “The credibility of the world he is attempting to recreate will be called to question and he will defeat his own purpose if he is suspected of glossing over inconvenient facts.” 12 Viewed objectively, the African past will be seen, not as “one long, technicolour idyll,” but possessing, like any other people’s past, its good as well as its bad sides. Objectivity is not the preserve of the writer, but is a prerequisite in all intellectual pursuits. Indeed, the writer as teacher was in very good company, for his task, “to help my society regain its belief in itself,” was not exclusively that of the creative writer. There were other intellectuals to whom objectivity mattered as much as to the writer—historians, an¬ thropologists, sociologists, and political scientists—who were devoted to the task of giving back to Africa the pride and self-respect it lost during the colonial period. The African writer’s role as a teacher, as Achebe himself realized, could only be a temporary measure, something dictated by the political logics of the time. Once the lesson had been learned, the teacher’s duty falls into abeyance. In 1964 Achebe was not saying that he did not accept the present-day as a proper subject for the novelist. After all, his second book, No Longer at Ease, had been about the present-day, and as he promised then, the forthcoming one, A Man of the People, would again come to date. “But what I do mean is that owing to the peculiar nature of our situation it would be futile to try and take off before we have repaired our foundations. We must first set the scene which is authentically African; then what follows will be meaningful and deep.” 13 Thus, the writer’s role as a social critic is a logical sequence to his role

CHINUA ACHEBE

43

as a teacher. Having repaired the foundations of his society by establishing the validity of African traditions, the writer can now afford to take an unflinching look at his society and its shortcomings. However, the writer’s role as a social critic is higher than his role as a teacher, since it can go beyond the requirements of the moment. Writers all over the world have always been called upon to play this role. But it demands more of the writer than the role of the teacher. It demands more than ob¬ jectivity; it demands considerable detachment. The writer may not have found it difficult to be detached when writing about the past, but this quality becomes doubly necessary when writing about the present. This is where Achebe as social critic fails. His righteous indignation with his corrupt society, however justified, does not permit detachment. A Man of the People is an authentic picture of the Nigeria of 1964-1965, as would be confirmed by anyone who had lived in the country or, for that matter, anyone who had read the newspapers of the time. But the authenticity of the novel is that of journalism rather than that of creative literature. Achebe had said in 1964 that “the novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human condition.” Less than a year later he seemed to have forgotten this. As he was writing A Man of the People , Achebe must have been repeatedly muttering to himself with impatience: “Perhaps what I write is applied art. But who cares?” The logical conclusion of his efforts at producing applied art are the poems and short stories Achebe wrote during the war. The role of a freedom fighter has very little to do with creative writing, as we can see by the example of Achebe’s fellow countryman, the late Christopher Okigbo, who stopped writing poetry during the war, took to running guns, and finally met his death on the war front. Unable, or unwilling, to make the distinctions which seemed so clear to Okigbo, Achebe was forced to term as creative any activity engaged in by a creative writer. This is nothing short of denigrating the creative impulse itself. Achebe labelled as half-truth the belief that creativity is something that must come from a kind of contemplation, quiet, or repose; and that it is diffi¬ cult to keep the artistic integrity of one’s writing while being totally involved in political situations: I can create, but of course not the kind of thing I created when I was at ease. I can’t write a novel now; I wouldn’t want to. And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. So that particular artistic form is out for me at the moment. I can write poetry—something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood. I can write essays. I can even lecture. All this is creating in the context of our struggle. At home I do a lot of writing, but not fiction, something more concrete, more directly related to what is going on. What I’m saying is that there are forms of creativity which suit different moments. I wouldn’t consider writing a poem on daffodils particularly creative in my situation now. It would be foolish; I couldn t do it}*

44

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Achebe seems here to be confusing the words “creative and “useful.” It is only by stretching the meaning of the term “creative literature” to the point of absurdity that we could apply it to the propaganda which Achebe wrote for Radio Biafra or the lectures he delivered in Europe and America during the war. Okigbo’s gun-running and enlistment in the Biafran army were more concrete than anything Achebe ever did and were “more directly related to what was going on.” Yet the poet would have disdained to call his efforts “creative” in any artistic sense. There could be no poetic way of firing a gun. In an interview in 1965, Okigbo had said that he took his work seriously because it was the only reason he was alive. I believe that writing poetry is a necessary part of my being alive, which is why I have written nothing else. I hardly write prose. I’ve not written a novel. I’ve not written a play. Because I think that somehow the medium itself is sufficiently elastic to say what I want to say, I haven’t felt the need for some other medium.'5

So during the war we had the ironic situation whereby Okigbo the poet, realizing that this was not the time to say anything, forsook his medium for more direct intervention, whereas Achebe the novelist took to writing poetry. Achebe’s war poems, such as “Air Raid,” “Refugee Mother and Child,” and “He Loves Me: He Loves Me Not,” show a closeness of observation and an intense emotional involvement in the situation. The same could be said for the short stories “Girls at War” and “Civil Peace.” Achebe has minutely recapitulated the ugly facts of life in Biafra during and immediately after the war. Unfortunately, neither a photographic attention to details nor an emotional involvement in people’s suffering is sufficient in itself to make a good work of art. Achebe’s “creative” efforts—whether they be pure propaganda, poems or short stories—on behalf of Biafra invite comparison with the products of newspapermen, radio and television journalists who recorded what they saw in the beleaguered enclave. A work of art should create, not just copy. The mood of anger, frustration, and despair which Achebe has demonstrated since 1965, and which he finds in South African writers, is characteristic of the intelligentsia—not just writers—all over Africa today. Yet it constitutes a serious danger to art. Righteous political indignation as the primary impetus for writing belongs more to the world of propaganda than to creative literature. In the writer, it accentuates the personal impulse to write protest and militates against detachment. One way out, if the situation becomes too oppressive to allow room for detachment, is to suspend writing and take a direct hand in influen¬ cing the situation. This was Okigbo’s solution. This was the solution recommended by the South African writer-in-exile, Lewis Nkosi, who advised his fellow countrymen to stop writing until the political problem

CHINUA ACHEBE

45

in the country is solved rather than continue to grind out third-rate hackneyed stories.16 Another way out is that followed by Nkosi himself and a host of South African writers—Mhpahlele, Abrahams, Hutchinson, amongst others—who have quit their country and settled elsewhere, although, significantly, none of them is now living in an African country.* Abroad, they have been able to write with the leisure and detachment that their country did not permit them. It speaks enough for their commitment that even in exile they have all written about South Africa. But they have been able to produce other art forms longer and more artful than the short story. Even if their autobiographical works are considered as anti-apartheid propaganda, it is a better propaganda than the protest writing they did in South Africa. Paradoxically, at a distance of several thousand miles from their society, they have been able to discipline their art. As Mphahlele said five years after leaving South Afri¬ ca, “Excessive protest poisons one’s system, and thank goodness I’m emancipated from that. The anger is there, but I can harness it.”17 All over Africa, the writer needs to harness his anger in order to write well. There is a very strong temptation for the writer within a young liter¬ ary tradition to embark on a crusade, either on behalf of or against his society, to attempt to educate the world about his people’s civilization, or to teach his own people how to behave. This crusading spirit can damage his art as irretrievably as any governmental or party control in totalitarian states. In order to criticize his society most effectively, he needs to be detached from it. With greater control over his emotions, he can sharpen his focus on his society and aim more carefully at his target. For some time to come, the political situation on the continent would tax to the utmost the African writer’s emotional involvement in the fate of his society. Alienation is a much-abused word. But the African writer needs at least to be disengaged, if he does not necessarily need to be alienated, from his society if he is to produce a lasting work of art.

*Mphahlele in exile until 1977

FOOTNOTES

1

“The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine, 81 (1964), 157.

2 “The Novelist as Teacher,” New Statesman, 29 January 1965, pp. 161-62; re¬ printed in Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture, ed. John Press (London: Heinemann, 1965), pp. 204-05; and in Achebes Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975), pp. 44-45. 3

“The Black Writer’s Burden,” Presence Africaine, 31, 59(1966), 135.

4 5

Ibid., p. 139. Conch, 1, 1(1969), 9-14; reprinted in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays,

pp. 79-84; and as “The Duty and Involvement of the African Writer” in The Afri¬ can Reader: Independent Africa, ed. Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson (New York. Vintage, 1970), pp. 136-142. 6 Bernth Lindfors, “Achebe on Commitment and African Writers, Africa Report, 15, 3(1970), 18.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

46

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid., pp. 16-17.

9 Ernest and Pat Emenyonu, “Achebe: Accountable to Our Society,” Africa Report, 17, 5(1972), 25. 10

Ibid.

11

West Africa, 3 March 1972, p. 249.

12

“The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” p. 158.

13

Ibid.

14

Lindfors, pp. 17-18.

15 Marjory Whitelaw, “Interview with Christopher Okigbo, 1965,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9(1970), 37. 16

Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile (London: Longmans, 1965), p. 132.

17

Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber, 1957), p. 54.

THE PALM-OIL WITH WHICH ACHEBE’S WORDS ARE EATEN Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. CHINUA ACHEBE

Chinua Achebe is a writer well known throughout Africa and even beyond. His fame rests on solid personal achievements. As a young man of twenty-eight he brought honor to his native Nigeria by writing Things Fall Apart, the first novel of unques¬ tioned literary merit from English-speaking West Africa. Critics tend to agree that no African novelist writing in English has yet surpassed Achebe’s achievement in Things Fall Apart, except perhaps Achebe himself. It was published in 1958 and Achebe has written three novels and won several literary prizes since. During this time his reputation has grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan. Today he is regarded by many as Africa’s finest novelist. If ever a man of letters deserved his success, that man is Achebe. He is a careful and fastidious artist in full control of his art, a serious craftsman who disciplines himself not only to write regularly but to write well. He has that sense of decorum, pro¬ portion and design lacked by too many contemporary novelists, African and non-African alike. He is also a committed writer, one who believes that it is his duty to serve his society. He feels that the fundamental theme with which African writers should concern themselves is that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.1

Each of Achebe’s novels2 sheds light on a different era in the recent history of Nigeria. Things Fall Apart (1958) is set in a traditional Ibo village community at the turn of the century when the first European missionaries and administrative officials were beginning to penetrate inland. In Arrow of God (1964) the

48

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

action takes place in a similar environment about twenty-five years later, the major difference being that the missionaries and district officers have by this time become quite firmly entrenched. Achebe switches to an urban scene in jVo Longer at Ease (1960) in order to present a picture of the life of an educated Nigerian in the late nineteen-fifties. He brings the historical record right up to contemporary times in A Man of the People (1966), a devastating political satire that ends with a military coup. Achebe’s novels read like chapters in a biography of his people and his nation since the coming of the white man. What gives each of Achebe’s novels an air of historical authenticity is his use of the English language. He has developed not one prose style but several, and in each novel he is careful to select the style or styles that will best suit his subject. In dialogue, for example, a Westernized African character will never speak exactly like a European character nor will he speak like an illiterate village elder. Achebe, a gifted ventriloquist, is able to individualize his characters by differentiating their speech. Of course, any sensitive novelist will try to do this, but most novelists do not face the problem of having to represent in English the utterances of a character who is speaking another language. To resolve this problem, Achebe has devised an African vernacular style3 which simulates the idiom of Ibo, his native tongue. One example of this style will suffice. In Arrow of God a chief priest tells one of his sons why it is necessary to send

him to a mission school: want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is some¬ thing there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow.” (p. 55) “1

In an article on “English and the African Writer,” Achebe demonstrates that he could have written this passage in a differ¬ ent style: I am sending you as my representative among those people—just to be on the safe side in case the new religion develops. One has to move with the times or else one is left behind. I have a hunch that

CHINUA ACHEBE

49

those who fail to come to terms with the white man may well regret their lack of foresight.4 Achebe comments, “The material is the same. But the form of the one is in character and the other is not. It is largely a matter of instinct, but judgement comes into it too.”5 Achebe’s use of an African vernacular style is not limited to dialogue. In Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, novels set in tribal society, the narrative itself is studded with proverbs and similes which help to evoke the cultural milieu in which the action takes place. In No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, on the other hand, one finds the language of the narrative more cosmopolitan, more Westernized, more suited to life in the city. Here are some similes drawn from narrative portions of Things Fall Apart (TFA) and Arrow of God (AOG):

. . . like a bush-fire in the harmattan. (TFA, p. i) . . . like pouring grains of corn into a bag full of holes. (TFA, p. 19) ... as if water had been poured on the tightened skin of a drum. (TFA, p. 42) . . . like a yam tendril in the rainy season. (TFA, p. 45) . . . like the snapping of a tightened bow. (TFA, p. 53) ... as busy as an ant-hill. (TFA, p. 100) . . . like the walk of an Ijele Mask lifting and lowering each foot with weighty ceremony. (AOG, p. 84) . . . like a grain of maize in an empty goatskin bag. (AOG, p. 100) ... as one might pull out a snail from its shelb~(AOG, p. 118) . . . like a bad cowry. (AOG, p. 146) . . . like a lizard fallen from an iroko tree. (AOG, p. 242) . . . like the blue, quiet, razor-edge flame of burning palm-nut shells. (AOG, p. 274) Now here are some similes drawn from narrative portions of No Longer at Ease (NLAE) and A Man of the People (AMOP):

... as a collector fixes his insect with formalin. (NLAE, p. 1) . . . swivelling their hips as effortlessly as oiled ball-bearings. (NLAE, p. 18) like a giant tarmac from which God’s aeroplane might take off. (NLAE, p. 24) . . . like an enchanted isle. (NLAE, p. 28) . . . like the jerk in the leg of a dead frog when a current is applied to it. (NLAE, p. 137) . . . like a panicky fly trapped behind the windscreen. (NLAE, P- !49) ... as a dentist extracts a stinking tooth. (AMOP, p. 4)

50

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

. . . like that radio jinsrle advertising an intestinal worm expeller. (AMOP, p. 29) ... as I had been one day, watching for the first time the unveil¬ ing of the white dome of Kilimanjaro at sunset. (AMOP, p. 45) ... as those winged termites driven out of the earth by late rain dance furiously around street lamps and then drop panting to the ground. (AMOP, p. 51) . . . like a slowed up action film. (AMOP, p. 145) . . . like a dust particle in the high atmosphere around which the water vapour of my thinking formed its globule of rain. (AMOP, p. 146)

In the urban novels one also finds similes drawn from village life, but in the novels set entirely in tribal society one finds no similes drawn from urban experience. This is altogether fitting, for Achebe’s urban characters have lived in villages, but most of the characters of his village novels have had little or no ex¬ posure to cities. Here again we see Achebe using judgment and instinct to select the type of imagery that is appropriate to the time, place and people he is trying to picture. It is Achebe’s sensitive use of appropriate language that lends an air of his¬ toricity to his novels. I have taken time to comment on Achebe’s artistry because the argument I intend to pursue is based on the premise that Achebe is an exceptional literary artist. I believe that he is both a conscious and an unconscious artist, that he has an instinct for knowing where things belong and a talent for putting them there, and that he possesses a shrewd sense of what is in character and what is not. All these qualities are displayed in his deliberate search for an appropriate language for each novel, a style that will not only suit his subject and evoke the right cultural milieu but will also help to define the moral issues with which the novel is concerned. It is my contention that Achebe, a skillful artist, achieves an appropriate language for each of his novels largely through the use of proverbs. Indeed, Achebe’s proverbs can serve as keys to an understanding of his novels because he uses them not merely to add touches of local color but to sound and reiterate themes, to sharpen characterization, to clarify conflict, and to focus on the values of the society he is portraying. Proverbs thus provide a

grammar of values 6 by which the deeds of a hero can be

CHINUA ACHEBE

51

measured and evaluated. By studying Achebe’s proverbs we are better able to interpret his novels. Things Fall Apart is the story of Okonkwo, a famous warrior

and expert farmer who has risen from humble origins to become a wealthy and respected leader of his clan. His entire life has been a struggle to achieve status, and he has almost attained a position of preeminence when he accidentally kills a kinsman. For this crime he must leave his clan and live in exile for seven years. When he returns at the end of the seventh year, he finds that things have changed in his home village. White mission¬ aries have established a church and have made a number of converts. White men have also set up a court where the district commissioner comes to judge cases according to a foreign code of law. Okonkwo tries to rouse his clan to take action against these foreigners and their institutions. In a rage he kills one of the district commissioner’s messengers. When his clan does not support his action, he commits suicide. Okonkwo is pictured throughout the novel as a wrestler. It is an appropriate image not just because he is a powerful brute of a man and a renowned wrestler, not just because his life has been a ceaseless struggle for status, but because in the eyes of his people he brings about his own downfall by challenging too powerful an adversary. This adversary is not the white man, but rather Okonkwo’s chi, his personal god or guardian spirit.7 Okonkwo is crushed because he tries to wrestle with his chi. The Ibo have a folktale about just such a wrestler. Once there was a great wrestler whose back had never known the ground. He wrestled from village to village until he had thrown every man in the world. Then he decided that he must go and wrestle in the land of spirits, and become champion there as well. He went, and beat every spirit that came forward. Some had seven heads, some ten; but he beat them all. His companion who sang his praise on the flute begged him to come away, but he would not. He pleaded with him but his ear was nailed up. Rather than go home he gave a challenge to the spirits to bring out their best and strongest wrestler. So they sent him his personal god, a little, wiry spirit who seized him with one hand and smashed him on the stony earth.8

Although this tale does not appear in Things Fall Apart, there is

52

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

sufficient evidence in the novel to suggest that Okonkwo is being likened to one who dares to wrestle with a spirit. A hint is con¬ tained in the first paragraph of the opening chapter which tells how Okonkwo gained fame as a young man of eighteen by throwing an unbeaten wrestler “in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.” (p. i) And later, when Okonkwo commits the sin of beating one of his wives during the sacred Week of Peace,

. . people said

he had no respect for the gods of his clan. His enemies said his good fortune had gone to his head. They called him the little bird nza who so far forgot himself after a heavy mqal that he challenged his chi.” (p. 26) Achebe uses proverbs to reinforce the image of Okonkwo as a man who struggles with his chi. Notice in the following passage how skillfully this is done: Everybody at the kindred meeting took sides with Osugo when Okonkwo called him a woman. The oldest man present said sternly that those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble. Okonkwo said he was sorry for what he had said, and the meeting continued. But it was really not true that Okonkwo’s palm-kernels had been cracked for him by a benevolent spirit. He had cracked them himself. Anyone who knew his grim struggle against poverty and misfortune could not say he had been lucky. If ever a man de¬ served his success, that man was Okonkwo. At an early age he had achieved fame as the greatest wrestler in all the land. That was not luck. At the most one could say that his chi or personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi also says yes. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed. And not only his chi but his clan too, because it judged a man by the work of his hands, (pp. 22-23)

When Okonkwo returns from exile, he makes the mistake of believing that if he says yes strongly enough, his chi and his clan will agree. No doubt he should have known better. He should have accepted his years in exile as a warning from his chi. In his first months of exile he had come close to understanding the truth: Clearly his personal god or chi was not made for great things. A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the

CHINUA ACHEBE

53

elders was not true—that if a man said yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation. (P- 117) However, as the years of exile pass, Okonkwo’s fortunes improve and he begins to feel “that his chi might now be making amends for the past disaster.” (p. 154) He returns to his clan rich, con¬ fident, and eager to resume his former position of leadership. When he finds his village changed, he tries to transform it into the village it had once been. But although he says yes very strongly, his chi and his clan say nay. Okonkwo the wrestler is at last defeated. Quite a few of the proverbs that Achebe uses in Things Fall Apart are concerned with status and achievement:

. . . the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them. (p. 5) ... if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings, (p. 6) ... a man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness, (p. 16) The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did. (p. 18) . . . you can tell a ripe corn by its look. (p. 18) I cannot live on the bank of a river and wash my hands with spittle, (p. 148) ... as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. (p. 165) Such proverbs tell us much about the values of Ibo society, values by which Okonkwo lives and dies. Such proverbs also serve-as thematic statements reminding us of some of the major motifs in the novel—e.g., the importance of status, the value of achievement, the idea of man as shaper of his own destiny. Sometimes in Achebe’s novels one finds proverbs expressing different views on the same subject. Examined closely, these proverbs can provide clues to significant differences in outlook or opinion which set one man apart from others. For example, there are a number of proverbs in Things Fall Apart comparing parents and their children. Most Ibos believe that a child will take after his parents, or as one character puts it, “When mother cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth.” (p. 62) However, Okonkwo’s father had been a failure, and Okonkwo, not wanting to be likened to him, had striven to make his own life a success. So impressive were his achievements and so rapid

54

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

his rise that an old man was prompted to remark, “Looking at a king’s mouth, one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.” (p. 22) Okonkwo believed that one’s ancestry was not as important as one’s initiative and will power, qualities which could be discerned in a child at a very early age. “A chick that will grow into a cock,” he said, “can be spotted the very day it hatches.” (p. 58) He had good reason for thinking so. He himself had achieved much as a young man, but his own son Nwoye had achieved nothing at all. How could he have begotten a woman for a son? At Nwoye’s age, Okonkwo had already become famous throughout Umuofia for his wrestling and his fearlessness. He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smouldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply, (p. 138)

It is worth noting that in complaining about Nwoye’s unmanli¬ ness, Okonkwo says, “A bowl of pounded yams can throw him in a wrestling match.” (p. 57) All the proverbs cited here are working to characterize Okonkwo and to set him apart from other men, especially from his father and his son. The proverbs reveal that no one, least of all Okonkwo himself, considers him an ordinary mortal; rather, he is the sort of man who would dare to wrestle with his chi. Obi Okonkwo, who is Okonkwo’s grandson and the hero of Achebe’s second novel, J\'o Longer at Ease, is a very different kind of person. When he returns from studies in England, he is an honest, idealistic young man. He takes a high paying job in the civil service but soon finds that his salary is not sufficient to meet the financial demands made upon him. He also gets involved with a woman his parents and clan despise. In the end he is caught taking bribes and is sent to prison. Obi is an unheroic figure, a good man who slides rather than falls into evil ways. His actions are ignoble and unworthy. When he begins taking bribes, he tries to satisfy his conscience by refusing to take them from people he knows he cannot help. Kinsmen who attend his trial cannot understand why he took such risks for so little profit; one says, “I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if

CHINUA ACHEBE

55

you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.” (p. 6) But Obi lives by half measures, by resolute decisions molli¬ fied by irresolute actions. He falls in love with Clara, a woman whose unusual ancestry Obi’s parents look upon with horror, and he wants to marry her. A friend warns him not to pollute his lineage: “What you are going to do concerns not only your¬ self but your whole family and future generations. If one finger brings oil it soils the others.” (p. 75) Obi, feeling he must free himself from the shackles of tradition, becomes engaged to Clara but later yields to parental pressure and breaks off with her. When she reveals she is pregnant, he arranges for her to get an abortion. More shameful, at least in the eyes of his clan, is Obi’s refusal to return home for his mother’s funeral, an action that leads one dismayed clansman to suggest that Obi is rotten at the core: “A man may go to England, become a lawyer or doctor, but it does not change his blood. It is like a bird that flies off the earth and lands on an ant-hill. It is still on the ground.” (p. 160) Obi never gets off the ground, never reaches heroic heights, never stops swallowing undernourished toads. Helping to set the tone of the story are a great number of proverbs which comment on or warn against foolish and un¬ worthy actions. Besides those already mentioned, one finds: He that fights for a ne’er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime, (p. 5) The fox must be chased away first; after that the hen might be warned against w'andering into the bush. (p. 5) ... he replied that a man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle, (pp. 10, 135) like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come. (p. 11) When a new saying gets to the land of empty men they lose their heads over it. (p. 48) A person who has not secured a place on the floor should not begin to look for a mat. (p. 60) Shall we kill a snake and carry it in our hand when we have a bag for putting long things in? (p. 80) . . . digging a new pit to fill up an old one. (p. 108) ... a man should not, out of pride and etiquette, swallow his phlegm, (p. 156) . . . The little bird nza who after a big meal so far forgot himself

56

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

as to challenge his chi to single combat, (p. 163) A man does not challenge his chi to a wrestling match, (p.

40)

The last two proverbs cited here may remind us of Okonkwo, but no one could mistake Obi for his grandfather. Okonkwo erred by daring to attempt something he did not have the power to achieve; this makes him a tragic hero. Obi erred by stooping to take bribes; this makes him a crook. To put it in proverbial terms: Okonkwo wrestles his chi, Obi swallows a toad. It is not only the stupidity but the contemptibility of Obi’s ways that many of the proverbs in the novel help to underscore. An important theme in No Longer at Ease is the conflict be¬ tween old and new values. Obi’s people tax themselves merci¬ lessly to raise funds to send him to England for university train¬ ing. The “scholarship” they award him is to be repaid both in cash and in services when he finishes his studies. They want him to read law so that when he returns he will be able to handle all their land cases against their neighbors. They expect a good return on their investment because Obi is their kinsman; they have a saying that “. . . he who has people is richer than he who has money.” (p. 79) Obi, however, immediately asserts his selfwill by choosing to read English instead of law. When he returns he starts to pay back the loan but refuses to allow’ his kinsmen to interfere in his personal life. He especially resents their efforts to dissuade him from marrying Clara. Having adopted Western values, Obi believes that an individual has the right to choose his own wife. It is this that brings him into conflict wdth his parents and kinsmen. Obi’s Western education has made him an individualist, but his people still adhere to communal values.9 Obi’s people attach great importance to kinship ties, and their beliefs regarding the obligations and rewards of kinship are often revealed in their proverbs. Even when a prodigal son like Obi gets into trouble, they feel it is necessary to try to help him:

. .

a kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.” (p. have a song which cautions: He that has a brother must hold him to his heart, For a kinsman cannot be bought in the market, Neither is a brother bought with money, (p. 129)

5)

They also

CHINUA ACHEBE

Certainly it would be very wrong to harm an in-law for

57

. a

man’s in-law was his chi." (p. 46) And conflict within the clan should be avoided, for in unity lies strength: “If all snakes lived together in one place, who would approach them?” (p. 81) Those who prosper are expected to help those who are less for¬ tunate:

. . when there is a big tree small ones climb on its

back to reach the sun.” (p. 96) But all the burdens should not fall on one man: . . it is not right to ask a man with elephantiasis of the scrotum to take on small pox as well, when thousands of other people have not had even their share of small diseases.” (p. 99) Obi accepts some of the values expressed in these proverbs, but his own indiv idualistic attitude is probably best summed up in the saying “Ours is ours but mine is mine.” (p. 32) Obi’s problem lies in hav ing to make choices between the old values and the new, between “ours” and “mine.” Ezeulu, hero of Achebe’s third novel, Arrow of God, is faced with a similar problem. As chief priest of a snake cult Ezeulu is committed to traditional ways, but just to be on the safe side he sends one of his sons to a mission school to “be [his] eye there” and to learn the white man’s ways. This action draws criticism from some of the leaders of the clan, criticism which rapidly mounts into angry protest when the Christianized son is caught trying to kill a sacred python. Ezeulu also falls afoul of the district officer by declining to accept an official appointment as paramount chief of his village. For this he is thrown into prison for two months. When he returns to his village he envisions him¬ self as an avenging arrow in the bow of his god, an instrument by which his god intends to punish his people. Ezeulu therefore refuses to perform certain rituals which must be performed before new yams can be harvested. This precipitates a crisis which results in the destruction of Ezeulu, his priesthood and his religion. To understand Ezeulu one must comprehend his deep con¬ cern over the way his world is changing. This concern is ex¬ pressed both in his decision to send one of his sons to a mission school and in the proverbs he uses to justify his decision. He tells his son that a man must move with the times: “. . . I am like the bird Eneke-nti-oba. When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: ‘Men of today have learnt

58

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.’ . . . The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.” (p. 55) Months later Ezeulu reminds his son that he must learn the white man’s magic because “a man must dance the dance prevalent in his time.” (p. 234) Ezeulu explains his decision to the village elders by comparing the white man to a new disease: “A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs. When we want to makfe a charm we look for the animal whose blood can match its power; if a chicken cannot do it we look for a goat or a ram; if that is not sufficient we send for a bull. But sometimes even a bull does not suffice, then we must look for a human.” (p. 165) Ezeulu’s son is to be the human sacrifice which will enable the clan to make medicine of suffi¬ cient strength to hold the new disease in check. In other words, Ezeulu decides to sacrifice his son in order to gain power to cope with the changing times. The question is whether Ezeulu’s action is an appropriate response to the problem. Some elders think it is not and blame Ezeulu for bringing new trouble to the village by taking so improper a step. The importance that Ezeulu’s people attach to appropriate action is reflected in many of the proverbs in the novel. For example: If the lizard of the homestead neglects to do the things for which its kind is known, it will be mistaken for the lizard of the farm¬ land. (pp. 20-21) ... let us first chase away the wild cat, afterwards we blame the hen. (p. 122) We do not by-pass a man and enter his compound, (p. 138) We do not apply an ear-pick to the eye. (p. 138) . . . bale that water before it rises above the ankle, (pp. 156, 197) When a masked spirit visits you you have to appease its footprints with presents, (p. 190) ... a traveller to distant places should make no enemies, (p. 208) ... a man ofsense does not go on hunting little bush rodents when his age mates are after big game. (p. 209) He who sees an old hag squatting should leave her alone; who knows how she breathes? (p. 282)

Sending a son to a mission school is regarded by some elders as a highly inappropriate action for a chief priest to take, no matter what his motivation.

CHINUA ACHEBE

59

Ezeulu s enemies interpret his deed as a gesture of friendship toward the white man. Thus, when the district commissioner rather curtly commands Ezeulu to appear in his office within twenty-four hours and Ezeulu calls the elders together to ask if they think he should

heed

the

summons,

one

unfriendly

elder replies in no uncertain proverbs that Ezeulu must either suffer the consequences of friendship with the white man or do something to end the friendship: . . does Ezeulu think that their friendship should stop short of entering each other’s houses? Does he want the white man to be his friend only by word of mouth? Did not our elders tell us that as soon as we shake hands with a leper he will want an embrace? . . . What I say is this ... a man who brings ant-ridden faggots into his hut should expect the visit of lizards. But if Ezeulu is now telling us that he is tired of the white man’s friendship our advice to him should be: You tied the knot, you should also know how to undo it. You passed the shit that is smelling; you should carry it away. Fortunately the evil charm brought in at the end of a pole is not too difficult to take outside again.” (pp. 177-78) It is worth noting that the proverb about bringing ant-ridden faggots home is quoted twice by Ezeulu himself. He uses it to reproach himself when his mission-educated son is found trying to kill a sacred python, (p. 72) Here, momentarily at least, Ezeulu seems willing to accept responsibility for the abomina¬ tion. Ezeulu uses the proverb a second time when a friend accuses him of betraying his people by sending his son to the white man’s school. Ezeulu counters by pointing out that he did not bring the white man to his people; rather,

his

people

brought the white rrjan upon themselves by failing to oppose him when he first arrived. If they wish to blame someone, they should blame themselves for meekly submitting to the white man’s presence and power. “The man who brings ant-ridden faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.” (p. 163) This is a key proverb in Arrow of God for it enunciates a major theme: that a man is responsible for his actions and must bear their consequences. But in addition to being responsible for his actions, a man is also expected to act responsibly. This idea is conveyed in another key proverb which is used four times in the novel: “... an adult does not sit and watch while the she-goat suffers the pain

60

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

of childbirth tied to a post.” (p. 258, cf. pp. 21, 31, 189) Ezeulu uses this proverb twice to reprimand elders for encouraging the village to fight a “war of blame” against a neighboring village. He reminds them that elders must not neglect their duty to their people by acting irresponsibly. It is quite significant that this same proverb is used later by the elders to rebuke Ezeulu for failing to perform the ritual that will permit new yams to be harvested, (p. 258) The elders suggest that Ezeulu is doing nothing to prevent or relieve the suffering of his people. They urge him to do his duty by performing the necessary ritual. They urge him, in other words, to act responsibly. Ezeulu answers that he has a higher responsibility, for his god, Ulu, has forbidden him to perform the ritual. The elders then say that if Ezeulu will perform the ritual, they themselves will take the blame for it: “. . . if Ulu says we have committed an abomination let it be on the heads of the ten of us here. You will be free because we have set you to it, and the person who sets a child to catch a shrew should also find him water to wash the odour from his hand. We shall find you the water.” (p. 260) Ezeulu answers, “. . . you cannot say: do what is not done and we shall take the blame. I am the Chief Priest of Ulu and what I have told you is his will not mine.” (pp. 260-61) Ezeulu sincerely believes that he is the instrument of a divine power, “an arrow in the bow of his god.” (p. 241) When his actions bring disaster upon himself and his people, he does not feel responsible but rather feels betrayed by his god. Why, he asked himself again and again, why had Ulu chosen to deal thus with him, to strike him down and cover him with mud? What was his offence? Had he not divined the god’s will and obeyed it? When was it ever heard that a child was scalded by the piece of yam its own mother put in its palm? What man would send his son with a potsherd to bring fire from a neighbour’s hut and then unleash rain on him? Who ever sent his son up the palm to gather nuts and then took an axe and felled the tree? (p. 286)

Tortured by these questions, Ezeulu finally goes mad. The elders come to regard Ezeulu as a man who brought tragedy upon himself by failing to recognize his own limitations. In order to act appropriately and responsibly, a man must know his limitations. This idea finds expression in many of the proverbs in the novel:

CHINUA ACHEBE

61

. . . like the little bird, nza, who ate and drank and challenged his personal god to a single combat, (p. 17) . . . no matter how strong or great a man was he should never challenge his chi. (p. 32) The man who carries a deity is not a king. (p. 33) A man who knows that his anus is small does not swallow an udala seed. (pp. 87, 282) . . . only a foolish man can go after a leopard with his bare hands.

(P- 105) The fly that struts around on a mound of excrement wastes his time; the mound will always be greater than the fly. (p. 282)

To sum up, Ezeulu, in trying to adjust to the changing times, takes certain inappropriate actions which later lead him to neg¬ lect his duties and responsibilities. Not knowing his limitations, he goes too far and plunges himself and his people into disaster. Achebe’s most recent novel, A Man of the People, is set in con¬ temporary Nigeria and takes as its hero a young schoolteacher, Odili Samalu. Odili, who tells his own story, is moved to enter politics when his mistress is seduced by Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P. and Minister of Culture. Odili joins a newly-formed political party and prepares to contest Nanga’s seat in the next election. He also tries to win the affections of Nanga’s fiancee, a young girl Nanga is grooming as his “parlour wife.” In the end Odili loses the political battle but manages to win the girl. Nanga loses everything because the election is so rough and dirty and creates such chaos in the country that the Army stages a coup and imprisons every member of the Government. In Nanga, Achebe has created one of the finest rogues in Nigerian fiction. Claiming to be a “man of the people,” Nanga is actually a self-seeking, grossly corrupt politician who lives in flamboyant opulence on his ill-gotten gains. He is fond of pious platitudes—“Not what I have but what I do is my kingdom” (p. 3); “Do the right and shame the Devil” (p. 12)—but his ruthless drive for money and power is far from pious. When criticized, he accuses his critics of “character assassination” and answers that “. . . no one is perfect except God.” (p. 75) He frequently complains of the troubles and burdens that Govern¬ ment Ministers have to bear and readily agrees when someone remarks, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” (p. 68)

62

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Nanga has enormous power which he is willing to use to help others provided that they in turn help him. In a country in which “it didn’t matter what you knew but who you knew,” (p. 19) Nanga was obviously a man to know. The maxims quoted here help to characterize Nanga and his world. They are sayings borrowed from a foreign culture and are as often misapplied and abused as are the manners and institutions which have also been borrowed from Europe and transplanted in contemporary Africa.

Nanga quotes these

maxims but does not live by them; similarly, he gives lip service to democratic elections but does everything in his power to sub¬ vert

and

manipulate

them.

Detribalized

but

imperfectly

Westernized, adhering to no systematic code of values, Nanga battles to stay on top in a confused world. He is one of the most monstrous offspring produced by the tawdry union of Europe and Africa, and his misuse of non-African mottoes and maxims exposes not only his own insincerity and irresponsibility but the moral chaos in the world in which he lives. Odili, a more thoroughly Westernized African, is a man of far greater virtue and integrity. His narrative is sprinkled with im¬ ported metaphors and proverbial expressions—e.g., “kicked the bucket,” (p. 28) “pass through the eye of a needle,” (p. 63) “one stone to kill two birds with,” (p. 152) “attack ... is the best defence,” (p. 162) “a bird in the hand” (p. 165)—but he always uses them appropriately. Whatever he says can be trusted to be accurate and honest. Somehow Odili has managed to remain untainted amidst all the surrounding corruption and his clear vision provides an undistorted view of a warped society. Contemporary Nigeria is, after all, the real subject of the novel. What sort of society is it that allows men like Nanga to thrive while men like Odili suffer? Some important clues are provided in the proverbs in the novel. In contemporary Nigeria one must, for example, be circumspect: . . . the proverbial traveller-to-distant-places who must not culti¬ vate enmity on his route, (p. 1) . . . when one slave sees another cast into a shallow grave he should know that when the time comes he will go the same way. (p. 40)

CHINUA ACHEBE

63

... if you respect today’s king, others will respect you when your turn comes, (p. 70) ... if you look only in one direction your neck will become stiff. (P- 90) But one must not be unduly inquisitive: . . . naked curiosity—the kind that they say earned Monkey a bullet in the forehead, (p. 153) The inquisitive eye will only blind its own sight, (p. 164) A man who insists on peeping into his neighbour’s bedroom know¬ ing a woman to be there is only punishing himself, (p. 164) One should take advantage of opportunities (“. . . if you fail to take away a strong man’s sword when he is on the ground, will you do it when he gets up . . .?” p. 103); capitalize on good fortune (“[would] a sensible man . . . spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth?” p. 2); and avoid wasting time on trivialities (“. . . like the man in the proverb who was carrying the carcass of an elephant on his head and searching with his toes for a grasshopper” p. 80). Most important of all, one must be sure to get one’s share. Like the world of Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease, this is a world in which “ours is ours but mine is mine.” (p. 140) One must not only get one’s share, one must also consume it. Eating is an important image in the novel. Politicians like Nanga tell their tribesmen, “Our people must press for their fair share of the national cake.” (p. 13) Those who stand in the way of such hungry politicians are branded as “the hybrid class of Western-educated and snobbish intellectuals who will not hesi¬ tate to sell their mothers for a mess of pottage.” (p. 6) These intellectuals, Nanga says, “have bitten the finger with which their mother fed them.” (p. 6) Although some people believe that God will provide for everyone according to His will (“He holds the knife and He holds the yam,” p. 102), the politicians know that the fattest slices of the national cake together with the richest icing will go to the politicians who hold the most power. This is the reason elections are so hotly contested. In these elections people are quite willing to support a corrupt politician like Nanga in the belief that if he remains well fed, he may let a few crumbs fall to his constituents. When someone like Odili protests that such politicians are using their positions to enrich

64

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

themselves, the people answer cynically, “Let them eat, . . . after all when white men used to do all the eating did we com¬ mit suicide?” (p. 161) Besides, who can tell what the future may bring?

. . who knows? It may be your turn to eat to¬

morrow. Your son may bring home your share.” (p. 162) It is not surprising that Odili sums up this era as a “fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime ... a regime which inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put away safely in his gut or, in language ever more suited to the times: ‘you chop, me self I chop, palaver finish.’ ” (p. 167) The reason such an era comes to an end is that the politicians make the mistake of overeating, of taking more than their share. In proverbial terms, they take more than the owner can ignore. This key proverb is used four times in the novel. Twice it is applied to a miserly trader who steals a blind man’s stick: “Josiah has taken away enough for the owner to notice,” people say in disgust. “Josiah has now removed enough for the owner to see him.” (p. 97) Odili later reflects on the situation and the proverb: I thought much afterwards about that proverb, about the man taking things away until the owner at last notices. In the mouth of our people there was no greater condemnation. It was not just a simple question of a man’s cup being full. A man’s cup might be full and none the wiser. But here the owner knew, and the owner, I discovered, is the will of the whole people, (p. 97) In the middle of his campaign against Nanga, Odili wishes that “someone would get up and say: ‘No, Nanga has taken more than the owner could ignore!’ ” (p. 122) But it is only after much post-election violence and an army takeover that Odili’s wish comes true. Only after such upheavals result in the estab¬ lishment of a new order do people openly admit that Nanga and his cohorts “had taken enough for the owner to see.” (p. 166) Thus, in A Alan of the People, as in Achebe’s other novels, proverbs are used to sound and reiterate major themes, to sharpen characterization, to clarify conflict, and to focus on the values of the society Achebe is portraying. By studying the proverbs in a novel, we gain insight into the moral issues with which that novel deals. Because they provide a grammar of values by which the actions of characters can be measured and evalua-

CHINUA ACHEBE

65

ted, proverbs help us to understand and interpret Achebe’s novels. Achebe’s literary talents are clearly revealed in his use of proverbs. One can observe his mastery of the English language, his skill in choosing the right words to convey his ideas, his keen sense of what is in character and what is not, his instinct for appropriate metaphor and symbol, and his ability to present a thoroughly African world in thoroughly African terms. It is this last talent that enables him to convince his readers “that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.”10

NOTES 1 Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine, No. 81 (June 1964), p. 157. 2 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London, 1958); No Longer at Ease (London, i960); Arrow of God (London, 1964); A Man of the People (London, 1966). All quotations are from these editions. 3 I discuss this at more length in “African Vernacular Styles in Nigerian Fiction,” CL A Journal, 9 (1966), 265-73. See also Gerald Moore, “English Words, African Lives,” Presence Africaine, No. 54 (1965), pp. 90-101; Ezekiel Mphahlele, “The Language of African Literature,” Harvard Educational Review, 34 (Spring 1964), 298-305; and Eldred Jones, “Language and Theme in Things Fall Apart f Review of English Literature, 5, No. 4 (October 1964), 39-434 Transition, No. 18 (1965), p. 30. The same article appears in Moderna Sprak, 58 (1964), 438-46. 5 Ibid. 6 I have borrowed this phrase from M. J. Herskovits, who once said, “. . . the total corpus of the proverbs of Africans, as with proverb-users in other societies, is in a very real sense their grammar of values.” Dahomean Narrative (Evanston, 1958), p. 56. For another discussion of Achebe’s proverbs, see Austin J. Shelton, “The ‘Palm-Oil’ of Language: Proverbs in Chinua Achebe’s Novels,” Modern Language Quarterly, 30, No. 1 (1969), 86-111.

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7 There has been some controversy about the meaning of “chi.” See Austin J. Shelton, “The Offended chi in Achebe’s Novels,” Transition, No. 13 (1964), pp. 36-37, and Donatus Nwoga, “The chi Offended,” Transition, No. 15 (1964), p. 5. Shelton prefers to translate it as “God within,” but Nwoga, an Ibo, supports Achebe’s translation of it as “personal god.” Victor Uchendu, an Ibo anthropologist, describes chi as “the Igbo form of guardian spirit” (The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria, New York, 1966, p. 16). I have followed Achebe and Uchendu here. 8 Quoted from Achebe’s Arrow of God, pp. 31-32. A variant of this tale can be found in Cyprian Ekwensi, Ikolo the Wrestler and Other Ibo Tales (London, 1947), pp. 34-37. Another variant appears in F. Chidozie Ogbalu, Niger Tales (Aba, n.d.), pp. 9— 11. 9 This theme is discussed by Obiajunwa Wali in “The Individual and the Novel in Africa,” Transition, No. 18 (1965), pp. 31-33. 1 o See footnote 1.

Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe Gareth Griffiths In the final section of Things Pall Apart Okonkvvo’s slaying of the court messenger has brought out the white District Commissioner. He is intent on ‘doing justice’, but Okonkwo's suicide forestalls him. We are then given two views of the subsequent action, Obierika’s and the com¬ missioner’s. To the commissioner the inability of Okonkwo’s fellowtribesmen to handle the body of a suicide is fascinating. He is, we are told, ‘a student of primitive customs’. Transferred momentarily by the phrase from an ‘inside’ to an ‘outside’ view of the action we become aware more decisively than before that the words we have been reading in English are reproducing Ibo thoughts and speech-patterns. Obierika, who had been gazing steadily at his friend's dangling body, turned suddenly to the District Commissioner, and said ferociously: 'That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog ...’ He could not say more. His voice trembled and choked his words. ‘Shut up!' shouted one of the messengers, quite unnecessarily. The command is unnecessary for two reasons. First, because Obierika, overcome by his feelings, can say no more; and, secondly, because any¬ thing he does say, including the speech he has just made, will be quite incomprehensible to the commissioner who has had to speak ‘through an interpreter’. To the commissioner anything that he says sounds like a series of primitive grunts. They are speaking, we recall ironically, in a savage tongue. Through a simple pointing device Achebe can demon¬ strate the commissioner's exclusion from the society he ‘rules’. It is a linguistic exile, and the staple of the novel is language. Achebe can recreate the bitter history of his people through the history of words. Defeated by the impenetrability of the Ibo world, the commissioner retreats into a language whose register emphasises him as the represen¬ tative of all those aged colonial administrators who ‘know their natives’. His reflections on the scene are preparations for memoir and reminiscence. But what he reflects on is not a memory but an act, not a

68

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

reminiscence but an experience. The crudity and imperccptivcness of his reflections are set over against the detailed and subtle insights of Achebe’s own 'record'. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book, livery day brought him some new material. The story of a man who had killed a messenger and then hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. I here was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

As Gerald Moore has said, the commissioner’s book is inevitable judged against the book we have just read. Achcbc has ‘gone back to that bleak little paragraph of despised and garbled history.’1 He has tried to refine the phrases which have clouded the values of tribal life. His vision, this implies, is superior, since it operates from an ‘inside’ viewpoint which is impossible for the ‘student of primitive customs’. But although this is clearly so, the insidencss of Achebe’s vision can be overstressed. By the very act of writing Achebe’s stance is contiguous to that of the com¬ missioner. Both seek to reduce the living, oral w’orld of Umuofia to a series of words on the page: and they are English words, for Achcbc as well as for the commissioner. In his attempt to present a picture of the destruction of tribal Iboland Achebe is aware that in gaining the voice to speak he reveals his involvement with the destruction which he records. That is wrhy there is no simple condemnation possible, not for Okonkwo, nor Nwoyc, nor even for the commissioner. Neither is there any temptation to sentimentalise. The search is not for a lost idyll, nor an historical excuse, but for a meaningful appraisal of what has been lost and what gained, and a clear analysis of where the writer and his contemporaries stand in the list of residual legatees. For Achebe the novel is a vehicle of self-discovery. Writing is an activity through which the African can define his identity and redis¬ cover his historical roots. This self-defining function of the novel is, for obvious reasons, especially important to writers in a post-colonial situ¬ ation, especially where their exposure to European culture has led to an undervaluing of the traditional values and practices. This explains in part the prominence of the autobiography, or autobiographical novel form, in recent African w'riting. The role of the autobiography, often the first book produced by young African intellectuals, is less to record past experience and evaluate it than to assess the possibilities for future action. The need to determine what 1 am precedes the possibility of

CHINUA ACHEBE

69

defining what I can be or do.Writers as diverse as Mphahlele, Gatheru, Kariuki, Ngugi and Achcbe are all, in their various ways, engaged in an investigation of the inherited and acquired characteristics in their cul¬ tural make-up. This concern with identity is rooted in the African writers problem with language. The very choice of language involves him in a deliberate public stance; his use of dialect, or of phrases in his native language, are cultural gests as well as rhetorical devices; while his movement from one register to another in the recording of speech is a direct sociological comment. Inevitably in such a situation the writing of a novel, even more than usual, becomes an act of self-definition. It is Achebe's distinction that he recognises this more clearly than any other African writer, and uses his situation to define the history of his own rhetoric. Achebe has insisted upon the committed stance of the African writer. He has a clear vision of the duty which the writer owes to his society in a post-colonial situation. The writer's task is primarily to rehabilitate the culture which the colonising culture has overlooked or distorted. In his own words the writer’s first duty is to demonstrate; that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. (Nigeria Magazine, June 1964) But, paradoxically, it is the legacy of colonialism in the shape of a world-language which the writer must employ to perform this re¬ habilitation. In Achebe’s words, if colonialism did not give the African peoples ‘a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for singing’. (Insight Oct./Dec. 1966, p. 20). In setting out to celebrate the traditional African culture Achebe is not blind to its faults. As he says; We cannot pretend that our past was one long technicolour idyll. We have to admit that like other people’s pasts ours had its good as well as its bad sides. (Nigeria Magazine, June 1964) He celebrates the tribal societies of the past as societies in which human beings face situations with the same tragic inadequacies that men possess in all times. Further, he is aware that as a modern writer he cannot identify totally with the values of the tribal past, since these values are only part of his inheritance, and often conflict with the social and emotional demands which the modern African experience makes upon those who live it. In Things Fall Apart the central character is Okonkwo. But, as the

70

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novel develops, we realise that it is Nwoye not Okonkwo who takes the first step that will lead the Ibo writer to be able to record in ‘a worldlanguage’ the disintegration of his tribal past. Okonkwo’s ’success’ leads to his destruction, Nwoye's ‘failure’ ensures his survival in the changing world of Umuofia. The modern African intellectual is the descendant of the tribal underdog, an ironic variation on the theory of social Dar¬ winism which has played such a prominent and derisory role in the colonial view of the Afro-Asian world. This is a concomitant of the central irony of the book, that Okonkwo is destroyed because he performs more than is expected of him, and sacrifices his personal life to an exaggerated, even pathological, sense of communal duty. This made clear by his over-response to the Oracle’s demand that Ikemefuna should be killed, when he ignores the warning of the old man Ezeudu. When such a man advises Okonkwo to mod¬ erate his action and he ignores his advice he is acting in defiance of the values of his society, for in Umuofia social values are, literally, in the mouths of the old and the wise. Nwoye, on the other hand, puts personal feelings above social respon¬ sibility. He and Okonkwo’s father, to whom he is considered a ‘throwback’, are more comprehensible to the post-tribal world. In this respect Nwoye’s greater capacity for personal relationships and his deeper feel¬ ings for personal value is clearly a gain; but one which is accompanied by a loss of pride, of social unity and clarity of purpose. It involves the destruction of the tribe as the unit of value. Nwoye's movement away from the tribal values that Okonkwo defends is the first stage of the journey for the Western-educated Nigerians of Achcbe's own genera¬ tion. Achebc is the inheritor of Nwoye's revolt as well as of Okonkwo’s sacrifice. He can celebrate the ‘depth and value and beauty’ of tribal Ibo culture, but he must do so with the tools gained in the act of destroying it. Achebe’s effect in the final chapter of Things Fall Apart is obtained by shifting from the dominant (Umuofian) viewpoint to that of the white intruder. Such a shift is only possible for a man exposed, in some degree, to both cultures. The characteristic effects of Achebe’s irony depend on the position which he occupies, poised between two worlds whose interaction he seeks to record. It is Achebe’s distinction that he is not content merely to document his situation. He sets out to explore the possibilities it offers for a unique comment on the limitations of the human situation. Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease faces an even more complex situation than that which destroyed his grandfather. But it is a situation which grows from the same basic dilemma. Obi’s inability to reconcile

CHINUA ACHEBE

71

his communal responsibilities with his personal life is the reverse image of his grandfather's failure. Like Okonkwo, Obi responds with a tragic, misdirected energy. Unable to accept the solution of the Umuofia Pro¬ gressive Union and outwit convention, he attempts openly to defy it. He is as over-ready to leap to the image of his emancipation from cus¬ tomary supefstition as Okonkwo was to leap to the role of defender of Umuofia. But the final result of his struggle is exposure and impris¬ onment, when he takes a bribe without observing the necessary cau¬ tion which the society requires. The central theme of No Longer at Ease is the distance between what is said to be and what is. For example, the morality of public office offered by Mr Green, the white civil servant, is a facade, like the ac¬ countant’s clean collar in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It asserts an ideal, but one irrelevant to the problems of the time and place; and it is bitterly exposed in Mr Green’s tired and cliche-ridden sermons on the effects of the climate on the ’African character’. But equally unac¬ ceptable is the UPS President’s suggestion that Obi's crime is not that he has accepted a bribe, but that he has not taken ‘time to look round first and know what is what’. The proverbial morality of the tribe is no clear guide in this new world, as the language of the UPS members clearly shows. The President said it was a thing of shame for a man in the senior service to go to prison for twenty pounds. He repeated twenty pounds, spitting it out. ‘1 am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.’ The relativity of the presidential morality is neatly caught in the shift from the Christian to the lbo aphorism. Mr Green, the UPS President, and Obi too, are all caught between two worlds, and the language and events of the novel analyse their dilemma with clarity and com¬ passion. In a recent article in this journal Bcrnth Lindfors argued that: Okonkwo erred by daring to attempt something he did not have the power to achieve; this makes him a tragic hero. Obi erred by stooping to take bribes; this makes him a crook. To put it in proverbial terms: Okonkwo wrestles his chi. Obi swallows a toad. It is not only the stupidity but the contemptibility of Obi’s ways that many of the proverbs in the novel help to underscore.2 But the process seems to me to be more complex, and the role of the proverbial commentary more ambiguous. It is not only a reduction in the hero we observe, but also a reduction in the scale of the moral universe lie moves in. In the proverbial commentary we arc aware not

72

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only of Obi's inadequacy, but also of the inadequacy of the proverbial culture itself. It no longer provides a valid morality from which Obi's 'crookedness' excludes him. In fact, it is one source of the pressure which makes Obi capitulate to the practice of his time and take bribes. It is this proverbial wisdom on which the UPS draws to justify its demands that Obi acts on behalf of the tribal community. Indeed, it would seem that one of the major functions of this residual tribal organ¬ isation is to effect bribes and to obtain posts under false pretences. We are not going to ask him to bring his salary to share among us. It is in little things like this that he can help us. It is to the proverbs that the speaker returns to justify his claim. It is our fault if we do not approach him. Shall we kill a snake and carry it in our hand when we have a bag for putting long things in? Communal loyalty and nepotism can be demonstrated in a single action. The proverbial universe is no longer intact, and so it is insufficient to view Obi's behaviour as a foolish movement from effective communal values to selfish individualism. The choice is outside his control. The communal values have themselves been destroyed, as we see when we view the proverbs in the context of the action. As Gerald Moore has said, commenting on the ‘uncertain pomposity’ of the UPS President’s style of public speaking. Someone clse's words, someone clse’s values are filling his mouth. All that is Ibo in him is his extravagance and love of status. The proverbs which still occur from time to time in the speech of Achebe’s modern characters come out like undigested gobbets. In Things Fall Apart, they were both the informing source and the natural expression of the people’s thought.3 But if the communal universe has fallen apart Obi is equally dissatisfied and ill at ease with his new individualistic values. They are unable to satisfy his continuing need for identity with the life of the past. Thus, although Obi recognises that by the standards of his European edu¬ cation it is right that he should reject the irrational ‘osu’ taboo, his decision is undermined by the silence with which he greets Clara’s con¬ fession of her status. ‘I am an osu,’ she wept. Silence. She stopped weeping and quietly disengaged herself from him. Still he said nothing. ‘So you see we cannot get married,’ she said, quite firmly, almost gaily - a terrible

CHINUA ACHEBE

73

kind of gaiety. Only the tears showed she had wept. Nonsense! said Obi. He shouted it almost, as if by shouting now he could wipe away those seconds of silence, when everything had seemed to stop, waiting in vain for him to speak. However franctically he acts, and however loudly he asserts his ‘eman¬ cipation’ afterwards this initial silence cannot be erased. Even Obi’s father has to admit that the cult-slave taboo is out-dated and unfair when he is reminded by Obi that the Christian ethic deplores such discrimination. He is, after all, that Nwoyc who found in the ab¬ stract Christian ideals of love and charity his own platform of revolt against the tribal codes. But he has learned from the bitterness of his own experience what Obi has yet to learn, that such a revolt destroys even as it liberates. ‘Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will marry your sons? Think of that my son. We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters.’ This is one of the few points where a clear allusion is made to the events of the previous novel. Isaac/Nwoye tells Obi the story of how his father Okonkwo had slain Ikemefuna, and how as a result he had fled his family with his father’s curse on his head. His meaning is improperly understood by Obi. But to the reader it is clear enough. Isaac is trying to tell the crusading Obi that destruction may result not only from evil actions but from those actions we believe to be good. Issues of good and bad are abstractions which men employ to justify their own ponderous and clumsy swings from excess to excess. In this analysis of the clash of standards we see that the Yeatsian dialectic implicit in the title of Achebe’s first novel is still active in the world of No Longer at Ease.* Obi's mother, profoundly unaware of the dilemma which has sent first father and now son ‘through fire’, plants the opposing pole and com¬ pletes the circle of destruction: \ .. if you do this thing while I am alive, you will have my blood on your head, because I shall kill myself.. The issues of right and wrong, of simple moral judgements on indi¬ viduals, or even simpler explanations in terms of social or historical pressures resolve themselves again into the living tensions of the people who endure them. Once again there is no simple choice between tribal custom and modern progress. Obi’s individualist stand is not heroic. The customary and proverbial wisdom of the tribe is not infallible. To

74

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satisfy the demands of the world which he has inherited Obi, like his contemporaries, must both change and remain static. It is this painful, and often sordid, condition of tension that Achebe's novels explore. In his third novel, Arrow of God, Achebe returns to the theme of destruction of the tribal world. It is a more complex and ambitious book than the earlier two. It has benefited from the definitions and insights which the two earlier books have provided. With greater confidence and control, and with a deeper assurance, Achebe sets out once again to show in the ‘historical process’ the inadequacies and limi¬ tations with which man confronts the worlds he claims to rule. Ezeulu, Winterbottom and Oduche, Ezeulu’s convert son, are all bound within the limitations of their vision. For Achebe there can be no simple choice between these viewpoints. He is able to step back from his characters and show us the intentions and failures of each: Winterbottom’s well-intentioned but destructive ‘paternalism’; Oduche’s des¬ perate attempt to come to terms with ‘the ambivalence of his present life’; and Ezeulu's struggle to determine what is possible for a man driven by the events of life and the whims of the god he serves. Even in Ezeulu’s tragic struggle there is no final solution, for the writer, as Achebe knows, is involved with the kind of self-consciousness which overthrows the gestures it celebrates. Okonkwo’s suicide and Obi's im¬ prisonment gesticulate towards an idea of fate as confusion and puzzled inadequacy, but in Ezeulu’s madness Achebe finds his most powerful symbol of the limitations of men. At any other time Ezeulu would have been more than equal to his grief. He would have been equal to any grief not compounded with humiliation. Why, he asked himself again and again, why had Ulu chosen to deal thus with him, to strike him down and cover him with mud? What was his olTcncc? Had he not divined the god’s will and obeyed it? When was it ever heard that a child was scalded by the piece of yam its own mother put into its palm? What man would send his son with a potsherd to bring fire from a neighbour’s hut and then unleash rain? Whoever sent his son up the palm to gather nuts and then took an axe and felled the tree? But today such a thing had happened before the eyes of all. What could it point to but the col¬ lapse and ruin of all things? Then a god, finding himself powerless, might take to his heels and in one final, backward glance at his aban¬ doned worshippers cry: If the rat cannot flee fast enough Let him make way for the tortoise! Perhaps it was the constant, futile throbbing of these thoughts that finally left a crack in Ezeulu's mind. Or perhaps his implacable as-

CHINUA ACHEBE

75

sail ant having stood over him for a little while stepped on him as on an insect and crushed him in the dust. But this final malevolence proved merciful. It allowed Ezeulu, in his last days, to live in the haughty splendour of a demented high priest and spared him know¬ ledge of the final outcome.

Bernth Lindfors argues that the ‘proverbial commentary’ condemns Ezeulu by showing that he has failed to act 'appropriately and respon¬ sibly’. But if we view the proverbial devices not in isolation but as part of a total linguistic structure then the ‘choice’ they offer seems less adequate than Lindfors suggests. Viewed in context we see that Achcbe offers more than one explanation: (‘Perhaps ... or perhaps .. .’)The first takes up the suggestion, developed in many places in the book by the proverbial commentary that Ezeulu has fallen because he has failed to act within the bounds of the ‘reasonable’ and the ‘sensible’ in respond¬ ing to the threat of the white man. The proverbs debate the wisdom of the central decision to send Oduche to learn the white man’s power. But significantly the same proverbial wisdom - ‘The man who brings antridden faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit’ - is used both by the elders to criticise Ezeulu’s policy of sending Oduche to learn the white man’s power, and by him to criticise their earlier policy of submission to the initial invasion of Umuaro. (pp. 177-8 and 163 respectively, as Lindfors notes.) At the end of the novel this relativity still appertains, only heightened to a tragic level in its effect. Ezeulu, throughout, has acted according to the truth as he sees it. The psychological insight which Achebe brings to the actions make them more than mere gestures. He establishes that Ezeulu is, in a largemeasure, stiff-necked and uncompromising, but there is no suggestion of hypocrisy in his belief that in all his actions he has been merely ‘an arrow in the bow of his god’. After his son’s death Ezeulu’s grief and distraction drive him to test the purity of his motives against the one source of truth outside personal feeling available to him. Frantically he runs through the proverbial wisdom seeking for a clear sign that the relationship of trust which must exist between high priest and god still endures. But the guide is no longer reliable. It is the ‘constant futile throbbing’ of the proverbs echoing mockingly through his brain which, in part, drives him insane. Like the great ceremonial drums which Ezeulu mounts to celebrate the feasts of Ulu the language of the tribe shakes to pieces the conviction and sanity of its chief celebrant. The search is futile, the passage goes on to suggest, because the moral uni¬ verse of the proverbs with its sequence of appropriate actions and re¬ sponses has disintegrated along with the society which produced it. It

76

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has collapsed in the face of the irresistible and incomprehensible force of the white man, a force blind to the values and meanings of tribal life. This irresistible and incomprehensible force, captured appropriately enough in an allusion resonant with the preoccupations of European culture,® is the paradigm for that blind and implacable fate which steps on Ezeulu as on an insect. The role of the white man in the de¬ struction of the tribal world is conceived as much symbolically as his¬ torically. And so, Lindfors’ conclusion that Ezeulu .‘goes too far and plunges himself and his people into disaster’ seems an inadequate way of expressing what, examined as a whole, reveals itself as a complex symbol for ‘the utmost that we know. Both of ourselves and of the universe’. The proverbial patterning of the novels does much more than ‘evoke the cultural milieu in which the action takes place’ (Lindfors). It is a flexible and subtle device which, particularly in the later novels, often serves to define ironically the inappropriateness and dislocation of the characters' responses. If we view it as a continuing pattern of valid judgement on the actions of the novel we will fail to see the ways in which Achebe defines the confusion and loss of identity which ac¬ companies social change. Increasingly in the novels the theme of uprootedness and disorientation is defined through the gap between language and action. An example is the case of the proverb cited by Lindfors in a list of those embodying a comment or warning ‘against foolish and unworthy actions’:

‘Shall we kill a snake and carry it in our hand when we have a bag for putting long things in?’

Clearly, in the context, the proverb does not warn against foolish or unworthy actions, in fact it is used by the old man at the Umofia Pro¬ gressive Union to justify an unworthy action, or rather to justify an action which in terms of the tribal code is acceptable but in terms of the public morality to which Obi's position exposes him is a crime. To understand the full effect of Achebe’s use of proverbial language, or indeed, of any single rhetorical device in his writing, we have to view it as part of an ordered and unified artistic structure. Proverbial language is not a static repository of wisdom to which Achebe subscribes unquestioningly, and against which he measures the actions of his novels in an uncritical way. Rather it is one of a range of rhetorical devices which serve to define response in a world in which increasingly all response is relative and inadequate. As a writer seeking to define the interaction of

CHINUA ACHEBE

77

two cultures Achebe needs more thnn a single linguistic standard by which to define the moral dilemma of his characters. The novels explore the growing inadequacy of the proverbial language to function effectively in a world whose demands are phrased in directly opposed terms. But, as Odili Samalu makes clear, a mechanical mastery of the new terminology is no more adequate than a parrot-like command of the old. A Man of the People is something of an intrusion into the steady flow of Achebe’s novels. Nigerian reviewers hailed it as a sign of Achebe’s new 'commitment’. But to regard it as marking a volte [ace in Achebe’s work is to ignore the continuity it has with earlier preoccupations and procedures. Nevertheless, it does mark a major technical innovation, since it is the first of the novels to omit the direct intervention of the narrator. The onus which this places on the reader to judge the re¬ liability of the central character makes it more vital than ever that we recognise the inadequacy of relying on any single rhetorical procedure as a ‘grammar of values’ by which to judge the events of the book. If we believe with Lindfors that Odili Samalu is a man whose ‘clear vision provides an undistorted view of a warped society’ then we can read the book as an indictment of a world in which Odili, the hero, is sacrificed to the wicked chiefs Nanga and Koko. But to read the novel in this way is to ignore not only the multiple distinctions between what Odili does and what he says, but also between what he says and how he says it. As Arthur Ravenscroft has said, Odili Samalu is:

both serious accuser and comically sclf-accuscd in the rotten society of A Man of the People. It isn’t simply a matter of contrast between Odili’s words and his performance, but a question of how the words themselves reveal a shallow personality: the smirking, familiar, I-know-what-I’m-talking-about tone of so many TV com¬ mentators.® It is this level of comment we miss if we concentrate too exclusively on the proverbial commentary as the controlling rhetorical device. The proverbial comment is an important guide which Achebe uses to pin¬ point the dangers and difficulties accompanying moral choice, and to comment on the reliability of his characters' responses. But it is one amongst many, and is often used not to establish a grammar of values but to comment ironically on the discrepancies between the solutions of the tribal past and the problcmsof the urban present. For example, at the end of the novel there occurs an example of a proverb which has echoed through the entire book; the proverb ‘that some one has taken

78

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enough for the owner to see’ is here applied to the urban offences of the Nangas and Kokos. In the society of the villages it represents a mean¬ ingful ideal of tolerance, an effective standard which sets a limit to the natural dishonesty of man. It recognises that men will always rob other men, and that the real offence is to take more than the owner can afford to lose. As an expression of a semi-communal society where personal property is not sacred, since the pattern of life docs not force men to compete with one another for survival, it is effective and meaningful. But when transferred to the ‘dog eat dog' world of Nanga and Koko it becomes a useless and dangerous piece of sophistry. ‘Koko had taken enough for the owner to see,’ said my father. My father’s words struck me because they were the same words the vil¬ lagers of Anata had spoken of Josiah, the abominated trader. Only in their case the words had meaning. The owner was the village, and the village had a mind; it could say no to sacrilege. But in the affairs of the nation there was no owner, the laws of the village become power¬ less. As with the laws of the village, so with the language in which those laws find expression. After all, we recall, Odili’s father is referring to the death of Max, which has deprived Eunice of more than she can over¬ look ... her lover. As Odili recognises, a different morality applies, embodied in a different language: Max was avenged not by the people’s collective will but by one woman who loved him. The single most important technique of A Man of the People is not the proverbial patterning but the superbly controlled distance estab¬ lished between the reader and Odili Samalu. Odili sees more clearly than any other character the gap between what is said and what is in the world around him. He struggles, as far as he is able, to act up to the ideals he proposes, but despite his intentions he is betrayed time and time again into self-deception and hypocrisy. He tells his story de¬ fensively, as if half-aware of his plight, and organises his material and his comment to justify his action and its outcome. But his efforts only serve to emphasise the gap between intention and achievement. We are simultaneously made aware of the double-standards he operates when judging his own actions and those of others, and of the tragic innocence necessary to continue such self-deceptions successfully. Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease was used by Achebc to explore the dilemma of the young Nigerian trapped by the conflicting demands of two worlds, exiled from both the traditional and the contemporary solutions; Odili

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is a victim of the same dilemma, but now Achebe has deliberately with¬ drawn his own articulacy, and capacity for honest self-appraisal. The result is an ironic novel of high distinction the achievement of which rests firmly on Achebe’s ability to make his technique an instrument of discovery. This technique is firmly rooted in Achebe’s manipulation of the wide range of ‘languages’ available to him to define Odili’s world. He has access to more than a single proverbial source of comment. He has available a whole series of ‘languages’, from the ‘literary’ European English register to the untranslated Ibo phrase. The selection of the appropriate register is not merely a question of accurate representation and effective documentation but also of rhetorical appropriateness. For example, he outlines the range of possibilities when he shows Odili trying to get a clear picture of the Nanga household, and their speech-habits. A small thing, but it struck me even as early as this: Mr Nanga always spoke English or pidgin; his children, whom I discovered went to expensive private schools run by European ladies spoke impeccable English, but Mrs Nanga stuck to our language - with the odd English word thrown in now and again. Ironically, Achebe can now demonstrate how the scale of values im¬ plicit in these speech-habits are reversed when one attempts to con¬ struct a convention for representing them all in English. Thus Mrs Nanga whom we remember is too ‘bush’ for her husband's new position speaks in a fairly standard English. How else is one to represent stan¬ dard Ibo? But her husband, the Minister of Culture, often speaks in pidgin, the mark of his ‘successful’ detribalisation and social advance¬ ment. The choice of languages comments with devastating irony on the effect which the ‘civilising’ process has had on the native African cul¬ ture, a culture despised by Nanga’s children who speak ‘impeccable English’. Apparently the Minister insisted that his children must be taken home to their village at least once a year. ‘Very wise,’ I said. ‘Without it,’ said Mrs Nanga, 'they would become English people. Don’t you see they hardly speak our language? Ask them something in it and they reply in English. The little one, Micah, called my mother ‘‘a dirty bush woman”.’ In Arrow of God Achebe had investigated similar ironies exposed by the peculiar insight gained in reporting the African world through an ‘out¬ side’ language. For example, in the scene in which the kotma - a pidgin corruption of court messenger - demonstrates to the Umuarians the linguistic advantages of being civilised. The two messengers have ar¬ rived at Ezeulu’s hut in order to arrest him, only to discover that he has

80

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already set out to answer Winterbottom’s summons and that they have passed him on the road. 'What does he look like?' asked the corporal. ‘He is as tall as an iroko tree and his skin is white like the sun. In his youth he was called Nwa-anyanwu.’ ‘And his son?’ ‘Like him. No difference.’ The two policemen conferred in the white man's tongue to the great admiration of the villagers. ‘Sometine na dat two porson we cross for road,’ said the cor¬ poral. ‘Sometine na dem,’ said his companion. ‘But we no go return back jus like dat. All dis waka wey we waka come her no fit go for nating.’ The corporal thought about it. The other continued: ‘Sometine na lie dem de lie, I no wan make dem put trouble for we head .. .’ He addressed them in Ibo: ‘We think you are telling us a lie, and so we must make quite sure otherwise the white man will punish us. What we shall do then is to take two of you - handcuffed - to Okperi.’ As a moment’s reflection makes clear the irony depends upon all the language being English, so that when Achebe shifts from pidgin to ibo he does so by shifting from a fractured and half-digested English to a rich and subtle version of the same language. The rich and subtle language is the savage speech of Unniaro. In A Man of the People yet another level of language is discovered, and'turned to account. This is the language to which Odili aspires, and which serves as the main vehicle of his distancing in the book. In its own way it is as half-digested and false as the kotma’s pidgin. It leans heavily on redundant metaphors and the cliches of second-rate fiction; Odili,we recall,has literary ambitions amongst others.lt is this language which undermines the confidence which the reader has in Odili’s re¬ liability as a narrator. Take, for example, his account of the first time he 'slept with’ Elsie: Elsie was, and for that matter still is, the only girl I met and slept with the same day - in fact within an hour. I know that faster records exist and am not entering this one for that purpose, nor am I trying to prejudice anyone against Elsie. I only put it down because that was the way it happened. It was during my last term at the University and, having as usual put off my revision to the last moment, I was having a rough time. But one evening there was a party organised by the Student's Christian Movement and I decided in spite of my arrears of work to attend and give my brain time to cool off. I am not usually

CHINUA ACHEBE

81

lucky, but thnt evening I was. I saw Elsie standing in a group with other student nurses and made straight for her. She turned out to be a most vivacious girl newly come to the nursing school. We danced twice ... The reader's initial distrust is sparked off by the cliches, and the selfconscious slickness of the phrasing: ‘for that matter still is’, ‘in fact within’, ‘the way it happened’, ‘having a rough time’, ‘time to cool off’, ‘made straight for her’, ‘most vivacious’. These draw our attention to a more radical falsity in the self-justifying and swaggering tone that Odili adopts. Even before he begins the story of his relationship with Elsie he has adopted a defensive stance: ‘I . .. am not entering’, ‘nor am I trying to prejudice’. Of course, the denials only make it even clearer that this is exactly what he is trying to do. Later in the novel, when Elsie is taken from him by Chief Nanga, Odili is bitter and morally indignant. But, as this passage makes clear, Elsie’s later ‘faults’ are the virtues which first attract him to her, vivaciousness and attainability. When Odili meets the American public relations expert whose brief is to advise the government on the best way of selling its image to Am¬ erica he is exposed to the logical end of the journey from language to lie. ‘So you see, Mr ... I’m sorry I didn’t catch your first name?’ ‘Odili.’ ‘Odili - a beautiful sound - may I call you by that?’ ‘Sure,’ I said, already partly Americanised. ‘Mine is John. I don’t see why we should call one another Mister this and Mister that - like the British.’ ‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘What I was saying,’ he went on, ‘is that we do not pretend to be perfect. But we have made so much progress lately that I see no cause for anyone to despair. What is important is that we must press on. We must not let up. We just must not be caught sleeping on the switch again ...’ 1 was still savouring the unusual but, I thought, excellent tech¬ nological imagery when I heard as though from far-away John's voice make what 1 call an astounding claim . .. The claim towards which the whole conversation has been skilfully leading is that America is the only nation to have had the power to conquer others and to refrain from doing so. Odili is bemused by the new language, by its unfamiliarity and the new vistas it opens up of a world in which the problems of men can be solved if only we pay sufficient attention to our switches, and is unable to refute the argu¬ ment, though he does not believe it. He has been exposed to a master of

82

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the rhetoric which he himself employs in his little self-deceptions, and which Nanga too uses to fool his electorate. When Nanga uses the phrase ‘national cake’ to describe the rights of his compatriots to a share in the posts of government we observe the same process operating. The hackneyed phrase ‘national cake’ was getting to some of us for the first time, and so it was greeted with applause. ‘Owner of book!’ cried one admirer, assigning in those three brief words the ownership of the white man’s language to the Honourable Minister, who turned round and beamed on the speaker. Just as with the kotma in Arrow of God, we are distanced from the reaction of the villager to Nanga’s ‘command of’ the English language through the registers of language in which admirer and admired oper¬ ate. Odili, too, seems to be distanced as we are, and to share our sense of the irony. But this is not entirely true. The phrase 'getting to some of us’ suggests that Odili’s insight is the product of hindsight, and that he is laying claim to a perceptiveness which at the time he did not possess. So we react not only to the falsity of Nanga’s world, but also to the falsity of Odili’s claim to be outside the Nanga values. Like a set of Chineseboxes Achebe operates the shades and nuances which separate the worlds of words that make up his inheritance. Odili is not a deliberate hypocrite. He develops in the course of the novel, and makes often courageous attempts to find a workable mora¬ lity which will bridge the gap between his ideals and the shifting morass of ideas and standards he has inherited. The pathetic, and often comic, convolutions that this involves him in reflect the difficulties which face him and his contemporaries. Odili sees the way in which Nanga and Koko can exploit the failure of the old moral code: ‘Let them eat,’ was the people’s opinion ... ‘if you survive, who knows? it may be your turn to eat tomorrow.’ I Ic sees too that until men have been out of the rain long enough ‘to be able to say “To hell with it’’ ’ there is no hope of impartiality and principle in political life. In fact, he sees more clearly than anyone else in the novel what is wrong, but his analysis is useless because he shares the very faults which destroy those around him. He brings to his actions a pettiness and a hypocritical pride which prevent him from dis¬ tinguishing between his private satisfactions and his public hopes. What Odili lacks is the detachment to see his own faults as clearly as he sees those of the people around him. At the end of the novel, he comments bitterly that:

CHINUA ACHEBE

83

You died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest without asking to be paid. It is a conclusion which fails to satisfy. From Eunice’s act there is no way through to reality. It remains a blind gesture of personal re¬ taliation, quite incomprehensible to the world in which it occurs. She stood like a stone figure, I was told, for some minutes more. Then she opened her handbag as if to take out a handkerchief, took out a pistol instead and fired two bullets into Chief Koko’s chest. Only then did she fall on Max’s body and begin to weep like a woman; and then the policemen seized her and dragged her away. A very strange girl, people said.7 A Man of the People is Achebe’s first attempt completely to disassociate

himself from the solutions and figures he creates. But it is a logical technique for a man whose work as a whole shows the finest kind of objectivity. The need for such objectivity, so amply illustrated by Odili Samalu, is the product of the dilemma which Achebe faces by being isolated from a simple allegiance to any one culture. At the end of this novel the military coup offers a temporary relief, but there is no evi¬ dence that they will not prove to be merely the latest residents to bar¬ ricade themselves within the house of government. The irony of Odili’s account of the elevation of Max to Hero of the Revolution makes it clear that this is no simple Golden Age which is being ushered in. If any solution is proposed, it is that political and moral life will remain that of 'you chop, meself I chop, palaver finish’ until the kind of detachment and objectivity which guides this novel becomes a possibility for the nation at large. That a Nigerian artist has shown himself capable of this is the most tangible sign of hope.

NOTES 1. Gerald Moore, Seven African Writers, Three Crowns Books, Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 65. 2. Bernth Lindfors, ‘Ihe Palm Oil with which Achebe’s words are eaten’. African Literature Today, No. 1, 1968. 3. Gerald Moore, op. cit., p. 70. See 'Yeats and Achebe', A. G. Stock, Journal of Commonwealth Litera¬ ture, July 1968, No. 5. 5. The image recalls the final image of Hardy's Tess. 6. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, No. 6, January 1969, pp. 122-3. 7. My stress.

. r

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Things Fall Apart

Yeats and Achebe A G. Stock Perhaps human nature has always felt the need to interpret history, to find a guiding idea which makes an acceptable pattern of the past and extends it into the future. Not that any idea can change what has hap¬ pened, but the pattern affects the mind that contemplates it, the more deeply the more its owner cares about the destiny of mankind. He may be lifted from passion to compassion, from anxiety to serenity; he may, in a Yeatsian phrase, be enabled to hold in a single glance reality and justice. Christianity has one such idea of history, Marxism a different one, and both fortify their disciples by assuring them of ultimate victory. The Yeat¬ sian idea, on the other hand, takes the bitterness out of defeat, by repre¬ senting defeat as inevitable, victory as impermanent, and the contending forces as phases of a single, inexhaustible creative energy. For Yeats the whole of potential being is a vast chaos, a ‘fabulous formless darkness’. Every civilization is an ordered structure which mind builds up, the cumulative mind that is in tradition, by defining a hierarchy of values and imposing it on experience. The chaos is always beating on its walls, but is kept out so long as the hierarchy holds its own integrity— which shapes its artifacts, its speculative thought, its codes of conduct, and moulds its children by giving a language to their experience. But to define is to limit, and mind cannot be contained forever within any one enclosed order; mind belongs also to the outer darkness. In every hier¬ archy there are some impulses made shameful because others are exalt¬ ed, some types of personality frustrated which would have been fulfilled in a different mould, beliefs made nonsensical which could have made sense in another context of thought. In the end these negligible-seeming cracks make up the ‘opposing gyre’ which becomes its nemesis: they widen, coalesce, form a breach in the walls letting in the ‘mere anarchy’ of the kingdom of darkness. Thus, no civilization can either remain static or evolve forever towards a more inclusive perfection. It must both collapse from within and be overwhelmed from without, and what replaces it will appear most opposite to itself, being built from all that it overlooked or undervalued. This in brief is the view of history that is expounded in A Vision and is the frame of reference of such poems as The Second Coming. I have compressed it because my theme is less Yeats’s philosophy than Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart.1 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

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87

It is startling to find the Yeatsian pattern traced most closely where Yeats himself was least likely to look for it, in an imaginary but typical village of the lower Niger. Not that Things Fall Apart smells of discipleship; the two minds, their perspectives and their fields of vision, are too different for that. For Yeats the pattern is an instrument of prophecy. He looks at Europe with its two-thousand-year-old tradition of Christian civilization, which itself once made chaos of the values that preceded it and is now collapsing before the onset of something new, something all the more frightening because it is nameless, being all that our inherited civilization has incapacitated us from understanding. Achebe is not interested in pro¬ phecy but in analysing the way things happen. Nor is he primarily inter¬ ested in Europe; from the standpoint of Umuofia the western world is it¬ self the fabulous formless darkness. But his instrument of interpretation is the same; his Umuofia is a civilization in miniature, and the chaos finds its way in through slight flaws in its structure, murmurs that might have remained inaudible if they had not found an echo in the darkness. Achebe’s title insists on the analogy. Two things happen when it is taken seriously: the Yeatsian idea becomes more than a subjective fan¬ tasy, for it is seen to have validity for other minds in other contexts and the coherence of structure and depth of analysis in the novel become much more evident. The first part depicts ‘the ceremony of innocence’ in Umuofia—those customary ways of doing things which, because they have always been accepted, are able to embody man’s whole sense of his relationship to the present and the past, the natural and the supernatural worlds. Achebe gives some commentary, enough to make it intelligible to an out¬ sider, but not the commentary of a social anthropologist, who would probably focus on the peculiarities of Umuofian religious beliefs till he gave the impression that they were more obsessed with the supernatural and less aware of the actual than most Europeans. He writes like a son of the tribe for whom this way of life is the norm, though wider knowldege has made him aware that it is not everyone’s. The result is that in watch¬ ing the procedures of seed-time and harvest, courtship and marriage and death, the reader grows into the life; he comes to accept the characteristic way (for every civilization has its own) in which the natural world is pene¬ trated by the supernatural. Spirits mix with men at solemn festivals, they give judgement in disputes likely to endanger the unity of the tribe. The adult Umuofian knows, if he chooses to think about it, that their forms are those of respected living counsellors, but why should this make their authority any less? It would in fact be a kind of sacrilege to draw attention to it. The man, in the disguise that depersonalizes him, speaks with the supernatural wisdom of the ancestors, much as the Catholic priest saying mass ceases to be himself and becomes a channel of the divine. The village is held together by a network of relationships, with a com¬ mon recognition, much stronger than in modern European civilization,

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that the community is greater than the individual and is the source and means of his self-fulfilment. They do not cease on that account to be individuals; they break the law, as Okonkwo himself does, in bursts of momentary passion, but never in deliberate nonconformity. When they break it they accept the penalty. Okonkwo violates the peace of the vil¬ lage by pure accident when his gun kills Ezeudu’s son, but although everyone knows it was an accident he never dreams of pleading special hardship or special merit against the inflexibility of the law. Nevertheless the seeds of disintegration are there and become gradually visible. Within this general set-up, with its provision for every¬ thing and its fairly exacting discipline, the qualities commanding most respect are toughness, courage, self-reliance; without them, whatever else you may have you will not win a place of honour, for the accepted values are hard on weakness. Okonkwo’s father Unoka was a failure. He had many endearing gifts; he was a flute-player of genius and a gay com¬ panion filled with the joy of life. In the whole book there is nothing so nearly lyrical as Unoka’s response to the return of the sun: Unoka lowed it all, and he loved the first kites that returned with the dry season, and the children who sang songs of welcome to them. He would remember his own childhood, how he had wan¬ dered around looking for a kite sailing leisurely against the blue sky. As soon as he found one he would sing with his whole being, wel¬ coming it back from its long, long journey and asking if it had brought home any lengths of cloth. That was years ago, when he was young.2

A boy can be whatever he naturally is, but Unoka the grown man would not fit into the mould of Umuofia. His talents might make him a welcome guest at parties, but he was lazy and improvident and no fighter, and his son was ashamed of him. Unoka himself seems to have ac¬ quiesced in his status. He once says wistfully that the hardest of misfor¬ tunes is to fail alone when other men succeed—a remark in which there is pathos, but not rebellion. Okonkwo, however, reacts over-violently against his father’s incompetence, cultivating in himself all the qualities of success and suppressing everything that is like his father. He is hard to himself and merciless to his family, and has no forbearance for the soft strain in his eldest son Nwoye. It was not that the manners of Umuofia had no place for tenderness, but Okonkwo did not dare give way to it. There was no need for him to take part in the killing of Ikemefuna, who had been like one of his sons, except that he gloried in trampling on his private feelings in the name of public virtue. The thing is to be done, he argues, and why should I be exempt more than another? Some of his friends, who thought it would have been graceful in the circumstances for him to stay away, were per¬ turbed by this ruthless rectitude, but Okonkwo lost no public esteem. Only his son Nwoye could not forgive the deed: he had loved Ikemefuna,

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and was the kind of youth to whom personal feeling meant more than public spirit, which was one reason that he was a nonentity in Umuofia. Such an outrage must have clarified the issue, making him see where he stood in relation to the ideals of his society, and prepared him for articu¬ late revolt when the time came. When Okonkwo was exiled he took refuge, as was right and proper, with his mother’s kinsfolk. It might have been a healing experience, as his uncle Uchendu gently showed him, if he had understood how it symbol¬ ized man’s need of the tender and consoling qualities which are the woman’s side of his nature; but he submitted without humility, as an act of will. Consequently he was not chastened or subdued by exile, it was nothing but seven years out of his life, at the end of which, with the same unfaltering will, he returned to build his reputation in Umuofia over again. In the meantime the Christian missionaries had arrived in the region. They made no sense to Okonkwo, but for Nwoye their teaching gave ar¬ ticulate expression to much that he had felt and never dared to think aloud; his simmering resentment of his father’s harsh code, his need to be recognized and valued as a person. Nwoye was an easy convert, and Okonkwo, true to his character, disowned him.

Nwoye was not the only one. It is always the failures and misfits who are the first converts, and others like him found in Christianity the strength that springs from clear statement of their rejected values. So for the first time Umuofia, whose unity was its life, was divided against itself. How could it take common action against its own sons when a man like Okonkwo, merely for accidental breach of the peace, had gone without demur to seven years’ exile? Even then the centre might have held if all the Christians had been as tolerant and wise as Mr Brown, the first missionary to come, and none of the others as obstinate as Okonkwo. Lacking the democratic machinery of western device, Umuofia was nevertheless perfectly sensitive to the popular will and capable of accommodating minorities, and because a section of the people clearly desired the new religion it looked for a while as if it might be fitted in. But misfits, although they may be honest are seldom wise, and Mr Smith who succeeded Mr Brown was an arrogant militant, while on the other side diehards like Okonkwo were spoiling for a fight. When it came Okonkwo was happy, thinking that the destruction of the church was a victory. It appeared so in the battle of gods, but behind the church was a force they only dimly knew about—the white government, incomprehensible, uncomprehending, invincible. To a European mind the British raj, however monstrous, is not ‘mere anarchy’, but Achebe’s angle of vision makes it just that, as meaningless as it is invincible. No orgies of bloodshed are needed to make the point

90

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clear; it is all in the concentrated irony of the scene where the Commis¬ sioner, having arrested the six leaders by barefaced treachery without even listening to what they have to say, proceeds to harangue them: We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy. If any man ill-treats you we shall come to your rescue. . .

3

They are up against a monster so powerful and so blind that it cannot see what it treads on: too powerful and too blind to be dealt with as men deal with men, and they are not its match in brute force. When Okonkwo killed the messenger he knew he was right. He acted without hesitation like the embodiment of all the forefathers; but not a hand was raised in his support. He had too much courage to know or care to know what had dawned on all the others: that they confronted something too big for them and could only submit. Okonkwo, seeing that the world he belonged to was dead, went away and hanged himself. Up to this point the story has been told so unemotionally that its im¬ pact on first reading is uncertain. One sees exactly how and why it has happened, but what it is that has happened has not fully come home. But when in a flash of insight Obierika bursts out: ‘That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself and now he will be buried like a dog’, one suddenly realizes it. Okonkwo’s end was not only that of an obstinate hero running his head against a machine too big for him, it was the end of a way of life. The Commissioner, evidently one of the enlightened kind, knows nothing about it: The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a chapter, but a reasonable paragraph at any rate.4

The other characters in the book are shadowy, but Okonkwo comes vividly to life in all his failings and excesses. He is also the epitome of a process: in himself he is at once the strength of Umuofia and the reason for its downfall, that imbalance in one particular direction which leaves something frustrated. ‘His whole life was dominated by fear—the fear of failure and weakness.’ Achebe states this as a recognizable fact, not thinking it necessary to establish the point like a psychological novelist with interior monologues and elaborately analysed incidents of child¬ hood. The code of Umuofia might tolerate gentleness but it expected strength, and because of his father’s inadequacy Okonkwo was afraid to live by his merely natural strength; he must be strong to the repression of all patience with weakness. So it came about that his own son was driven from mere mediocrity to conscious alienation, and found in the white man’s religion a different code which turned his weakness into a kind of strength. But in the whole confused impact of the whites on Umuofia one

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element could not be taken apart from another. They have their perplexingly subversive religion, they have their total ignorance of the very meaning of tradition and reverence, they have physical force on a scale that makes them inaccessible to reason; they are in fact mere anarchy let loose on the Umuofian world. Like Yeats, but in a very different framework of feeling, T. S. Eliot was aware How twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

His Magi having seen the cradle return home changed, half-citizens of a country not yet born, alienated from their own people and no longer at ease. Achebe took his next title from The Journey of the Magi, and trans¬ lated it no less appositely into the terms of modern African society. He has assimilated the vision of history of the two most detached of the poets, accurately but not in the least subserviently. He has taken the ab¬ stract idea of historical process out of the two thousand years of history and replanted it on African soil with no damage to its historical validity. He has stripped away the metaphysics, and Eliot’s belief in the Christian revelation transcending all others for all time has vanished as completely as Yeat’s doctrine of eternal recurrence and his nostalgia for the lost Hellenic world. What remains is the analysis of fact. This is how a histori¬ cal process works in the lives of men.’ Unless an abstract formula can be thus retranslated convincingly into concrete happenings, it has no place among what Aristotle called the laws of probability and necessity.

NOTES 1

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Wm. Heinemann, 1958.

2

ibid., p. 3.

3

ibid., p. 173.

4

ibid., p. 185.

Narrative Techniques in "Things Fall Apart" Solomon

O. Iyasere

No West African fiction in English has received as much critical attention as Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s first and most impressive novel. In defending its importance, most critics link its value solely to its theme, which they take to be the dis¬ integration of an almost Edenic traditional society as a result of its contact and conflict with Western practices and beliefs. These enthusiastic critics, such as Gleason and Killam, are primarily in¬ terested in the socio-cultural features of the work, and stress the historical picture of a traditional Ibo village community with¬ out observing how this picture is delimited, how this material serves the end of art. This approach, which cannot withstand critical scrutiny, does great violence to the text and denies it the artistic vitality they so vigorously claim for it. Overemphasizing the ways in which Okonkwo represents certain values fundamental to the Umuofia society, Killam turns Okonkwo into an embodiment of the values of this society, averring, "Okonkwo was one of the greatest men of his time, the embodiment of Ibo values, the man who better than most sym¬ bolizes his race” (The Novels of Chinua Achebe, 17). Eustace Palmer, a moralistic critic, presents a similar interpretation but extends Okonkwo’s role from champion to victim: Okonkwo is what his society has made him, for his most con¬ spicuous qualities are a response to the demands of his society. If he is plagued by fear of failure and of weakness it is because his society put such a premium on success. . . . Okonkwo is a personification of his society’s values, and he is determined to suc¬ ceed in this rat-race. (An Introduction to the African Novel, 53)

CHINUA ACHEBE

93

The inaccuracies of this view derive from disregarding the particularities of the rhetoric of Achebe’s controlled presentation. Killam and Palmer take as authoritative Okonkwo’s vision of himself as a great leader and savior of Umuofia and so fail to realize that this vision is based on a limited perception of the values of that society. Nowhere in the novel is Okonkwo pre¬ sented as either the embodiment or the victim of Umuofia’s traditional laws and customs. To urge that he is either, as do Killam and Palmer, is to reduce the work to a sentimental melo¬ drama, rob Okonkwo of his tragic stature, and deny the reader’s sympathy for him. More responsive to the novel’s simultaneous sympathy for and critical judgment of Okonkwo, David Carroll observes: As Okonkwo’s life moves quickly to its tragic end, one is re¬ minded forcibly of another impressive but wrongheaded hero, Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge. They share in obsessive need for success and status, they subordinate all their private re¬ lations to this end, and both have an inability to understand the tolerant, skeptical societies in which their novel single-minded¬ ness succeeds. . . . Viewed in the perspective of the Wessex, rustic way of life, Henchard is crass, brutal, and dangerous; but when this way of life as a whole is threatened with imminent de¬ struction, then his fierce resistance takes on a certain grandeur. The reader’s sympathy describes a similar trajectory as it follows Okonkwo’s career. By the values of Umuofia his inadequacies are very apparent; but when the alien religion begins to question and undermine these values, Okonkwo, untroubled by the heartsearching of the community, springs to its defense and acts.

(Chinua Achebe, 62-63) Carroll’s comment is to the point in directing our attention to the crucial limitations Okonkwo places on his relationship to and acceptance of Umuofia’s standards. But simply focusing at¬ tention on this matter is not sufficient; we must see how Achebe is able to achieve this control of sympathy for Okonkwo.

Things Fall Apart seems a simple novel, but it is deceptively so. On closer inspection, we see that it is provocatively complex, interweaving significant themes: love, compassion, colonialism, achievement, honor, and individualism. In treating these themes, Achebe employs a variety of devices, such as proverbs, folktales,

94

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

rituals, and the juxtaposition of characters and episodes to pro¬ vide a double view of the Ibo society of Umuofia and the central character, Okonkwo. The traditional Ibo society that emerges is a complex one: ritualistic and rigid yet in many ways surprisingly flexible. In this society, a child is valued more than any material acquisition, yet the innocent, loving child, Ikemefuna, is denied love, denied life, by the rigid tribal laws and customs. Outwardly, Umuofia is a world of serenity, harmony, and communal activities but inwardly it is torn by the individual’s personal doubts and fears. It is also a society in which "age was respected . . . but achievement was revered.” It is this sustained view of the duality of the traditional Ibo society that the novel consistently presents in order to create and intensify the sense of tragedy and make the reader understand the dilemma that shapes and destroys the life of Okonkwo. No episode reveals more dramatically the concomitant rigidity and flexibility of the society than the trial scene in which the do¬ mestic conflict between Uzowulu and his wife Mgbafo is settled. Uzowulu has beaten his wife so often and so severely that at last she has fled to her family for protection from him. While such conflicts are usually settled on a personal level, Uzowulu is the kind of man who will listen only to the judgement of the great egwugwu, the masked ancestor spirits of the clan. This ceremony proceeds with marked ritual (TEA, 85). The ritualistic procedure of this event reflects the seriousness and formality with which the people of Umuofia deal with in¬ ternal problems, even trivial ones, that undermine or threaten the peaceful coexistence of the clans. The stereotyped incantatory exchange of greeting, the ceremonious way in which the spirits appear, the ritual greeting, "Uzowulu’s body, I salute you,” and Uzowulu’s

response,

"Our

father, my

hand

has touched

the

ground,” even the gestures of these masked spirits, define the formality of the society and dramatize the fact that the peace of the tribe as a whole takes precedence over personal consid¬ erations. The decrees of the gods are always carried out with dispatch, even if it means a ruthless violation of human im¬ pulses, as in the murder of Ikemefuna or the throwing away of twins. But this formality does not preclude dialogue, probing,

CHINUA ACHEBE

95

and debate, aptly demonstrated in that the parties involved in the conflict are allowed to present their opposing, even hostile views. The way this domestic issue is resolved reveals the un¬ qualified emphasis the people of Umuofia place on harmony and peaceful coexistence (TFA, 89). The formality of this event, the firmness with which the so¬ ciety controls impending disorder, becomes even more apparent when contrasted with the spontaneous communal feasting that precedes it — the coming of the locust. This sudden occurrence aptly demonstrates the joy and vitality of the society when it is is not beleaguered by internal disharmony (TFA, 54-55). The overabundance of locusts provides an equal measure of joy for Umuofia. While the people restrain themselves enough to heed the elders’ instructions on how to catch the insects this control of happiness is momentary, and no one spares either time or effort in responding to this unexpected feast. For the moment, Umuofia is at peace; Okonkwo and his sons are united in sharing the joy which envelops the community. Against the joyfully harmonic rhythm of this event, the withdrawn, controlled formalism of the judgement of the egwugwu stands in sharp re¬ lief. By juxtaposing these events, Achebe orchestrates the modu¬ lating rhythms of Umuofia, the alternating patterns of spontane¬ ous joy and solemn justice. This modulation of rhythms devel¬ oped out of the juxtaposition contrasting events open as well within the framework of the same episode. The suddenness with which the locusts descend on the people, bringing joy, is matched by the suddenness with which that joy is taken away. The very moment that Okonkwo and his sons sit feasting, Ezeudu enters to tell Okonkwo of the decree of the Oracle of the Hills and Caves (TFA, 55-56). Just as Okonkwo’s response to the celebration of feasting is controlled by

the almost

simultaneous announcement of the

doom of the innocent child, Ikemefuna, so the narrator modu¬ lates the reader’s response to the contrasting values and customs of Umuofia. On the very day Ikemefuna sits happily with his "father,” Ezeudu somberly states, "Yes, Umuofia has decided to kill him.” Similarly, in order to articulate and call attention to the

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

96

rigidity of the Ibo code of values in requiring the exile of Okonkwo for the inadvertent killing of Ezeudu’s son, Achebe skill¬ fully orchestrates the circumstances of the boy’s death. In pre¬ senting this scene, Achebe emphasizes the atmosphere, the action, and

the

Such

situation

deliberate

without

attention

to

individualizing the

Okonkwo’s

circumstances

that

role.

day

in¬

tensifies the sense of accidental occurrence. The death of Ezeudu s son comes as a result of the situation, of the circumstances, not as any deliberate act on Okonkwo’s part. With this sense of chance established, the scene makes more apparent the rigidity of the tribal laws in dealing with this accidental event: The only course open for Okonkwo was to flee from the clan. It was a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman, and a man who committed it must flee from the land. The crime was of two kinds, male and female. Okonkwo had committed the fe¬ male because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after seven years. (TFA, 117)

In probing and evaluating this code whose rigidity negates circumstantial and human considerations, the thoughtful Obierika questions, "Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offense he had committed inadvertently?” Obierika’s thoughts reflect the submerged fears of the village elders, particularly Uchendu, Okonkwo’s uncle, and Ezeudu, as well as the doubts and questions of Okonkwo’s wives and even his son Nwoye. Indeed, he gives voice to the very question the reader himself asks. The inflexibility of this tribal code and its application is revealed not only in the formal decrees of the Oracles and the judgments of the egwugwu but also in the small details of every day life. The simple act of a cow getting loose in the fields is met with a harsh penalty (TFA, 108-109). Since the preservation of crops is essential in an agricultural society, the imposition of a severe fine on those whose animals destroy the produce is understandable. But the crucial point the narrator stresses here is that the laws are applied with absolute rigidity, with no regard for mitigating circumstances. Even though the responsible party in this instance was only a small child being watched by his father, who does not usually watch the children, while the mother

CHINUA ACHEBE

91

was busy helping another prepare a feast to ensure the proper observance of the marriage ceremonies, the same penalty is exacted. Just as Okonkwo is harshly punished for an inadvertent act which occurred while he was observing the proper funeral rites of the clan, so is Ezelagbo’s husband punished for an of¬ fense his small child committed both unintentionally and un¬ knowingly. In these subtle ways, Achebe succeeds in presenting the inflexibility of the code of values of Umuofia as it responds to any threat, no matter how small, to the overall stability of the clan. Yet to insist that this code is entirely inflexible is to present only one-half of the picture. The people of Umuofia can adapt their code to accommodate the less successful, even effeminate men, like Okonkwo’s father, Unoka, despite the fact that accord¬ ing to their standards of excellence, solid personal achievement and manly stature are given unqualified emphasis. This adapt¬ ability to changing or different situations is further demon¬ strated in Ogbeufi Ezeudu’s comment on the punishment meted out to Okonkwo for his violation of the sacred Week of Peace. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. But after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.” "Somebody told me yesterday,” said one of the younger men, "that in some clans it is an abomination for a man to die during the Week of Peace." "It is indeed true,” said Ogbuefi Ezeudu. "They have that cus¬ tom in Obadoani. If a man dies at this time he is not buried but cast into the Evil Forest. It is a bad custom which these people observe because they lack understanding. They throw away large numbers of men and women without burial. And what is the re¬ sult? Their clan is full of evil spirits of these unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living.” (TPA, 33)

It seems clear from this instance that in some ways the social code of Umuofia is responsive to change; if the people find elements of the code contradictory, they will alter them, pro¬ vided such modification does not conflict with the will of the gods. This receptivity to change is coupled with a willingness

98

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

to accept and accommodate even those who do not perfectly conform to their ways, in accordance with the proverbial wisdom, "Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break”

(TEA, 21-22). Though Unoka

was the subject of jest, he was not cast out, and even the albinos, whom the Ibos of Umuofia consider aliens, were accepted mem¬ bers of the clan, for, as Uchendu indicates to Obierika, " 'There is no story that is not true,’ said Uchendu. 'The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?’ ” (TFA,

130).

Throughout the novel, this complex, dualistic nature of the cus¬ toms and traditions of the Ibo society of Umuofia is made clear. This duality is well presented through Achebe’s technique of skillfully juxtaposing contrasting events, events which define and articulate the code of values of the tradition oriented people. On the one hand, we see the villagers actively engaged in a spon¬ taneous communal activity, such as enjoying a marriage feast, or in gathering and sharing the locusts, while, on the other hand, we see the rigid application of tribal laws and decrees of the gods which often deny and violate human responses. These elements are set in opposition to one another to give a complete, if self-contradictory, view of the society. To accept and emphasize only one aspect is to oversimplify and defend, as does Okonkwo, a limited perception. It is against this balanced view of the proud traditional Ibo society that the novel invites us to evaluate the actions and tragic life of the central character, Okonkwo. Only through such examination do the problems of Okonkwo’s relationship to the culture of his people become clear. As a careful reading of

Things Fall Apart reveals, one of

Achebe’s great achievements is his ability to keep alive our sympathy for Okonkwo despite our moral revulsion from some of his violent, inhuman acts. With Obierika, we condemn him for participating in the killing of the innocent boy, Ikemefuna. We despise him for denying his son, Nwoye, love, understand¬ ing, and compassion. And we join the village elders in disap-

CHINUA ACHEBE

proving

Okonkwo’s

unsuccessful,

uncompromisingly

effeminate men such

as

rigid his

attitude

99

toward

father, Unoka, or

Usugo. Yet we share with the narrator a sustained sympathy for him. We do not simply identify with him, nor defend his actions, nor admire him as an heroic individual. We do give him our innermost sympathies because we know from his re¬ actions to his own violence that deep within him he is not a cruel man. It is this contrasting, dualistic view of Okonkwo that the narrator consistently presents. On the one hand, we see Okonkwo participating in the brutal killing of Ikemefuna, his "son,” but on the other, we see him brooding over this violent deed for three full days. In another instance, we see him dis¬ passionately

castigating his

fragile, loving daughter, Ezinma,

and deeply regretting that she is not a boy, while on another oc¬ casion we see him struggling all night to save her from

iba or

returning again and again to the cave to protect her from harm at the hands of Chielo, priestess of

Agbala.

Throughout the novel, Okonkwo is presented as a man whose life is ruled by one overriding passion: to become successful, powerful, rich, found a dynasty, and become one of the lords of the clan of Umuofia. And Okonkwo’s unflagging commitment is not without cause, for ... his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion—to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idle¬ ness. (TFA, 16-17)

Emphasis here is placed on Okonkwo’s divided self, especially on his inner struggle to control and suppress his fears of failure which arise in reaction to his father’s disastrous life and shame¬ ful death. In some respects, the reader’s initial reaction is to identify with Okonkwo, to join with him in severe condemna¬ tion of his father, for "Unoka the grown up was a failure. He

100

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

was poor and his wife and children had barely enough to eat. People laughed at him because he was a loafer, and they swore never to lend him any more money because he never paid back” (TFA, 9). In modulating this initial response, the narrator also makes it quite clear that among these same people, "a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father,” and that while achievement was revered, age was respected. In violently repudiating all that his father represented, Okonkwo repudiates not only his undignified irresponsibility, but also those positive qualities of love and compassion and sensitivity

(TFA, 8, 10). Many of the qualities which to Okon¬

kwo were marks of femininity and weakness are the same qualities which were respected by the society Okonkwo wished to champion. In a larger sense, Okonkwo’s rigid repudiation of his father’s "unmanliness” violates a necessary aspect of the so¬ ciety’s code of values. We come to see that in suppressing his fears and those attributes which he considers a sign of weakness, Okonkwo denies as well those human responses of love and understanding which Umuofia recognizes as requisite for great¬ ness. This obsession with proving and preserving his manliness dominates Okonkwo’s entire life, both public and private: "He ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children”

(TFA, 16). Even in the informal, relaxed

story-telling sessions, Okonkwo sees a threat to himself and his "dynasty,” for these stories will make women of his sons, make them like their grandfather rather than like their father. So, at those times, "Okonkwo encouraged the boys to sit with him in his obi, and he told them stories of the land — masculine stories of violence and bloodshed” (TFA, 32). No episode in the novel dramatizes Okonkwo’s desire to assert his manliness more clearly than the killing of Ikemefuna whom Okonkwo loves as his own. It is the closeness of this father-son relationship, reiterated in the feasting on the locusts, that Ezeudu interrupts to tell Okonkwo that Ikemefuna must die. But Ezeudu provides more

CHINUA ACHEBE

101

than this stark message; as a respected elder of the clan he also advises Okonkwo on his conduct in heeding the decree, "'Yes, Umuofia has decided to kill him. The Oracle of the Hills and Caves has pronounced it. They will take him outside Umuofia as is the custom, and kill him there. But I want you to have nothing to do with it. He calls you his father.’ ” Though his feeling for the boy comes through in his effort to cloak the grim reality from the youth’s eyes—"later in the day he called Ikemefuna and told him that he was to be taken home the next day" (TFA,

56) — Okonkwo nevertheless disregards Ezeudu’s

advice and accompanies the men in their brutal task—"Okonkwo got ready quickly and the party set out with Ikemefuna carrying the pot of wine”

(TFA, 56-57). This same mixture of feelings

controls Okonkwo’s actions on that mission. He walks behind the others and gradually draws to the rear as the moment of execution

arrives;

indeed,

he

looks

away when one

of the

men raises his machete to strike the boy. But he is forced by his own dogged insistence on masculinity to deal the fatal blow. The child runs to Okonkwo for protection but finds instead the cold, hard steel of Okonkwo’s machete: "As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, 'My father, they have killed me!’ as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down” narrator weak.”

affirms, So

because

extreme

is

his

"he

(TFA, 59). He does so, as the was

desire

afraid

of

being

thought

that he might not appear

weak, that he might not be like his father, that Okonkwo blinds himself to the wisdom of the advice of the elder Ezeudu, the wisdom Obierika reasserts, " 'If I were you I would have stayed at home ... if the Oracle said that my son should be killed I would neither dispute it nor be the one to do it’ ”

(TFA, 64-65).

So determined is his effort to be known for achievement, which his society reveres, that Okonkwo gives no heed to the wisdom of age, which his society respects. The way which both Ezeudu and Obierika espouse is the way of compromise, of blending the masculine and feminine, but this is a compromise of which Okonkwo is incapable.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

102

For the most part, Okonkwo resorts to violence in order to maintain control of a situation and assert his manliness. Even

chi, or personal god, Okonkwo exerts force to mold his chi to his will. But in wrestling with his chi, in his relationship to his

in coercing it into submission to his will, Okonkwo violates the conventional, harmonious relationship one has with his personal god: "The Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes,

chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly, so his chi agreed. And not only his chi, his clan, too” (TFA, 29). On all his

levels, then, Okonkwo must dominate and control events; by sheer force and, if necessary, brutality, Okonkwo bends to his will his

chi, his family, and his clan. If "things fall apart,” it is

because

"the center

cannot hold”—because Okonkwo cannot

maintain the precarious tension which forcefully holds in place

chi, family, and clan. Yet Okonkwo is not wholly a brute force. Even at the very moment of his violence against Ikemefuna we glimpse the hu¬ manity locked inside: "As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away.” Okonkwo looks away not because he is a coward, nor because, like his father, he could not stand the sight of blood; after all, "in Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head,”

(TFA, 14), his fifth. Okonkwo looks away because this

brutal act is too much even for his eyes and his "buried hu¬ manity” struggles to express itself. The narrator includes these subtle details which emphasize the submerged human responses of Okonkwo to explore Okonkwo’s tragic

dilemma

and

modulate

our

responses

to

him.

Re¬

emphasizing these positive human aspects which Okonkwo pos¬ sesses but which he struggles to stifle lest he appear weak, the narrator sympathetically relates Okonkwo’s reaction to his own violence, without approving the violent act itself: Okonkwo did not taste any food for two days after the death of Ikemefuna. He drank palm-wine from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it is caught by the tail and dashed against the floor. He did not sleep at night. He tried not to think about Ikeme-

CHINUA ACHEBE

103

funa, but the more he tried the more he thought about him. Once he got up from his bed and walked about his compound. But he was so weak that his legs could scarcely carry him. He felt like a drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito. Now and then a cold shiver descended on his head and spread down his body.

In private, unguarded moments like this, Okonkwo cannot but allow his "buried humanity” to express itself. But he does not allow his reaction to Ikemefuna’s death to lead to selfpity and, in so doing, does not allow our sympathy for him to degenerate into pity. In his rigid view, any brooding, introspec¬ tion, or questioning is a sign of weakness: "Okonkwo was not a man of thought but of action” (TFA,

66). For this reason, on

the morning of the third day of brooding over Ikemefuna, Okon¬ kwo calls for food and answers his brooding with action. His attitude these three days brings him to question himself, but these questions do not investigate motive nor justify his deed; instead, they chastise him for his weakness in responding so to the death of his "son.” "He sprang to his feet, hung his goatskin bag on his shoulder and went to visit his friend, Obierika”

(TFA,

63). It is now daytime and no one must see Okonkwo submit to the human feeling of grief. Publicly, especially among the members of his own clan, Okonkwo struggles to maintain the image of an unusually calm and stalwart individual, a man worthy to be a lord of the clan. It is only in private—and often in the dark—that Okonkwo spontaneously reveals the love and warmth he feels for his family. In the dark, he rushes to protect his daughter from harm by Chielo; without thought, he rushes to save her from

iba. Ironically,

it is with the same quickness that Okonkwo prepared for the killing of Ikemefuna that he attends to the dying Ezinma

(TFA,

72-73). For Okonkwo, the conflict between private self and public man is the conflict between the feminine and masculine prin¬ ciples. His inability to comprehend the fact that those feminine attributes he vigorously suppresses in himself are necessary for greatness is revealed in his naive comments on the deaths of Ogbuefi Ndulue and his eldest wife, Ozoemena

(TFA, 63-66).

104

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

The sudden, willed death of Ozoemena is strange, as Ofoedu, Obierika, and Okonkwo agree. Yet, as is characteristic of Okonkwo, he can perceive and respond only to the obvious and welldefined. What Okonkwo cannot understand in this episode, de¬ spite Obierika’s explanation, is the full significance of Ozoemena’s death, especially as it is a willed response to her hus¬ band’s death. The union in life and in death of Ndulue and Ozoemena is a symbolic dramatization of the union of the mascu¬ line and feminine attributes essential in a great man. Ndulue was a great warrior and a great man, the respected elder of his village, because he was able to find that balance of strength and sensitivity, of masculine and feminine principles. And it is this union men as Ndulue and Ezeudu are able to achieve and which Umuofia respects and seeks in its leaders. For Okonkwo, one is either a man or a woman; there can be no compromise, no com¬ posite. He is baffled by Ndulue’s relationship to Ozoemena, for to him a strong man would in no way depend on a woman. This one-sided concept of what it takes to be a man determines Okonkwo’s actions and attitudes, and can be seen clearly in his thoughts about his children. To him, Ezinma should have been a boy and Nwoye has "too much of his mother in him”

(TFA, 64).

Okonkwo has held this monochromatic view of what people should be, with men and women performing sexually-defined tasks and exhibiting equally well-defined characteristics, since his youth. Traumatized by his father’s failure as owing to his gentleness and idleness, Okonkwo determines to be all that his father was not — firm and active. But in living up to this de¬ sign, Okonkwo becomes inflexible and his action allows no room for reflection. Throughout his life he clings to this pattern stead¬ fastly and without question. Such a rigid commitment to a code of behavior and design for action thwarts Okonkwo’s personal development. He does not grow and change with age and ex¬ perience; as a man he is dedicated to the same stereotypes he formed in his youth. Even after his code fails him and necessi¬ tates his exile, Okonkwo cannot see the limitations of that code in its denial of the "feminine” principles. While in exile in his mother’s land, Mbanta, Okonkwo is lectured on the importance of these feminine principles by the elder Uchendu, but still

CHINUA ACHEBE

105

Okonkwo cannot see: "Can you tell me, Okonkwo, why it is that one of the com¬ monest names we give our children is Nneka, or 'Mother is Su¬ preme’? We all know that a man is the head of the family and his wives do his bidding. A child belongs to its father and his family and not to its mother and her family. A man belongs to his fatherland and not to his motherland. And yet we say Nneka —'Mother is Supreme.’ Why is that?” There was silence. Uchendu.

"I want Okonkwo to answer me,” said

"I do not know the answer,” Okonkwo replied.

Through probing questions, Uchendu deliberately attempts to lead Okonkwo to an understanding of the importance of the feminine qualities which Okonkwo seeks to deny: he reminds Okonkwo that the consequence of this denial which has already resulted in Okonkwo’s alienation from his clan, his family, and himself, is doom. But Okonkwo is not the type of man who does things half way, "not even for fear of a goddess.” He is too "manly,” too single-minded to deal with subtleties which do not fit easily into his well-defined code of action. For this reason, he cannot respond to Uchendu’s questions, for they directly threaten his rigid philosophy of life. Uchendu, like Ndulue and Ezeudu, represents the traditional way of life which allows for flexibility and compromise within its exacting system. And in rejecting compromise and flexibility, Okonkwo rejects the values of the society he determines to cham¬ pion. In contrasting these two antithetical modes of perception and patterns of action, the narrator illustrates the extent to which Okonkwo has alienated himself from his society. The contrasting modes of action determine the different reactions of Uchendu and Okonkwo to Obierika’s tales of the killing of the white man on the iron horse, in Abame, which in turn led to the death of a large number of villagers. Hearing this tale of disaster and death, Uchendu ground his teeth together audibly and then burst out, "Never kill a man who says nothing. Those men of Abame were fools. What did they know about the man?” (TFA,

129).

As is characteristic of a wise and prudent man, Uchendu blames

106

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

the people of Abame for not being cautious and for fighting a "war of blame” which the society condemns. But Okonkwo sees the whole situation as supporting his method of turning to vio¬ lence for a solution to all problems. Instead of questioning and seeking a compromise between conflicting views, Okonkwo de¬ mands a violent action, " 'They were fools,’ said Okonkwo after a pause. 'They had been warned that danger was ahead. They should have armed themselves with their guns and their machetes even when they went to market’” (TFA,

130).

Throughout his life then, Okonkwo is bound to violence. He rigidly commits himself to a code of values which negates human response and severs him from his traditional roots. Even at crucial moments when all indications point to the limitation and inadequacy of his rigid system, Okonkwo still holds firmly to these values, even to his death. The failure of his code is clear in his attitude toward Nwoye and in his son’s subsequent re¬ jection of him. The feelings of tenderness and affection Okonkwo has so long suppressed erupt as violence. When he is confronted by the limitation of his values in responding to human needs, especially manifest in Nwoye’s turning to Christianity for an answer to these needs, Okonkwo’s recourse to violence is even more extreme:

It was late afternoon before Nwoye returned. He went into the obi and saluted his father, but he did not answer. Nwoye turned round to walk into the inner compound when his father, suddenly overcome with fury, sprang to his feet and gripped him by the neck. Where have you been?” he stammered. Nwoye struggled to free himself from the choking grip. "Answer me,” roared Okonkwo, "before I kill you!” He seized a heavy stick that lay on the dwarf wall and hit him two or three savage blows. Answer me!” he roared again. Nwoye stood looking at him and did not say a word. The women were screaming outside, afraid to go in. Leave that boy at once!” said a voice in the outer compound. It was Okonkwo’s uncle, Uchendu. "Are you mad?” Okonkwo did not answer. But he left hold of Nwoye, who walked away and never returned. (TFA, 141)

CHINUA ACHEBE

107

The bondage in which Okonkwo has kept his "feminine” qualities is the bondage in which he has tried to keep Nwoye. Coercing, cajoling, threatening, and even beating his son into conforming to his ways, Okonkwo alienates the "dynasty” his actions sought to insure. For Nwoye will not be kept enslaved to Okonkwo’s ways; he seeks release from bondage in the new religion of the white man. Okonkwo’s tragedy is not merely that he fails to understand the needs of his son Nwoye but that he also cannot comprehend certain of the society’s values. Unable to change himself, he will not accept change in others, in the world around him, in the people of Umuofia. When he returns from exile, Okonkwo faces an altered society, a society that in its flexibility has allowed a place for the white Christian missionaries. Like the recalcitrant Rev. Smith, Okonkwo views the situation in terms of absolute, irreconcilable antipodes. When the entire clan gathers to decide how to deal with the inroads established by the missionaries, Okonkwo’s response is predictable. He will brook no compromise and demands a violent repulsion of the

new religion. But this recourse to

violence is not the view of this society any more now than it was in the past. Indeed, Okonkwo’s views set him apart from his clan at this moment as earlier in his exile: but it is too late for Okonkwo to change now. If the society will not violently repel this threat, Okonkwo will. Compelled by his own uncompromising attitudes as they confront and clash with the equally adamant positions of Rev. Smith, Okonkwo turns to the only means he knows—violence—to solve the problem: In a flash Okonkwo drew his machete. The messenger crouched to avoid the blow. It was useless. Okonkwo’s machete descended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body. The waiting backcloth jumped into tumultuous life and the meeting was stopped. Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult. He heard voices asking, "Why did he do it? He wiped his machete on the sand and went away. {TEA,

187-188)

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When the society does not respond as he does, Okonkwo comes to the sudden, belated realization that he is all alone, set apart from his clan by the values he holds. This most recent act of vio¬ lence severs finally the precarious link between Okonkwo and his people. And, as before with the killing of Ikemefuna and the beating of Nwoye, Okonkwo’s brutal force creates for him an even greater dilemma than the one he resorted to violence to solve. If at the edge of Umuofia before this last violent act, Okonkwo is now pushed outside his society. He cannot return. He cannot begin again. Having no place in this new Umuofia, driven out by his own inability to bend and change, Okonkwo ends his life as he lived it—by violence. This act of violence against himself ironically fulfills Obierika’s "request” of several years ago: "I do not know how to thank you.” "I can tell you,” said Obierika. "Kill one of your sons for me.” "That will not be enough,” said Okonkwo. "Then kill yourself,” said Obierika. "Forgive me,” said Okonkwo, smiling. ”1 shall not talk about thanking you any more.” (TFA, 131-132)

Okonkwo’s suicide is, as Obierika explains

(TFA, 190-191),

an offense against the earth, an abomination. Okonkwo’s clans¬ men cannot touch him, cannot bury him, cannot consider him one of their own. In death, as in life, Okonkwo’s commitment to achievement through violence ostracizes him from the very society he sought so desperately to champion and honor. On the other hand, we do not justify Okonkwo’s killing of the messenger in an effort to save the doomed way of life of his beleaguered clan, a way of life whose subtle codes Okonkwo does not understand. Nor do we approve his unflagging commit¬ ment to his own code which does not provide for life. Yet we sympathize with him, even in his death, though perhaps not so emotionally as Obierika who, at this moment, loses all sense of

objectivity.

Temporarily

blind

to

Okonkwo’s

limitations,

Obierika seems to make Okonkwo the innocent victim of the brutal laws of the white missionaries. Prior to this dramatic con¬ frontation with the white missionaries, the narrator has made

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it inevitable that Okonkwo’s violent actions will lead him to his doom. At the same time, this knowledge does not deny him our

innermost

sympathies,

especially

when

we

evaluate

his

actions as juxtaposed against the actions of the "purist,” Rev. Smith, who "saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal combat with the sons of darkness. He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed in slaying the prophet of Baal” (TFA,

169). Rev. Smith’s approach was, in all respects, antithetical to that of his predecessor, Rev. Brown, and Achebe shows Rev. Smith to be a far more vicious, brutal, and violent man than Okonkwo.

There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. Mr. Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad. The over-zealous converts who had smarted under Mr. Brown’s restraining hand now flourished in full favor.

Following Rev. Smith’s cue, an over-zealous convert, Enoch, like¬ wise resorts to extreme actions and goes so far as to unmask

egwugwu, throwing Umuofia into confusion (TFA, 170). In retaliation, the egwugwu swarm into the church and level it: an

"Mr. Smith stood his ground. But he could not save his church. When the

egwugwu went away the red-earth church which

Mr. Brown had built was a pile of ashes. And for the moment the spirit of the clan was satisfied”

(TFA, 173). Replacing Rev.

Brown’s law of peace and love with his own code of aggression and hatred, Rev. Smith undoes the good Rev. Brown had ac¬ complished. Rather than convert the heathen ways to Christian purpose, Rev. Smith determines to destroy the traditional prac¬ tices. He will force the villagers to accept his ways and humiliate or eliminate those who don’t. Working through the District Commissioner, the new law of the land, Rev. Smith has the

egwugwu, including Okonkwo,

disgraced and humiliated, their heads shaved in testimony to their dishonor. Rev. Smith’s malice goes far beyond Okonkwo’s

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rigidity in ruthlessly dishonoring the customs of the Umuofia people and instigating an unprovoked attack on their religion. We are invited to condemn Rev. Smith’s ruthless methods in converting these supposed heathens to his religion. Because we see Rev. Smith in such a negative light, we almost come to see his religion in the same terms. For these reasons, we sympathize with Okonkwo while we see the pointlessness of his violent ac¬ tion in killing the messenger and taking his own life. Though Rev. Smith’s actions tend to obfuscate the positive aspects of Christianity, we can still recall its essentially valuable tenets as lived and spread by Rev. Brown. This religion, with its emphasis on individual salvation and love responded to a need deeply felt by certain people in Umuofia, such as Obierika and Nwoye, but never openly expressed. Christianity answered these private fears and doubts over the arbitrariness of the gods’ decrees, decrees which deny personal or human considerations in their application. Christianity is then the catalyst but not the primary cause of things falling apart. Umuofia was already dis¬ integrating and re-forming,

for Christianity would not have

spread if it did not fill a pre-existing need. This new religion takes root and flourishes in the very place where the twins are thrown away and Ikemefuna was killed, the Evil Forest outside Umuofia. From Achebe’s juxtaposition of conflicting values and actions emerge the paradoxes and ironies of

Things Fall Apart. The

flexibility of Umuofia allows room for Christianity which in turn contributes to the passing of the traditional ways in fulfill¬ ing the needs the inflexibility of Umuofia left unanswered. For a time the traditional and the Christian can exist side by side in peace, before the coming of Rev. Smith and the return from exile of Okonkwo. Each man believes himself to be the champion of his society’s religion and customs but each, in his extremism, distorts that religion and those customs so that ultimately— and paradoxically—he negates the very values he seeks to defend. This technique of juxtaposition works well in articulating the complexities and contradictions of Umuofia, of Okonkwo, and of the dilemma which arises when they confront Christianity.

Language, Poetry and Doctrine in Things Fall Apart Achebe’s keen awareness of the possibilities of language and his craftsmanship are revealed in the varying idioms and techniques of his later fiction as well as in his first novel, which recreates through language a nineteenth-century Ibo society. But while Things Fall Apart is an illustration of the creative power of language, it also suggests the ways in which words and phrases may become sterile and constructive. The language which gives a world substance, which crystallizes it, can also be a conservative force which protects that world from change. This interplay between the two possibilities of language—constraining thought or extending it—seems to me to lie at the core of Things Fall Apart. The use of a particular idiom and set of proverbs to convey the feel of an Ibo culture has been commented on by most critics who have gone beyond mere plot summary. Bernth Lindfors, for example, demonstrates how each of Achebe’s novels has a different style suited to its subject, and that Things Fall Apart, like Arrow of God, uses an African vernacular English which simulates the idiom of Ibo.1 In the narrative and descriptive passages, similes and idiomatic expressions are frequently employed to convey the feel of an agricultural and hunting society. Okonkwo’s fame has grown “like a bushfire in the harmattan;” before the wrestling match described in Chapter Six “the air shivered and grew tense like a tightened bow;” Ikemefuna “grew rapidly like a yam tendril in the rainy season, and was full of the sap of life;” Ekwefi “stood gazing in the direction of the voices like a hen whose only chick had been carried away by a kite.” The simile of the kite and her chick alludes to the folktale of Mother Kite and her daughter which is told by Uchendu in Part II.2 This interplay of the idiom and allusions of the narrator with the passages of dialogue and indirect thought of the characters in the novel indicates that the narrative voice is primarily a recreation of the persona which is heard in tales, history, proverbs and poetry belonging to an oral tradition; it represents a collective voice through which the artist speaks for his society, not as an individual apart from it—he is the chorus rather than the hero. We hear it thus in the novel’s opening paragraph: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights, (p. 1)

Not only does this passage introduce Okonkwo as a heroic figure and a wrestler (who will be seen to wrestle with others, with the white man and the missionaries, with his chi, his family and his own character), but also it reveals the primary characteristics of the narrative voice. His world is that

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of the nine villages from Umuofia to Mbaino; areas outside of these boundaries have little significance as yet, belonging simply to that vague realm “beyond.” His values are those of this society, recognizing “solid personal achievements” and approving those who bring honor to their village. And he is a recorder of a legend, which will link up with the legends recorded and passed on by the old men, their legendary status subtly underscored for the Westernized reader by the recurrence of the number seven, reminding him of other traditions in which history and legend, myth and poetry are closely intertwined. In terms formulated by Lukas in his Theory of the Novel, the narrative voice here represents the epic poet whose society is as yet unproblematic. For this speaker and for his society there is no gap between interior and exterior, between man and nature, between being and destiny (or chi); he is the voice in which “the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.” 3 For the narrator and his epic hero, Okonkwo, like Lukacs’ idealized Greeks, there are “only answers but no questions, only solutions (even if enigmatic ones) but no riddles, only forms but no chaos.” 4 The opening paragraph also suggests a kinship between the speaker and his implicit audience, for instance in the assumption that values are shared in regard to what constitutes worthwhile achievements. A sharp awareness of the needs of the audience, its call upon the speaker, is implied in the very qualities which make both the opening paragraph and the work as a whole, with its numerous digressions and episodic structure, reminiscent of oral composition. Explanations like that concerning the identity of Amalinze and the source of his nickname are inserted as the narrator feels his fictive audience’s need for them, not with regard to a preconceived structure and sense of proportion. The nature of the story of Okonkwo as legend and as an embodiment of an oral tradition is particularly significant when contrasted with the closing paragraph of the novel, in which the British District Commissioner contemplates what is to be his record of the events which the novel has just related: The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter, but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, (p. 185)

I shall return to this paragraph later; for the moment I wish to comment only on its significance in relation to the opening passage. The

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end of the book emphasizes not only the replacement of Ibo culture by English culture, and the Ibo language by the English language, but the displacement of the oral tradition by the written. Legend is supplanted by history; the oracular statement and proverb by continuous prose. With this change comes the self-absorbed and self-conscious concern with form, with the nature of the book, its chapters and paragraphs and title. The audience has become distant and impersonal—a vague and passive entity for which the story of Okonkwo would make interesting reading.” The language used by the narrator is also closely related to the speech of the Ibo characters who are the center of the novel. Expressions and proverbs used by Okonkwo, Obierika and others are repeated or echoed by the narrator, and thus the identity of the narrator as spokesman for the Ibo community is emphasized. At the same time, the dialogue is seasoned with proverbs which, while giving the conversation flavor, for “proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” also characterize the speaker, his mood, and the values of the society he represents. Achebe’s technique can be illustrated by the following dialogue between Okonkwo and Nwakibie: “I have come to you for help,” [Okonkwo] said. “Perhaps you can already guess what it is. I have cleared a farm but have no yams to sow. I know what it is to ask a man to trust another with his yams, especially these days when young men are afraid of hard work. I am not afraid of work. The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said that he would praise himself if no one else did. I began to fend for myself at an age when most people still suck at their mothers’ breasts. If you give me some yam seeds I shall not fail you.” Nwakibie cleared his throat. “It pleases me to see a young man like you these days when our youth has gone so soft. Many young men have come to me to ask for yams but I have refused because I knew that they would just dump them in the earth and leave them to be choked by weeds. When I say no to them they think I am hard¬ hearted. But it is not so. Eneke the bird says that since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching. I have learnt to be stingy with my yams. But I can trust you. I know it as I look at you. As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look. I shall give you twice four hundred yams. Go ahead and prepare your farm.” (p. 18)

The proverbs concerning the lizard and the bird emphasize the society’s concern with individual achievement and with physical survival, as well as its perception of man as at one with nature, learning from the animal world and constantly aware of it. They also suggest the whole store of tales and proverbs the Ibo culture has developed, an abundant collection which enriches and informs each Ibo’s set of associations and perceptions. The importance of such tales and proverbs as part of a living tradition is seen as they are echoed and alluded to in varying contexts. The bird eneke, for instance, appears again in the tale of how he challenged the whole world to a wrestling match and was finally overcome by the cat (p. 46). This tale, with its reference to wrestling with the cat, recalls Okonkwo’s famous victory and also links up with what we

114

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

are told the people of Umuofia said about Okonkwo: “They called him the little bird nza who so far forgot himself after a heavy meal that he challenged his chi" (p. 26). In addition to establishing the richness and validity of the oral tradition of that area, these interwoven proverbs and sayings provide an ironic and ominous counterpoint to the story of Okonkwo, hinting even at the height of his fame and power that he will be condemned for his hubris, which is associated with his belief that if a man says yes strongly enough his chi, or personal god, will say yes also. Okonkwo’s citing of the lizard who praised himself is appropriate to a man who is determined to make his chi say yes, and to one who begins almost every sentence in his speech with “I.” The rich and businesslike Nwakibie, on the other hand, is clearly a man who has “learnt to fly without perching.” His use of this particular proverb is particularly significant in contrast to the ritual speech which Okonkwo has just made while breaking the kola nut: “We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and the eagle perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.” (pp. 15-16) It is important to recognize the character of this speech as ritualistic, reflecting the deeply ingrained attitudes of the society rather than of Okonkwo, who is the last man to tolerate eagles and kites perching together. Whereas the elders of the village are willing to tolerate Mr. Brown and his Christians, and even tell Mr. Smith, despite his outrageous intolerance, that he can stay if he wishes and worship his own god, for “it is good that a man should worship the gods and the spirits of his fathers” (p. 170); whereas the elders in Umuofia are willing to let the gods take care of themselves and provide the punishment for the man who killed the sacred python, passively to “let his wing break,” Okonkwo is impatient to break that wing himself, and would allow no other religion or system to perch in his territory. Yet there is a further irony, for Nwakibie who is flexible, who calls upon the attitudes of the fathers (“as our fathers said”), who has survived through adapting and learning to fly without perching, will ultimately be left without any place to perch as the colonial government takes over. The language in which Okonkwo’s request for yams is couched reveals another paradox: Okonkwo appeals to the proverb, the expression of the social norm, in order to distinguish himself from that norm. He sees himself as remarkable in that he alone embodies the traditional social values: he, unlike the young men “these days”, is not afraid of work. Moreover, proverbs and sayings are used in both speeches not as an aid to thought or as a means of generating a decision, but to rationalize and justify a decision or action already taken. “I am not afraid of work,” Okonkwo says, and then goes on to cite the lizard who praised himself. Nwakibie explains why he has refused many young men, then calls upon the example of Eneke. And he has told Okonkwo he can trust him just by looking at him before he appeals to the saying that one can tell a ripe corn by its look. Phrases or statements which reaffirm rather than extend the existing world view of a person or his society are typical of Okonkwo and his

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companions. Okonkwo’s unawareness of the paradox discussed above suggests that the proverbs for him have solidified into units of thought which are no longer questioned. The tendency to cliche is emphasized by the assumption shared by both Okonkwo and Nwakibie that youth has gone soft “these days.” For the reader also the phrase echoes the cliches regarding youth in his own time, and its quality as cliche is underlined by the very fact that “these days” does not mean the same for Okonkwo, Nwakibie and the reader, and by Okonkwo’s unquestioning adoption of the older generation s attitude toward a group, young men, which in¬ cludes himself. In the following passage, Okonkwo’s inability to go beyond the ready¬ made phrases of his society is revealed: Inwardly Okonkwo knew that the boys were still too young to understand fully the difficult art of preparing seed-yams. But he thought that one could not begin too early. Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed. Okonkwo wanted his son to be a great farmer and a great man. He would stamp out the disquieting signs of laziness which he thought he already saw in him. (p. 28).

Here we have a kind of hardening of the arteries of language. The old saw, “one can’t begin too early,” triumphs over Okonkwo’s inner know¬ ledge that it is, in fact, too early. The significance of yam as a man’s crop has been alluded to frequently enough in the novel that the reader realizes this too has become a commonplace within the society. For Okonkwo the relationship between yam and manliness is no longer perceived as metaphorical, and the particular aspect of manliness signified by that metaphor has been replaced by all the qualities of a “very great man indeed.” Similarly, the word “great” used in one context immediately engulfs all facets of greatness; Nwoye is to be “a great man and a great farmer.” Okonkwo’s concern about his son also reveals the most characteristic value which he prizes and represents—manliness. Throughout the novel, Okonkwo judges all action and feeling by that criterion, classifying all that he admires as “manly,” all that he despises as “womanly.” Fear of being called agbala like his father is shown to be the motivating force in his life. But is also clear that Okonkwo is trapped, imprisoned by his classification of everything within such terms. His affection for Ezinma is distorted by his regret that she is a girl: “He never stopped regretting that Ezinma was a girl. Of all his children she alone understood his every mood. A bond of sympathy had grown between them as the years had passed.” (p. 154) He represses all feelings of gentleness, brotherhood, tenderness or tolerance because he classifies these as “womanly”: Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion—to hate everything that his

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness, (p. 11)

Out of fear of being classified among those “effeminate men who had refused to come with them,” Okonkwo participates in the killing of Ikemefuna, an act which he was warned against because “that boy calls you father.” When his “inward knowledge” threatens to get the better of him and he is unable to sleep or eat following this sacrifice, he goads himself with his own set of derogatory terms: “When did you become a shivering old woman,” Okonkwo asked himself, “you who are known in all the nine villages for your valour in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed, (p. 57) At¬ tempting to forget Ikemefuna, Okonkwo goes to see his friend Obierika and laments that his son Nwoye has “too much of his mother in him. That the extreme discontinuity between the man/woman categories is Okonkwo’s own, not those of his clan, is indicated by Obierika’s unspo¬ ken response, “Too much of his grandfather.” Similarly, Okonkwo sees the killing as “his latest show of manliness,” whereas Obierika condemns it as both unnecessary and an offense against the Earth Goddess. Finally, it is in bitter disappointment that his clan has become “soft and woman¬ ish” in its refusal to run headlong into war with the white man and his supporters that Okonkwo kills the court messenger and brings about his own death. The distortion which results from Okonkwo’s perception of all things in terms of “manly” and “womanly,” and the particular connotations he has attached to those terms, is emphasized not only by the reaction of his fellow clansmen, for whom it seems to me Obierika expresses the norm, but also by the importance attached to the feminine principle in the spiritual and moral life of the society. We are told that the Earth Goddess, Ani, is the final judge of all morality and conduct, and the source of • fertility. Okonkwo is repeatedly condemned for his crimes against this goddess, in the killing of Ikemefuna, in the beating of his wife during the Week of Peace, and finally he is banished for the “feminine” (because inadvertent and therefore relatively minor) crime of shooting a clansman, a killing which pollutes the earth. He is forced to seek refuge in his mother’s village, and receives a long lecture from his uncle on why “mother is supreme.” In acknowledgement of his mother’s family he calls his first child born there “Mother is Supreme,” but that the name is merely a gesture without real significance to Okonkwo is indicated by the name he gives the second child, “Begotten in the Wilderness.” Most significant with regard to the theme of language in the novel is the fact that the Oracle of the Hills and Caves is called Agbala (we are told this immediately after the section concerning Okonkwo’s fear of being call agbala), and is served by the powerful priestess Chielo whom even Okonkwo fears. It is she who speaks for the oracle and decides whether or not the village should go to war (it must be for a just cause), and she who prophesies the future (and accurately, as her prophecy concerning the coming of the white man indicates). Despite the importance of the feminine principle in determining the moral and spiritual values of the

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clan, however, the place of women in the group is a subordinate one as both the description of the life of the village and the terms for a minor crime and for a man who has taken no title indicate. It is that terminology and its implications which frame Okonkwo’s attitude; enclosed within the everyday usage of the words, he is unable to acknowledge the mythic implications of femininity and its values. The way in which language can distort perception is also suggested in the story of Abame. We are told that a white man came to Abame “riding an iron horse.” After killing the man, the villagers “tied his iron horse to their sacred tree because it looked as if it would run away to call the man’s friends.” (p. 123) The villagers had classified the new object, the bicycle, with regard to its property of being ridden by man, thus suppressing its quality as machine to the position of the adjective “iron.” Once named “horse” it acquires other properties; it ceases to be a machine and becomes animated, capable of running away to its former home. An analogous example occurs when Okonkwo is meditating on his son’s desertion to the Christians. Chilled by the spectre of abandonment by all his descendants, of his spirit and the spirits of his ancestors neglected and forgotten, Okonkwo wonders how he could have fathered a son so unlike himself: Okonkwo was popularly called the “Roaring Flame.” As he looked into the log fire he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? Perhaps he was not his son. No! he could not be. His wife had played him false. He would teach her! But Nwoye resembled his grandfather, Unoka, who was Okonkwo’s father. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He, Okonkwo, was called a flaming fire. How could he have begotten a woman for a son? At Nwoye’s age Okonkwo had already become famous throughout Umuofia for his wrestling and his fearlessness. He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smouldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply, (pp. 137-38)

As the metaphor “iron horse” obliterated the properties of the bicycle as machine, so Okonkwo is absorbed by his popular name. The man signified disappears and the symbol takes on a life of its own, begetting a new relationship. Having named that relationship, Okonkwo perceives his understanding of that analogy as an understanding of the original father/son relationship. The causal tie between fire and ash is transferred to the tie between father and son. Yet, clearly, Okonkwo has merely renamed that relationship; it remains unexplained, and his questions remain unanswered, although for Okonkwo the act of naming has silenced those questions. Clearly also, Okonkwo seizes upon the analogy in order to silence what he “knows inwardly,” that the relationship between himself and Nwoye is in part the consequence of his rejection of Unoka. For the reader, this particular evasion is apparent, as is the discrepancy between Okonkwo’s understanding of himself as “flaming fire,” connoting energy and brightness, and the community’s perception

118

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of him as “Roaring Fire,” connoting (as we see from other comments) not only his energy, but also his destructive and fiery temper, and his furious determination to get ahead. In the sense understood by the community, “Roaring Fire” is indeed the cause of Nwoye’s desertion, but not in the way Okonkwo perceives it: his analogy establishes a natural cycle of life and death which cannot be altered, and in response to which he can re¬ act by merely sighing deeply. In the paragraph which closes Part One we have a similar example of the paradox that the very words which express thought may also be a means of suppressing thought: Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an of¬ fense he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater com¬ plexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed? The Earth had decreed that they were an offense on the land and must be de¬ stroyed. And if the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others, (p. 111-112)

For Obierika, thought and speech are inextricably related; thought is unpronounced speech, and he seeks as answers to his questions verbal formulas. Like Okonkwo, he refused to recognize the validity of the “inward knowledge” which is unverbalized but which is suggested to the reader by the nature of his questions. He feels that the twins and Okonkwo have committed no crime; inner feeling, however, is soon suppressed by the prefabricated verbal sentence of the society: “The earth had decreed . . And the final proverb closes off all further question. Obierika represents his society’s inability to deal with such questions as the abandoning of twins, the punishment of innocents such as Ikemefuna, an inability which is partly responsible for its falling apart. The questions of Nwoye and of the women who have lost their twins are less easily silenced by the formulas of the elders. They are searching for a new language which will close the gap between their inner feeling of what should be and the language the culture has developed to justify what is. And above all it is “the poetry of the new religion” which appeals to Nwoye when the Christians first bring their message: But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwo’s first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within

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as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled, (p. 132) The simile of words like drops of rain on the dry palate of the parched earth recalls the kind of story Nwoye loved” as a child, the story of how Earth and Sky quarrelled and Sky withheld rain for seven years. Vulture was sent to soften Sky with a song “of the suffering of the sons of men. Whenever Nwoye’s mother sang this song he felt carried away to the distant scene in the sky where Vulture, Earth’s emissary, sang for mercy. At last Sky was moved to pity, and he gave to Vulture rain wrapped in leaves of coco-yam. But as he flew home his long talon pierced the leaves and the rain fell as it had never fallen before.” (p. 46) Okonkwo has taught Nwoye that such stories are for “foolish women and children,” and to please his father he pretends to despise “women’s stories,” listening instead to his father’s accounts of tribal wars and his exploits as a warrior. Thus the deliberate link between these two scenes suggests that it is not specifically the words of the new religion that stir Nwoye, but the songs of suffering and Poetry in general. In denying the fictional tales as womanish and insisting on stories which are factual and historical, Okonkwo has denied the poetic world, which in both contexts quoted is closely related to the world of myth. His rejection of the poetic is also related to his suppression of what he “inwardly knows,” or intuition, and for Nwoye poetry is equivalent to “something felt in the marrow.” For Nwoye, then, the appeal of the new religion is its seeming recognition of that inner, unverbalized world, where the vague and persistent questions are felt in terms of situations, not understood on a verbal level. The “poetry of the new religion” is at its most powerful for Nwoye and other Ibos when received through imagery and music: we are told that the rollicking hymn tunes pluck “at silent and dusty chords in the heart” (p. 131), and that Nwoye is affected by the image of “brothers who sat in darkness” and the image of the lost sheep. The “dusty chords” again pick up the connection between the songs of suffering, rain and the parched earth, and are a subtle reminder of Unoka, who was a musician, an expert with the flute and the talking drums, and man of great feeling, constantly vacillating between extremes of joy and grief. So he is called agbala. But the Oracle is also called Agbala, and symbolizes the power of the word at its highest level, and the word which is mysterious and enigmatic. Poetry, myth and fiction are all associated with the spiritual, the sacred, the feminine, and paradoxically, the inner, unspoken word. All are linked with the powerful figure of Chielo, priestess of the Oracle, whose voice when possessed is described as unearthly. When Okonkwo pleads with her not to carry off Ezinma, she responds, “Beware Okonkwo! . . .Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!” (p. 89) Okonkwo’s rejection of the words of the gods and of poetry for the factual and historical can be associated with his general suspicion of words and his feeling, shared by other Ibos, that language tends to evasion of action. We are told from the very beginning that Okonkwo

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stammered, and that “whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists.” (p. 2) When Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, warns him of the bitterness of failing alone (a bitterness which Okonkwo comes to realize when he kills the messenger), Okonkwo becomes impatient: “Unoka was like that in his last days. His love of talk had grown with age and sickness. It tried Okonkwo’s patience beyond words.” (p. 21) Although the narrator comments that “among the Ibo the art of con¬ versation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” Okonkwo is shown to be neither a connoisseur nor a talented practitioner of that art. He quickly grows weary of feasting and talk, and longs to be out working in the fields. His contributions to a discussion are generally short and commonplace. In general, he finds talk a poor substitute for action: “Okonkwo was not a man of thought but of action. But in absence of work, talking was the next best.” (p. 60) It is perhaps because conversation is regarded as an art that Okonkwo suspects it. For Okonkwo, talking is never a prelude to action; it leads nowhere. That his attitude is shared by other Ibos is indicated by the fable of Mother Kite and her daugther told by Uchendu to illustrate the foolishness of the men of Abame who killed the man who said nothing, while “there is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.” (p. 125) In the dealings with the Christians and colonial administrators, Okonkwo is constantly frustrated by his fellow elders who insist on talking the problem over without acting immediately. Before the final village meeting, he fears that talking will once again prevent action: “The greatest obstacle in Umuofia,” Okonkwo thought bitterly, “is that coward, Egonwanne. His sweet tongue can change fire into cold ash. When he speaks he moves our men to impotence. If they had ignored his womanish wisdom five years ago, we would not have come to this.” (p. 178) Okonkwo’s habitual association of artistry and skill in words with cowardice and effeminacy is here linked and ironically contrasted with his perception of himself as a fiery man of action in opposition to his son as “cold, impotent ash.” And Okonkwo’s final despair comes when he sees that his clansmen, in reaction to his killing of the messenger, have “broken into tumult instead of action. . . .He heard voices asking, ‘Why did he do it?’ ” (p. 182) Okonkwo’s attitude contrasts with that of the District Commissioner who, obviously fearing that words will lead to action, has sent the messengers to stop the meeting. His messengers express a similar attitude when they silence the Ibo men, tell them to shut up, and beat them when they speak their minds. And the D.C.’s book, in addition to being a complacent self-celebration, is clearly intended as a guide to specific action, stressing that which will be useful to other colonial administrators. Although for Nwoye the Christian hymns recognize and nourish the world of inner feelings, the language of the preachers and of the gospels only “seems” to provide answers to Nwoye’s “callow mind;” it is shown to be as much a closed system as the Ibo language. When Nwoye joins the Christians, Mr. Kiaga, the missionary, proclaims, “Blessed is he who

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forsakes his father and his mother.” (p. 137) The nature of such sentences as slogans, as hard-and-fast units of thought which are incapable of adapting to different situations, is emphasized by the context in which they occur. We are told that Nwoye “did not understand fully. Okonkwo’s meditations concerning the breaking of the links between the ancestral spirits and their descendents follow immediately. (In Ibo, as in many other African societies, it is believed that the descendants are responsible for sustaining the ancestral spirits; the link between the spirits of the dead and those of the living must constantly be renewed.) In the chapters which precede Mr. Kiaga’s triumphant affirmation of the breaking of family ties, the values of kinship have been manifested as Okonkwo is taken in, helped and comforted by his mother’s family. And Part Two closes with a lament by one of the elders of the tribe: ... I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunt¬ er’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan. (p. 150)

The new language which allows the previously unspoken and unheard, and therefore unrecognized, divisions in the clan to be voiced and which encourages the cursing of ancestral gods and traditions is heard with increasing insistency as the book closes. Within a few pages, ,we witness the breakdown of the Ibo language and the triumph of English. At first the white man’s language sounds so alien that it does not seem to be a language at all, for we are told that the first white man who came to Abame “said nothing.” Others, however, believe he “said something,” but the word was incomprehensible—perhaps he was asking for the way to Mbaino.5 As Lloyd Brown suggests, the “harsh dialect” and malapropism (“his buttocks” instead of his self) of the Ibo interpreters who come with the missionary symbolize the alien and hostile culture that they bring.6 In this encounter, the distinction between doctrine and poetry is stressed not only with reference to Nwoye’s questions but also with regard to the other members of this society. Derisive of the Christian doctrine that the Ibo gods are merely wood and stone, many Ibos start to leave, but are stopped and enthralled when the missionaries burst into one of those songs “which had the power of plucking at silent and dusty chords in the heart of an Ibo man. . . It was a story of brothers who lived in darkness and in fear, ignorant of the love of God. It told of one sheep out on the hills, away from the gates of God and from the tender shepherd’s care.” (p. 131) It is the suggestive power of the images combined with music which attracts the listeners; once the preachers turn from poetry to direct statements about Jesu Kristi and the “mad logic of the Trinity,” to doctrine and the appeal of Logos to the rational faculty—an appeal which seems totally irrational to the Ibo— then the audience is again aware of its alienation from the language and cultural tradition of the Christians. Both the doctrine of the Trinity and

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the language in which it is expressed become absurd: “Your buttocks said he [God] had a son,” said the joker. “So he must have a wife and all of them must have buttocks.” (p. 131) That doctrine itself, in the form of prose statement, is incapable of converting either the Ibo to Christianity or the Christian to belief in Chukwu is suggested by the conversations between Mr. Brown and Akunna (pp. 160-61). For Mr. Brown in particular, his assertion that “Chukwu is the only God and all the others are false” is indicative of both his sincere attempt to communicate and his failure to do so. Although he uses the Ibo name “Chukwu” for the “one supreme God,” it is clear that he has accepted only the formal and denotative qualities of that term; the connotations which Akunna goes on to discuss and which for him are an intrinsic part of the significance of Chukwu are rejected by Mr. Brown. The failure to communicate beyond the denotative level is emphasized by the presence of the interpreter and his interpolation, “They have a queen,” when Akunna tries to explain his concept of Chukwu by analogy with a king and his messengers. What this passage suggests is the difficul¬ ty of bridging the gap between two cultures merely by translating the vocabulary of one into that of the other. The role of the interpreter or translator is contrasted in a parallel scene, the confrontation of the elders of Umuofia with the second white missionary: Mr. Smith said to his interpreter: “Tell them to go away from here. This is the house of God and I will not Hue to see it desecrated.” Okeke interpreted wisely to the spirits and leaders of Umuofia: “The white man says he is happy you have come to him with your grievances, like friends. He will be happy if you leave the matter in his hands.” (p. 170) Okeke’s wise interpretation indicates the need for total transformation of the white man’s message so that it might be acceptable within the terms of the Ibo culture; in fact, the necessary transformation is so great that it is no longer the white man’s message. In the Christian culture Mr. Smith is the counterpart of Okonkwo in the Ibo. His world is also perceived in terms of rigid categories which make flexible behavior impossible; it is an epic vision which admits no questions: Mr. Brown’s successor was the Reverend James Smith, and he was a different kind of man. He condemned openly Mr. Brown’s policy of compromise and accommodation. He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battleground in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness. He spoke in his conflict with the sons of darkness. He spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed in slaying the prophets of Baal. (p. 164) Just as Okonkwo’s manly/womanish terminology distorts his world and divides it into an either/or universe, so too Mr. Smith’s world is a Manichean one similar to that described by Fanon and sharply

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distinguished in terms of good and evil; men are either sheep or goats, to be saved or damned; their actions are either wheat or tares, to be nourished or uprooted. Those who do not worship the Christian god are prophets of Baal and sons of darkness. His classification of Mr. Brown’s approach under the cliched “compromise and accommodation” prevents him from seeing anything advantageous in that approach, although it has won many adherents. Mr. Smith has also classified results in terms of either quantity or quality; he cannot conceive of both together. As Lloyd Brown has pointed out, the deliberate reminder of the connotations of “black” and “white” in the Christian religion and culture stresses that the European’s language is not only expressive of a different set of perceptions but also actually destructive of a world view which includes seeing the African and his culture as possessing validity and dignity.7 Yet that the Ibo language and culture is also ethnocentric, though perhaps in less absolute terms, is suggested by references to white men as lepers or albinos, and the description of those who came back to Abame as “three white men led by a band of ordinary men like us.” (p. 124) In the closing pages of the novel, the Ibos find their language increasingly inadequate to the new situation; failing to find appropriate verbal formulas, they remain silent. Concerning the hanging of Aneto by the colonial government—a hanging which results from the government’s ignorance of and indifference to Ibo customs (“How can he [understand our customs] when he does not even speak our tongue?” asks Obierika)—we are told that the other people arrested with him “have not found the mouth with which to tell of their suffering.” (p. 158) When Okonkwo and the elders are arrested following the burning of Mr. Smith’s church, the District Commissioner lectures them while “the six men remained sullen and silent. . . Even when the men were left alone they found no words to speak to one another” (pp. 173-74) In the village the voices of the children have been stilled, the manly voices of the young men are not heard, the air is silent, and everyone in Okonkwo’s compound speaks in whispers. And when Okonkwo is finally set free, “the District Commissioner spoke to them again about the great queen, and about peace and good government. But the men did not listen. They just sat and looked at him and his interpreter. . . They rose and left the courthouse. They neither spoke to anyone nor among themselves.” (p. 176) But while the Ibos become aware of the inadequacy of their own language, they also perceive even more clearly the gap between the formulas of the English language and the reality they are intended to describe. Of this discrepancy the District Commissioner is smugly and disastrously oblivious. Having named his mission as one which “brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy” and as dispensing “justice just as it is done in my country under a great queen” (p. 173), he is unable to see what is cruelly evident to the people of Umuofia and the reader—that he has brought neither peace, happiness nor justice. Having classified Okonkwo’s suicide and burial under the heading of “primitive customs” (because he shares Mr. Smith’s perception of Africans as “children of darkness”), he is incapable of

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understanding Obierika’s view of these same events as a bitterly tragic ending to a heroic life. The English language triumphs. The change is marked by the scene which immediately precedes the final paragraph. As Obierika began to eulogize Okonkwo, “his voice trembled and choked his words.” (p. 185) He is told to shut up. Then the District Commissioner orders the body taken down. “Yes, sah,” the messenger responds. The spelling “sah,” marks the rejection of Ibo for English and the speaker’s alienation from English in his very affirmation of it. From now on the world of the Ibo will be imprisoned within the language of the Commissioner whose written record will classify the story of Okonkwo as a mere detail, the story of the massacre at Abame and the destruction of a civilization as “pacification.” However, the failure of the District Commissioner to understand and respect the world of the Ibo is not merely a product of the particular language which blinds him. His decision that the story of Okonkwo is not worthy of a whole chapter in his version of the history of the region parallels Okonkwo’s own denial of fiction and the poetic, and insistence that Nwoye reject “womanish” folktales for histories of tribal wars and warlike feats. Like Okonkwo also, the District Commissioner is afraid of appearing weak or undignified, of giving “the natives a poor opinion of him.” Achebe’s novel becomes the “mouth with which to tell of their suffering,” and, in its mixture of historical, anthropological and fictional elements, provides an implicit answer to the denial of the validity of the poetic in the “real” world. It is in part an attempt to restore the oral fictional tradition which both the European and Okonkwo denied. Paradoxically, Achebe uses the written word brought by the colonizers in order to record and recreate the oral world obliterated or denied by them. This paradox is related to the irony that although Achebe shows the failure of language to enlarge understanding, to become a means of communication, and to break out of a self-enclosed system, yet the novel itself is an attempt to reach, through self-conscious use of the language of one culture, the culture of another. The paradox is highlighted by direct reference to the Western literary tradition which now belongs also' to the author: the title, Things Fall Apart, from Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” is not only a reminder of that tradition but is also appropriate to the novel’s record of the destruction of a civilization; at the same time, one recalls that Yeats’ theory of the cycles of history ignores African history, as does European thought generally. A further irony, of course, is that Yeats’ poem foresees the end of the Christian era, while Achebe’s novel records the end of the non-Christian era in Eastern Nigeria. Yet that non-Christian tradition, its religion and culture, is in part validated for the Western or Westernized reader by indirect parallels with Biblical tales: for instance, the parallel between Okonkwo’s sacrifice of Ikemefuna and the story of Abraham and Isaac is brought to the surface when Nwoye takes Isaac as his Christian name. Within the text itself, the occasional inclusion of phrases such as “nature. . . red in tooth and claw” from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, or of literary words such as “valediction” in the otherwise non-British and non-literary idiom, serve to remind the

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reader of the contrasting worlds that have finally come together in the authorial consciousness. That consciousness is to be distinguished from the epic voice discussed earlier, and it is closer to the questioning and alienated vision of Nwoye than the unquestioning and integrated culture which Okonkwo fights desperately to preserve. (Such a conflict between the nostalgia for epic totality and the consciousness alienated from its society is for Lukacs the core of the novel form.) The references to the poetry of the British and Christian cultural tradition and Achebe’s use of the novel form also suggest the importance of the Poetic as a means of bridging the gap between languages, of going beyond the Logos of each culture. Things Fall Apart is a commentary on the ways in which language can become rigid and incapable of communication, but at the same time demonstrates the creative possibilities of language. The very proverbs and phrases which have become cliches for their Ibo speakers, which no longer have a living relation to the things signified, are yet for the Western reader creative of a world in which the tension between word and referent, the awareness of metaphor as such, is alive and vibrant. When Okonkwo says, “Let the kite and the eagle perch together,” we are made aware of the ritualistic nature of those words for him; but this same sentence helps to create a world and its value system for us, and gains significance as the novel proceeds. At the same time, the need for constant poeticizing of the English language and culture is emphasized: the poetry of the African world can become the life-giving rain on the parched tongue of the English tradition.

C. L. Innes 1. “The Palm Oil With Which Words Are Eaten,” African Literature Today, 1 (1968), 1-10. 2. (London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 125. Henceforth page references to this edition will be incprporated into the text. 3.

Trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 29.

4.

Ibid., p. 31.

•

5.

The question of what this white man was saying also puzzles the reader.

Perhaps it was “bwana,” which would indeed be an ironic attempt by the foreigner to speak his notion of the African. 6. “Cultural Norms and Modes of Perception in Achebe’s Fiction,” Research in African Literatures, 3(1972), 28. 7.

Ibid., p. 30.

Symbolic Structure in Things Fall Apart Donald Weinstock. and Cathy Ramadan

Important in the criticism of modern African fiction in English has been a close examination of its language. The nov¬ elist to profit most from such an investigation is the highly regarded Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, offers the most obvious starting place. Achebe’s style appears to be cleanly and functionally realistic, as most commentators have remarked. But a pioneering brief study by Eldred Jones' showed that at least some of the many proverbs and folk idioms in the novel were more than merely decorative. This approach can be carried much further, how¬ ever. The way Achebe uses descriptive passages and inset tales symbolically and structurally seems to have gone unnoted, al¬ though his use of them may well be an important reason for the novel’s being enjoyed and comprehended almost universally. Readers tend to be unaware of these devices because, as in most good art, they operate unobtrusively, almost subliminally. When after repeated readings one sees how subtly they work to unify a novel which as first seems jaggedly episodic, held to¬ gether mainly by the author’s focus on a central character, and by the clearly tragic structure of the whole, one’s pleasure is enhanced and one begins to see fully what the novel really says, and to find support for earlier intuitions. Things Fall Apart, well received for its obvious and varied merits, has not yet been noticed for how well and how tightly constructed it is; although nearly everyone who writes about it says it is well put together, little specific analysis is made, and only scanty evidence is given in support of the assertion. It is so patently an excellent realistic novel that readers have been able to derive much of value from it without having to read deeply. But a work of art speaks in many voices, and some of the most

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interesting of these in Things Fall Apart have apparently not been heard. Basically, Achebe’s technique in Things Fall Apart is akin to those of Conrad, Joyce (in Portrait of the Artist), and Lawrence. That is, Achebe uses a blend of realistic and symbolic modes, with the symbolism worked in so smoothly that it becomes an integral part of the realistic texture. Yet the novel can easily be read as the product of, say, a contem¬ porary George Gissing or Upton Sinclair; most readers appar¬ ently assume Achebe is a purely realistic writer. Instead of carefully examining the patterning of the language and the nuances of tone and description to understand what the novel says, many people have sought and found only the statements or clues they probably expected to find, not always the most relevant ones for comprehending and evaluating the novel fairly. That Achebe is more than a propagandist for precolonial Africa is rarely objected to, partly because few who are un¬ friendly to the older African values bother to read African fic¬ tion. If the novel is propaganda, however, it is propaganda only in the very widest and least pejorative sense of the term — the sense in which all true art is moral. Achebe does not glue a message onto a piece of fiction. The moral permeates, rein¬ forces and weaves together; it is integral and functional. But what is that moral? In a televison interview a few years ago Achebe said it was "that this particular society had its good side — the poetry of the life; the simplicity, if you like; the communal way of sharing in happiness and in sorrow and in work and all that. It also had art and music. But it had this cruel side to it and it is this that I think helped to bring down my hero.”* This statement of Achebe’s is disappointing, be¬ cause it tells us only what any reasonably alert reader of the novel grasps immediately. Fortunately, the critic — so long as he can establish a reasonable case — may differ with the artist. The moral of Things Fall Apart can be shown to be a good deal more complex than the author’s remarks indicate. He probably had good reasons for oversimplifying, but nobody can deter¬ mine that with certainty. Repeatedly in the novel, however, appear symbolic actings out of a far more subtle and manyfaceted moral or message. Whether Achebe himself was com-

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pletely aware of this is irrelevant, as anyone knows who has tried to get a writer’s works and his self-evaluations to jibe. The novel’s voices, that is, speak more eloquently than the author’s. Just before the important description of the coming of a swarm of locusts, foreshadowing and symbolizing the arrival of Christianity and its effects on the Ibos, we are told of Okonkwo’s relationship with his eldest son, Nwoye, and with the boy who has become almost a son, Ikemefuna.3 Under Ikemefuna’s influence and tutelage, Nwoye begins to develop into the kind of manliness Okonkwo likes and which he has feared Nwoye would never attain. One indication of this outward change in Nwoye is that he pleases his father by pretending to prefer "masculine” stories to the kind he really wants to continue hearing, stories Okonkwo thinks are only "for foolish women and children” (pp. 46-47). Achebe gives an example of "the kind of story that Nwoye loved:” He remembered the story [his mother] often told of the quarrel between Earth and Sky long ago, and how Sky withheld rain for seven years, until crops withered and the dead could not be buried because the hoes broke on the stony Earth. At last Vulture was sent to plead with Sky, and to soften his heart with a song of the suffering of the sons of men. When¬ ever Nwoye’s mother sang this song he felt carried away to the distant scene in the sky where Vulture, Earth’s emissary, sang for mercy. At last Sky was moved to pity, and he gave to Vulture rain wrapped in leaves of coco-yam. But as he flew home his long talon pierced the leaves and the rain fell as it had never fallen before. And so heavily did it rain on Vulture that he did not return to deliver his message but flew to a dis¬ tant land, from where he had espied a fire. And when he got there he found it was a man making a sacrifice. He warmed himself in the fire and ate the entrails, (p. 46)4

The passage serves admirably to give some of the flavor of child¬ hood in an Ibo village, and to reflect some of the people’s con¬ cerns. This apparently simple story is structurally important in Achebe’s novel. Like most of the other tales and many of the descriptive passages in Things Fall Apart, it foreshadows, re¬ capitulates, interweaves, and connects the major themes and events of the novel. These episodes reinforce one another by yielding essentially similar interpretations.

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The initial quarrel between Earth and Sky reflects the nov¬ el’s basic conflict: the struggle between masculine and feminine powers and principles, which incorporates the more apparent clash between old and new, for the Earth is a goddess, Ani, “the source of all fertility,” and the Sky is a god (pp. 31, 130; also see pp. 24, 25, 59, 111). Okonkwo is consistently associated with masculinity, and he virtually always mistrusts, opposes and attacks anything feminine or linked with femininity. Both the gentle Christ-figure Ikemefuna, who foreshadows Chris¬ tianity, and Nwoye, who converts to it, are associated with the new religion. Christianity embodies and stresses the qualities Okonkwo considers "womanish”—love, affection and mercy; and he characteristically evaluates the missionaries as "a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens” (p. 137). In the tale the masculine Sky withholds precious lifegiving rain for so long that crops die and dead men remain unburied. Throughout the novel Achebe uses water images to symbolize Christianity. Manly Okonkwo’s holding back of what is suggested by the tale’s symbolic rain — the love and tenderness that go with the best practice of Christianity — leads to his actual and emotional death, and to the actual death of one "son” and the psycho¬ logical murder of another. The scene also reminds readers that the first yams Okonkwo planted at the beginning of his career, by withering and dying for lack of rain, foreshadowed greater events (pp. 19-20). The yams themselves represent Okonkwo’s male-oriented society, for "yam stood for manliness” among the Ibos (pp. 28, 19). The same passage should remind us too that Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, could not be buried in the earth because of the "abominable” manner of his death (pp. 14-15). But we must understand what the important Vulture stands for if we are to comprehend the tale at all. Vultures are gen¬ erally regarded as repulsive scavengers; but for Achebe (and perhaps for the Ibos in general) it symbolized what it did in certain ancient societies, notably those of the Egyptians and the Parsees8 — the female principle. It is no longer too surpris¬ ing then that this bird is chosen as "Earth’s emissary” to make the plea. When the reluctant masculine Sky finally does yield

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some rain, it is wrapped up, a reminder of the stony Okonkwo s reluctance to release or express his tender (that is, feminine) emotions. Thus the rain is wrapped ironically in coco-yam leaves, the coco-yam being a woman’s crop (p. 19). Like Okonkwo’s love, this rain cannot be unwrapped without becoming somehow destructive: Even though he inwardly loves Ikemefuna and Ezinma, for example, Okonkwo rarely shows it ex¬ cept perversely, by expressing love’s antitheses — insult and violence (e.g., pp. 28, 39). Hence the rain which escapes from Vulture’s bundle and rains "so heavily” on him "that he did not return to deliver his message” brings immediately to mind a vivid instance of Okonkwo’s anger exploding at one he should love. This is the dra¬ matic moment when he tries to confront Nwoye about the boy’s association with the Christians (pp. 136-137). As always, no communication occurs between the quiet Nwoye and the perennially inarticulate Okonkwo. Here as elsewhere Okonkwo can only "stammer” or "roar,” and Nwoye says nothing. After "two or three savage blows” from his father, Nwoye, like Vul¬ ture in the fable, "walked away and never returned” (p. 136). Nwoye intends to "return later to his mother and his brothers and sisters and convert them to the new faith” (p. 137). But the rain of blows from his father, and the rain of Christianity, the religion which Achebe reminds us, specifically blesses those who forsake their parents (and gods) for Christ, combine to keep Nwoye away forever. Again like Vulture, who "did not return to deliver his message,” Nwoye "never returned” to the compound of his parents. For all the good Christianity might do, it has the deleterious effect of splitting families, turning one member against another. Another question about the symbolic use of Vulture is raised by the bird’s talon piercing the bundle of rain. If Vul¬ ture represents a force for good, as has been claimed above, why does its claw release destruction? The explanation may simply be that it is the creature’s nature to act as it does. Vulture can¬ not help doing what his animal body and instincts dictate. Similarly, Nwoye cannot help becoming a Christian, for his temperament draws him instinctively to Christianity: "It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow”

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"that captivated him” (p. 132). Inadvertent acts both by Nwoye and by Vulture bring temporary discomfort and harm. Both must learn how to control and use their precious bundles. Christianity, like rain, though capable of bringing enormous good, can be destructive unless managed well and carefully. Other aspects of this important incident — Nwoye’s con¬ version and his leaving home — are paralleled and clearly pre¬ figured in the earlier folktale. The missionaries’ "gay and rol¬ licking tunes . . . had the power of plucking at silent and dusty chords in the heart of an Ibo man” (p. 131), just as Vulture’s "song of the suffering of the sons of men” softens the heart of Sky, and as Nwoye’s mother’s singing of it transports him to what can only be a heavenly appeal for mercy. As a result of the heavy rain Vulture flies "to a distant land”; as a result of his punishing and baptizing rains Nwoye is sent to a faraway training college for teachers (p. 163). Furthermore, the fire which Vulture sees is obviously Okonkwo. As he sits "gazing into a log fire” and wondering how he could ever have fathered such a "degenerate and effeminate” son, we are told — and thrice reminded — that he "was popularly called the 'Roaring Flame’” (pp. 137-138). The tale also prepares the reader for the sacrificial death of Ikemefuna, unmentioned since very early in the narrative. Three pages after the tale, Ezeudu calls on Okonkwo to tell him the boy is to die (p. 49). Somewhat later in the novel, just after Nwoye finally leaves home, comes another important ref¬ erence to a sacrifice. Okonkwo shudders at "the terrible pros¬ pect, like the prospect of annihilation,” that all of his sons might emulate Nwoye "and abandon their ancestors-He saw him¬ self and his father crowding round their ancestral shrine wait¬ ing in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days” (p. 137). Pondering this frightening possibility, Okonkwo concludes, in terms that allow Achebe to show with brilliant irony the limitations of his protagonist’s understanding, that "he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash” (p. 138). Achebe intensifies the irony by indicating, in the same scene, that Okonkwo has never been further from seeing things clearly, that he cannot face

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reality: "He pushed the thought out of his mind” that there was any basis in his ancestry for Nwoye s despicable .. . be¬ haviour” (pp. 137-138; also see p. 58). In a sense, Okonkwo is sacrificing his son on the altar of "manliness,” as he earlier has sacrificed his father, brutally cutting out of his life both of these reminders that there are men with "feminine” natures in his family. Okonkwo is in two other, larger senses the man in the tale who "ate the entrails” of the sacrificial animal. By repressing his softer feelings, he ultimately destroys himself, in the sense that men destroy themselves physically by developing ulcers, and mentally by developing their emotional equivalents — neuroses, psychoses, obsessions. Less debatably, Okonkwo, who "knew how to kill a man’s spirit” (p. 22), figuratively eats the entrails of anyone who fails to conform to his narrow notion of manly behavior. Nwoye and Unoka are his two major victims, but not his only ones. If a man destroys his family, what has he left of worth? Okonkwo’s voluntary part in the communal killing of Ikemefuna, and his accidental killing of Ezeudu’s son, really only externalize this tendency toward moral destructiveness in him. All of Okonkwo’s sacrificial killings are present in embryo in the closing lines of the tale, and in another apparently casual statement late in the novel that "Nwoye . .. was now called Isaac” (p. 163). Nwoye’s taking this name suggests overpoweringly Nwoye’s conscious or unconscious awareness that his father was, like Abraham, willing to sacrifice one son (Ikeme¬ funa, who calls Okonkwo father), and that this latter-day Abraham was still willing, even after that bloody and traumatic event, to sacrifice another son, although in an outwardly dif¬ ferent manner. As he does in a number of other symbolic ways in this novel, Achebe demonstrates clearly by his allusive use of the folktale that he equates Okonkwo and Umuofia with the Old Testament, and the gentleness and mercy he considers for¬ eign to them with the implicitly preferable New Testament. Okonkwo’s and Nwoye’s story tastes are another indicator of their essential differences. Though an Old Testament character, Isaac has for centimes been regarded as a prototype of Christ, the sacrificial Lamb of God.

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Furthermore, Nwoye is linked to the novel’s Christ-figure, Ikemefuna, in enough ways to indicate that they are literary doubles. Not the least of these links is that Ikemefuna pre¬ ferred "the kind of story that Nwoye loved”: Tucked away by Achebe in another context is the seemingly unrelated statement that Ikemefuna’s favorite story was of "that land ... where the ant holds his court in splendour and the sands dance for ever” (p. 30), like Nwoye’s story the antithesis of Okonkwo’s bloody tales "about tribal wars, or how, years ago, he had stalked his victim, overpowered him and obtained his first human head” (p. 47). Also alluded to in this brief tale told to Nwoye are other elements of the novel serving as reminders of prior or subse¬ quent events. When one reads that "the rain fell as it had never fallen before,” he might recall that the same words have been used concerning Okonkwo’s difficulties in his first year on his own (p. 20). The stony ground foreshadows Reverend James Smith’s gloomy conviction about his flock’s ignorance of even "the Trinity and the Sacraments. It only showed that they were seeds sown on a rocky soil” (p. 164). Instead of bringing the rain of genuine loving Christianity to soften this "rocky soil,” Mr. Smith can offer only a divisive and exclusive version of his religion: "He [Mr. Brown, Smith’s more flexible and accommo¬ dating predecessor] should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. ... Our Lord used the whip only once in His life — to drive the crowd away from His church” (p. 164). That those Christ drove from the temple were moneychangers, not would-be worshippers, Mr. Smith’s ironic distortion of the Bible neglects to mention. His onesidedness and his narrowness remind us ironically of Okonkwo’s, as Achebe no doubt intends they should. As stated earlier, Achebe’s symbolic and allusive use of this tale as a structural device which reflects as it unifies is only one of many similar examples in Things Fall Apart. That all of

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them point toward the same general conclusion the^ need for retaining the best qualities of both the old ways and the new dispensation” — is good evidence of Achebe s control of his materials and of his technique, and of his willingness to take moral and ethical stands on the relative merits of the old and the new. Many readers may think that, in Gerald Moore’s words, Achebe refuses "to justify, explain or condemn, and that the final judgment of [traditional Ibo] life ... is left to us. * But rigorous attention to the novel’s language strongly suggests a very different interpretation. One mark of the true artist is his capacity for compassion and understanding. Achebe has this and displays it in abundance. But another mark of every fine novelist is his willingness to make the authoritative moral and ethical judgments he believes warranted by his clear hard look at life; and Chinua Achebe, superficial impressions to the con¬ trary, does this too. We need only learn how to look for the evidence; Nwoye’s beloved fable illustrates a basic lesson in how we may do so. University of California, Los Angeles

FOOTNOTES

1.

“Language and Theme in ‘Things Fall Apart’,” A Review of English Literature, V (Oct.,

1964), 39-43; Bernth Lindfors, in “The Palm-Oil with Which Chinua Achebe’s Words Are Eaten,” Bulletin of the Association for African Literature in English, Jan., 1968, deals with some of the functions of proverbial material in all four of Achebe’s novels. The soundest of the other commentaries on Achebe is Abiola Irele, “The Tragic Conflict in Achebe’s Novels,” Black Orpheus, No. 17 (June, 1965), 24-32. 2.

Lewis Nkosi, “Interview with Chinua Achebe,” Africa Report, IX (July, 1964), 19.

3.

Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1962; first published 1958), pp. 45-47.

Subsequent page references in the text are to this 1962 edition. 4.

Quoted with the kind permission of William Heinemann Ltd. and Astor-Honor, Inc.,

holders respectively of the British and American rights. 5.

J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), pp. 342-

343. The explanation seems to be that because the vulture feeds on carrion, it was identified with the Great Mother Nature, who also grew new life out of the decayed dead. Furthermore, birds have traditionally represented spiritual values in many societies; hence the Christchild, for example, is frequently portrayed in paintings with a bird in His hand. 6.

Seven African Writers (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 59.

Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart

Bu-Buakei Jabbi

Although Chinua Achebe’s “fundamental theme” as a beginning novelist was the neo-negritude assertion of dignity in the African past,1 which was of course legitimate as a matter of historical necessity, yet the focus of drama in his first novel may, rather, be said to be a society’s response to the complex challenge of contact with a colonizing cultural force. For the impressively proud African past which he depicts in Things Fall Apart is a people caught in the initial throes of contact with an imperial force which is self-righteously bent upon a civilizing mission. The impact of that force on the host culture, especially in the minds and lives of the indigenous Africans, is the plane of action on which the story unfolds its tragic drama. Culture, like life itself, is a dynamic or continuing process; and its quality often depends upon a people’s responses to evolutionary pressures from within or to stresses generated from outside through friction with new sets of values and institutional structures. Transition and change, and seldom stasis, usually result from such meetings between different cultures and peoples. And, for both society and the individual, the intriguing process of relative acculturation is often fraught with a good variety of modes of responses and consequences. Achebe himself has suggested the tragic possibilities inherent in such en¬ counters: “life just has to go on; and if you refuse to accept changes, then tragic though it may be, you are swept aside.”2 And that, more or less, is in fact the source of Okonkwo’s tragedy, the main character in the novel. Throughout the story Okonkwo indulges without restraint a personal misoneism which he seeks to impose upon the clan; he is hell-bent to avert change, to nip in the bud all new influences from outside, lest they enervate his society’s values. His sustained incapacity for adjustment or compromise sparks off his final tragedy. Okonkwo’s attempts to stand in the way of change and resist transition spring from the peculiar conditions of his character, shaped partly by communal elements in his environment. For some of his characteristic shortcomings are also shared by the clan as a whole. In spite of relative individual exceptions and the many evident values of Igbo traditional society in the novel, Umuofia still betrays a few traits or symptoms of rigidity and moral indifference in some of its customs. The shows of manliness which characterize Okonkwo’s actions are only one shade of a general streak in the beliefs and customs of his clansmen as a group. We may call it the manliness complex; but it involves a whole gamut of other attitudes and socio-cultural features over and above a mere preoccupation with strength and physical prowess as such. A complete embodiment of that complex, both in some of its best and some of its worst attributes, is Okonkwo himself. And, in connection with him, the image for it in the minds of the people is the “roaring flame” or “flaming fire.”3 Achebe borrows this image from the popular speech of

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the village and works it into a central artistic symbol with which to explore his subject and convey its meaning. And the imagery of fire or elemental heat accumulates considerable expressive and organizing power as the story unwinds. It symbolizes not only Okonkwo’s pride of strength and dignity, but his personal shortcomings as well. It is associated at points with the people’s own grandeur of achievements and aspirations; but here as well it lights up some of their areas of cultural weakness, namely, the streaks of violence and destructiveness which are finely ingrained in the traditional philosophy and institutions of these people. In both spiritual and secular affairs the image functions in this basically dual way. By means of it, especially as it relates to Okonkwo, the novel manages to suggest how, unchecked or indulged, the manliness complex may blaze into a veritable edax rerum, working out a sinister scheme of suicide and disintegration from within. The novel’s main thematic expression also seems to be achieved through the same symbol; that is, to put it crudely, the inevitability of change in a people’s cultural life. For Things Fall Apart seems to affirm transition as a historical imperative in the dynamics of culture. Human values, Achebe says elsewhere, are never “fixed and eternal. . . values are relative and in a constant state of flux.”4 But this imperative, demanding a delicate responsiveness or flexible tolerance of mind, does not function as a didactic or overt statement in the novel; it is at once the springboard of its dramatic conflicts and the source of its tragic consequence. Above all, the fire imagery interacts with a symbolism of water to define the desired quality or direction of that inevitable change. The occurrence of these interacting images in Achebe’s thinking outside the novels may serve to reinforce their significance. This is how he explains the relevance (to the verbal artist, as it were) of folkloric raw material in the society: The good orator calls to his aid the legends, folklore, proverbs, etc., of his people; they are some of the raw material with which he works. . . They are like dormant seeds lying in the dry-season earth, waiting for the rain. 5

As is suggested in the imagery of this final sentence, the generative symbolic interaction of these twin elemental phenomena in the novel is unlikely to be a mere fortuitous chance. Achebe s treatment of the image of fire in Things Fall Apart is just one measure of his artistic discipline and reaching after excellence in his narrative art. Among all the characters in that novel, it is Okonkwo whose nature and circumstances are most consistently depicted through an imagery of fire. The similes and metaphors which describe his deeds and thoughts spring from fire and related elements. Indeed, fire yields a steady flow of verbal imagery in which Okonkwo’s character is forged for us, shaping our attitude gradually towards him. His habitual temper and recurrent outbursts of feeling often find expression in fire imagery. His own thinking and speech are profusely strewn with metaphors from this basic stock. When the novel opens, his fame and prestige have seen a meteoric rise into lordship of the clan. The image is invoked here for the

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first time to describe this ascendance: “Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan” (p. 1). That he was chosen not only to go as “the proud and imperious emissary of war” to Mbaino (p. 10), but also to take care of the sacrificial hostage lad he brought back with him, was a mark of that fame and greatness. But the description of his greatness and achievements is perhaps the only instance where the fire imagery relates to Okonkwo without a smoke trail of pejorative suggestions. Almost all other uses refer to his character and temper, and with them an ironic eye is invited. Through them as well a tragic mood is increasingly conjured, for they evoke possibilities which seem to hover menacingly over almost every deed of Okonkwo. For instance, his wives and children “lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper” (p. 10). And throughout, he can hardly check his brusque impatience towards less successful men and his own family living under a big-stick discipline at home. Okonkwo scorned humility and open displays of gentle emotions. Of course, this lopsided personality was rooted in the shameful memory of a lazy father, a feckless debtor who had lived an improvident life and died an ignoble death, leaving his son none of the customary legacies to start him off. “And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion—to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness” (p. 11). Even before his father’s death Okonkwo had already started his grim struggle with life in search of success and prestige. His great strength and an “inflexible will” (p. 21) were weapons. But a basic human reaction of ambition soon gave way to a cultic obsession with manliness, especially in its harsher manifestations. Not only did anger and violent strength become, for him, the hall-marks of manliness; they also had to be repeatedly enacted as its own proof and assurance. All other emotions, he thought, should be repressed. “Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength” (p. 24). It is no wonder then that his characteristic utterances take shape in metaphors of thunder and threats of destruction. The open-air ogbanje therapy is rife with them. The understanding patience of Okagbue Uyanwa, true to the veteran psychiatrist, contrasts pointedly with Okonkwo’s impatient threats toward his own daughter. He either “swore furiously” or “roared at her.” “Okonkwo stood by, rumbling like thunder in the rainy season” (pp. 7376). On many other occasions we see him either threatening somebody or almost breathing fire (e.g., pp. 28, 136). Amadiora of the thunderbolt, by whom he often swore or cursed, was obviously Okonkwo’s most favored deity in the Umuofia pantheon. For Okonkwo is a loaded cannon of bottled-up emotion, easily ignited into a roaring flame, often by trivial happenings and seldom with due regard to circumstance or ceremony: “He, Okonkwo, was called a flaming fire” (p. 138). It is through his indulgence of the manliness complex that flaming fire comes to symbolize the clan’s own tendencies to violence and destructiveness. But he is more generally oblivious of the overall balance which the clan ideally maintains between manliness and its opposing principle, an ideal which can be traced from some of their customs and social structures.

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There is, for instance, the more or less consistent pattern of every male deity mediating with the people through a priestess and every female deity through a male agent. And then, also, the custom of return to the motherland (for burial or consolation) in cases of death, misfortune, or exile from the fatherland (pp. 118-120). It is Okonkwo’s ignorance of this balance that makes him overvalue manliness, setting up a false system of values as a personal ethic. Those moments when his fury erupts openly in the novel trace a general pattern of potential or realized violence. They are hierarchical scheme of aberrations which increase in enormity with every succeeding incident. And each one is an adumbration of his ultimate suicide, that final tragic “offence against the Earth” (p. 184) into which they all culminate. In addition, not only is each an assuring show of manliness, each is also almost irresistible, proceeding from very force of character. But they are also proof that Okonkwo is not completely at one with his own society. For, somehow, whenever there is a communal festivity, a public gathering, or an observance of sacred rites, Okonkwo commits some act of indiscretion or violence which blights the occasion and draws public disapproval upon his head. From his beating of his wife Ojiugo during the Week of Peace, through the accidental killing of Ezeudu’s son, to his killing of the whiteman’s messenger, that is the pattern of Okonkwo’s tragedy. Obierika and Ezeudu disapproved of his part in killing Ikemefuna for the same reason that these other deeds were abominable: “What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families” (pp. 58-59). And, as Achebe says in another context, these people believe that “there is a fundamental justice in the universe and nothing so terrible can hap¬ pen to a person for which he is not somehow responsible.” 6 Sometimes Okonkwo incurs a more painful and tragic punishment than mere condemnation—as in the case of the messenger, when he has to commit suicide, the crowning irony of an end he had struggled against all his life. Indeed, a relentless inevitability hangs over Okonkwo’s life, earning him deep sympathy without redeeming him. He may be a champion or embodiment of his clan’s customs, but he is not a complete epitome of their more or less rounded system of values, a balance which he tends to subvert. He is like the candle wick which burns out its own pith, but this time without giving out much light. But, still, his inadequacies exemplify to some extent the clan’s own central cultural malaise; that is, those cruel customs of ignorance perpetuated by them. Their attitude towards twins, or the dead ogbanje child, and towards lads offered by offending neighbors who would avoid the bloodshed of war, is evidence of this: “The Earth had decreed that they were an offence on the land and must be destroyed” (112). Like Okonkwo’s own shows of strength, these are also “silent and dusty chords in the heart of an Ibo man”(p. 131). They are shades or manifestations of the general manliness complex which gnaws at the heart of Umuofia civilization. Here, however, Achebe is only presenting the past with all its imperfections.”7 But those imperfections are not just testimony to “the writer’s integrity;” 8 they also enter actively into the

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novel’s imaginative logic and its general scheme of plot development. These weaknesses play an important part in the acceptance and spread of Christianity among the people. They are a moral blind-spot which the missionaries soon discover as an object for attack, thereby providing the initial paths or inroads into the people’s cohesiveness. And the place of the white man’s appearance in the moral scheme of the novel is that, in spite of its considerable long-term havoc, it helps to spark off a crisis of values in the cultural life of the people, one which constantly calls for a kind of resolution or reconcilement. It seems that this is a legitimate way to assess the aesthetic relevance of a writer’s background stuff. Their unfamiliar or esoteric nature should not be allowed to put off a critic too soon; for unfamiliarity is no intrinsic attribute of things, but is always in relation to, or a reflection of, some observer’s own ignorance. In a work of literary art, therefore, the role of a so-called unfamiliar element may be assessed in its relationship to the style and structure, its contribution to the distinctive tone and quality, of the work in question and to its place in the drama of values which is enacted. In this section so far we have discussed fire mainly as a source of verbal imagery, that is, as a mine for similes and metaphors which help to reveal and evaluate both character and theme. But this presupposes no presence of actual fires in the novel’s world itself. A novel, however, usually deals with literal details of background and living experience, in visible or tangible elements which may or may not be prodded to yield images. That is, sometimes the details are purely for “that effect of concrete particularity which is a staple of the novel form.” 9 Obviously, fire and thunder were as much a part of the tropical rural life of Umuofia as they are for us today. But sometimes such physical details in a novel may function beyond the superficial level of realistic description and literal fact. To quote David Lodge again: The selection and ordering of these surrogates must have an aesthetic motive and an aesthetic effect, though both writer and reader may be to some extent unconscious of the processes involved. 10 Perhaps “must” implies here too much of an imperative in a matter which is more or less relative. However, while elements of background, setting, or atmosphere need not operate extraliterally in a work of art, they do sometimes reveal a tempting tendency in that direction in the hands of certain craftsmen. Now, these are some of the details which Achebe calls “the supporting scenery” of a story.11 This phrase probably implies that they may also support the story aesthetically, say, by helping it to attain internal structural coherence and evocative depth, or perhaps merely to instill a distinctive quality and timbre associated with the society being depicted. They may therefore be used with changing effects from story to story. It is partly in such a sense that Achebe may claim to have utilized in both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God basically the same background or scenery to write about the same society and yet produce stories which are the “exact opposite.” 12 In the rest of this section, therefore, we will try to investigate at least

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one example of Achebe’s use of the realistic physical surface of life in the novel for such non-literal effects of art. Generally, it is a use of concrete imagery, as distinct from mere verbal imagery. It may consist, among other things, in real happenings, gestures, or deeds, and also in features of landscape, weather, the elements, or physical objects, which are present in the novel primarily as an obvious literal fact, but which are also invested with symbolic dimensions through the artist’s contextual handling of them, Garrett says: “Symbolism” here means not a theoretical outlook but the use of symbols, which, as they appear in the novel, I take to be images, objects, events, or complexes of these which are both literal and suggestive of further, usually more abstract, meaning. Such meaning may range from the most explicit to the most ambiguous and indefinite. I shall consider a symbol’s associations as primarily grounded not just in universal human experience (which would define the symbol as archetype), or in particular historical conventions, but in the context created by the individual work. A symbol’s meaning will be considered primarily as the function of its place in the structure of the internal relations between the component elements of a novel. 13

One discovers in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that its realistic details sometimes become symbolic without giving up their literal or physical bases; for surface fact is hardly ever completely sacrificed on the altar of symbolic propensity. His art is ever so concealed! Before we analyze the novel’s use of purely concrete symbolism, however, we may mention a set of references to fire and water which oscillate delicately in a sort of no-man’s land between the two types of imagery we have outlined. In these cases, one is not so sure which of them is operating, whether it is only one of them or both of them at once. These innominate uses refer mainly to certain points of glory and grandeur in the life of the clan, and some of them further on show how Okonkwo is sometimes closely identified with, but at other times distanced from, the life of the community. Wrestling, war, and the egwugwu cult, all of them pre-eminent sources of pride and achievement for these people, are illustrative instances. First, their martial life. In times of peace, war-dresses are usually hung over the fireplace. And during ceremonial observances, and probably in war as well, the warriors “all wore smoked raffia skirts and their bodies were painted with chalk and charcoal” (pp. 108, 177). War, as we know, was both Okonkwo’s personal vocation and the greatest single cause of Umuofia’s fearful fame abroad. But it is wrestling, their other brand of physical prowess, that reveals a more significant relationship with the element of fire in the novel. Wrestling is even more properly Okonkwo’s natural and vital element. And it is communally cultivated as a true virtue of manliness in (Jmuofia. Deft moves and corresponding shouts of applause at a wrestling contest are described in metaphors of thunder and fire. Here is the final moment of a memorable contest: Quick as the lightning of Amadiora, Okafo raised his right leg and swung it over his rival’s head. The crowd burst into a thunderous

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roar. Okafo was swept off his feet by his supporters and carried home shoulder-high. (p. 44)

It is through such effects of imagery and shared experience that points of identity between Okonkwo and his society are lighted up from time to time. Then, also there is between Okonkwo, Ekwefi, and Ezinma a bond of fondness, understanding and rapport which sometimes subdues his tantrums of fury and also bears out his warmth of heart. There is an interesting but minor relation between this rapport and the general imagery of fire (pp. 34-39). Ezinma is making a fire for Nwoye’s mother and we are aware of her eagerness to go to the New Year’s wrestling contest, as her idea of the “twitching eye-lid” shows (p. 35): She went on fanning it until it burst into flames. . .Just then the distant beating of drums began to reach them. . . The drums beat the unmistakable wrestling dance. . .Okonkwo cleared his throat and moved his feet to the beat of the drums. It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth. . .It throbbed in the air, in the sunshine, and even in the trees, and filled the village with excitement, (pp. 36-38)

The contest itself has always been for Ekwefi, Ezinma’s mother, the climactic point in each year’s round of festivals (p. 34). And for Okonkwo it had been both a means of self-realization (p. 1) and an obvious influence on his view of life. Ezinma’s flaming fire seems to be an outward index to her own growing (and even her parents’ accustomed) anxiety to see the wrestling match. And that mutual eagerness is only an instance of the entire society’s ever-intense ritual involvement with this traditional ceremony of transition. A more balanced oscillation between verbal and concrete imagery appears in the treatment of the egwugwu cult. And here again the points of identity and difference between Okonkwo and Umuofia are underscored through the imagery. As custodians of law and order and ultimate dispensers of justice in the clan, the egwugwu are sometimes superior instruments of punishment or vengeance (pp. 164-170). Each of them had a “smoked raffia body,” and “charred teeth.” Their leader, Evil Forest, often “roars.” Also, a “steady cloud of smoke rose from his head.” But, significantly Evil Forest was also called “Fire-that-burns-without-faggots” (pp. 79-83). This smoldering fire is unlike Okonkwo’s own sobriquet, “Flaming-fire.” The leading egwugwu is also a traditional restorer of order and moderation (pp. 108-110). Another egwugwu is a one-handed spirit, “carrying a basket full of water” (p. 110). He would pour this as it were on aberrant tendencies and violent frenzies during public rituals, for they always abated on his entry. We thus see enshrined in this cult an awe-inspiring power and glory, an ethos of moderation and a restorative influence, all of which inhere in a faintly suggestive fire¬ water imagery. Ajofia’s offer of tolerance to the white man (p. 170) is as typical of the clan itself as it is uncharacteristic of Okonkwo as a person. Even the people’s initial offhand or amused resignation, with the blind trust that the clan’s gods would fight their own offenders, is only a manifestation of their patience and general spirit of accommodation (pp. 129-145). Ironically, however, this popular temper would help to speed

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up their “falling apart” and its attendant moral crisis. In any case, this instance of symbolism is another way of assimilating the esoteric to art in fiction. Of course, as we have already said, unfamiliarity itself is more a function of the observer’s own state of knowledge than an intrinsic attribute of social customs. A writer who parades it for mere advertisement is an exhibitionist, together with the critic who is awake to this mode of depiction alone. But, equally, a critic who scorns or ignores it simply because it is strange to him is abandoning his role out of a type of prejudice. When we come to the instances of a purely concrete symbolism of fire, we see that they often either occur at a point of crisis or may merely presage some impending change in the life of a character or the clan as a whole. These are instances where the fire is obviously a literal presence, and yet it also serves a distinctively non-literal function without merely being a source of simile or metaphor. It may be the fire for cooking or for warming oneself in the home, as in Ezinma’s flaming fire above. Or perhaps the funeral glowing brand in paying the last respects to great men of the clan (p. 109). The use of fire for communal vengeance is perhaps more pertinent here as an instance of symbolic resonance. For example, when Okonkwo inadvertantly killed a clansman: They set fire to his houses, demolished his red walls, killed his animals and destroyed his barn. It was the justice of the earth goddess. . .They were merely cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman, (p. Ill)

This is an act of effacement which underscores the fact of exile and leaves it in no doubt. And here we see how the spiritual and the mundane are often so closely connected in Umuofia. For this punitive vendetta is also an act of purification, a virtual fertility rite in the customary farming life of the community. But the ritual is also a symbolic enactment of what we have already diagnosed, a predilection to violence and destructiveness. It would become the first cause of direct humiliation by the white man. (pp. 168-177) The hearth-place is conventionally the scene for handing down the wisdom and literary heritage of the clan. But this domestic phenomenon is imbued with religious overtones when we see its counterpart in the shrine of Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. The fire is unlike that associated with Okonkwo; but it is essentially like the leading egwugwu’s head of smoldering fire. “The fire did not burn with a flame.” (p. 13) It is a sacred fire which lights up crucial moments of insight, revelation and foreknowledge for the worshipping onlooker. It lends an awe-inspiring aura and a divine infallibility to the proclamations of the priestess. As had been the case with Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, these are sometimes moments of acute self-analysis or disenchantment, (p. 14) And Okonkwo’s own domestic fire serves a similar function in one of the novel’s central effulgences of meaning. It is the night following Nwoye’s desertion or conversion: As Okonkwo sat in his hut that night, gazing into a log fire, he thought over the matter. A sudden fury rose within him and he felt a strong desire to take up his matchet, go to the church and wipe out

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the entire vile and miscreant gang. But on further thought he told himself that Nwoye u>as not worth fighting for. . .Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. . . He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days, and his children the while praying to the white man’s god. If such a thing were ever to happen, he, Okonkwo, would wipe them off the face of the earth. Okonkwo was popularly called the “Roaring Flame”. As he looked into the log fire he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate?. . . He, Okonkwo, was called a flaming fire. How could he have begotten a woman for a son?. . . He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smouldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply, (pp. 137-138)

Okonkwo obviously associates flame with manliness, and the smoldering fire with its passing away. Like the whole clan, he is sitting here on the promontory of a dilemma, face to face with inevitable change, but unable to arrest or direct its drift. The smoldering log suddenly crystallizes into a symbol of that historical process. It seems to lend Okonkwo some clairvoyance, though what he sees takes the color of his befogged hyperpatriotic lens. He “saw clearly in it” the threatened extinction of the clan’s cultural heritage; it was a “terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation.” (p. 137) He sees the impending change as too radical a shift of cultural center, a necessary enervation of moral fiber, and a devaluation of spiritual fervor. “Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.” If this should not be denied the name of insight, it is at least fuzzy and stilted; for Okonkwo is blind to any prospects of a balanced synthesis or accommodation. In fact, the conversion of Nwoye, towards which Okonkwo reacts with these temptations to violence, is a positive step towards that synthesis. For a long time Nwoye has been disturbed by instances of insensitivity in the life of the clan. The inward impact of conversion in his soul is presented with sharp symbolic force: The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled, (p. 132)

Nwoye has not at all reached a final synthesis; nor is he even conscious of deliberately moving towards such an ultimate goal. But his conversion, though again it is neither requisite nor adequate in itself in the search for adjustment of values, is nevertheless a first step towards it. The image of rain water falling with relief on the sun-baked earth, which describes the import of that step, is one of the recurring images in the

144

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

novel. Its previous occurrences are, in fact, symbolized foreshadowings of that ultimate denouncement towards which Nwoye has started himself off. And just as Okonkwo’s tragic end had been prefigured a few times before, so is Nwoye’s effort at a reconcilement of values anticipated repeatedly in a few symbolic incidents. The first drought in the novel (pp. 19-21) is a joint symbolization of the two types of anticipation. The “blazing sun” (p. 10) of the drought is imaginatively associated with Okonkwo’s “flaming fire.” So are both of these with the subsequent “violent torrents” (p. 20), that is, within the total structure of the novel. And what is emphasized in each case is the life-destroying propensity of all three through sheer immoderacy, Okonkwo being someone “who never did things in halves.” (p. 148) For only if “the rain became less violent,” followed by the usual “spell of sunshine which always came in the middle of the wet season,” would a good yield be assured, (p. 20) Indeed, that year “the harvest was sad, like a funeral. . . One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself.” (p. 20) But this is obviously adumbrative more of Okonkwo’s suicide than of Nwoye’s crucial conversion. By far the most powerful anticipation of that spiritual rebirth is the second miniature drought which greeted Okonkwo’s initial efforts at rehabilitation in Mbanta: At last the rain came. It ioas sudden and tremendous. For two or three moons the sun had been gathering strength till it seemed to breathe a breath of fire on the earth. All the grass had long been scorched brown, and the sands felt like Hue coals to the feet. Evergreen trees wore dusty coat of brown. The birds were silenced in the forests, and the world lay panting under the live, vibrating heat. And then came the clap of thunder. It was an angry, metallic and thirsty clap, unlike the deep and liquid rumbling of the rainy season. A mighty wind arose and filled the air with dust. Palm trees swayed as the wind combed their leaves into flying crests like strange and fantastic coiffure. When the rain finally came, it was in large, solid drops of frozen water which the people called ‘‘the nuts of the water of heaven”. They were hard and painful on the body as they fell, yet young people ran about happily picking up the cold nuts and throwing them into their mouths to melt. The earth quickly came to life and the birds in the forests fluttered around and chirped merrily. A vague scent of life and green vegetation was diffused in the air. As the rain began to fall more soberly and in smaller liquid drops, children sought for shelter, and all were happy, refreshed and thankful, (p. 116)

There is an irony inherent in Okonkwo’s struggles against these droughts as a farmer. An elemental counterpart of his own life’s guiding principle poses a dilemma or threat of failure to him from time to time. But as a man of action rather than thought, he is nowhere aware of the sinister possibilities cryptically suggested in the irony. Here, however, we see once more his twin favorites: the breath of flame of fire and thunder, again with their scorching effects upon life. And there is the rain cloud, bringing its promise of welcome change. And, finally, the life-inspiring

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rain itself, with its relief as it begins “to fall more soberly and in smaller liquid drops.” This is the ideal planting season in both Umuofia and Mbanta when sunshine and rain alternate without being violent. All the main symbols in the novel coalesce into this fabulous vignette in order to achieve a microcosm of the novel’s wider structure of events. The entire passage is a very paradigm, an enacted drama almost, of the novel’s moral cosmogony. It is an effective imaginative projection of that ultimate adjustment and accommodation towards which Nwoye would start himself off through conversion. But, of course, conversion itself is neither a necessary means nor a sufficient guarantee and proof of that process. And that synthesis of values is achieved nowhere in the novel, at least not in the sense of an historical event. Nwoye may embrace Christianity; or we may find the people becoming increasingly accommodating towards the white religion and influences. But these are budding signs which only presage, rather than realize, that final synthesis. If anything, we see that realization only in the interactions between the fire and water images, in the procreative intercourse of these elements which symbolizes and repeatedly foreshadows Nwoye’s conversion. This is realization in a preeminently aesthetic or imaginative sense. It is more a pointer to possibilities than a dramatization of observable social facts. And that is probably because, to work a synthesis of values out of a conflict of different cultures requires in the long run a real force of imagination. Achebe himself has said that such processes can hardly be completed either immediately or in a straight progression. He holds out a cautious optimism about the evolution of values in a society: unfortunately when two cultures meet, you would expect, if we were angels shall we say, we could pick out the best in the other and retain the best in our own, and this would be wonderful. But this doesn’t happen often.. .and I am not being so naive as to thir k that the progress is in one direction. You see, there are halts, there are even backward steps and so on. . But if you take a long view of society, you will see . . . that society is, in fact adjusting 14

The “wonderful” and the “long view” are depicted through the symbolic interactions we have outlined for they define for us the direction and quality of the needed change. Even by the time of the final crisis in the novel, the process of adjustment is still in its infancy.

Conclusion This paper argues and attempts to present a balance between two critical approaches to African literature, that is, the one through the analy¬ sis of content or themes and the other through a close examination of the writer’s craftmanship. For that balance is actually an intrinsic blend in literature itself. And we have had to go to one of the earliest works of African writing in order to make our points. The paper thus identifies the inevitability of transition as a controlling theme in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and then it tries to see how imagery and symbolism help to convey this theme together with the character and dilemma of those people who

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

146

have to come to terms with it or duck under. The direction and quality of the change itself are also defined, again as these appear to be expressed through elements of style in the novel. The whole effort has been partly defensive, suggesting that this novel is a work of literary art which demands, indeed deserves and sustains attention from the critic. In addition, however, one hopes the effort will be of general relevance not only to the canon of Achebe’s novels, but to the wider cause of modern African writing. Hitherto, African literature has often had to be defended against either the critic who had little faith in it, or those who innocently regard it as a mere sociological handmaid, and sometimes even against those well-meaning patrons who accord it a mere gratuitous compliment. But, certainly, there is now an appreciable body of serious literature by African writers for the criticism of it to give riddance to a mere defensive pose. That is, criticism of African literature can surely afford to become truly literary and exploratory. Of course, here and there this trend has already set in, though it has yet to be firmly established and also be widely applied to the various areas of African writing today. In this process it would be rewarding to appropriate at least one assumption in the criticism of fiction proposed by Mark Schorer: criticism must begin with the simplest assertion: fiction is a literary art. It must begin with a base of language, with the word, with figurative structures, with rhetoric as skeleton and style as body of meaning. 15

Criticism would do well to remember that a work of fiction is a structure of meaning. Life and experience are, of course, its native subject matter, but it is seldom a mere transcription of them. But this goes as much for the writer himself as for the critic of his literary artifacts. Both of them owe that as a debt to the growth of a strong tradition of African writing today.

NOTES 1 Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine, 81(1964), 157. 2 African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews, ed. Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 14. 3 Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 137-38. All page references are to this edition. 4

“The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” p. 158.

5 “Foreword,” in A Selection of African Prose, Vol. 1, ed. W. H. Whiteley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. viii. 6 Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 97. 7

“The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,”

8

Ibid., p.

p. 158.

9 David Lodge, The Language of Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 122.

CHINUA ACHEBE

10

Ibid., p. 46.

11

African Writers Talking, p. 16.

12

Ibid.

13 P. K. Garrett, Scene and Symbol from George Eliot to James Joyce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 9-10. 14

African Writers Talking, pp. 13, 14, 17.

15 Mark Schorer, “Fiction and the ‘Matrix of Analogy’,” Kenyon Review, 11(1949), 539.

147

No Longer at Ease

Language as a Theme in No Longer at Ease FELICITY RIDDY A year before war broke out in Nigeria the novelist Chinua Achebe wrote, to a group of people concerned with English teaching in Nigeria, that he knew of ... no serious weight of opinion today against the continued presence of English on the Nigerian scene. This is fortunate for our peace of mind for it means we can believe in the value of English to the very survival of the Nigerian nation'without feeling like deserters. Thus we can use our energies constructively in the important task of extending the frontiers of the language to cover the whole area of our Nigerian consciousness while at the same time retaining its world-wide currency.1 Nor was this a new theme. On a previous occasion, for example, Achebe had spoken of the need for ‘. . . a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new African surroundings’.2 The implications of these remarks are obvious, and are not entirely invalidated by the current plight of the Federation: the vernacular tongues of Nigeria lack universality in a country made up of diverse peoples and orientated towards the rest of Africa and the world at large; and yet English, though as an international language essential to Nigerian nationhood, has not yet fully adapted itself to the Nigerian scene. Less obvious perhaps is the relevance of all this to Achebe’s second novel No Longer at Ease, and yet it is precisely this situation that confronts Obi Okonkwo: none of the languages available to him is adequate to express the urban experience. Furthermore, in this book languages are closely related to values; English and Ibo are not merely different ways of saying the same thing, but vehicles for expressing completely different attitudes to life. Where one language or the other proves inadequate, so for the same reasons do the values it represents. The tension between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ in the educated West African has been described elsewhere 1 Nigeria English Studies Association bulletin, x (1966), p. 9. 2 Chinua Achebe, The English Language and the African Writer, mimeo¬ graphed text of lecture delivered at University of Ghana, Legon, April 1964.

CHINUA ACHEBE

151

by the poet and playwright John Pepper Clark: The great complication, perhaps, for the West African elite brought up in a system not quite British is that he swims in a stream of double currents, one traditional, the other modern. Both currents do not completely run parallel; in fact, they are often in conflict. Accordingly, you are likely to find him at church or mosque in the morning and in the evening taking a title at home that carries with it sacrifice of some sort to his ancestors and community gods. In the same manner, a man however ‘detribalized’ and successful in his city career and profession, will not outgrow the most backward member of his family.3

Obi Okonkwo is what Clark calls ‘a citizen of two worlds’. As the first person in his village to receive a university education and a post in the senior service, his future seems assured in a Nigeria approaching independence. The difficulties which confront and finally overcome him stem from his inability to identify himself wholly with either the traditional or the modern way of life, and his lack of a sense of identity is most clearly reflected in his speech. Achebe uses on occasion two different styles, particularly in con¬ versation, to distinguish between the Ibo and English tongues.4 On the one hand, Ibo is represented by a cadenced, proverb-laden style similar to that in Things Ball Apart and Arrow of God, to which Professor Eldred Jones has drawn attention,5 rich in images drawn from tra¬ ditional rural life. It is the rhetorical manner of ‘men who made a great art of conversation’: Here is a little child returned from wrestling in the spirit world and you sit there blabbing about Christian house and idols, talking like a man whose palm-wine has gone into his nose.6 If a man returns from a long journey and no one says mo to him he feels like one who has not arrived.7 3 J. P. Clark, ‘Poetry in Africa Today’, Transition (Kampala, Uganda), 18 (1965), p. 24. . 4 Also noted by B. Lindfors in ‘The Palm Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten’, African Literature Todaj, 1 (1968), pp. 3-18. 5 E. Jones, ‘Language and Theme in Things Tall Apart', A Review of English Literature, V, 4 (1964), pp. 37 ff. and ‘Achebe’s Third Novel’, JCL, 1 (1965), pp. 176-8. 6 No Longer at Ease, H.E.B. (African Writers Series), 1963, p. 51. 7 ibid., p. 81.

152

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

That is why I say a black man who marries a white woman wastes his time. Her stay with him is like the stay of the moon in the sky. When the time comes she will go.* Greatness has belonged to Iguedo from ancient times. It is not made by man. You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Whoever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.9

They are also men who make an art of living, and the ‘Ibo’ style not only stands for a mode of speech but also symbolizes a whole way of life: ceremonial, ordered, governed by traditional wisdom and rooted in the soil. It is the way of life practised by the Christians and the adherents of the old religion of Umuofia alike. Both retain, for example, an ele¬ ment of ritual in daily living in the ceremonial breaking of kola. In fact, Christianity has not swept aside the traditions of Umuofian society as completely as it seemed about to do in Things Fall Apart-, in certain areas it has accommodated itself to them. The most obvious example of this is in the scandalized reaction of Isaac Okonkwo, the catechist, to his son’s proposed marriage to an osu or outcast; his wife had long since come to a compromise over the matter of teaching pagan folk-tales to her children. The element of syncretism in Umuofian Christianity finds expression, fittingly enough, in a syncretic style half ‘Biblical’, half ‘Ibo’. This is displayed early in the novel, when Hannah Okonkwo’s friend Mary leads the prayers at the meeting held before Obi’s departure to England: ‘Oh God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob,’ she burst forth, ‘the Beginning and the End. Without you we can do nothing. The great river is not big enough for you to wash your hands in. You have the yam and you have the knife; we cannot eat unless you cut us a piece. We are like ants in your sight. We are like little children who only wash their stomach when they bath, leaving their back dry . . .’,0

After this glimpse into the nature of Umuofian Christianity it is not altogether surprising when, much later on, Isaac Okonkwo not only draws naturally on the Biblical analogy of Naaman to defend the osu »ibid., p. ibid., p. 10 ibid., p. 9

53. 54. 9.

CHINUA ACHEBE

153

system, but also describes the consequences of marriage to an osu in a manner which reveals a less conscious identification of Christian and pagan thought: Osu is like leprosy in the minds of our people. I beg of you, my son, not to bring the mark of shame and of leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generations will curse your memory.11

If, as Dr Abiola Irele has suggested, the paramount virtue in Things Tall Apart was manliness,12 in No Eonger at Ease the main emphasis has shifted on to what might be termed ‘brotherliness’, a sense that one’s primary obligations are to one’s kinsmen, both within the family circle and beyond it in the clan. The proverb, ‘anger against a brother is felt in the flesh, not the bone’, is quoted on more than one occasion, and the theme is repeated in the pagan song that Obi hears outside his father’s house: He that has a brother must hold him to his heart. For a kinsman cannot be bought in the market, Neither is a brother bought with money.13

The Umuofia Progressive Union is itself a product of this sense of kinship; it was as a result of communal effort that Obi was sent to England in the first place, and when he has gained his post in the senior service it is assumed that his prestige will reflect (in a strictly practical way) on his kinsmen. The sense of brotherliness takes an external form in the sharing of a common language, as Obi realizes at an early stage in his relationship with Clara: ‘But then she had spoken in Ibo, for the first time, as if to say, “We belong together: we speak the same language.” ’*♦ In attempting to bribe Obi, Air Mark addresses him in Ibo to establish the same point. But there is a moment when brother¬ liness becomes exclusiveness (as with the treatment of the osu), and an incident like that in which a hostile policeman’s manner changes abruptly when he realizes that Obi and Clara are, like himself, Ibo, reveals how kinship may be abused in a larger society not based on kin. Just as the Ibo language is strictly limited in its currency, so the traditional way of life has parallel limitations, as Achebe’s occasionally overt satire reveals: ibid., p. 133. A. Irele, ‘Chinua Achebe: The Tragic Conflict in Achebe’s Novels’, Black Orpheus, 17 (1965), pp. 24-32. 13 No Longer at Ease, p. 129. o ibid., p. 25. 11

12

154

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Mr Jkedi had come to Umuofia from a township, and was able to tell the gathering how wedding feasts had been steadily declining in the towns since the invention of invitation cards. Many of his hearers whistled in unbelief when lie told them that a man could not go to his neighbour’s wedding unless he was given one of those papers on which they wrote R.S.V.P. - Rice and Stew Very Plenty - which was invariably an over-statement.15

This minor incident serves to illuminate a larger truth, that urban life has complexities of which traditional society has no comprehension. Obi cannot begin to explain his financial predicament to his clansmen when, faced with a fifty-pound debt to Clara and the bill for an abortion, he has to simplify his situation into terms they can understand in order to be relieved of his obligations to them: He would just stop paying and, if they asked him why, he would say he had some family commitments which he must clear first. Everyone understood family commitments and would sympathize. If they didn’t it was just too bad. They would not take a kinsman to court, not for that kind of reason anyway.'6

His education seems to have emancipated Obi from the restricted world of the clan, and he continually flouts its conventions, not only by planning to marry an osu but in smaller things as well. He turns up to the welcome meeting in the wrong kind of clothes; he sleeps at Joseph’s rather than at a hotel; he announces his intention to Joseph of ignoring the bride-price tradition, and so on. Finally he proposes to challenge the whole basis on which the clan rests, the bond of kinship: Obi knew better than anyone else that his family would violently oppose the idea of marrying an osu. Who wouldn’t? But for him it was either Clara or nobody. Family ties were all very well as long as they did not interfere with Clara.'7

But he over-estimates his own resources. He is ultimately unable to reject the strongest tie of all, with his mother, and through her with the clan. His position is not unlike that of one of J. P. Clark’s elite: ‘A man, however “detribalized” and successful . . . will not outgrow the most backward member of his family.’ Hannah Okonkwo is not ‘the most backward member’ of Obi’s family in Clark’s sense, but she does present the most extreme statement of traditional opposition to Obi’s plans. The strength of the blood-tie of brotherliness and kinship is symbolized by an incident in Obi’s childhood when his mother cut herself on a razor-blade he had left in his pocket: ibid., p. io. ibid., p. 156. ■7 ibid., p. 75.

15

16

CHINUA ACHEBE

155

For some reason or other, whenever Obi thought affectionately of his mother, his mind went back to that shedding of her blood. It bound him very firmly to her.*8

It is ironic that Obi, forced to choose between his mother and Clara (between traditional and modern values in fact) should, by default, choose his mother, when he is himself the son and grandson of men who rejected their fathers. But both Okonkwo and his son Isaac found a source of strength in alternative codes to those by which their fathers lived: Okonkwo, with his belief in his own prowess, was able to identify with the prevailing mores of the clan against his father’s non¬ conformist weakness; Isaac Okonkwo found in Christianity’s tolerance of the meek support for his sense of repugnance at his father’s cruelty. Obi has no such support. He is faced on the one hand with a set of values that demand Clara’s rejection as an osu, and on the other with a set of values which, while appearing rational and ‘modern’, reveals itself as giving support to a caste system as invidious as that practised by traditional Ibo society, and yet, it seems, equally compatible with Christianity. Obi’s relationship with his people is paralleled in his attitude to¬ wards his native language. He has lost control over it. He stumbles over the prayers in his father’s house. When he is searching for an apt proverb, Clara tells him, ‘I have always said you should go and study Ibo.’ The second time he addresses the Umuofia Progressive Union he begins in Ibo but is unable to sustain it. Nevertheless he still derives a sense of pride from his language and the way of life it represents: Let them come to Umuofia now and listen to the talk of men who made a great art of conversation. Let them come and see men and women and children who knew how to live, whose joy of life had not yet been killed by those who claimed to teach other nations how to live.1*

He takes no such pride in English, which, as his second language and the subject he studied for his degree, is available to him in two forms: in the intercourse of colonial society and in English literature. English conversation, in contrast to Ibo, has no distinctive rhetoric. It is laconic, almost abrupt: ‘Come in, Clara. Come in, Obi,’ he said as if he had known both of them all his life. ‘That is a lovely car. How is it behaving? Come right in. You are looking very sweet, Clara. We haven’t met, Obi, but I know all about you. I’m happy you are getting married to Clara. Sit down. Anywhere . . .’2°

ibid., p. 76.

ibid., pp. 49-50.

20 ibid., p. 67.

156

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

‘Hello, Peter. Hello, Bill.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘May I join you ?’ ‘Certainly.’ ‘Most certainly. What are you drinking? Beer? Right Steward. One beer for this master.’ ‘What kind, sir?’ ‘Heineken.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘We were talking about this young man who took a bribe.’ ‘Oh yes.’21

The unceremoniousness of this kind of talk coincides with the casual¬ ness of relationships in colonial urban society and its lack, for Obi at least, of the genuine sense of community out of which ceremony grows. European corporate life finds its only manifestation in the club; in the first chapter of the book the club and the Progressive Union are portrayed as two parallel groups of exiles striving to preserve their identities. In fact European Lagos as a whole is symbolized for Obi by the club (a club that is more like a secret society) whose members are all engaged in an elaborate masquerade. It has a language of its own; one must either speak it or consider oneself expelled. Having laboured in sweat and tears to enrol their kinsman among the shining dlite, they had to keep him there. Having made him a member of an exclusive club whose members greet one another with ‘How’s the car behaving?’ did they expect him to turn round and answer ‘I’m sorry, but my car is off the road. You see I couldn’t pay my insurance premium.’ ? That would be letting the side down in a way that was quite unthinkable. Almost as unthinkable as a masked spirit in the old Ibo society answering another’s esoteric salutation: ‘I’m sorry, my friend, but I don’t understand your strange language. I’m but a human being wearing a mask.’ No, these things could not be.22

Obi has been admitted to the club because of his talents, but his mem¬ bership is precarious. When he endeavours to speak its language he is in a sense acting out a part; his financial difficulties are exacerbated, if not caused, by his attempts to maintain his role and supply the answers expected of him. Language is no longer a tool but a master. Even the Hon. Sam Okoli, who seems so much at ease among the trappings of colonial society, and who gives the esoteric salutation with such urbane assurance (‘That’s a lovely car. How is it behaving?’) reveals 21 ,2

ibid., p. ibid., p.

4. 98.

CHINUA ACHEBE

157

himself on occasion as less than certain about his own predicament. ‘White men done go far. We just de shout for nothing’, he says to Obi at their first meeting. Momentarily he speaks not as a member of the club but as an outsider, and it is significant that in doing so he drops its language and switches into pidgin, the lingua franca of the un¬ educated. In a somewhat similar fashion Obi deliberately uses an unEnglish pronunciation in order to dissociate himself from expatriate attitudes, when, at a restaurant with Joseph, he is served European instead of Nigerian food: Then he added in English for the benefit of the European group that sat at the next table: ‘I am sick of boiled potatoes.’ By calling them boiled he hoped he had put into it all the disgust he felt.2^ The uncertainty of both Obi and the Hon. Sam Okoli about their position in colonial society stems largely from its exclusiveness. Apart from the marked difference in their speech patterns, there is very little to choose between Isaac Okonkwo on the subject of Clara’s father and Mr Green on Africans in general. Isaac speaks of Clara’s father: He is a good man and a great Christian. But he is osu. Naaman, captain of the host of Syria, was a great man and honourable, he was also a mighty man of valour, but he was a leper.2* Of Africans, Mr Green says: They are all corrupt . . . I’m all for equality and all that. I for one would hate to live in South Africa. But equality won’t alter facts.2* Nigerians may take their degrees, gain places in the senior service and learn to talk the right language, but they are still open to insults from Mr Green and Irish girls are still warned away from them by the nuns. Nevertheless, there are indications that even among the Europeans there is a discrepancy between the genuine impulse and the formal attitudes that they are required to adopt. It is most glaring in the case of the two Irish girls whose friendship with Obi and Christopher comes to so abrupt an end, but even in the paternalistic Mr Green may be sensed a certain tension: He is quite different at home. Do you know he pays school fees for his steward’s sons? But he says the most outrageous things about educated Africans.26 2J ibid., p. 34. ** ibid., p. 133.

2> ibid., p. 3. 26 ibid., p. 104.

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Material possessions are the mark of the elite, and European values are directed towards maintaining external appearances. The cardinal sin is ‘letting the side down’, being found out. When Obi is finally arrested and tried it is the Union, not the club, that stands by him; colonial society closes its ranks against him, even though — ‘You think white men don’t eat bribe? Come to our department. They eat more than black men nowadays.’*7 English as a medium of exchange is inadequate for Obi because its formulas inhibit genuine self-expression: decorum governs speech just as etiquette governs behaviour. Consequently Obi’s political idealism is not translated into action, but instead is finally compromised by society’s demands upon him. He challenges the values of Umuofia from the vantage point of English; to challenge those of Lagos would mean ‘fashioning out a new tongue’. But spoken English is not the only form of the language that ‘fails to cover the whole area of. . . Nigerian consciousness’, since in writing his own poetry Obi draws on the tradition of English literature in which he has been educated. Joseph Warton’s The Charms of Nature and Wordsworth’s The Prelude lie somewhere behind ‘How sweet it is to lie beneath a tree’,28 but in Obi’s poem nature is merely a means of localizing nostalgia. His failure to take account of the ugly realities of the Lagos slums reveals itself in the evasiveness of his poeticizing language and in the clumsy blank verse rhythm, neither of which bears any relation to a contemporary Nigerian form of speech. When he rejects the poem with the words, ‘I have tasted putrid flesh in the spoon. Far more apt’, he is in effect substituting something more like the manner of Eliot for that of Wordsworth, and yet it is not the style of either but the achievement of both, in relating poetry to speech, which is most directly relevant to his situation. Obi’s other poem, ‘God bless our noble fatherland’, has similar failings. It traces its ancestry in attitude, diction and rhythm back to the national anthem, which as a literary form may have its place, but makes no pretence of being anything other than a vehicle for wishful thinking. Obi’s use of the form is therefore strictly irresponsible, and it is for this reason that Achebe is able to use it for ironic purposes towards the end of the novel. Teach them to work in unity Tq build our nation dear; Forgetting region, tribe or speech By caring always each for each.2*

27 ibid., p. 33.

28 ibid., p. 17.

29 ibid., p. 151.

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The tone of naive optimism is not only invalidated by Obi’s experience but also fails to take account of his own far more tentative and con¬ tradictory attitudes towards his native land. With his sharply critical turn of mind, Obi is well aware of the feebleness of his own creative efforts, but as F. R. Leavis has pointed out in another context: To invent techniques that shall be adequate to the ways of feeling or modes of experience of adult sensitive moderns is difficult in the extreme. 3°

It is a task for which Obi has the training but not the strength of character. When his mother threatens to kill herself if he marries Clara he is made aware for the first time of his own lack of a sense of identity and purpose: His mind was troubled not only by what had happened but also by the dis¬ covery that there was nothing in him with which to challenge it honestly. All day he had striven to rouse his anger and his conviction, but he was honest enough with himself to realize that the response he got, no matter how violent it sometimes appeared, was not genuine. 31

He cannot after all reject the claims of the blood-tie, and in failing Clara acquiesces, however unwillingly, in the values of the clan. Nevertheless it is only a temporary capitulation: on his mother’s death his bond with the clan, which his relationship with her has symbolized, is relaxed and he immediately outrages Umuofian morality by not attending the funeral. He writes in his diary at this time that he feels ‘like a brandnew snake just emerged from its slough’,*2 but he discovers that this rebirth is also a death: He no longer felt guilt. He, too, had died. Beyond death there are no ideals and no humbug, only reality. The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”

Coming to terms with reality in this sense is an invitation to compro¬ mise. Stripped of ‘ideals and humbug’, including his vision of a Nigeria freed from corruption, owing allegiance to nothing and having lost all self-respect. Obi finally succumbs to the financial pressures upon him. His decision to take bribes is at once a confirmation of that loss of a sense of identity of which he is already aware and the defeated gesture of a man who has been unable to find the means of expressing himself. 3°

F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, Chatto & Windus, 1942, p. 25. 31 No Longer at Ease, p. x 3 7; Dr Irele (loc. cit.) also discusses the significance of this passage. 3J ibid., p. 163. 33 ibid., pp. 166-7.

Eliot and Achebe : An Analysis of some Formal and Philosophical Qualities of “No Longer at Ease ’

RODERICK WILSON We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors... but the most influential parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent’’1 The success of [Ibo] culture was the balance between the two, the material and the spiritual... Today we have kept the materialism and thrown away the spirit¬ uality which should keep it in check. Achebe, ‘The role of the writer in a new nation’2

IN A MOST perceptive article,3 Miss A. G. Stock has explored the fruitful influence of a major western poet on Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart} Miss Stock sets forth very clearly Yeats’s con¬ cept of history as it is revealed both in the poem to which the novel owes its title and in the theoretical writings. The doctrine is one of eternal recurrence, in which each civilization, each turn of the “gyre”, is inevitably defeated both by internal and external forces, and thus a new movement grows out of the old. Mind builds a tenuously ordered structure out of disparate consciousness and calls the order “civilization”, yet since mind belongs to the “outer darkness” as well as to the light of civilized order, the opposing gyre slowly gains strength until it becomes dominant. Thus there is neither ultimate perfection nor static development: “mere anarchy” is attained. The term “mere anarchy”, however, raises questions of ambivalence and definition, for what is anarchic to one observer may appear the opposite, or a different kind of anarchy to another at a different 1 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” first appeared in 1919, but all page references to it in this article are to Selected Essays (London, Faber, 1951). This particular quotation is on page 14. 2 Achebe, ‘The role of the writer in a new nation’, Nigeria Magazine 81, June 1964, p. 158. * A. G. Stock, ‘Yeats and Achebe’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature July 1968, pp. 105-11. 4 Heinemann, 1958.

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point of culture. The important point about the anarchy that Yeats now visualizes, however, and a point which Achebe makes vitally applicable to his own specific situation, is that this change is not merely another turn of the gyre, but that the gyre itself is breaking down. The fact that the falcon cannot hear the falconer suggests clearly that history can no longer be ordered by the mind in ways that have been hitherto found acceptable. The logic of history has become ineluctable, and though Achebe is no Yeatsian apocalyptist, there is a parallel sense of history moving into an uncertain phase. Yeats therefore sees Europe after two thousand years as breaking up, as Christianity itself broke up that which preceded it. Achebe sees traditional African society as being broken up by the forces of a civilization that is itself disintegrating. Yeats uses this view of history as an instrument of prophecy, Achebe as a tool of analysis, and the view, transformed by Achebe for his own situation and purposes, is thus seen to have a potent validity for men of widely different cultural backgrounds. Things Fall Apart is centrally concerned with the break-down of traditional Ibo society, and Miss Stock quite properly concentrates on the superseded turn of the gyre. Yet Yeats’s vision of history clearly indicates, as we have seen, that the present phase of civilization is not merely another level of the gyre but that the logic of history is changing. In other words, as far as Things Fall Apart is concerned, that force, British Christian Imperialism,5 which is the external element responsible for the break-down of Umuofian society, is itself part of something which is breaking down. There is thus a falling-apart within a falling-apart. Though Achebe has not, up to now, been concerned to deal with this latter process specifically, he nevertheless in No Longer at Ease6 does show its participation in the fragmented state of modern Nigerian society. The new culturallydiverse society of late and post-colonial Nigeria is a paradigm of the “mere anarchy” which began in the world of Things Fall Apart. Achebe is concerned not only to show that Ibo society has lost its wholeness, both spiritual and moral, both political and social,6 7 but also that Obi Okonkwo, the young protagonist of the story and the grandson of the already very distant Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart, fails to bring back any fresh imaginative synthesis from

6 The phrase is used by G. D. Killam. See Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe (London, Heinemann, 1969). 6 No Longer at Ease (London, Heinemann, 1960). 7 See Achebe, the head quotation to this article.

162

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his western education,8 any new vision to take the place of the old. This perception leads us, as the title of the novel indicates, from Yeats to Eliot, and not merely to Journey of the Magi but also to The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, texts which it is hoped this article will show have illuminated No Longer at Ease. The article does not, it should be needless to say, intend to suggest that there has been any point for point influence involved: if that were so then No Longer at Ease would be much less considerable as a work of art. The intention is rather to show, in addition to the points of identifiable influence that exist, a shared ambience of outlook. In reading Achebe it is necessary to perform several crucial critical tasks, tasks which will be more or less applicable in reading any considerable work of literature but which are especially im¬ portant, for reasons to be suggested, in the case of African literature. First of all, one must give close attention to the details of social life and background which are so painstakingly and selectively rendered in the novels, but one must avoid in this necessary process treating works of art as if they were merely vessels of sociological or anthropological data. Secondly, it is necessary to experience and analyse the subtle formal texture, the related patterns and levels of meaning in the works, which include but are not limited to the vivid details of strange new subject-matter and settings. This close atten¬ tion to the various aspects of form9 is particularly important in view of the frequent and deceptive surface simplicity of much of Achebe’s work. Finally, it is essential to avoid limiting oneself to either of the above two critical approaches, and vital instead to go beyond them and try to connect the new work of art to what we have read before, to fit it into our imaginative universe and to ask what difference it makes to us.10 This latter process, which has no meaning, unless the other two can be successfully carried out — unless, that is to say, the work of art meets the formal and imaginative demands implied there — this process is nevertheless what constitutes the 8 See No Longer at Ease, p. 23: “He had very little religion nowadays, but he was nevertheless deeply moved.” 8 This degree of close attention is demonstrated admirably in both the two earliest separate critical studies of Achebe. See Arthur Ravenscroft, Chinua Achebe, (London, Longmans, 1969) (Writers and their Work No. 209) and Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe. 10 The obvious locus classicus for a statement of this kind of approach to literature is “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. See especially the passage, on page 15 of Selected Essays, beginning “The existing monuments...” down to .. the old and the new.”

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test of the universality of any work of art. The test is especially important tor any work which is rooted in a very different cultural experience but written in a world language.11 The purpose of the present article is therefore to suggest and to discuss a number of important formal and philosophical insights which Achebe shares with Eliot, and secondly to show that, in learning from Eliot, Achebe has not merely tried to find analogues for the cultural fragmentation of his own society but that he has also tried to delineate a common ground of modern experience between himself and Eliot.12 The intention is neither to suggest that Achebe is of comparable stature to Eliot, nor that they are concerned wholly with similar problems, but rather that Achebe, like Eliot, recognizes the fragmentation of the modern world as inescapable and that he is similarly concerned in his art with the ordering of this disorder. The theme of No Longer at Ease is in one sense, as G. D. Killam says,13 the price of modernity for an African society: it is Nigerian society itself which is “no longer at ease” and not merely Obi him¬ self, though of course the social unease centres in Obi, the “only palm-fruit”. The conflicts which are interrelated in the novel in complex ways centre around a number of incompatible expectations, each having a certain force, both in Obi and in those around him, which may be summarized as follows. There is, firstly, the conflict between Obi’s at times wayward individuality and the expectations of the group which has been responsible for subscribing for the loan which has enabled Obi to go to England for a university education that was intended to benefit society first and foremost. The Umuofia 11 Achebe himself characterizes his concern with the universal communication of particular African experience in the following way: “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.” ‘The English language and the African writer’. Insight October/December 1966, pp. 19-20. ** Though I am concerned in this article to concentrate chiefly on the relation¬ ship with Eliot, it will be obvious to readers of Achebe’s novels that useful work remains to be done on the relations between Achebe and, for example, Conrad. Note, for example, the passage in No Longer at Ease on the character of Mr Green, pp. 104-06. The quotation from Conrad (“By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.”) points up again Achebe’s intricate use of dramatic irony: Obi returns to Africa with a similar belief and, though in a different way to Green, succumbs just as surely to “the incipient dawn”. As often happens, Obi himself fails to make a necessary connection, between Green and himself, and beyond that between himself and Kurtz. M Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe, p. 37.

164

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Progressive Union expects Obi to pay back the money loaned to him, and to maintain a European standard of living, and at the same time to fulfil his financial obligations according to the requirements of the “extended family system”. Although Obi is made to appear exceedingly if not incredibly careless about money and the financial demands to which he is to be subject,14 there is nevertheless a real sense of irreconcilable demands being made on him. Secondly, there is the conflict between traditional beliefs and Christianity, and between both of these and a non-religious, superficial rationalism. In this novel, the traditional belief most crucial in Obi’s fate is the opposition of his parents to his relationship with the “osu”15 girl Clara, for it is at this point, when he gives way under pressure, that Obi realizes, partially and too late, his own hollowness, that in face of his father’s objection “there was nothing in him with which to challenge it honestly”.16 Obi tries to use the argument for Christian compassion as a means of persuasion, but there is in Obi no real commitment to Christian belief which could have given him the strength to continue fighting. Yet Isaac’s own Christian belief is real — he has been through a fire that Obi does not even know exists — and Isaac’s retention of the prohibition against the “osu” is a sign that he, like so many others, though much less damagingly to himself than most,, is a divided man in a divided society. Obi therefore, returning with romantic idealism to transform society, or at least to make it more honest, or at the very least to resist corruption himself, finds a society full of conflicting demands. There is no core in Obi with which to resist, no wholeness by which he can stand firm in a society which itself lacks a core. All those around him are divided or fragmentary beings in one way or another: his friend Christopher, an economist, has his religion of sex (Chris¬ topher’s bed is flippantly called the “Holy of Holies”) and a specious line of reasoning about corruption; Joseph, Obi’s “countryman”, is both urbanized in his employment and sufficiently traditional to warn both Obi’s parents and the U.P.U. about Obi’s involvement with Clara; the divided commitment of Isaac, Obi’s father, has

Ravenscroft, Chtnua Achebe, p. 21. points, I think rightly, to “this gormlessness of Obi’s” as a weakness of the novel, suggesting that Achebe is thereby stacking the cards impossibly against the character. I agree that Obi’s unworldliness and his fairly swift corruption smack rather too much of a polemical demon¬ stration, but there seems to me to be sufficient credible disorganization in Obi to make Achebe’s point stand despite the over-insistence. 1S This traditional Ibo belief prohibits the marriage of an “osu” and a non-osu. An “osu” is a descendant of one dedicated to the service of a god and therefore set apart, with his posterity, from marriage with anyone outside the caste 18 No Longer at Ease, p. 137.

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already been noticed; Mr Green, Obi’s boss, is a man born out of his time, in power yet powerless, totally unable to see that it is the civilization of which he is a member that has been responsible, in large part, for the historical element in Obi’s fate; finally, Clara too is divided, an “osu” and a modern nurse, a “been-to” who is yet unable to escape from her traditional role, and divided in another way between a real relationship and cinema fantasies. Achebe is, therefore, dealing with a many-sided fragmentation, but is doing so in a highly structured formal discipline. Obi’s own “undisciplined squads of emotion” are rendered with a tact and subtlety which go a long way towards accounting for the artistic excellence of the novel. It would be wrong to suggest that there is, in Achebe’s presentation of a divided society, an extensive debt in details to The Waste Land, but there is a shared ground in the difficulty of reconciling various traditions and commitments, the sense of a felt lack of a unified view of life, a specifically modern awareness. Achebe too seems to be asking “What are the roots that clutch . .. ?” and Obi in the end17 has only a “heap of broken images”: his Audenesque view of tragedy, his nostalgic and distorted patriotism in his poem about Nigeria, his recognition of the slums and squalor of Lagos, his intellectual individualism, his dangerous evasiveness and ration¬ alization. One could add to the list, but it is sufficient to make the point that Obi is fragmented, and is so in a peculiarly modern way, attributable in its historical sense to the irreversible meeting of incompatible forces. There is, however, a particular formal device which Achebe uses in order to enforce the sense of a divided society in No Longer at Ease which is reminiscent of The Waste Land and that is the varieties of language: characters of different kinds or in different contexts speak in “normal” English, stilted “impressive” English, Ibo or pidgin. An example is the song of the traders when Obi is on his way home to Umuofia, a song which Obi is very proud of being able to translate and analyse with his tools of a western literary education. He does not, however, apparently recognize the applic¬ ability of the reference to himself or people like him in the important line “The paddle speaks English.” The burden of the song, as Obi with some self-congratulation recognizes, is “the world turned upside-down” but, typically distracted by other things, “he could not concentrate on his thinking”18 and he fails to include himself in

17 Philosophically as well as structurally Obi’s end is in his beginning. 18 No Longer at Ease, p. 46.

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the chaos of the world. Joseph, Obi’s countryman, provides another example of linguistic division which mirrors the many-sidedness of society. He normally speaks Ibo or pidgin, but on the telephone puts on an “impressive manner”, and after hanging-up reverts to pidgin.19 The government minister, the Hon. Sam Okoli, speaks normally in educated English, but at his ease slips into pidgin.20 The secretary of the U.P.U., in his welcome address to Obi, uses a stylized poly¬ syllabic English which “fills the mouth”,21 whereas Obi in his reply mistakenly speaks with a straightforwardness and informality which is in turn mistaken by his audience for slovenliness. One is reminded, amid this variety of linguistic usages, of the nickname given to Obi at school: “Dictionary”. Obi “has book”, is a compendium of many meanings (Conrad, Greene, Eliot, Housman, naive idealism, intelligent insight, self-indulgent pessimism, vacuity), yet he lacks a coherent language of the mind in which to unify the world. He has come back across the sea, “. . . an endless waste of restless, jaggy hillocks topped with white”22, to a society fragmented in purposes, visions and languages (which are both the mirror and the instrument of culture). In the end both Obi’s own character and his relationships have the kind of tired, known quality which is expressed in the poem by Tiresias. Compare, for example, the quality of the sexual encounter towards the end of the novel, with that in The Fire Sermon: there is the same process of using and being used, the same sense of flatness, as if nothing had really happened. Compare also Eliot’s concluding “Shantih shantih shantih”23 with Obi’s emotional nullity less than three days after his mother’s death, which he describes as “The peace which passeth all understanding”.24 One may point the difference between the experience of the “I” of The Waste Land and Obi Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease by noting the difference in meaning between the two kinds of peace: “peace” in The Waste Land is of the kind which confronts one who has travelled as far as the “understanding” can go, but Obi’s peace is the torpor attained by the evasion of any coherent attempt at understanding. Obi is in short, therefore, a hollow man,25 headpiece filled with

19 Ibid., p. 77. 29 Ibid., p. 68. 21 Ibid., pp. 31-32. 22 Ibid., pp. 168-69. 23 The Waste Land, 11. 222-56. 21 No Longer at Ease, p. 164. 26 See note 12. It is interesting to note that Eliot, in his epigraph to The Hollow Men, acknowledges a certain congruence of vision with what Conrad was saying in Kurtz. Achebe extends this congruence by relating Obi and Mr Green in their different ways, to both.

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the blown straw of diverse notions, but it is only by seeing both him and the novel, finally, in the context of the poem from which the title is drawn, that the indebtedness to Eliot can be brought into complete focus. The poem Journey of the Magi is a retrospective meditation on an ambiguous experience, a journey taken under the pressure both of an external force and of an inner compulsion towards a vision the meanings and consequences of which the participants are unable to understand. The magi, journeying from the warmth and sensory delights of their homeland, pass through a wintry landscape, both literal and metaphorical, a loneliness of the spirit, a disruption of their whole life, and return, with the perplexing vision, to become strangers in a world that can never be the same again. There are obvious similarities which come to mind in reading No Longer at Ease: the novel, like the poem, is cast in the form of a flashback set within the frame of an existential present moment; in the case of the poem this is the act of meditation itself and in the novel the trial of Obi, and in each case the present moment is seen to gather together the ambivalence of past and future. One is reminded in both cases of the opening lines of Burnt Norton on the diverse unity of time. Obi, like the magi, acquired a knowledge the meaning and consequences of which were to prove ambiguous, and again, in the novel, “the very dead of winter” is a feature of the environment in which the vision is gained. Of course the novel becomes richer if we are aware of its predecessor, Things Fall Apart, in this as in other respects; if we see that the ‘journey’ to witness the birth of a new order is made up of the whole tribal experience of western civiliza¬ tion. Obi’s own journey is merely the logical continuation of the larger process. Obi too is aware in various ways, though he frequently draws the wrong conclusions and acts illogically, of the question “.. . were we led all that way for/ Birth or Death?”26 He has his vision of the world transformed by the complex experience of culture collision, and is left “no longer at ease”. The vital difference, however, is that Obi has had no deep ineluct¬ able religious experience, nothing to give him a sense of a possible wholeness, either in his own being or in the nature of things. The experience of Obi, in other words, is not merely lower in intensity than that of the magi, but different in kind. The points of contact between the poem and the novel cannot be pursued too far, but thus far it is possible to go. The education from which Obi constructs his liberal humanist ethic, romantically idealistic as that ethic is, is a

*• Journey of the Magi.

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direct consequence of the experience of the interpenetration of cultures, as also are the various kinds of fragmentation of personality and the central element of corruption. In a society with such complex and contradictory qualities and demands, it would be hard enough for a moral man of unified vision to survive intact; but for the vacillating and disorganized Obi it is impossible.

Arrow of God

The Human Dimension of History in Arrow of God Emmanuel Obiechina

The forces working against tradition seem already entrenched in the Umuaro of Arrow of God. The local school and mission station, irreverent strangers like the catechist Goodcountry, and the inarticulate though palpable reality of the white man’s adminis¬ trative presence, all these have undermined traditional confidence and shaken the sense of common purpose and solidarity which in the past constituted the spirit of traditionalism. The natives of Umuaro bear witness to these changes in matter-of-fact remarks which show that they are realistic enough to recognize that these things are there to stay. A character, for example, sees Mr Wright’s new road connecting Umuaro to the administrative town of Okperi as a part of the new forces that are transforming the old society. “Yes, we are talking about the white man’s road,” he reminds his audience. “But when the roof and walls of a house fall in, the ceiling is not left standing. The white man, the new religion, the soldiers, the new road—they are all part of the same thing. The white man has a gun, a matchet, a bow and carries fire in his mouth. He does not fight with one weapon alone.” 1 The theme of contact and change is not carried by such overt statements but rather by the human drama, in which those deeply entrenched in the past attempt to adapt to the present. The conflicts in Arrow of God develop around the person of the Chief Priest of Ulu, who is the ritual and religious leader of Umuaro. On the one hand, there is the conflict between the local British administration represented by the old-fashioned administrator, Winterbottom, and the native authority represented by the Chief Priest. On the other hand, there are the internal politics of Umuaro and the conflict between the supporters of the Chief Priest and those of his rival, Idemili. On yet another level belongs the conflict taking place within the Chief Priest himself, a conflict between personal power, the temptation to constitute himself into an “arrow” of God, and the exigencies of public responsibility. All these are handled in the main plot. A subsidiary plot deals with the domestic tensions and crises in Ezeulu’s own house, the tensions and stresses between the father and his grown-up sons and between the children of different mothers in his polygamous household.

CHINUA ACHEBE

171

Not all these conflicts are a result of culture-contact. Personality deficiencies and mistaken judgements have something to do with some of them. The intervention of fate and chance also plays a part. But the contact situation exacerbates the conflicts and radicalizes the incipient oppositions and contraditions within the native tradition. Where this shows most emphatically is in the breakdown of the sense of solidarity among the traditionalists. Ezeulu, the Chief Priest and a man whose role marks him out as keeper of collective security, is the person who feels most keenly this breakdown, and he never tires of attributing the change, deprecatingly, to “the new age”. At a critical stage in the narrative, after he has seen his advice set aside by the community, not once but twice in quick succession, Ezeulu reviews the situation, using the opportunity to reiterate the historical and ritual charter of his role as first among the leaders of the clan: In the very distant past, when lizards were still few and far between, the six villages—Umuachala, Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani, Umuogwugwu and Umuisiuzo—lived as differ¬ ent people, and each worshipped its own deity. Then the hired soldiers ofAbam used to strike in the dead of night, set fire to houses and carry men, women and children into slavery. Things were so bad for the six villages that their leaders came together to save themselves. They hired a strong team of medicine-men to install a common deity for them. This deity which the fathers of the six villages made was called Ulu. Half of the medicine was buried at a place which became the Nkwo market and the other half thrown into the stream which became Mili Ulu. The six villages then took the name of Umuaro, and the priest of Ulu became their Chief Priest. From that day they were never again beaten by an enemy.2

But all that seems to have suddenly changed. When the story opens, the authority of the Chief Priest is under active attack from the Priest of Idemili who uses his kinsman, the wealthy, volatile and demagogic titled elder Nwaka of Umunneora. Idemili is one of the old gods relegated to subordinate status by the coming of Ulu. Its priest had never altogether forgotten this setback and had been in latent opposition to the priest of Ulu from time immemorial. Ezeulu himself is aware of this: “He knew that the priests of Idemili and Ogwugwu and Eru and Udo had never been happy with their secondary role since the villages got together and made Ulu and put him over the older deities.” 3 But the resentment was played down as long as the threat to collective security continued, since group solidarity is necessary to meet external threat and since only a deity evolved in the spirit of collective solidarity could be an adequate unifying symbol to ensure this solidarity. The presence of

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the colonial administration has the effect of increasing the need for collective security, since the colonial authority has taken away from the traditional authority and peoples their right to exercise judicial or even non-legal violence. The exercise of judicial coercion and violence belongs solely to the colonial regime from now onwards, as the people of Umuaro are to learn when they wage war on the people of Okperi. But the worst forms of local insecurity such as those caused by the Abam slave-raiders are certainly over. It is not surprising that institutions evolved to ensure collective security begin to weaken when the threats which gave rise to them are no longer felt. And the effect of the superimposition of a higher authority with a greater power of coercive violence is to create a ferment in the structure of traditional authority itself. Specifically, the older gods of Umuaro accepted the dominance of Ulu as long as the old power structure remained. But now, with the imposition of a higher authority over Ulu, the minor gods see the situation as an opportunity to shake off an irksome hegemony. The resentment that lay dormant in pre-colonial days becomes active again. The speech in which Nwaka repudiates the right of Ulu to lead the clan expresses all this. The speech is made at a secret rally attended only by Nwaka’s partisans: Nwaka began by telling the assembly that Umuaro must not allow itself to be led by the Chief Priest of Ulu. “My father did not tell me that before Umuaro went to war it took leave from the priest of Ulu,” he said. “The man who carries a deity is not a king. He is there to perform its ritual and to carry sacrifice to it. But I have been watching this Ezeulu for many years. He is a man of ambition; he wants to be king, priest, diviner, all. His father, they said, was like that. But Umuaro showed him that Igbo people knew no kings. “We have no quarrel with Ulu. He is still our protector, even though we no longer fear Abam warriors at night. But I will not see with these eyes of mine his priest making himself lord over us. My father told me many things, but he did not tell me that Ezeulu was king in Umuaro. Who is he, anyway? Does anybody here enter his compound through the man’s gate?If Umuaro decided to have a king we know where he would come from. Since when did Umuachala become head of the six villages? We all know that it was jealousy among the big villages that made them give the priesthood to the weakest. We shall fight for our farmland and for the contempt Okperi has poured on us. Let us not listen to anyone trying to frighten us with the name of Ulu. If a man says yes to his chi also says yes. And we have all heard how the people of Aninta dealt with their deity when he failed them. Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbours and set fire on him?” 4

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This is a piece of dangerous demagogy, to be treated with reserve. For instance, it is difficult to credit the view that the Chief Priest whose deity leads the people to war and protects them from external and internal insecurities did not have a strong voice in determining war policy. After all, if he refused to perform the ritual functions of his priesthood, it is hard to see how his deity could be involved in action at all. The incitement against the authority of the Chief Priest is possible because the threat that made the founding of Ulu necessary has receded. Nwaka says as much. But traditional people are not so foolish as to base their institutions so narrowly. Indeed Ulu’s power is not tied only to the provision of security. He is also the guardian of social well-being and keeper of the calendar. His priest keeps the agricultural calendar and calls the biggest feast of the year, the Feast of the New Yam which ushers in the harvest season. So his protection of security is not only religious, political, military and ethical, but also economic, and extends to such things as keeping the communal census. Nwaka’s uncompromising attack is therefore a serious schismatic move indicative of the falling apart of the old collective ideology. His charge of ambition is exaggerated, though there is no doubt that Ezeulu’s conception of his power is exorbitant. A peacetime Chief Priest has less scope for extending his power. Ezeulu is unaware of the limitation of his power and of the precise nature of his priesthood as the expression of corporate rather than personal will. This is shown in his own soliloquy: Whenever Ezeulu considered the immensity of his power over the year and the crops and, therefore, over the people he wondered if it was real. It was true he named the day for the feast of the Pumpkin Leaves and for the New Yam feast; but he did not choose the day. He was merely a watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that was said to be his. As long as the goat was alive it was his; he would find it food and take care of it. But the day it was slaughtered he would know who the real owner was. No! the Chief Priest of Ulu was more than that, must be more than that. If he should refuse to name the day there would be no festival—no planting and no reaping. But could he refuse? No Chief Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done. He would not dare. Ezeulu was stung to anger by this as though his enemy had spoken it. “Take away that word dare,” he replied to this enemy. “Yes I say take it away. No man in all Umuaro can stand up and say that I dare not. The woman who will bear the man who will say it has not yet been born.” 5

This is a dangerous speculation—as dangerous as Nwaka’s dema-

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gogic incitement. Even though until he refuses to call the feast of the New Yam the Chief Priest acts within his ritual rights and authority, in his mind he has already begun to assume for himself vast illegal powers that justify Nwaka’s accusation. His thought is to prove father to his subsequent act. Though no overt act of his justifies the accusation of ambition, he has within him undoubted authoritarian urges at odds with the republican outlook of the people. So Nwaka’s accusation cannot be dismissed out of hand, but is borne in mind, and lights up the subsequent action. The authoritarian streak in the Chief Priest contributes to the final crisis when a greater flexibility and devotion to the common weal would have eased the situation. Nwaka’s appeal to republican sentiment is an astute move, calculated to carry weight with an egalitarian people, as the people of Umuaro appear to be. But this egalitarianism is itself overplayed. “That Igbo people knew no kings” is only true as a figure of speech; some Igbo communities do have kings, and certainly they recognize certain specific roles which are defined in the social structure6 and they also recognize personal achievement. In addition, there are prescribed roles pertaining to those successful members of different families who have taken titles (ozo and nidichie in the area of Igboland in which Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are set) and who perform ritual functions in their family segments and have political and judicial roles in the clan. An elder who fails to take a title, like Unoka in Things Fall Apart, is an unfulfilled elder. It is fair to say that personal achievement is recognized in Igbo society within the framework of a hierarchy of titles, and a certain degree of ascription also obtains, since the process of title investiture takes place through elaborate ritual ceremonies which vest title-holders with semi-sacred attributes. Nwaka is aware of the mobile nature of the society, as well as its hierarchical features, but he chooses to emphasize the one and to ignore the other. Nwaka and Ezeulu as types of character and temperament have always been a part of the traditional society. Since they differ so widely, they always repel each other and become a focus of intercommunal rivalry, factiousness and disagreement. But where the overall security of the community is paramount, personal rivalries and temperamental oppositions would not be allowed to undermine collective security. Nwaka would not be able to openly challenge the leadership of the Chief Priest in a matter of security in which his deity has a dominant influence. One finds confirming evidence for this in Things Fall Apart where we are told that Umuofia “never went to war unless its case was clear and just and was accepted as such by its Oracle—the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. And there were indeed occasions when the Oracle had forbidden Umuofia to

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wage a war.” 7 The oracle is the interpreter of the will of the earth goddess, the deity in charge of security. In Arrow of God, the god of security is Ulu, and his will is interpreted by the Chief Priest, who is thus in the position of the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. The open attack on Ezeulu’s authority, which would have been unthink¬ able in Okonkwo’s Umuofia, becomes possible in Umuaro because under the combined pressure of the new colonial administration, the Christian church and the new economic forces, the oracles and the priests are beginning to lose their hold on the people. Nwaka’s subversion of the Chief Priest’s power succeeds because of the encroaching changes which are working towards a realignment of relationships and a readjustment of attitudes. Ulu’s dominance in the structure of a traditional power is itself a result of social change. It represents a certain centralizing trend somewhat at odds with the federalizing, segmentary political relationships of earlier times. The centralization has not been consolidated or it would have led to a priest-kingship such as that of Umunri in Igboland and probably like the obaship among the Yoruba. This lack of consolidation is exploited by Ezidemili. He is always harking back to the golden age of the people’s history “in the days before Ulu” when “the true leaders of each village had been men of high title like Nwaka.” 8 This near-enactment of the Cassius-Brutus-Caesar syndrome is interesting because it supports the point that a feeling of greater security is behind the attack on Ulu’s authority; the “security” role of Ulu is completely left out of Ezidemili’s tirade. His conspiracy could only work at a time of increased security. The presence of the colonial administration and the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade explain this feeling. But it should not be forgotten that the colonial presence generated its own insecurities, since the “pacification” involved the use of force. But the new threat to security differs from the sudden, unpredictable predations of marauding slave raiders. Achebe here departs from the narrative strategy of Things Fall Apart. In Arrow of God, he starts the narrative in medias res, dipping back from time to time into the past for the historical material with which he impregnates the narrative present. From these brief but significant flashes back into the past, we build up a picture of the pre-colonial society with which the colonial present is contrasted. His treatment is full of ironies. For example, the Chief Priest who, as a symbolic head, should be the rallying point of resistance to the colonial authority is unwittingly an instrument for subversion of the traditional system. At Winterbottom’s prompting, he sends his young son Oduche to join the Christian sect and attend the village school. Oduche is to become Ezeulu’s “eye” in the new situation.

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His reason is perfectly rational: one must change with the changing times. Several times this pragmatism finds outlet in a recurrent proverb: “A man must dance the dance prevalent in his time” and more poignantly in the extended metaphor of the elusive bird. “I am like the bird Eneke-nti-oba,” he asserts. “When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: ‘Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.’ ” 9 In other words, the Chief Priest sees the strength of the new forces and is attempting in his own way to come to terms with them. With Oduche as a look-out in the enemy camp, the Chief Priest feels more secure. The rest of the story shows how this feeling proves illusory and the Chief Priest is smashed by the forces he had imagined to be under his control. Oduche, the sacrificial offering to the new forces, precipitates the first of Ezeulu’s crises. He becomes a Christian diehard, tries to suffocate a royal python, the totemic animal sacred to Idemili, and is found out. This heightens the ill-will between the priest of Idemili and Ezeulu, their families, villages and partisans in the clan. Ezeulu’s enemies cite the incident as proof of his ambition to destroy every other source of authority in the clan in order to promote his own. It is argued also that his sending his son to school is part of his strategy for reinforcing his personal power by ingratiating himself with the British administration. Earlier, the good opinion of the white District Commissioner, won by testifying against the clan in the land dispute with Okperi, had been chalked up by his enemies as Ezeulu’s first open act of betrayal, and proof of his ambition. His son’s sacrilege five years later revives the memory and bitterness of that betrayal. Taken together, the two events look like an attempt by the Chief Priest to reach a personal accommoda¬ tion with the forces threatening the old social order. And this renders his motives suspicious and dishonourable to his enemies and disturbing to his friends. Even his best friend and kinsman, Akuebue, finds it hard to reconcile the Chief Priest’s traditional role as protector of communal tradition with his implied attack on this heritage by sending his son to join the Christians. He expresses his doubts: “When you spoke against the war with Okperi you were not alone. I too was against it and so were many others. But if you send your, son to join strangers in desecrating the land you will be alone. You may go and mark it on that wall to remind you that I said so.” 10

But the shattering blow is yet to fall. Captain Winterbottom, having received a directive to introduce Indirect Rule in his area of authority, decides to make Ezeulu a warrant chief for the Umuaro district. But the choice could not have been made at a less auspi-

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cious time than when the Chief Priest is taunted by his enemies as the creature of the British administration. Ezeulu at first refuses to leave his home immediately to go to Okperi as ordered by the white man. Instead, he summons an assembly of the leaders for advice and support. Nwaka and his partisans see this as an opportunity to accuse the Chief Priest openly of his deals with the white man. Nwaka makes a long speech full of taunts and innuendoes implying that Ezeulu should be cast out to face the music alone. His gibes are skilfully reinforced with his usual rhetoric and proverbs: “The white man is Ezeulu’s friend and has sent for him. What is so strange about that? He did not send for me. He did not send for Udeozo; he did not send for the priest of Idemili; he did not send for the priest ofEru; he did not send for the priest of Udo nor did he ask the priest of Ogwugwu to come and see him. He has asked Ezeulu. Why? Because they are friends. Or does Ezeulu think that their friendship should stop short of entering each other’s houses?Does he want the white man to be his friend only by word of mouth? Did not our elders tell us that as soon as we shake hands with a leper he will want an embrace? It seems to me that Ezeulu has shaken hands with a man of white body.” 11

The pun on “white man” and “leper” is Nwaka’s indirect indictment of the Chief Priest and is calculated to wound most deeply. Ezeulu abandons the effort to mobilize support within his clan and sallies out to face his fate single-handed. His isolation is complete at a time when collective solidarity is a man’s greatest strength. Totally embittered, he is in an uncompromising mood which is made no better by his being detained for not answering the summons promptly enough. Tony Clarke has taken over from Winterbottom, who has been suddenly taken ill, and finds the priest intransigent and baffling. Where he expects gratitude for the imperial favour of being raised to a paramount chief, he is confronted with haughty rejection. After two months, Ezeulu is released from detention to go back, still embittered against those who cast him out. The rest is a quick plunge into the molten centre of disaster. His two month’s detention upset the agricultural calendar because he could not eat his ritual yams while in detention. He refuses to call the Feast of the New Yam until he has eaten all the remaining yams. The delay in harvesting the yams begins to hurt the people and threaten famine. Desperate and confounded, the people turn to the Christian religion for salvation. They send their sons with yam offerings to the Christian harvest festival and thereafter harvest their crops in the name of these sons. A tailpiece to the drama is provided by the sudden death of Obika, Ezeulu’s favourite son. The Chief Priest goes mad and the people

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draw their own moral from his tragedy: “To them the issue was simple. Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and thus upheld the wisdom of their ances¬ tors—that no man however great was greater than his people; that no man ever won judgement against his clan.” 12 But the people of Umuaro do not have the last word. This belongs to the novelist who sees the story in its total historical and cultural context. “If this was so [he argues] then Ulu had chosen a dangerous time to uphold this wisdom. In destroying his priest he had also brought disaster on himself, like the lizard in the fable who ruined his mother’s funeral by his own hand. For a deity who chose a time such as this to destroy his priest or abandon him to his enemies was inciting people to take liberties; and Umuaro was just ripe to do so.” 13

The mass defection to the Christians which follows must be seen as the result of the failure of the old dispensation to provide security, and the availability of an alternative source of security. The historical basis of the story is well known. It was one of the major setbacks to the British colonial administration in Nigeria. The attempt to set up warrant chiefs in the predominantly republican Igboland came to grief in the late 1920’s, and led to widespread turmoil and rioting by women, since known as the Igbo Women’s Riot (1927). The failure of the experiment in Indirect Rule is recorded by Dr P.C. Lloyd in Africa in Social Change. He writes: In attempts to “find a chief”, men were often selected whose traditional roles had little to do with political authority. They were ritual experts or merely presided over councils of elders with equal status. Indeed the introduction of Indirect Rule on the Northern Nigerian pattern to the Ibo peoples and their similarly organized neighbours of Eastern Nigeria proved impossible. From the beginning of the century, administrative officers had created “warrant chiefs”—men who often had no traditional authority but who seemed powerful enough to act as British agents in recruiting labour. Then when direct taxation was introduced in 1927, widespread rioting, led by Ibo women, disclosed the extent of hostility to these warrant chiefs. In the 1930s, therefore, councils were instituted which were based upon traditional political units and their represen¬ tation.14

A good deal of the historical outline survives in Arrow of God, but Achebe’s handling of the subject exposes the human realities, the dilemmas facing men and women who are caught up in the historical drama. He draws out of history the human dimension; by

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concentrating on the Chief Priest, a fully realized individual character, he brings the action out of the area of public gestures and abstract formulations to that of the emotions and attitudes of living people. In Arrow of God, the cracks which had tragically developed in the traditional system in Things Fall Apart grow into chasms. But a good deal of the action is concerned with the attempt by the chief character to build a bridge over the widening chasm. Ezeulu fails because his grasp of the situation is inadequate and so he is constantly surprised.

NOTES 1

Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1964), p. 105.

2

Ibid., pp. 17-18.

3

Ibid., p. 49.

4

Ibid., p. 33.

5

Ibid., pp. 3-4.

6 SeeG. 1. Jones, The Trading States of the Oil Rivers (London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1963), p. 5; Francis Ikenna Nzimiro, Studies in Ibo Political Systems (London: Cass, 1971); and Richard Henderson, The King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). I

Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 10.

8

Arrow of God, p. 49.

9

Ibid., p. 55.

10

Ibid., p. 166.

II

Ibid., p. 177.

12

Ibid., p. 287.

13

Ibid.

14

P. C. Lloyd, Africa in Social Change (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 65-

66

.

Idols of the Den Achebe’s Arrow of God M. M. Mahood

Several generations, each of them possessing its own insights into the friction of cultures in a colonial situation, have passed since Blackwood’s, the empire-builders’ magazine, published ‘Heart of Darkness’. Readers of this generation must sometimes find themselves playing with the idea of re-writing Conrad’s story from the viewpoint of one of Kurtz’s adherents: some elderly head of a Bakongo family, perhaps, for whom a religious rite, speakable or unspeakable, was not an orgy and a bloodbath, but a duty responsibly performed for the glory of the gods and the alleviation of the tribe’s estate. One reader of Conrad who actually has had the knowledge and initiative to do this is Chinua Achebe. Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, set in Eastern Nigeria at the turn of the century, opened to English readers one of the complex and ordered rural societies that lay behind Marlow’s momentary glimpses ‘of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying’ in the great equatorial forests that extend from the Congo to the lower reaches of the Niger. Like every novelist of the colonial experience, Achebe is strongly influenced by Conrad. But he was stung into writing his first novel by the praise lavished on Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson as a faithful portrayal of Nigerian life, and his second novel of traditional Ibo life, Arrow of God, is set near to the Joyce Cary epoch: its events cover the greater part of 1921. To speak of a ‘novel of traditional Ibo life’ implies a limitation which Achebe himself, in talking about his work, appears modestly prepared to accept as the duty of a writer in a new nation. ‘The fundamental theme must first be disposed of,’ he writes. ‘This theme—put quite simply—is that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.’ And in the same year, which was also the year Arrow of God appeared, Achebe admitted to a literary conference: ‘I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf

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delivered them.’ We may well feel that declarations such as these understate Achebe’s real intentions as a novelist, and that in the end we shall do better to trust the tale, not the artist; but so clear a pointer by the novelist cannot be ignored, and first and foremost Arrow of God—his richest book to date—presents itself as the documentation of a way of life which is confirmed in all its details by historians and anthropologists. Umuaro, the village-group or clan where most of the action is set, is a community in the normative and approbationary sense of the word. For Ibos, according to one of their own anthropologists, ‘human interdependence is the greatest of all values’ and Arrow of God displays this social cohesion at the lineage, village, and clan levels. The narrative centres upon the homestead of the Chief Priest, Ezeulu, and his extended family, in which marriage and parenthood are never private concerns: a son marries, and his bride is regarded by Ezeulu’s two surviving wives and all his children as ‘their new wife’. As the extended family coheres around the obi and its shrine, the village coheres around its marketplace and the market’s protective deity. In these humming market crowds, there are few nameless faces. Names proliferate in a way that at first bewilders the English reader, until he realizes that many of them are there, like the names of off-stage figures in Shakespeare, to give a sense of the thickness of life, of a world in which everybody knows everybody else. Even an involuntary ‘Nigerianism’, rare in Achebe whose departures from standard English are deliberate and deft, can reveal, like the occasional Gallicism or Polish turn of phrase in Conrad’s writing, social attitudes that differ radically from English ones. ‘We have not come here to abuse ourselves!’ someone shouts at an age group meeting—itself another aspect of Ibo social interdependence, (p. 104) The English ‘abuse one another’ is an individualizing form of the reflexive which would not express the protest the speaker is making. Larger still than the individual marketplaces is the great ilo, the setting for those festivals which bring together not only the living members of the six villages but also those who belong to the world of spirits: the ancestors who may reappear in a masquerade, the gods represented in figures born on their custodians’ heads. The New Yam Feast, a harvest offering to the clan’s tutelary god Ulu, is the greatest of these festivals: ‘it was the only assembly in Umuaro in which a man might look to his right and find his neighbour and look to his left and see a god’, (p. 254) The failure of this great cumulative festival to take place in the year of the novel marks the collapse of the old tribal unity; the centre cannot hold. Six miles from

Umuaro is Okperi,

seat of the

British

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administration. Here, on ‘Gorment Heel’, is a non-community of five Englishmen, divided one from the other by class and by the intricate protocol of official life; if Wright the road-builder and a social outsider—the Public Works Department was not pukka— continues to play around with native women, Captain Winterbottom will go so far as barring him from the Club. Achebe has remarked that his people accepted the missionaries ‘with humuor’, and Ibos have always regarded the British administration with a good deal of ironic amusement—a sane and confident response to colonial intrusion which puzzles black readers elsewhere, whose ancestors experienced more embittering culture-contacts. But there is more amusement in the juxtaposition of the scene in which Ezeulu receives a visit from his age group friend Akuebue and that in which A.D.O. Clarke entertains Captain Winterbottom with ‘the long, arduous ritual of alcohol, food, coffee, and more alcohol’, (p. 125) In the easy banter between Ezeulu, Akuebue, and Ezeulu’s son Edogo, who brings in a calabash of palm wine for the two older men, we feel a sense of community painfully lacking when Clarke’s steward, emerging in crackling white from the kitchen, is reproved for proffering to Winterbottom scraggy chicken from the right and not the left. Government Hill officials live in an artificial group without women—Clarke is rather envious of Wright’s sex life—and without children: Winterbottom too feels envy, as he watches his servants’ pickin dancing in the year’s first rain. For the white men, there is no such joy to be had from the climate; the rain presents itself in the image of a riot, the cool evening wind is ‘treacherous’. They do not belong, and their alienation sharpens our awareness of the solidarity, the social cohesion of African life. The community of Umuaro has continuity as well as cohesion. It is, like all Ibo communities, an acephalic society in which custom and tradition—‘rules rather than rulers’—perform the functions elsewhere vested in overlords. Through the involvement of members of Ezeulu’s household in various rites of passage such as marriage and second burial, Achebe gives us a feeling of the continuity of custom; the continuity of tradition is ensured by the. principle that a man always tells the truth to his son. The white men at Okperi pride themselves on their clocks and calendars; ‘they’ve no idea of time,’ says Winterbottom, though half an hour later he is remembering with pride that a whole age group has been named from his destruction of Umuaro’s firearms. Yet their lives are without the continuity seen in the lives of their Ibo neighbours; they are at the mercy of every change of policy emanating from Enugu and Lagos. This cohesion and continuity of Ibo life have to be strong to take the stress of the energy and competitiveness, the urge to ‘get

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up which is encouraged by the Ibo view that ‘the world is a marketplace and it is subject to bargain’. For all the collectivism of his society, the Ibo child is brought up to strive for individual achievement. ‘Learning the Igbo way’, writes V.C. Uchendu, involves constant adjustment to competitive situations. The domestic group, the play group, the age grade, and the wider Igbo society are extremely competitive, each with its own rules.’ In the novel there are rivalries within the compound, such as those between Ezeulu’s wives, or between his sons; rivalries between the age groups conscripted for road-building; rivalries between villages competing for farmland or for trade; even rivalries between the gods, such as B. I. Chukwukere has discussed else¬ where: A village group possesses a guardian deity in the same way that each village, family and individual has one. Therefore one would assume that Igbo religion postulates a pantheon of gods. The paradox of this phenomenon, however, is that there is no hierarchical ordering of the pantheon in the ‘action sphere’ of Igbo peoples’ relationship with these gods and other spiritual beings. Here the semblance of religious unity implicit in the fact of a common village-group guardian deity forcefully, as it were, gives way to an atomistic ‘organisation’ of gods, each manipulating its relationship with Igbo mortal beings in order to secure more power and influence in the very same way that the latter themselves manipulate their own social relationships for material and spiritual benefits.

In this process of manipulation, this market bargaining, a god may abandon a group or a group abandon a god; the evidence of the missionary G.T. Basden that a god could be rejected or even destroyed is confirmed by several Ibo writers and there is even a saying: ‘If a god becomes perky, we will show him what wood he is carved from.’ In Arrow of God this fate befalls the deity of Aninta when he fails his people: ‘Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbours and set fire on him?’ (p. 33) There has perhaps been in recent anthropological writing a tendency to overstress the competitive aspect of Ibo social and religious life. D.I. Nwoga attempts to right the balance when he insists that ‘the achievements of individuals were after all measured against established societal norms. The freedom of the individual was circumscribed by the demands of social cohesion and progress.. . .If one must... seek a religious counterpart of the Igbo mentality, it has to be seen as consonant with a situation of social stability rather than aggressive individualism.’ An individual such as John Nwodika, in Arrow of God, who takes employment with Winterbottom so that eventually he will be able to set himself

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up in trade, also seeks ways for his whole clan of Umuaro to ‘get up’. And within the group a continual process of adjustment is at work; the headstrong behaviour of individuals like Ezeulu and his son Obika is tested against the live-and-let-live ethos of the community encapsulated in the proverbs of Akuebue and other elders. It is a world that is perpetually astir. The checks and balances through which it preserves its equilibrium are a far more delicate mechanism than that of the clocks ticking on Government Hill. Any sudden interference can dislocate this finely-balanced society, so unchanging and yet so subject to change; so cohesive, yet so diverse. So far we have followed Achebe’s own signpost and taken a first distant view of Arrow of God as the presentation of a particular society—one alleged by European invaders to be ‘primitive’, but shown by the novelist to have philosophy, poetry, dignity. This social concern, which Achebe shares with most other African novelists, has been held by some European critics to imply that the established criteria of fiction have no relevance to the African novel; that Achebe’s fictional world does not, as it were, turn, in the way that the European novel turns, on the poles of the author’s world-view and his individualization of character. But African writers have themselves been quick to challenge this. When the success of Achebe’s first novel, in 1958, tempted publishers into printing a good deal of fictionalized anthropology, a fellow Ibo, Nkem Nwankwo, wrote a hilarious novel—published in the same year as Arrow of God—about a likeable character lacking in every Ibo virtue and bored to death by the wisdom of the tribe. Clearly the Nigerian, like the English reader, expects more from his fiction than sociological analysis. And if we trust ourselves primarily to Arrow of God itself we shall find that all the seeming ‘anthropology’, a few minor details apart, relates directly to the tragedy of Ezeulu, in which Achebe’s own criticism of life and his sensitivity to complexities of character come together in a story of great force and beauty. Thus we may pick up a clue that will lead into the heart of the book from a small instance of picturesque but seemingly irrelevant local colour: a children’s song. The children who are everywhere in the book—as they are in an Ibo village—afford Achebe the means of half-concealing and half-revealing his authorial intentions. The revelation has not been enough for some readers, who have found only anthropological detail in the children’s games; and this may be the reason why, in the second (1974) edition, Achebe has cut most of the singing game which the children in Ezeulu’s compound are playing on the eve of the feast of Pumpkin Leaves. ‘Nwaka Dimkpolo’ winds and unwinds

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like The House that Jack Built’. It starts with a series of demands for retribution, beginning from the fall of the ukwa (breadfruit) on Nwaka Dimkpolo: Who will punish this Ukwa for me? E-e Nwaka Dimkpolo Matchet will cut up this Ukwa for me E-e Nwaka Dimkpolo Who will punish this Matchet for me? E-e Nwaka Dimkpolo Blacksmith will hammer this Matchet. . . .

and so on, till we get to the Earth; but since nothing can be done to the Earth, the song begins to unwind: What did Earth do? Earth swallowed Water What did Water do? Water put out Fire. . . . (pp. 79-80)

What was retribution now appears as the psychological process of compensation, also known as taking it out on someone else. This chain reaction recurs continually in the events of the story. As usual the Europeans, drawn in broader strokes than Achebe uses for his own people, supply a simple and entertaining example. Hurt by what is virtually a reprimand in a memorandum from the Senior District Officer (three years his junior and promoted over his head) Captain Winterbottom strides from his desk to the window and shouts ‘Shut up there!’ to the prisoners cutting the grass. Since they have no inferiors to whom to pass on the hurt, the worst returns to laughter; they remove themselves to a distance and start a new song: When I cut grass and you cut What’s your right to call me names? (p. 67)

As often happens, Winterbottom’s action mirrors a similar act of Ezeulu; in the previous chapter Ezeulu, enraged with his Christianized son but unable to reach him, ‘takes out’ his rage on Edogo. Edogo has, like the prisoners, a way of sublimating his resentment; he carves fearsome masks that express all his pent-up aggression. Oduche, the son who has been offered as sacrifice to white power, is less fortunate, and has to act as whipping boy at several points in the novel. At some point, that is, the chain reaction can go no farther: Who will punish this Earth for me?. . . . ‘No, No, no,’ Nkechi broke in. ‘What can happen to Earth, silly girl?’ asked Nwafo. 7 said it on purpose to test Nkechi,’ said Obiageli.

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ‘It is a lie, as old as you are you can’t even tell a simple story.

‘If it pains you, come and jump on my back, ant-hill nose.’ ‘Mother, if Obiageli abuses me again I shall beat her.’ ‘Touch her if you dare and I shall cure you of your madness this night.’ (p. 80)

There is an echoing reminder here of a children’s squabble that flickered across a tense earlier scene in the novel. A deputation from Umuaro has arrived at the house of the town-crier in Okperi, with whom they are involved in a land dispute: A little girl came in from the inner compound calling her father. ‘Go away, Ogbanje,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see I have strangers?’ ‘Nweke slapped me.’ ‘I shall whip him later. Go and tell him I shall whip him.’ (P- 26)

This incident seems at the time quite irrelevant to the grim events that follow. A brawl breaks out, and one of the deputation, enraged at being called impotent, seizes and splits the ikenga of an Okperi man. A man’s ikenga is the carved embodiment of his strength, his life force, and it is split only when he dies. The messenger’s act is thus an abomination, a crime against the earth and the community; and abominations have no defence. Ibo law provides for continual processes of adjustment by which injuries to pride or person may be healed or at least balanced, as the children’s squabbles remind us they are balanced in family life. But nothing other than disaster can overtake the man who directs his psychological hurt, his sense of being impaired, against the community itself and the objects that symbolize its continuity and vitality. This is the tragedy of Ezeulu. In his determination to make the community suffer for the humiliation it has inflicted upon him, he strikes at its very existence, the life-rhythms of the farming year. It is an assault on basic reality, and has to fail. What can happen to Earth? At the time of the deputation to Okperi, five years prior to the main events of the novel, Ezeulu refuses his support to the subsequent conflict on the grounds that the land in dispute belongs to Okperi and that the splitting of the ikenga by the Umuaro messenger was an abomination. His strong god Ulu, called into existence generations before to empower the clan to resist the slaveraiders, will not fight an unjust war. In this stand Ezeulu is doing what is expected of a Chief Priest; according to the anthropologist M.S.O. Olisa, he should ‘lead the society in uprightness, boldness (especially in declaring actions abominable), and in being absolutely impartial in all disputes between groups of individuals’. Out of this regard of his god for the truth, Ezeulu,

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once the war has been stopped by Winterbottom, gives evidence that the land is Okperi’s. Resentment over this lingers in Umuaro. Inevitably, friction arises between Ezeulu and other men of title who are envious of his power—or, put another way, between Ulu and the guardian deities of the other villages in the group—and this friction is intensified when Ezeulu’s son Oduche, whom he has been persuaded by Winterbottom to send to the new mission school, shuts up in a box the python which is sacred to one of these village deities. Ezeulu is held to be the white man’s tool. Then a chance to show his solidarity with Umuaro against the white man comes when Ezeulu is summoned to Okperi, where Winterbottom plans to appoint him warrant chief over Umuaro. He refuses; a priest does not leave his village and his god. But the community is not behind him in this refusal. Confused by fear of the new power in the land, they insist that he should go to Okperi at the invitation of his white friend. At Okperi, Ezeulu is detained by the white administrators, who are offended by the slight his refusal has cast upon their own tribal god, the British Empire; deeply resentful, he seeks a means of compensation for this humiliation that he has suffered at the hands of Umuaro. His opportunity comes three months after his release, at harvest time. One of Ezeulu’s priestly duties has been to keep count of the months to the yam harvest. But in the guard room at Okperi he has failed to see two new moons in succession. Now he refuses to proclaim the New Yam Festival which would initiate the harvest. In this he believes he is acting as the agent of Ulu. But whether his refusal is the action of an avenging deity or a resentful man, it is a crime against the earth that feeds man. And the earth compels. Even before the sudden death of his son Obika, which seems to Ezeulu to show Ulu’s desertion of him and which causes his mind finally to break, the reality-principle has driven the people to find a way to avoid starvation: the first fruits of harvest can safely be transferred to the new god of Christianity. But this harvest in nomine Filii, though it preserves the lives of the community, puts what may prove an intolerable strain upon its cohesion and continuity. ‘In his extremity,’ the novel concludes, ‘many an Umuaro man had sent his son with a yam or two to offer to the new religion and to bring back the promised immunity. Thereafter any yam that was harvested in the man’s field was har¬ vested in the name of the son.’ The measure of Ezeulu’s downfall is the contrast between the lonely, demented figure at the end of the book, whose people have carried their tribute to a strange god, and the Chief Priest who only a few months previously summons the whole of Umuaro to the Feast of Pumpkin Leaves. On that occasion he is an awesome figure, his body painted so that he is half black and

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half white to symbolize his role as intermediary between the world of men and the world of spirits. The prelude to the rite is Ezeulu’s re-enactment of the priesting of the first Ezeulu, the descent of the creative spirit upon the man strong enough to carry such live energy. ‘I carried myAlusi and, with all the people behind me, set out on the journey. A man sang with the flute on my right and another replied on my left. From behind the heavy tread of all the people gave me strength.’ (p. 88) When the divine power has been renewed in him by this recitation, he begins his godpossessed encirclement of the marketplace, while the women shower upon him the leaves that represent the sins and abominations of the past year. And the people are still behind him as he vanishes into his shrine to bury some of the leaves deep in the earth; village by village, the women circle the marketplace, crushing and stamping the past evils into the dust. Here, as in many other places in the novel, Achebe succeeds triumphantly in making us share the religious emotions of Umuaro, even though we do not fully understand all that is happening. Indeed it is essential to our imaginative participation that we should not fully understand, any more than a Sicilian villager could be said ‘fully’ to understand the Mass. Yet for all this participation, we are never in doubt that for Achebe himself all gods reside, in Blake’s phrase, in the human breast. The recognition that Ulu has no objective reality, neither transcendent nor immanent, underlies the muted irony with which Achebe has Ezeulu ponder his physical and mental exhaustion the morning after the ceremony: ‘the exhaustion he felt after the festival had nothing to do with advancing age. . . .It was part of the sacrifice. For who could trample the sins and abominations of all Umuaro into the dust and not bleed in the feet? Not even a priest as powerful as Ezeulu could hope to do that.’ (p. 107-8) Once again a point made with finesse about Ezeulu is made more crudely about his English counterpart, Winterbottom, who can also mistake inner emotions for external powers. In a zestful recollection of ‘Heart of Darkness’, Achebe has Winterbottom lie awake listening to distant drums and imagining unspeakable rites. ‘Then one night he was terrified when it suddenly occurred to him that no matter where he lay awake at night in Nigeria the beating of the drums came with the same constancy and from the same elusive distance. Could it be that the throbbing came from his own heat-stricken brain?’ (p. 36) Achebe’s ironic treatment of Ulu and other deities is something much more complicated than the simple suspension of disbelief which operates in the novels of Elechi Amadi, his strongest rival among Nigerian writers of traditional life. Whereas

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Amadi adopts the viewpoint of a credulous villager throughout, Achebe, even while he makes us participate in such a point of view, overrides it with a profound Conradian scepticism about the transcendent reality of any of the powers that move men to action. As an authorial stance, this is dangerously self-aware, and it is not surprising that it leads Achebe in his first novel into an occasional archness in his treatment of traditional religion. But in Arrow of God the ironic assumption of belief in Ulu’s objective existence, in opposition to the author’s and the reader’s realization that he is a figment of Ezeulu’s mind, is wholly successful. Perhaps this is because this tension reflects, first, the ambivalent attitude of the Ibo community towards its own gods, and secondly, a certain ambiguity in the story about the nature of Ulu. This ambivalence and ambiguity are both revealed by the rivalry between Ezeulu and Ezidemili, the priest of Idemili. Ezidemili claims that his god has existed from the beginning of things; his name means Pillar of Water and he is thus a nature god holding up the raincloud in the sky—an account confirmed by earlier investigators of North Iboland. But Ulu, of whom we hear nothing outside the novel, was called into being by a powerful sacrifice at the time of the Abam raids, and partakes less of the character of a force of nature than of the personal spirit known as the chi. Ezeulu himself associates Ulu and the chi, though perhaps in a metaphoric way, when he reminds Umuaro, bent on war with Okperi, that ‘Umuaro is today challenging its chi. Is there any man or woman in Umuaro who does not know Ulu, the deity that destroys a man when his life is sweetest to him?’ (p. 32) Thus Ulu is linked, not with the objective environment, the unchallenge¬ able forces of nature, but with the personal portion of the world power. If in the proverbial saying ‘a man does not challenge his

chi’, this power is presented as dominant over its carrier, it is in another saying presented as amenable to its carrier’s manipulation. ‘Let us not listen’, jeers Ezeulu’s rival Nwaka, ‘to anyone trying to frighten us with the name of Ulu. If a man says yes, his chi also says yes.’ (p. 33) Clearly Ulu is an anthropomorphous god, who has had a beginning and will one day have an end, like the lesser gods of Umuaro which are brought out head-high at the New Yam Festival: ‘Perhaps this year one or two more would disappear, following the men who made them in their own image and departed long ago.’ (p. 254) Ulu is what his custodian makes him; and what he makes depends on what kind of man Ezeulu himself is. The complexity of Ezeulu’s character is suggested, with remarkable economy of means, in the opening chapter. He is watching the sky for the fourth new moon of the farming year; it

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will be his signal to eat another yam out of the store of thirteen that enables him to keep count of the months to harvest. He watches anxiously, because the life of the community depends upon his time-keeping and ‘he must not take a risk’. Responsibility is the theme of many of Ezeulu’s proverbs. Twice, during the quarrel with Okperi, he reminds Umuaro that a she-goat does not suffer parturition on the tether while there is an adult in the house. The same proverb is later spoken about Ezeulu when, in a spirit of responsibility towards the whole community, he answers Winterbottom’s summons. But we last meet it used against Ezeulu by one of the anxious elders who beg him, at the crisis of the story, not to refuse to proclaim the New Yam Festival. And the ruthless exercise of power that this refusal represents is incipient on the first page of the novel, in the enjoyment Ezeulu experiences in making young men wince at his handshake. These two contrary drives of his nature, his will to dominate his community and his will to serve its needs, are shown in equipoise in the reflections which follow as he looks at the nature of his power. ‘If he should refuse to name the day there would be no festival—no planting and no reaping. But could he refuse? No Chief Priest had ever refused. So it could not be done... .But.. .what kind of power was it if everyone knew it would never be used?’(p. 4) Thus from the outset Ezeulu experiences in his own nature that tension between communal responsibility and individual ambition which Arrow of God, in confirmation of all the anthropologists tells us, shows to be the temper of Ibo village life. And just as the delicate equilibrium of such a community can be upset by the intervention of an alien power, so can the balance of Ezeulu’s mind. These forces of disruption, which we must now examine, cause Ezeulu to remake his deity as an idol of the den: ‘for everyone’, writes Bacon, ‘has his own individual den or cavern which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature.’ And in the end the community has to withstand his megalomania for the sake of its survival—much as the fellow-villagers of the anthropologist V.C. Uchendu resisted the rainmaker who attempted to abuse his power by causing too great a drought—‘and he was forced to abandon his profession altogether’. The first force of disruption was military. Since the Ibos had no powerful chiefs, British penetration of Iboland at the turn of the century could not follow the usual imperial pattern of treaty¬ making with local rulers. Sir Claude Macdonald, first ConsulGeneral to the Oil Rivers Protectorate, in fact hoped to achieve such ‘peaceful penetration’ and asked an astonished Foreign Office to send him five hundred treaty forms. But Macdonald left in 1895, and for the next decade Iboland was subjected to a series

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of patrols and punitive raids which the Aborigines Protection Society with some justification described as ‘nigger hunting’. The Ibo historian J.C. Anene has described a typical raid such as is recalled in the traditions of practically every village group east of the Niger. The patrol would be preceded by a summons to the community to send its chief men to meet the white man at the nearest government-controlled town. Such a summons was often ignored, ‘because the chiefs were looked upon as the representa¬ tives of the ancestral god and were so valuable to their communities that they were not normally allowed to travel outside their villages’. The area would be hastily evacuated, and messages would go to and fro between the fugitives and the military. When the white man ran out of patience he would achieve submission by burning a village or two to the ground and destroying its crops—which the people found ‘was not the kind of war they had been used to’. It is fair to add that the most renowned of these military expeditions, that against Arochuku in 1902, was undertaken in part—albeit a minor part—to defend other Ibo areas from harassment by the Abam mercenaries who were in the pay of the Aro-chuku oracle. Even so, Arrow of God makes the specific point that a community such as Umuaro had been able to deal with the Abam in its own way. In the novel, the age of military expeditions already seems remote to Clarke, the young A.D.O., when he reads The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger by George Allen—the District Commissioner who helped things to fall apart in Achebe’s first novel. But is still a living memory to the senior Christian in Umuaro, Moses Unachukwu: I have travelled in Olu and I have travelled in Igbo, and I can tell you that there is no escape from the white man. He has come. When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. The white man is like that. Before any of you here was old enough to tie a cloth between the legs I saw with my own eyes what the white man did to Abame. Then I knew there was no escape. As daylight chases away darkness so will the white man drive away all our customs. I know that as I say it now it passes by your ears, but it will happen. The white man has power which comes from the true God and it burns like fire... .The white man, the new religion, the soldiers, the new road— they are all part of the same thing, (pp. 104-5)

Moses’ response to the new power he witnessed as a young boy is a typical Ibo one. He decides to learn to manipulate it for the benefit of himself and his group. At his baptism he takes the name of Moses because he intends to lead his people into the promised

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land. He travels to the great river of European commerce, learns the strangers’ language, and gains a skill in carpentry which is highly appreciated by a nation of woodworkers. After 1906 the show of military might in Eastern Nigeria was a good deal less formidable than it had been at the opening of the century. It seldom went beyond such action as that of Winterbottom when he breaks the guns of Umuaro and Okperi after putting a stop to their land-war. This intervention, and Winterbottom’s subsequent award of the disputed land to Okperi, is, in Ezeulu’s eyes, a show of strength in vindication of Ulu; but Winterbottom naturally sees it as the victory of his own tribal god, British imperial power. He too has fought his tribal war, against the Germans in the Cameroons; and in civil life he retains his title of Captain with a pride comparable to Ezeulu’s in his title of Chief Priest. Such retention of a title is of course a well-known sign of insecurity. Winterbottom’s confidence has been impaired by his wife’s desertion (Ezeulu too feels his polygamous family do not support him as they should) and by the challenge of younger members of his tribe proclaiming the power of their new deity, which is called Indirect Rule—so disastrously imposed on Iboland in the nineteen-twenties in place of the old authoritative paternalism exercised by Winterbottom’s generation. Like many of the earliest colonial administrators, Winterbottom has a romantic, ‘missionary’ belief in the civilizing mission; the storm-bent palm trees present themselves as fleeing giants to his Quixotic gaze. He bears much resemblance to G.T. Basden, who was the pioneer missionary among Achebe’s own people; for the very voice of Winterbottom, paternal and knowing, we have only to go to Basden’s 1921 study of Ibo life, while his later Niger Ibos has for frontispiece what is virtually a photograph of Ezeulu: the priest who is half man and half spirit, the spirit of half being painted white, confronts with dignity the white photographer Basden whose black shadow falls across the foreground. In Arrow of God the relationship between Ezeulu and Winterbottom conveys just this same feeling of negative and positive, of attraction and repulsion. Winterbottom knows a great deal about the Ibos but he is totally unable to put himself into their place. He marvels over their love of titles, their tendency to turn themselves into little tyrants, over their people—‘it seems to be a trait in the character of the negro’—and (as he sips his third or can it be his fourth brandy-and-ginger?) the quantity of palm wine they are able to drink. And because of this lack of the real knowledge that comes through imaginative insight, he misinterprets Ezeulu’s testimony against his own people as an asknowledgement of British might.

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Acknowledgement of a kind is there, but it is of a nature that has always confused Ibo-English relations. For an Ibo man, once the new strength abroad in his land had been recognized, ‘the task was not merely to control the British influences, but to capture it’. Like Moses, Ezeulu realizes that the new force could be used to the benefit of the community towards whom his responsibility is so strong. Thus he agrees to send his son Oduche to be educated by the Christian mission in Umuaro. And in this way he becomes implicated in a further show of white power, this time by African Christians. Among the Ibos to harm a python, a creature sacred to Idemili, was an abomination—a crime against the community. The first generation of Christians therefore on occasion killed a python in order that their impunity might demonstrate the strength of their god uis-a-vis other deities. It is significant that the catechist who urges the Umuaro Christians to such a show of strength is an outsider from the Niger Delta, with the ‘assimilated’ name of Goodcountry. Moses has the sense of responsibility strenuously to oppose the proposal, but Goodcountry’s star pupil, Ezeulu’s son Oduche, offers chapter and verse in support of python-slaying, and carries the day. Publicly humiliated, Moses stalks from the meeting with a challenge to Oduche to kill a python himself, and the hurt rhetorical question: ‘Do I look like something you can put in your bag and walk away?’ This vernacular image is made concrete when Oduche, not daring actually to kill a python, shuts one up in his box in the hope that it will die. The box was made by Moses with the skill in carpentry he acquired at the Onitsha mission. The python’s struggles reproduce the resentment that Moses, as one of the first, technically-trained converts, experiences when his authority is questioned by the new generation of Christians with ‘book-learning’; on a larger scale they reproduce the frustration that the society as a whole suffers when its guns are broken by the new administrators and its gods blasphemed against by the new religion. Moreover, the python is a scapegoat. As such it is imaginatively associated with Ezeulu, who in the course of the novel is demoted by Umuaro from the role of intermediary between god and man, carrying their failings by virtue of his strength of character, to the scapegoat whom they drive out, loading their sins upon him. The process is not without its parallels in Western literature, while ’Wole Soyinka’s play The Strong Breed furnishes a striking parallel in Nigeria. There too the roles of sin-bearer and scapegoat provide the work’s dramatic tension: the son who tries to assume his father’s role in carrying away the community’s abominations in an exhausting purification rite finds that times have changed, and that the society of his own generation, anxious and asunder, can

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only disburden itself of its distress by hounding him to death. In a similar manner Ezeulu’s position changes, from that of the priest burying the year’s evils while his people stamp behind him, to that of the sacrificial victim driven out by those hungry to compensate for their own humiliation in seeing him humiliated. As if to emphasize this contrast, the Feast of Pumpkin Leaves at which Ezeulu, although already threatened by mounting hostility engendered by the python episode, is still able to exercise his traditional powers, is quickly followed by a series of events that force him into the plight of the python in the box. They begin with yet another show of white power, this time one that is notably squalid: Obika, Ezeulu’s favourite son, conscripted with his age group to work on the white man’s road, falls foul of the P.W.D. man Wright and is flogged by him. Because the group of young workers is distressed but unable to retaliate, its frustration erupts in internal quarrels: ‘it was so much easier to deal with an old quarrel than with a new, unprecedented incident’, (p. 102) Among them the only voice of reason is that of a character, Nweke Ukpaka, who makes this brief appearance as Achebe’s raisonneur. The world, Ezeulu says, is like a Mask dancing; to see it well you do not stand in one place. The same is true of Achebe’s fictional world, but, like Conrad, he always gives us a passing glimpse, through a minor character, of his own view. ‘The white man’, according to Nweke Ukpaka, is like a hot soup and we must take him slowly-slowly from the edges of the bowl. . . I know that the white man does not wish Umuaro well. That is why we must hold our ofo by him and give him no cause to say that we did this or failed to do that. For if we give him cause he will rejoice. Why? Because the very house he has been seeking ways of pulling down has caught fire of its own will. For this reason we shall go on working on his road; and when we finish we shall ask him if he has more work for us. But when dealing with a man who thinks you a fool it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace. This white man thinks we are foolish; so we shall ask him one question.. . .why we are not paid for working on his road. I have heard that throughout Olu and Igbo, whenever people do this kind of work the white man pays them. Why should our own be different? (pp. 105-6)

Nweke’s advice is intrinsically Ibo; the new power can be manipulated by verbal skill, by asking the right questions. Ezeulu is ready to act in this way in his son’s defence: to go to Winterbottom and ask him why, if his son was not the aggressor, Wright should have beaten him. Such an encounter could have done nothing but good, since it would have confirmed for

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Winterbottom what he already suspects, that Wright is abusing his powers. But through his irascibility, Ezeulu fails to ask Obika if Wright struck the first blow; like many responsible fathers, he cannot believe his son to be other than irresponsible. And before the misunderstanding can be sorted out, while all Umuaro is feeling frustrated and hurt, Winterbottom sends for Ezeulu. Winterbottom too has his frustrations. His freedom of action is boxed in by directives from headquarters. In accordance with the fashionable policy of Indirect Rule, which worked well in Northern Nigeria where there were powerful traditional rulers, he has to start appointing warrant chiefs. His choice lights on Ezeulu; for once it seems that a man of real status in Ibo society has been chosen. On top of these irritations, the D.O. is in the first morose stage of an attack of malaria, so that when Ezeulu initially responds with a firm refusal his message finds Winterbottom as debilitated and touchy as Ezeulu was, on the morrow of the Feast, when he heard of the flogging. In consequence, Winterbottom fails to go to Umuaro and ask Ezeulu why he has refused; had he done so, the two strong men would literally have met each other halfway with their questions. Instead he issues a warrant for Ezeulu’s arrest—and is borne off, delirious, to hospital. Affairs at Okperi are left in the hands of Clarke, a character born rather to be led than to lead, who bears a marked family likeness to Joyce Cary’s Rudbeck in Mister Johnson. Achebe handles him with the insight of Ibo observers into the difference between the first and the second generation of British administra¬ tors. Clarke, like his superior officer, fails to ask the right question at the right time. In his touring of the district he has been instructed by Winterbottom to investigate the rumour that Wright has been flogging road-workers. But he has not yet acquired— though he will begin to do so before the end of the novel— Winterbottom’s paternal concern for the people. Moreover, in the loneliness of this non-society, he is glad to accept Wright’s hospitality and overtures of friendship, and these inhibit him from making enquiries about the road gangs. He rationalizes his failure to ask questions by constructing a theory that the way to get things done in colonial administration is to impose the demands of one’s own culture, in the French way, rather than to enquire endlessly into the culture of the subject people. If he were less youthfully cocksure and more intelligently curious he might ask Ezeulu, to whom he finally offers the post of warrant chief on Winterbottom’s behalf, the reason for his refusal. But his selfsatisfaction at his benefactory powers is disagreeably frustrated by Ezeulu’s behaviour, and he returns the Chief Priest to the guard room for the very reason—produced by Winterbottom himself—

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which had so often served as pretext for a show of strength in the days of the ‘pacification’: refusal to co-operate with the Administration. The crisis of the novel, handled with a skill that will repay a close reading, comes in the sixteenth chapter with Ezeulu’s return to Umuaro. He is free to go home because concern has been expressed by the Secretary for Native Affairs about the unsuitability of the warrant chiefs already appointed, and Political Officers have been told to refrain from further appointments. They are instructed—in one of Achebe’s nimble parodies of officialese—‘to handle the matter with tact so that the Administration did not confuse the minds of the natives or create the impression of indecision or lack of direction as such an impression would do untold harm’, (p. 222-3)* The harm of course is already done. Isolated for over a month at Okperi, cut off for the first time in his life from his own community, Ezeulu’s mind twists with rage against the people of Umuaro who have shut him into this box of the white man. The first night in the guard room, he dreams a dream of frustration and persecution: the whole assembly of Umuaro elders turns on him because he cannot save them from the white man; they spit on him and call him the priest of a dead god. Determined to make Umuaro pay for his humiliation, Ezeulu walks the six miles home in pouring rain which serves still further to feed his resentment: ‘The rain was part of the suffering to which he had been exposed and for which he must exact the fullest redress.’ (p. 225) He is acting like the puff adder which will suffer every provocation, even letting itself be trodden upon, before it unerringly strikes. The image had already been used of Ezeulu during his detention at Okperi, where he was widely and admiringly held to be responsible for Winterbottom’s critical illness. This evidence of his god’s strength, together with his proud refusal to serve the Crown rather than Ulu, have together ensured that his credit at Umuaro stands higher than it has ever done before, and a great welcome awaits him. Villagers crowd into the family circle of Ezeulu’s obi; and as they join in laughing at his grandson’s insistence that he be carried by the priest’s youngest daughter, Obiageli, a child scarcely bigger than himself, Ezeulu’s resolution to challenge his community begins to weaken. Once again, the children in the story are made to serve an integral purpose. Obiageli’s song, which we have already heard in the days before Ezeulu’s exile when she was left alone to take care of the homestead, is a song of vigilance like ‘The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn’: "There was really such a report, S.M. Grier’s Report on the Eastern Provinces by the Secretary for Native Affairs (Lagos 1922).

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Mother’s goat is in the barn And the gams will not be safe. Father’s goat is in the barn And the gams will all be eaten . . .(p. 230)

As she disappears, immensely proud of her burden, there revives in Ezeulu that pride in his own burden which once made him the trusted carrier of Ulu. And when Ofoka, a man who is neither friend nor enemy, comes to congratulate him on having gone out and wrestled alone with the white man, Ezeulu’s pride in his responsibility brings back an ancestral memory of the priest’s function: Yes, it was right that the Chief Priest should go ahead and confront danger before it reached his people. That was the re¬ sponsibility of his priesthood. It had been like that from the first dag when the six harassed villages got together and said to Ezeulu’s ancestor: ‘You will carrg this deitg for us.’ At first he was afraid. What power had he in his bodg to carrg such potent danger? But his people sang their support behind him and the flute man turned his head. So he went down on both knees and theg put the deitg on his head. He rose up and was transformed into a spirit. His people kept us their song behind him and he stepped forward on his first and decisive journeg, compelling even the four dags in the skg to give wag to him. (p. 233)

But though Ezeulu, at this memory, once again holds the power in his hands, he does not lift it to his own head. Instead he calls another of his children, Oduche, and urges him to seize the power which, during his stay in Okperi, he has seen reside in the written word. The solemnity of the commission is relieved by a flicker of that absurdity which plays round all culture-contacts: When I was in Okperi I saw a goung white man who was able to write his book with the left hand. From his actions I could see that he had verg little sense. But he had power; he could shout in mg face; he could do what he liked. Whg? Because he could write with his left hand. That is whg I have called gou. I want gou to learn and master this man’s knowledge so much that if gou are suddenlg woken up from sleep and asked what it is gou will replg. You must learn it until gou can write it with gour left hand. That is all I want to tell gou. (p. 234)

So the unhappy Oduche, once the welcomes have died down, crouches over his Ibo primer by the light of a palm oil taper, while his younger brother and sister absorb an older and less alien tradition from their mother’s story-telling. The tale she tells so enchantingly is one of the most widely spread of African quest stories. A good child goes to the land of

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the spirits to seek his lost flute; he is truthful, polite, ungreedy, and obedient, and the spirits reward these social virtues with a pot which, when broken open, produces every good thing. Next day the boy’s half-brother is commanded by his jealous mother to lose his flute and go on a similar quest. He shows himself to untruthful, rude, greedy, and disobedient; and his pot, when broken, lets out all the ills that flesh is now heir to. In the novel’s second edition Achebe gives only the opening of this story, but this is enough to ensure its recognition by the Ibo readers. Ezeulu too has made a journey to the land of spirits, which in Ibo art have white faces. He too could bring back plenty or misery for his people. What is in the pot for them depends on whether the god he serves is a projection of those social instincts that bind and sustain the community, or a projection of his deeply egotistical resentment. Now, in this critical chapter’s final paragraphs, Ezeulu is poised between reconciliation and revenge. But he is too weak from the trauma of his exile to be able to sustain the mental fight. ‘Ta! Nwanu!’ barked Ulu in his ear, as a spirit would in the ear of an impertinent human child. ‘Who told you that this was pour own fight?’ Ezeulu trembled and said nothing. 7 say who told you that this was pour own fight which you could arrange to suit you? You want to save pour friends who brought you palm wine he-he-he-he!’ laughed the deitp the wap spirits do—a dry, skeletal laugh, (p. 240)

We have heard this laugh before, from Ezeulu himself, at several places in the story; its most telling occurrence is when Akuebue warns the Chief Priest that no one man can win judgement against a clan. The foreboding it then awakened in Akuebue is explained when we learn of the madness of Ezeulu’s mother, whose maniacal laughter echoes through his dreams once he has thrown down his challenge to the community. This ‘intervention’ of Ulu is of course Ezeulu’s surrender to the irrational, to the idols of the den; he abrogates all responsibility and luxuriates in the belief that he is not more than an arrow in the bow of his god. Resentment is exalted into retribution: vengeance is Ulu’s. Ezeulu’s fatal decision—or Ulu’s fatal decision—to postpone the New Yam Festival for a further two moons is presented with great narrative dexterity so that the reader’s expectation is blended with his surprise. When Clarke, receiving the weekly Reuter’s telegram, notices that it reports that Russian peasants, in revolt against the new regime, are refusing to grow crops, the English reader’s mind may go to the most famous example of communal suicide on record, that of the Xosa cattle-slaying early in the century; while the Ibo reader will recall instances nearer

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home, such as the incident recorded by the anthropologist Margaret Green in 1937: because of the delays of indigenous justice in a case which had involved the removal of the sacred spear of the yam cult, the custodians of the cult were unable to proclaim the New Yam Festival. Like Ezeulu’s refusal to proclaim the festival in Arrow of God, this crisis undermined the tradition of the community Margaret Green was living in; the Britishcontrolled police had to be called in to avert bloodshed. Over and above his reminder of similar happenings on historical record, Achebe offers a fine clue of anticipations within the story itself, from Ezeulu’s opening reflections—‘If he should refuse to name the day there would be no festival—no planting and no reaping—’ to his comment that the Christians’ bell, with its message of ‘leave your yam, leave your cocoyam and come to church’ is singing ‘the song of extermination’ and so on to Moses’ warning that if the road gang get themselves into trouble and end up cutting Captain Winterbottom’s grass at Okperi they will miss the moon of planting, (pp. 7, 52, 104) As the hunger with which the Ibo farming year customarily ends is prolonged into famine, two elders of the village act a choric role by weighing up the meaning of Ezeulu’s behaviour. We have grown to like Akuebue, but recognize he is a tradition-bound personality; Ofoka we know as a man who asks the right questions, and although Akuebue is given the last word, he is bewildered where Ofoka is incisive. It is Ofoka’s interpretation we¬ ave more likely to accept, and eventually it is the one that (Jmuaro will accept. ‘Sometimes I want to agree with those who say the man has caught his mother’s madness,’ said Ogbuefi Ofoka. ‘When he came back from Okperi I went to his house and he talked like a sane man. I reminded him of his saying that a man must dance the dance prevailing in his time and told him we had come—too late—to accept its wisdom. But today he would rather see the six villages ruined than eat two yams.’ ‘I have had the same thoughts myself,’ said Akuebue, who was visiting his in-law. ‘1 know Ezeulu better than most people. He is a proud man and the most stubborn person you know is only his messenger; but he would not falsify the decision of Ulu. If he did it Ulu would not spare him to begin with. So, I don’t know.’ ‘I have not said that Ezeulu is telling a lie with the name of Ulu or that he is not. What we told him was to go and eat the yams and we would take the consequences. But he would not do it. Why? Because the six villages allowed the white man to take him away. That is the reason. He has been

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CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES trying to see how he could punish Umuaro and now he has the chance. The house he has been planning to pull down has caught fire and saved him the labour.’

7 don’t know.’ ‘Let me tell you one thing. A priest like Ezeulu leads a god to ruin himself. It has happened before.’ ‘Or perhaps a god like Ulu leads a priest to ruin himself.’ (p. 266)

It is clear from this that the more traditional element in the clan requires a sign from ani mmo, the abode of spirits, before they accept Ofoka’s view that Ezeulu is trying to get his own back on Umuaro. The sign comes with the sudden death of Obika, presumably from heart failure, when he is masquerading as a night spirit at the second burial of an important villager. There is something particularly awe-inspiring about this death of a man at the time when he is possessed by a supernatural power (indeed ‘Wole Soyinka in The Road builds a whole play round this theme) and our awe is the measure of Achebe’s art in making us denizens of his Ibo village group. But also from our ‘outsider’s’ view—and surely most Ibo readers are now outsiders in this sense—of Ezeulu as a megalomaniac rather than the instrument of a divine power, there is an awe-inspiring fitness in the catastrophe. Of the masquerading costume donned by night spirits such as Obika carries, Basden writes: ‘A man must be physically strong to endure the heat, semi-suffocation and strain demanded of him when so disguised. He is indeed far from being a disembodied spirit; there is nothing ethereal about him.’ In his surrender to the irrational, seen by him as the spiritual power of Ulu and the white power of the new regime that appears to work with Ulu, Ezeulu fails to realize that man cannot live by spirit alone. The physical realities of existence also demand our deference, and in running as a night spirit when debilitated by malnutrition and fever Obika challenges those realities. Like father, like son; the strong man who should be the carrier is transformed into the scapegoat when his father’s sins are visited upon him. Ezeulu reproaches his god in a lament rich in proverbial images. Why has Ulu not looked after his own? ‘When was it ever heard that a child was scalded by the piece of yam its own mother put in its palm? What man would send his son with a potsherd to bring fire from a neighbour’s hut and then unleash rain on him? Who ever sent his son up the palm to gather nuts and then took an axe and felled the tree?’ (p 286) The proverbs, echoing similar ones spoken earlier in the novel, strike home with ironic force. Ezeulu himself has failed to look after his own. He has ceased to

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serve an Ulu who personifies the clan’s collective strength and wellbeing, and has gone a-whoring after strange gods in the recesses of a mind that now loses its last hold upon reality. Between Ezeulu’s return from Okperi and the catastrophe of the story another festival takes place, a minor village affair called Akwu Nro. On a casual reading it might be dismissed as an anthropological’ episode. In fact it is firmly structural. Occurring between Ezeulu s defiance of the British and his defiance of his own clan, it is the eye of the storm. It affords us, in its honouring of the dead, a last glimpse of the clan united by its traditional reverences. Yet the rivalries that give Ibo life its tension still obtain: the crowd’s acclaim goes to Obika for his vigorous ejection of an ill-wisher and for his skilful performance of the sacrifice rather than to his brother Edogo who has carved the ceremonial Mask. Edogo moves through the crowd, studying his handiwork from different positions, satisfying himself that the weakness he suspected in its features—‘a certain fineness which belonged not to an Agaba but to a Maiden Spirit’—no longer shows now the mask is in action. Many are praising the carver, but to Edogo’s disappointment no one compares the mask with the famous Agaba of Umuagu: ‘He had not after all set out to excel the greatest carver in Umuaro but he had hoped that someone would link their two names.’ (p. 251) This anxiety of Edogo’s is in character. It is also the self-questioning of the artist in any medium. In just this way a modern Edogo might hunt for understanding comment through the notices of his new book. So it is possible to see in this passage Achebe’s half-satirical and halfappealing awareness of his concern for his own art. I have placed the Agaba of Achebe beside the Agaba of Conrad: has it a comparable ‘fierceness? It is not a word one easily associates with Achebe. The terms that come most readily to mind in an attempt to evaluate his quality as a novelist are such epithets as ‘deft’ and ‘dextrous’. He is a highly skilled craftsman, acutely aware, among other things, of the importance that must be given to tone, or voice, in a novel written in a language different from that of its setting. This carefulness led Achebe in his first novel, Things Fall Apart, to adopt for his third-person narrative the viewpoint of a moderate and responsible member of the tribe who has lived through the book’s events as they unroll at the end of the last century. The effect of this, it has often been said, is to give the book a classical gravity, simplicity, and decorum. Yet a reader who compares the book’s total effect with the turbulent vitality of Ibo rural life as he has observed it—and it cannot have changed profoundly—might be forgiven for finding that effect at times more Ossianic than

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Homeric. In his second novel, No Longer at Ease, Achebe again tells a story as it might strike a contemporary. But now the viewpoint has become very close indeed to the outlook of the hero, a young, well-educated civil servant caught up in the moral confusions of Lagos in the nineteen-fifties. In this tragedy the sufferings of the protagonist have to be endured alone and unnoticed. And the voice that recounts them is correspondingly muted, without passion or resonance, like the voice of a studio news-reader. Only briefly at the end does it vibrate with the overtones of a communal Stoicism: ‘the most terrible sight in the world cannot put out the eye’. But for the most part Achebe, like his hero Obi, ‘talks “is” and “was” and just as Obi’s countrymen complain that they expected more of the man they paid to educate in England, readers of No Longer at Ease on its publication were troubled lest they should be forced in the end to group Achebe with those South African novelists trounced by Roy Campbell: You praise the firm restraint with which they write— I’m with you there, of course. They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where’s the bloody horse?

Fortunately four years later Arrow of God showed the horse to be alive and kicking, and Achebe very much in the saddle. Here was a taut, nervous prose, a real stylistic advance on the rather static archaisms of Things Fall Apart and the nerveless English colloquialisms of No Longer at East. It reflects a society in which words still have inherent power and have not yet become arbitrary labels. Edogo and his wife do not voice their fear that their child is a spirit child who will return by death to the spirit world, because ‘utterance had power to change fear into a living truth’, (p. 117) Such a conviction shapes the formal speeches made in the clan’s debates. The communal energy of proverbs and the challenge of rhetorical questions build up the conflict of attitudes and of personalities into the stylistic equivalent of that thrust and counterthrust of social forces which anthropologists have shown to be the temper of traditional Ibo life. An apt example is offered in a conversation between Ezeulu and Akuebue, whose real affection for one another does not prevent contentions that, like many Ibo arguments, are ‘dangerous-looking scenes’ for the bystander. Ezeulu is speaking: ‘Do not make me laugh,’ he said. ‘If someone came to you and said that Ezeulu sent his son to a strange religion so as to please another man what would you tell him? I say don’t make me laugh. Shall I tell you why I sent my son? Then listen. A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs. When we want to make a charm

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we look for the animal whose blood can match its power; if a chicken cannot do it we look for a goat or a ram; if that is not sufficient we send for a bull. But sometimes even a bull does not suffice, then we must look for a human. Do you think it is the sound of the death-cry gurgling through blood that we want to hear? No, my friend, we do it because we have reached the very end of things and we know that neither a cock nor a goat nor even a bull will do. And our fathers have told us that it may even happen to an unfortunate generation that they are pushed beyond the end of things, and their back is broken and hung over a fire. When this happens they may sacrifice their own blood. This is what our sages meant when they said that a man who has nowhere else to put his hand for support puts it on his own knee. That was why our ancestors when they were pushed beyond the end of things by the warriors ofAbam sacrificed not a stranger but one of themselves and made the great medicine which they called Ulu. (pp. 164-5)

Power has been carved into the lineaments of this prose. It is transparently simple, yet it bears out Blake’s dictum about the wide and impassable gulf between simplicity and insipidity. A crackling impetus is given to Ezeulu’s speech by cumulative repetitions, by the rising intonation of questions, by emphatic connective inversions (This is what’ . . .‘That was why’), by ferocious images and the gnomic force of proverbs. And if we are to attempt to discover why Achebe’s writing achieves such vigour in Arrow of God, it may help us to look closely at the substance as well as at the style of what Ezeulu is here saying. Arrow of God appeared four years after Nigeria’s Independence. The interim was a time of mounting resentment and apprehension for the Ibo. British partiality for the North appeared to them to have been built into the Independence constitution. They looked to the results of a new census to right the balance; but the results, which indicated that the East and West together now outnumbered the North, were declared void on the grounds that the returns must have been false. Ibo men who left their overcrowded and overcultivated farmlands in order to work in the North found themselves discriminated against and sometimes in physical danger. The impossible task of sifting the truth from the falsehood in all the accusations and counter-accusations of the time must be left to the historians. For us as readers of Achebe the important fact is that he wrote his third novel at a time when the Ibo people believed themselves to be shut up in a box: even that they were hung over a fire. It would not be long before their frustration would be pushed beyond the edge of things and they would sacrifice their own sons in the Civil War of 1967-9. I am not of

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course claiming that Achebe, who performed a sufficiently remarkable feat of prophecy in his next novel by describing the first military coup some months before it took place, is foretelling the Civil War in Ezeulu’s eloquence. But I would suggest that Arrow of God, like some other outstanding political novels, derives much of its vitality from the fact that it was written at a time of sharpened political awareness. If the arrow flies fast and true it is because the bow of the writer’s sensibility has been tightly drawn. Ezeulu is not, however, Achebe’s spokesman. He is his tragic hero, and as such is in a position where circumstances may impel but cannot compel his moral choice. In the end he chooses to risk the destruction of his people. A no less tragic choice was made, possibly for no better motives, by the Ibo political leaders in 1967; and if European readers of Arrow of God are painfully aware as they read of the disaster incipient in the delayed planting, this is in part because the near-starvation of people in the Ibo heartland in 1969 brought fully home to them the total dependence of an agricultural people on the due observance of seedtime and harvest. Achebe himself is in some degree a victim of the war; he has written little since it ended, and as yet nothing of comparable distinction with his first four novels. But there is time yet. If Arrow of God is a story of frustration and of the suicidal defiance which is an individual way of escape from that frustration, it is also a story of resilience. A blind and desperate act of vengeance offends against the community and against the earth that nourishes it, but both renew themselves; the question ‘What can happen to Earth?’ asserts an acceptance of forces that are far more powerful than the idols of the den.

Notes on Sources My quotations from Arrow of God are from Heinemann’s 1965 paperback edition which has the same pagination as the original 1964 edition. Significant changes introduced in the second edition (1974) have been noted in my text. I have also quoted from The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’ which appeared in Nigerian Magazine, 89 (1966) and has been reprinted in African Writers on African Writings, edited by G.D. Killam (1973). Chinua Achebe’s other novels are Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), and A Man of the People (1966)! Other novelists referred to in this chapter are Nkem Nwankwo (Danda, 1964; My Mercedes is Bigger than Yours, 1975) and Elechi Amadi (The Concubine, 1965; The Great Ponds, 1969).

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Wole Soyinka is also well known as a novelist and a poet, but my references are to his plays, of which a collected edition appeared in 1973-4. I give my informants on Ibo history and social life in chronological order: A.G. Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes (1906); G.T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (1921) and Niger Ibos (1938); C.K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (1937); M.M. Green, Ibo Village Affairs (1947); Daryll Forde and Gd. Jones, The Ibo and Ibibio speaking Peoples of South Eastern Nigeria (1950); R.G. Horton, ‘God, man and land in a Northern Igbo village group’ in Africa, 26(1956); J.S. Boston, ‘Some Northern Ibo Masquerades’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 90 (1960); Simon Ottenberg, ‘Ibo Receptivity to Change’, in Continuity and Change in African Cultures, edited by W.J. Bascom and M.J. Herskovits (1959); V.C. Uchendu, The Igbo of South-East Nigeria (1965); J.C. Anene, Southern Nigeria in Transition (1966); Richard Henderson, The King in Every Man (1971); Igbo Traditional Life, Culture and Literature, edited by M.J.C. Echeruo and E.N. Obiechina (1971), an admirable symposium forming a special number of The Conch (I am particularly indebted to the articles by D.I. Nwoga, M.S.O. Olisa, B.I. Chukwukere, and Obiora Udechukwu); and E.N. Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel (1975). I have also gleaned a good deal of anthropological information from the novels of Onuora Nzekwu. There is much disagreement among these scholars, beginning from their different spelling and uses of the name of the people they are writing about. I have kept to ‘Ibo’ instead of the more correct ‘Igbo’, which an English reader is likely to pronounce ‘Iggbow’; and when I have had to use the word substantively I have preferred the linguistically barbarous ‘Ibos’ to ‘the Ibo’, which suggests a much more homogeneous group than the Ibo people actually comprise. The word itself, Dr B.E. Obumselu informs me, probably means ‘neighbour’. The area in which I have had to tread most warily, partly as a result of the diversity within unity of the Ibos, is my interpretation of the way Achebe presents Ibo religious ideas. In his collection of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), Achebe himself discusses ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’ and one passage in this essay is particularly relevant to Arrow of God: The Igbo. . .postulate the concept of every man as both a unique creation and the work of a unique creator. . . .All this might lead one to think that among the Igbo the individual would be supreme, totally free and existentially alone. But

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the Igbo are unlikely to concede to the individual an absolutism they deny even to chi. The obvious curtailment of a man’s power to walk alone and do as he will is provided by another potent force—the will of his community.

In the novel I find this tension represented by Ezeulu’s devotion to a unique deity in contrast to the community’s recognition of the need to live in harmony with natural forces. I find significance in the fact that when M.S.O. Olisa calls village priests ‘the genuine philosophers of Igbo life’ he is writing about Ezealas, or priests of the Earth Goddess, not about devotees of such an anthropomor¬ phic being as Ulu. There is perhaps also significance in R.G. Horton’s report of the existence, in a community near Enugu, of a cult of Uluci, ‘evil luck’, similar to the Yoruba and Egba veneration of a trickster spirit who works against the common will of men and gods. Chinua Achebe’s books have attracted more critical comment than those of any other African writer. David Carroll’s study (1970) seems to me to be far and away the best.

Mister Johnson and the Complexity of Arrow of God Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God is the most complex, richly-textured novel to come out of Africa. It is considerably finer in this respect than its predecessor from Nigeria, the Englishman Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson.1 Discussion of Cary’s novel in this context is inevitable because it is one of the novels that Achebe says appalled him and motivated him to tell “the story that we had to tell.” 2 I do not deny the faults of Mister Johnson. But nevertheless I propose a rather detailed analysis of its virtues. This prior discussion will illuminate the rather greater virtues of Achebe’s novel and illustrate as well the cultural presumptions of the two authors and the contrast between them. However delightful, even splendid, the character of Johnson may seem to the British reader, to the African, Johnson is a European monster, a culturally vacuous stage Irishman dressed in black skin and voiced with a bad approximation of West African pidgin English. But in a vitally important sense, the novel is not about him at all; it is about Rudbeck, colonial officer, symbol and activist of Progress: he will build a road, not because the road is needed, not because it is wanted, not because it is ordered, but because—in some unarticulated way—he thinks that to Build a Road is Good. Johnson is the operative agent of the Road, for he gives Rudbeck the means to build it. Because Johnson is so purely instrumental, the novel almost breaks in two: the Rudbeck story with the making of the road, and the Johnson story, with its awful ending—the execution of the appreciative black by a white who would have done as much (with the same feeling) for a sick dog.3 The Johnson story can be largely disregarded here. That Johnson helped Cary to go on to better things—notably Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth—cannot be denied, and the literary critic would be ungrateful indeed to deny that Johnson’s character has literary validity. But it wholly lacks African validity, and for that reason Johnson’s antics are as ottensive as the attectionate pet name Rudbeck’s wife gives him— Wog. He is a gollywog, a little black Sambo, if you like, that Cary’s skill has made seem alive and even, at times, splendid. His splendor, of course, lies in his odd, anarchistic ability to create for Rudbeck what Rudbeck cannot create for himself: the Road. It is this, the Road, that is the center of the present discussion. Cary makes it very clear that Rudbeck’s passion for roads has no ideational base. Early in the novel the reader learns from the first resident Rudbeck served under “that to build a road, any road anywhere, is the noblest work a man can do.”4 It is also something, when it is done, that you can see. Later Rudbeck is unmoved by the doubts of another resident, Blore, to whom “motor roads [are] the ruin of Africa.” They are like the railways earlier, which “spoilt the old Nigeria wherever they went.” 5 What is this “old Nigeria”? It is never defined. In the novel it seems to be no more than the old town of Fada, which (in a passage made famous by critics who despise it) “is a pioneer settlement five or six

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hundred years old, built on its own rubbish heaps, without charm even of antiquity. Its squalor and its stinks are all new.” 6 Cary is fully conscious of the irony. Such a place may be transformed romantically, as it is not only by men like Blore, but even by Rudbeck’s wife Celia. To her it seems “the house of unspoilt primitive, the simple dwelling-place of unsophisti¬ cated virtue.” 7 Yet Cary makes it clear that she and Blore are justified in a measure that they themselves do not understand. There is—Cary emphasizes this—something like virtue, certainly unsophisticated, in Fada. The Government Office staff does not seal the mail bags. Cary explains why: “There has never been a mail robbery in Fada, and there never will be until civilization and private enterprise are much further advanced.” 8 Cary’s point is in its own way romantic, for by European standards Fada is thoroughly corrupt. In the Waziri, for example, Cary paints a portrait of an intelligent and vicious manipulator of money and power. The family of Johnson’s wife Bamu are potentially utterly corrupt. Cary illustrates this through the way Bamu’s brother Aliu sees the world: “All things are stubborn and dangerous; all men, except one’s own family, find their chief pleasure in tormenting the helpless stranger. After all, what else could anyone do with a stranger, except to fleece him?” 9 So the lack of stealing in Fada is not a matter of virtue; it is more a matter of technique, of style, of technology: thieves do not steal until they learn how. It is now possible to see in part what it was that—while it repelled Achebe, as is only just—engaged him as well. Unlike the mass of colonial novelists, Cary struggled to fit the colonial into a practical African context that the colonial did not and could not comprehend. It is an African context devoid of mysterious drums in the night and unspeakable rites, without fabled treasure, white goddesses, Prester Johns, and the white man’s burden. It is—and for this it deserves praise— unique in that the African world is recognizably the world of ordinary affairs, and yet still beyond the colonial officer’s understanding. It is irrelevant that Cary’s understanding is so limited. He saw that the British officers, whether benign or malign, did not know what they were doing, and however much Cary misunderstood the Africans, he understood the colonial officials extraordinarily well. And, most importantly, he saw the significance of their mindless actions. His symbol, richly worked out, for this significance is the Road. It is unnecessary here to detail the road or its construction. Cary lets the location remain vague—it will link “Fada direct with Kano and Sokoto,” 10 perhaps, which means an end to isolation at least. Construc¬ tion of the road requires financial ingenuity—misappropriation to be exact—on Rudbeck’s part, and the genius of leadership that Johnson can provide. But why the road should be built at all, and what the result will be—these questions are unarticulated because Rudbeck cannot directly imagine them. Early in the novel, Rudbeck’s passion for road building seems harmless. The first clear indication that something is amiss is seen when even the Emir, a man of vast limitations, recognizes a danger in the road and in the zungo, the primitive inn that is built for travellers. He and the

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Waziri hate both. The road they say “will bring thieves and rascals, [and] the zungo will encourage them to stay.” Johnson is seen to disagree, but in the light of Cary’s ironic comment above on stealing and civilization, the defence is an implicit attack: “You are not civilized, Waziri. You don’t understand that people must have roads for motors.’’ “Why, lord Johnson?” “Because it is civilized. Soon everyone will be civilized.” 11

The implications of this “civilization” are very clear. At a high point in the novel, Rudbeck is surprised: a lorry from the north appears and the driver, not knowing he is the first, goes through without pause. Rudbeck “has not realized perhaps that the road would open itself.” The road has become an operative entity. The next day, Rudbeck has cause to reflect: He is surprised to find how much his court work has increased in the last three months, not only with cases due to the new road, such as disputed bargains, complaints of extortion, adulteration, fraud, highway robbery; but purely local ones, such as theft, assault, quarrels between villages, disputes between chiefs and their people, disputed claims to all kinds of rights; and even wife-beating, kidnapping, and divorce. There is a crime wave in Fada. . . 12

Civilization—embodied in the road, in commerce (in “free enterprise”)— has come, and it has activated the potential for crime that was inherent; it is like the infection of a virus that attacks but one organ and thereby sickens the whole man. As Cary saw, and as Achebe understood, the intention was good. It was to civilize through commerce, a proposition Rudbeck would never have articulated, but one which underlay, philosophically, “the white man’s burden” as Englishmen saw it. “The missionaries,” according to the historian J.F.A. Ajayi placed emphasis on .. . trade because they believed it would inevitably lead to the formation of... a class who would . . . carry out the social reforms the missionaries .. . would rather not meddle with. Commerce, said [one missionary], will aid the “change in Society which the Gospel seeks . . . will erect new standards of responsibility and thus remove one of the strongest props of polygamy.” 13

The absurdity of the last proposition should not blind us to the fact that, earlier in this century, to doubt the essential idea would be to doubt the moral base of English society itself. Trade is good. What promotes trade is good. The road is good. Yet, when it is finished, when it has “opened itself,” it seems to speak to its creator: “I’m smashing up the old Fada—I shall change everything and everybody in it. Iam abolishing the old ways, the old ideas, the old law; I am bringing wealth and opportunity for good as well as vice, new powers to men and therefore new conflicts. I am the revolution. I am giving you plenty of trouble already, you governors, and I am going to give you plenty more. / destroy and I make new. What are you going to do about it? I am your idea. You made me, so / suppose you know.” 14

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Rudbeck does not know. He is caught in a web of interconnectedness, the existence of which he never imagined. To build the road, to increase trade, even to break “tribal” isolation—these he might have understood as goods, but to see (as he seems finally to see), that unexpected and unwanted by-reactions actually enforce his objectives while reversing or negating their value, leaves Rudbeck looking at the ruins of a society he set out to help. Under his innocent hand, things fall apart. When he has done the job, then he sees what he has done. In anguish, he raises the question to a superior: “We’re obviously breaking up the old native tribal organization or it’s breaking by itself. The people are bored with it. Yes, yes, and I’m not surprised,” Bulteel says. Rudbeck is greatly surprised. “Don’t you believe in the native civilization?” “Well, how would you like it yourself?” Bulteel smiles .... “Then you think it will go to pieces?” “Yes, I think so, if it hasn’t gone already.” “But what’s going to happen then? Are we going to give them any new civilization, or let them simply slide downhill?” “No idea,” Bulteel says cheerfully. 15

It is this idea that Achebe seized upon. George Allen, the district officer of the last chapters of Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, is more pretentious than Rudbeck and more ruthless, and he is less cheerful than Bulteel, but it hardly matters: he is the master, and he does not know, guess or suspect the outcome of his actions. It is obvious that Rudbeck’s “new civilization” and Bulteel’s insouciance are functional if not moral equals in failing to solve the problems that the road has created. There is no answer to the Road: “You made me, so I suppose you know.” Nobody knew. Cary the novelist was aware, as Cary the colonial officer perhaps was not, that one act is the cause of many effects, most of them unlooked for. This is a fundamental principle of the contemporary science of Ecology, and the operative word is pleiotropy, a genetic term which identifies the astonishing capacity of the biological gene to produce—usually by interaction—an immense variety of physical manifestations in the living organism. Pleiotropism, applied to the things that men do, is suggestive of that circumstance in human life when a single aberrant—or mutated—gene produces a living monster. Nature has made an error; commonly the error dies. When man acts—as Rudbeck does in building the road—it is as if a wild gene were loose, transforming the social body. Rudbeck’s is the rational prognosis: the social body will die; an ancient and viable civilization (whether Englishmen would care to live in it or not) is doomed. Chinua Achebe found Mister Johnson “appalling” as a novel about Africa16—for reasons, I think, that are irrelevant to the preceding discussion. He adopted what I take to be Cary’s central proposition: The

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colonial powers undermined a healthy civilization, constructed over centuries, and, witnessing its destruction, were unwilling or unable to put anything in its place. This is not to say that Achebe lifted the proposition boldly from Cary. As will be seen below, he took a single aspect (the disintegrative effect of colonial intervention) as the base for his first novels, and then evolved, entirely in his own terms, a new and more comprehensive pleiotropic concept, which came to be embodied in his finest novel—easily one of the finest novels of the century—Arrow of God. This was not in any likelihood a conscious process. The generation of Arrow of God was an immensely complex process, its scope drawn from a cumulative awareness which Achebe gained through wideranging investigation and experience. Cary’s appalling novel was the base upon which Achebe worked his transformation. The first step in the transformation was the writing of Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart.11 The title is an immediate reflection of Cary’s disintegrative theme. The essential element is the same: a community into which colonial power intrudes rending the social fabric. On the other hand, Achebe’s Umuofia is not merely geographically distant from Cary’s Fada, it is also a different realm of experience. The geographic difference is significant but should not be overempha¬ sized. Fada—a fiction, of course—lies somewhere south of the cities of Sokoto and Kano, and well to the north of Ilorin. It is, one may suppose, in Borgu (where Cary served); a town with an Emir of Fulani descent and Islamic religion, with a rural animist population of farmers and pastoralists. Such is the western part of today’s Kwara State of Nigeria, as seen with an alien eye, superficially. In Fada, colonial rule was “indirect”: the British officer ruled the Emir, and the Emir ruled the people. Resistance, such as it was, to the colonial authority was embodied by Cary in the intelligent, wily, and pederastic Waziri, a man as sophisticated in his politics as in his sexual taste. The time would seem to be near 1920—a little before rather than later. Umuofia seems a different world—and in at least two ways, it is. It too is fictional, but the reader is to imagine it thirty or forty miles east of the great Niger River market city Onitsha; one would not improbably find it somewhere in the vicinity of Awka today. Umuofia is a dispersed town composed of nine villages; commonality of ancestry links the nine into a clan. Rule is vested in the commonality of citizens, particularly men of substance, while grave decisions are reserved for the ancestors, embodied in terrible masked figures, sacredly impersonated by great men of the clan. All men are farmers, wealth is counted in yams and wives, and the colonial power—when the novel begins, around 1900— has not yet been felt. Such is the superficial difference of Umuofia from Fada. The other difference is more profound. For all the richness of Cary’s imagination, his African characters are outside of his understanding. His Fada is two-dimensional: carefully observed, precisely pictured, without depth. From his superior vantage, Achebe creates an Umuofia in which each practice, each ritual, each formality is detailed functionally. Fada is

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rich in African oddities; Umuofia is rational, ordered. Cary acknowledges the old African “civilization” of Fada, but allows the reader to doubt that it really exists except as a kind of satisfactory stagnation. Achebe shows on the other hand that behind the colonial’s confused awareness of savage practices and unspeakable rites, jungle drums and cries in the night, is a dynamic, rich, and generous culture. It has one great flaw: fragility. This fragility is little indicated in the plot of the novel. A fiercely am¬ bitious man, violent because he fears weakness, Okonkwo alienates his eldest son by the ritual murder of the boy’s foster-brother, and the white man’s church is established in time to capture the disaffected child. Okonkwo makes a final effort to free the community from the newlyestablished colonial government, fails, and hangs himself. Around this plot, however, is woven a firmly textured community life which slowly unravels in the second half of the novel as the invaders’ presence and power become increasingly pronounced, increasingly evident, challenging and even forbidding practices which are indispensa¬ ble to the design of the culture. The title, from Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” reflects both what the novel shows and what Cary predicted: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .

The agent of this anarchy is, of course, impersonal. It is not Cary’s Rudbeck, nor is it the George Allen of Things Fall Apart, a man both ruthless and insensitive. Achebe portrays good white men as well—the Reverend Mr. Brown is nicely, if briefly, sketched—but it does not matter; Brown is no less disruptive than Allen. Cary suggested the essential impersonality very well when he said of Rudbeck: He understands that people in themselves, full of goodwill and good sense, can form, in an organization, simply an obstructive mass blocking all creative energy; not from any conspiracy or jealousy, but simply from the nature of rules and routine, of official life. He accepts this cheerfully and says Bulteel, "Ours is not to reason why.’’ 18

Implicitly, Achebe accepted this point of view in Things Fall Apart; in Arrow of God, it is explicitly operative. Before proceeding to Arrow of God, however, it would be well to note briefly the sequel Achebe wrote to his first novel. In No Longer at Ease,19 Okonkwo’s grandson extends his father’s disaffected separation from the traditions of Umuofia. Obi Okonkwo—British educated—embodies anarchy: he can live by neither the traditions of the colonials nor those of his own ancestors. He idealizes both and is trapped by their contradictions. In many ways, Arrow of God is a truer sequel to Things Fall Apart than No Longer at Ease. It is as if between the two novels, Achebe saw what he had failed to do in the first. His point of view changed. The society of Things Fall Apart, for all its richness and variety, had this in common with Fada’s: it was static—or at least seemed to be through part one—more than half the novel, just as Cary’s town had in some fashion

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been what it was at the start of Mister Johnson throughout the indefinite past. The “old native tribal civilization” was in both novels somehow fixed, permanent until Europeans came to tamper with it and thereby destroyed it. The context of Arrow of God in contrast is greatly expanded in both time and space. Umuaro, the town that is the center of the action of the novel, itself has a history that retreats into “the very distant past, when lizards were still few and far between”; 20 this history is an essential dynamic to the progress of the novel. The missionary who helps bring about the denouement is motivated to his aggressive evangelicalism by the martyrdom of his relative during the previous century. The district officer is willing to risk and perhaps sacrifice his chances for honors in the service by his opposition to foolish misapplications of colonial political theory; he is not wise, he is not understanding—but he is not stupid. He too has a history. Spatially, the novel is energized by violence and peacemaking both at great distances and at hand; this spaciousness is functional to the history and part of it. The present essay can deal with only a small part of the his¬ tory, only enough to illustrate the proposition announced above, that in this novel Achebe has embodied a pleiotropism that pervades the entire novel, that is not, as in Mister Johnson, only an aspect. The power of the Road in Mister Johnson is brilliantly conceived. The Road is a powerful symbol and makes a profound point, but Johnson’s splendor and his crimes, like his death, seem scarcely relevant to the power of the Road: Johnson’s happy anarchism doomed him on page one. In Arrow of God there is no one event, no point in time, no thing that sets the pleitropic organism into decisive action. A multitude of events—a hundred arrows in the hand of the god—bring about the rite of passage that is the sub¬ stance of the novel. Briefly, the action concerns the priest of (Jlu who must deal simultaneously with the adherents of the rival god Idemili, adherents who hold great political power, and with the district officer, Captain Winterbottom, who has chosen Ezeulu to be his warrant chief in Umuaro. The priest declines the chieftaincy even though it would give him the power to dominate his enemies. Instead, imprisoned for his obstinacy, at government headquarters far from home, he conceives a higher retribution for his enemies and the enemies of his god: during his captivity two new moons pass, two sacred yams remain uneaten, and the yam harvest to be called by the priest in the name of Ulu cannot proceed. Umuaro is faced with immediate famine. Climactically, the Christian mission offers absolution from the wrath of Ulu to those who bring thank offerings to Christ, and Ezeulu, seemingly abandoned by his god, rises into “the haughty splendor of a demented high priest.” 21 Even in briefest outline, the story suggests complexities: the rival gods and the warrant chieftaincy are the two most obvious, and the present essay will deal with those alone. The rivalry of Ulu and Idemili is, with one exception, seen in the novel as an immediate thing—not new, of course, not restricted to the present

214

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priests, but without a specific beginning. Ezeulu and Ezidemili (eze meaning, in this context, priest) do in fact have different histories and different powers, in accord with the histories of their gods. The origin of Idemili is never discussed in the novel, but in Achebe’s 1974 revised edition the insertion by the author of a single word defines the history in a way that can be confirmed by evidence outside the novel, in the town of Achebe’s birth, Ogidi. In the revision, Ulu is speaking directly to his priest, at a time when Ezeulu has been contemplating appeasing the towns¬ people by permitting the harvest. “Go home and sleep,” the god says, as if speaking to an unruly child, “and leave me to settle my quarrel with Idemili, whose envy seeks to destroy me so that his python may again come to power.” 22 The operative revision is the word “again”; in earlier editions, Idemili had no claim to power, but the change implies that Idemili was supreme before the coming of Ulu. Unlike Idemili, Ulu was created (the origin of Idemili will be suggested shortly). Indeed, the creation of Ulu was at the same time the creation of Umuaro. Unlike Umuofia, whose nine villages shared a common ancestor and therefore constituted a clan with powerful common loyalities, Umuaro was the union of six relatively antagonistic villages. Years of victimization by the fierce warriors called the Abam had forced an unwilling unity, and medicine of the utmost power was used to create the new ruling, guardian diety named Ulu. This unity, forged by fear, made Ulu great because the united villages succeeded in resisting the Abam, and Ulu was beyond challenge as long as the Abam were to be feared. At the time of the action of the novel—around 1921—Ulu is still supreme, but that supremacy has been undermined. Ezeulu’s formidable antagonist, supporter of Ezidemili, Nwaka, speaking during an earlier episode, calls attention to Ulu’s loss of primary function: “We have no quarrel with Ulu. He is still our protector, even though we no longer fear Abam warriors at night . . ” 23

No explanation is given in the novel for this peculiar circumstance, but if the people of Umuaro knew only by distant hearsay why the Abam no longer raided, Achebe as author certainly knew exactly why. The action that stopped the Abam was the beginning of European penetration of that hinterland which is the place of the story, until not long ago called Iboland—now the Nigerian Anambra and Imo States. The Abam were highland allies of the great Iboland traders, called collectively the Aro. It was in late 1901 that the British launched a huge military exercise against the Aro in the belief that the Aro ruled Iboland; control of the Aro would then mean control of the entire territory.24 The assumption was. wrong, and more than fifteen additional years were required before the British could say that every Ibo village was secure under government rule—but the crucial change had already occurred: the subjection of the Aro was accompanied by the subjection of the Abam and their allies, and—far away in Umuaro—for fifteen years the villagers had learned that they need fear the Abam no longer. Without fear of the Abam, there would be no great fear of Ulu, so Nwaka could carry his contempt for Idemili’s rival to an astonishing extreme:

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215

.. .we have all heard how the people of Aninta dealt with their deity when he failed them. Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbours and set fire on him? 25

This virtual threat, though not made publicly, nevertheless caused some to tremble for Nwaka, but Ulu, for whatever reason, took no action to meet the threat then. The novel does not say, but perhaps Ulu could not. What Achebe has shown, by indirection, is that colonial interference with the Aro and the Abam in 1901 decisively weakened the one spiritual power that united the people of Umuaro a hundred uncharted miles away, and prepared, all unwittingly, the death of the god twenty years later. The occasion of Nwaka’s threat was the opposition of Ezeulu to a proposed war, strongly advocated by Nwaka, against the neighboring town of Okperi. In spite of Ezeulu, the war began. But it was ended by a second, more immediate interference from government: Winterbottom and his soldiers (strangers, black men from the north, though the novel does not say this) intervened, collected all the guns in Umuaro, and broke them. Then, after listening to the evidence of Ezeulu, Winterbottom awarded the land in dispute to Okperi. Five years later, the priest’s testimony against his town stood as another threat to his god, Ulu—who, it must be recalled, was not only protector in war but also guardian of the agricultural year in peace. Idemili is commonly identified in the novel as the god to whom the python is sacred, but that does not account for his origin. The story of how a village ceased to exist after certain villagers unwisely cooked a python for food concludes only with the observation that the village was doomed because “the royal python was sacred to Idemili; it was this deity that had punished Umuana.”26 The answer to the origin lies outside the novel, but is significant. Oral testimony among elders in Achebe’s home village of Ikenga, in Ogidi town, attests that since time immemorial all the clans of the region drained by a tributary of the Niger which has as its source the spring called ide have revered Idemili (literally, pillar of water). The spring feeds the python as well as all the people of the region.27 Thus, unlike Ulu, Idemili is clearly autochthonic in Achebe’s home; if Achebe has moved Idemili some miles to the east, he has done so with the free license of fiction. In brief then, the quarrel between Ulu and Idemili was the quarrel of the no-longer-needed protector against the autochthonic deity. The British action in breaking the power of a warlike community at one extreme of Iboland, in good time destroyed the power of a god essential to the ecological cycle of a community unheard of and unthought of by the colonials and their government. Things fall apart once again, it is true, but now the fragility of the cultural defenses has distant as well as immediate causes, the society and its gods were dynamic before the British came. Indeed British intervention can be seen as one factor in the great change; certainly not, as in the earlier novel, the sole cause. The Abam raids and the British subjugation of the Aro respectively caused the creation and caused the fatal weakening of Ulu. In its turn, the institution of the Warrant Chieftaincy—or rather the attempt—exacer-

216

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bated the internal quarrels of Umuaro and thus led indirectly to the dual triumph of Ezeulu’s enemies and, ironically, the Christian church. The scope of this essay does not permit full development of the warrant chieftaincy concept as it was applied in southeastern Nigeria. Briefly, the governor of Nigeria, Sir Frederick Lugard, had come to believe that all Africans had in some natural fashion come to be organized in hierarchical states, despotically ruled by kings. Where something like that state of affairs did exist—Lugard thought he had found it in Uganda and in the Fulani-ruled portions of northern Nigeria (including, one must suppose, Cary’s town of Fada)—the British appointment of a “Resident” to “advise” the ruler insured British control while maintaining the appearance of traditional political organizations. But the policy, called “indirect rule,” was not applicable (whatever Lugard thought) everywhere. As Achebe’s Winterbottom, in disgust, put it: “We do not only promise to secure old savage tyrants on their thrones—or more likely filthy animal skins—we not only do that, but we now go out of our way to invent chiefs where there were none before . . 28

What disturbs Winterbottom is that he must appoint a chief in Umuaro, a town which, however little Winterbottom understands, he knows has no chieftaincy institution. His choice is Ezeulu, because of the testimony he gave in the land-war dispute five years earlier. Winterbottom described what happened: “I should mention that every witness who testified before me— from both sides without exception—perjured themselves . . .Only one man—a kind of priest-king in Umuaro—witnessed against his own people. I have not found out what it was, but I think he must have had some pretty fierce tabu working on him.’’ 29

To Ezeulu, the “tabu” was his god Ulu; to Ezeulu’s enemies, the tabu was his mother, a daughter of the opposing town in the land dispute. Winterbottom, naturally, found for Umuaro’s enemies on Ezeulu’s testimony, and when he could no longer resist demands from the government at Lagos that he appoint a chief, he chose the priest. Ezeulu’s enemies expected no less; they saw him as the friend of the white man, not Umuaro. This was unbearable to the priest and, as has been indicated before, he found the means of his revenge upon his people while imprisoned. But his failure to call the yam harvest, instead of vindicating himself and Ulu, created the first great opportunity for the Christians—and in but a single season, the mantle of priesthood fell from the descendant of priests to a stranger, John Jaja Goodcountry, and his god of the Christians, for Goodcountry sanctified the harvest that Ezeulu had denied. Only two of the threads that make up the intricate web of Achebe’s ecological complexity have been explored. Others have been touched upon or hinted at. The Aro expedition of 1901, the Church Missionary Society (Goodcountry’s employer), the Church in the coastal towns of Bonny and Opobo (obliquely identified in the missionary’s names), the abuses of the warrant chiefs (Winterbottom is all too familiar with one

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appointed chief who has become rich through extortion), all contributed. Yet there is much more that a short essay cannot notice: things like the strains within Ezeulu’s household, the intellectual propositions which both maintain and endanger Ulu’s power, and the appeal of the white man’s education. But what should be clear is that Achebe has adopted and transformed Cary’s pleiotropism. Instead of the Road as a single inclusive metaphor that shows but one thing—how the British wrecked a “civilization” that they neither respected nor saw any reason to respect—Achebe has looked at something of the same kind of event from the inside, and shown that it is not a road (though a road is built in the novel) that transforms a society, but the interaction of forces ancient and new; that the British did not contribute a dynamic to a static culture, but rather contributed to a process of change long in progress. They gave to it a direction it would not otherwise have taken, of course, but—in contrast to Cary’s vision—Achebe shows a society that is far more an actor in its destiny than an object that is acted upon.

Robert M. Wren Footnotes 1. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God, (London: Heinemann, 1964; rev. ed. 1974; Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939; new ed. 1962). 2. Achebe, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,” New Letters, 40, 1(1973), 15-22; reprinted in Morning Yet on Creation Day, (London: Heinemann, 1975), p. 70. 3. Malcolm Foster in Joyce Cary: A Biography, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), pp. 328-329, says of Rudbeck’s shooting Johnson, “This is not the callous deed it may appear,” and goes on to show that the act was one which Rudbeck knew would destroy his career, at best, and, at worst, get him hanged for murder. Nevertheless, the effect Cary achieved is what I have described. 4.

Cary, p. 52

5.

Cary, p. 51

6.

Cary, p. 110.

7.

Cary, p. 111.

8.

Cary, p. 57.

9.

Cary, p. 20.

10. Cary, p. 162. 11. Cary, pp. 94, 95. 12. Cary, p. 181. 13. J.F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longmans, 1965), p. 18. 14. Cary, p. 186 (italics added). 15. Cary, p. 185. 16. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958. 16. Achebe, “Named for Victoria,” p. 70.

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17. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 1958. 18. Cary, p. 10. 19. Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1960). 20. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 14. 21. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 229. 22. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 192. Cf. earlier editions, chapter sixteen. 23. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 28. 24. J. C. Anene, Southern Nigeria in Transition 1885-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 222-35. 25. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 28 26. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 48. 27. Oral testimony of an elder of Ikenga, Ogidi town, and Emmanuel Chukwuka Agulefo, my host and translator, to whose generosity and helpfulness I am greatly indebted. 28. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 36. 29. Achebe, Arrow of God, p. 38.

A SOURCE FOR ARROW OF GOD

Charles Nnolim

With the exception of occasional remarks on oral or folkloric sources, scholars have said little about the literary materials upon which African authors have based their writings. My own research has not led me to any detective criticism reconstructing written sources for any long fic¬ tional prose works from Africa. What one is likely to find are vague conjectures and suspect theorizings of diffuse sources for, say, Okigbo’s poetry. Many a critic, without painstaking efforts at proof, has made weak-kneed suggestions that Achebe’s novels owe a lot to Joseph Con¬ rad. One possible reason for the vacuum existing in source-study of African literature is, of course, complacency: we all assume that our writers, especially novelists, do not research their stories, that their material comes naturally to them like leaves to a tree, and that all they did was merely to reconstruct their stories from the common petty-cash drawer of their culture. And a great writer like Achebe has consistently given the impression that all he did in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God was merely to reconstruct Igbo culture from his own personal knowledge (which is irrefutable) and from stories told him by his father and grandfather (which must be taken with a grain of salt: either his grandfather told him more than ours told us or he began keeping a diary from the age of seven). A few words about the normal problems of source-study are in order here. The aim of source-study, we are all aware, is to establish the nature of the ingredients that coalesced into a finished literary artifact.1 Every literary critic knows that the possible sources of a finished literary work are as diverse as the writer’s whole experience, for the writer might have sketched his characters from people he has known in real life who serve him as prototypes; or he might have drawn the main events of his story from contemporary or past historical events, or from a visual im¬ pression or a dream or a story he has heard. But genuine source-study must demonstrate evidence that goes beyond mere echoes, by showing the concrete testimony of a printed page laid side by side with the orig¬ inal text. Above all, the source-scholar must try to transcend Douglas Bush’s good-humored definition of a scholar as "a siren which calls at¬ tention to a fog without doing anything to dispel it!”2 With this in mind, let me get down to the task of demonstrating a source for Achebe’s Arrow of God.

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One of the rare original insights G. D. Killam came up with in discussing Achebe’s Arrow of God is contained in the following pas¬ sage: A cursory reading of the novel suggests that much of the back¬ ground is there for its own sake, that it has come to dominate the book and has in a sense become the subject of the book. There is much in the novel which has little direct relation to the story the novel has to tell. Yet the gains made in terms of the overall tragic consequences the novel displays wherein a whole society is involved are obvious once Achebe’s purpose is taken into account.3 Very true, for as will soon be demonstrated, Achebe was heavily shackled by his source. Although Achebe has never admitted it publicly, the sin¬ gle most important source—in fact, the only source—for Arrow of God is a tiny, socio-historical pamphlet published without copyright by a re¬ tired corporal of the Nigeria Police Force. His name was (he died in 1972) Simon Alagbogu Nnolim, and the title of his pamphlet was The History of Umuchu, published by Eastern Press Syndicate, Depot Road, Enugu, Nigeria, in 1953. It was while I was preparing a second, en¬ larged edition of this booklet (published by Ochumba Press, Ltd., Enugu, Nigeria, 1976) that certain passages began to remind me of Arrow of God. One such passage was the story of the priest who refused chieftaincy, was imprisoned, and stubbornly refused to roast the sacred yams. As it turned out, this happened in my own village, Umuchu, in Awka Division, Nigeria, in 1913. The District Commissioner who is called Winterbottom by Achebe in his fictional work was, in history, J. G. Lotain. The High Priest called Ezeulu by Achebe was, in the his¬ tory of Umuchu, Ezeagu, the High Priest of Uchu. He was actually imprisoned for two months at Awka by J. G. Lotain; and the Seed Yam Festival (changed to New Yam Festival by Achebe), which usually fell during the harvest months of November and December, began to fall —and still falls to this day—in February and March, because he refused to roast two sacred yams in one month. As I began to collate the two texts, I found out to my amazement that Achebe did not merely take the story of the High Priest and blow life into it, as Shakespeare did when borrowing material for Julius Caesar from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and the Romans\ Achebe went much further. He lifted every¬ thing in The History of IJmuchu and simply transferred it to Arrow of God without embellishment. One must admit, of course, that he fiction¬ alized his source, created characters other than that of Ezeulu, and pro¬ vided thematic and dramatic centers. My first impulse was to take up the phone and call him, since we

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were not more than sixty miles from each other, but I resisted the im¬ pulse: he would think it sheer effrontery. But when I met Achebe at the First African Literature Association Conference in Austin, Texas, in March of 1975, I felt encouraged to approach him. Did he know one Simon Nnolim, a former policeman in Enugu, I ventured to ask, and did he read his book entitled The History of Umuchu from which much of Arrow of God seems to have been drawn? Yes, he said, he knew him. He went further: he admitted that while working for the Eastern Nigeria Broadcasting Service he interviewed Nnolim in 1957. He was visibly shocked to hear of his death. He reminisced that Nnolim and one Mr. Iweka who wrote The History of Obosi (to which Nnolim himself al¬ luded as the source of his inspiration to write a similar book) were rare people who collected invaluable information that was of historical and anthropological interest. Nnolim had never mentioned the writer of The History of Obosi by name. Achebe filled in that gap for me. Achebe also added that he and the officers of the E.N.B.S. interviewed Nnolim in our hometown, Umuchu; that the object of the interview was Night Masks who performed for them; that they stayed about three nights in Umuchu. But he did not remember reading Nnolim’s book. However, as will be demonstrated, the internal evidence is overwhelming that he had Nnolim’s book before him as he wrote Arrow of God. It is very probable that Nnolim, being a generous man, had made a present of his book to Achebe. Let us turn now to the textual evidence. Since Nnolim’s The History of Umuchu predated Arrow of God by thirteen years, and Things Fall Apart by five, and since the discus¬ sion that follows will make clearer sense if organized around Nnolim’s chapters, I shall discuss Achebe’s borrowings under Nnolim’s subhead¬ ings, where appropriate. A running commentary will be carried on as the two books are laid side by side, but the reader must be warned that, for the purposes of clarity, the order of events in both works could not be adhered to here. One more preliminary remark: it is surely more than coincidence that Achebe’s Umuaro is Nnolim’s Umuchu; that Achebe’s Ezeulu is Nnolim’s Ezeagu; that Achebe’s god, Ulu, is Nnolim s Uchu; that Achebe’s six villages which sought amalgamation are Nnolim s six villages in Umuchu; that Achebe’s New Yam Festival is Nnolim’s Seed Yam Festival; that Achebe’s missionary, "Hargreaves,” is no more than Nnolim’s anthropologist, "Hargroves”;4 that Achebe’s story of Umuama and the sacred python is Nnolim s Umunama and the sacred short snake, that Nnolim’s Gun Breaker, J. G. Lotain, is Achebe s Gun Breaker, Winterbottom; that Achebe’s "The Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves” is Nnolim’s "The Feast of Throwing First Tender Pumpkin Leaves”; that Achebe’s ceremony of Coverture is Nnolim’s ceremony of Nkpu; that

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the main market in Achebe’s Umuaro and Nnolim s Umuchu is Nkwo, where the Ikoro and the amalgamation fetish in both sources are located. S. A. Nnolim began his History of Umuchu with the story of the amalgamation of the six villages for the sake of mutual protection against Abam warriors. He writes in Section IV: The history of the town is really a study of the different sets of people who now inhabit the area known as Umuchu. The town, though a unity today, is beyond all doubt the Union of a number of towns, which necessitate the individual procedure in discussion herein adopted. This method has been carefully followed up to help those who will find the booklet useful in the course of their study. In dealing with the matter in hand certain questions will naturally crop up: 1. What towns unite to make Umuchu? 2. How and why did they so unite? Well, reference to question (i), the present day Umuchu is composed of: Ihite; Ogu; Osete; Ogwugwu; Ibughubu and Achalla. With exception of Ogu, whose origin at the moment can not be traced, each of the other five towns have their different lines of origin. Ibughubu traces its geneology to Osete, but still it may be maintained quite consciously that there are no rigid line of demar¬ cation to this originality, since the ties of inter-relationship directly or otherwise are noticeable among the towns. Their union in an¬ swer to question two was brought about by a crave for defence dur¬ ing the days of repeated warfares and gross brutality. The story of the amalgamation is clearly portrayed in that which gives the au¬ thentic origin of the name. LOCAL AMALGAMATION: THE ORIGIN OF NAME: For the purpose of this booklet, the term local amalgamation is employed in distinction from the kindred amalgamations which obtained in Nigeria due to European influence. The local amalgation took place round about the time when Abriba, Abam, Ohafia, and Adda menace was at its highest, the above named were war¬ riors of old time used by "Arochukwu” to subdue any town which may by that time disobey their orders, but before the union of the towns (now villages) they were each quite independent of the others and each had its own name, customs, and its annual festi¬ vals; defence was likewise resigned to individual towns concerned; thus when they were attacked by warriors from Arochukwu called by then "Agha” Abam, Abriba or Umuada, the wretched town

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often put to fight and captives among them were carried off into slavery. The warriors of those days whose story are still in the heart of many throughout the Eastern Nigeria were strong black and brave men of huge size; they often marched into the victims at the dead of night armed with long heavy bow shaped swords with brass hilts; their number was never below hundred in a batch. When in the enemies’ territories they generally began their slaughter early the following morning, thus the then sparsely peopled towns being unarmed and outnumbered, offered little or no stout resistance and the Abriba kept on preying on and diminishing the number of the scanty few. This state of affairs lingers on around the neighbouring towns till the six friendly towns sensed their complete annihilation. Should the old individual protection which was useless before the huge number of Abribas continue? A united front therefore against these common foes was the primary craving of every one. Heaven knows what source of terror their adversaries are to them and sure as death, their night rests are nothing but dreams of illusive means of freedom. They met and agreed to unite; to do this effectively they in¬ vited a strong team of qualified native Doctors who prepared a medicine known as "Ichu” meaning Antidote, in other-words to render null and void the attempt of any aggressors to cause them more harm by means or by violence. Though the legendary "Ichu”, meaning antidote was supposed to be the goddess, after the medi¬ cine had been prepared, the united towns dedicated themselves to and called themselves the children of "Ichu” (Umu-Ichu); the medicine was parcelled in two; one buried in the heart of the meeting place now called Nkwo Uchu, the other parcel was buried into a lake formerly known as Odere; the lake’s name automatically became Ichu Stream; the meeting place became the seat of the god¬ dess protectoress of the town. A market was also erected there to keep in living memory the idea of the meeting and local amalgama¬ tion therein engendered. The market and Odere lake are still called Nkwo-Uchu, and Uchu lake respectively, (pp. 7-8)

Below is how Achebe fictionally recreates this passage: In the very distant past, when lizards were still few and far be¬ tween, the six villages—Umuachala, Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani, Umuogwugwu and Umuisiuzo—lived as different people,

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and each worshipped its own deity. Then the hired soldiers of Abam used to strike in the dead of night, set fire to houses and carry men, women and children into slavery. Things were so bad for the six villages that their leaders came together to save them¬ selves. They hired a strong team of medicine-men to install a com¬ mon diety for them. This diety which the fathers of the six villages made was called Ulu, Half of the medicine was buried at a place which became the Nkwo market and the other half thrown into the stream which became Mili Ulu. The six villages then took the name of Umuaro, and the priest of Ulu became their Chief Priest. From that day they were never again beaten by an enemy. How could such people disregard the god who founded their town and protected it? (pp. 16-17) The above defies commentary. Of the six villages, Achebe discarded four and retained two, as he found it in his source. With a little fictional engineering, he changed Nnolim’s Uchu goddess to Ulu goddess. The rest is set down almost verbatim. Another important passage Achebe lifted from Nnolim is the story of Umunama and the sacred python. My town does have an uninhabited, fertile farmland called Umunama. To date, no one lives there, even though villages surround it on all sides. My own family still has a rich farm patch in Umunama, but it is in a valley and subject to floods, which frequently wash away the yam mounds. Here is how Nnolim tells the story, or rather the legend, of Umunama (pp. 16-17): UMUNAMA The legend about Umunama in my opinion seems to be use¬ less so far none of them could really be traced. It came about that they killed a short snake (Eke) and gave to one man Eweshi by name to cook for them, each of them contributed a piece of yam, and small pot full of water (Okwu Ite); these were collected in a wooden bowl (Ikpo) for making stew with the short snake (Awayi); before that, each person marked his yam. When it is done each person again took his remarked yam, and also filled his small pot with the amount of water he gave out for the cooking. Funny as it were; at last Eweshi and his brother found that there was no water remaining in the cooking pot to fill their own small pots. They began to agitate that others would not remove their own cooked water until they explain what happened with their own water, which each of them witnessed when it was poured into the same pot with others. At this juncture everybody claimed to be

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right. No reason prevailed among them that some water might dry in the process of cooking. The misunderstanding developed into family bickering, and man-to-man duels later to civil conflicts on which many lives were lost. The rest of the Umunama inhabitants then evacuated and settled in Okigwi area where we get Umuna today in Owerri Province. The neighbouring towns who saw the disorder caused by the killing of the short snake made a law that anybody killing the short snake will be punished as though he killed a human being. From this also we have a common proverb in our town "Ibu Ikpo Awayi Eweshi” because he suffered to make the stew, but never tasted a drop of the pottage. The land formerly occupied by Umunama still bears the name to this date. (pp. 16-17) And here's how Achebe tells the same story: Mr. Goodcountry’s teaching about the sacred python gave Moses the first opportunity to challenge him openly. To do this he used not only the Bible but, strangely enough for a convert, the myths of Umuaro. He spoke with great power for, coming as he did from the village which carried the priesthood of Idemili, he knew perhaps more than others what the python was. . . . He told the new teacher quite bluntly that neither the Bible nor the cate¬ chism asked converts to kill the python, a beast full of ill omen. "Was it for nothing that God put a curse on its head?” he asked, and then turned abruptly into the traditions of Umuaro. "Today there are six villages in Umuaro; but this has not always been the case. Our fathers tell us that there were seven before, and the seventh was called Umuama.” Some of the converts nodded their support. Mr. Goodcountry listened patiently and contemptu¬ ously. "One day six brothers of Umuama killed the python and asked one of their number, Iweka, to cook yam pottage with it. Each of them brought a piece of yam and a bowl of water to Iweka. When he finished cooking the yam pottage the men came one by one and took their pieces of yam. Then they began to fill their bowls to the mark with the yam stew. But this time only four of them took their measure before the stew got finished. . . . "The brothers began to quarrel violently, and then to fight. Very soon the fighting spread throughout Umuama, and so fierce was it that the village was almost wiped out. The few people that survived fled from their village, across the great river to the land of Olu where they are scattered today. The remaining six villages see-

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ing what had happened to Umuama went to a seer to know the reason, and he told them that the royal python was sacred to Idemili; it was this deity which had punished Umuama. From that day the six villages decreed that henceforth the python was not to be killed in Umuaro, and that anyone who killed it would be re¬ garded as having killed his kinsman.” (pp. 53-54) Again, the above defies comment. Achebe hardly garnished his material beyond changing the name of the village Umuna to the fictional Olu. Nnolim’s Eweshi who made the stew simply becomes Achebe’s Iweka! On the same page, immediately following his legend of Umunama, Nnolim discusses the function of the Ikoro: a mighty wooden tom-tom carved out of the trunk of a tree and used by Umuchu to summon her people in times of danger or when matters of urgency arose. He writes:

UMUCHU AFTER i486 Before i486 there was practically no marked improvements in the segregated towns, due to insecurity of life and property. It fol¬ lows, then, that security of life was of prime importance and needed prompt attention. Hence a reliable device of call was introduced: "Ikoro.” After the local amalgamation Umuchu people anxious about self defence decided together on the establishment of a per¬ manent system of call in cases of danger or otherwise, to this end, "Ikoro” was introduced. It was a wooden bell carved out of a strong heavy log of wood and measured eighteen and half feet long, five and half feet high, and carved in about two and half feet deep. When beaten with the short lengths of wood it gives a deep note that carries for a dis¬ tance, that it could be heard in any part of the town. Certain danger, urgent call, unexpected occurrence and merriment after conquest or festival. It still exists in a much reduced size and can now be seen at the southern end of the market square. Its sound envigorates and stirs up the people to mad action irrespective of conse¬ quences, especially when the beater causes it to vibrate the gallant names of persons, age-grades, villages and the town at large. In the old times the skulls were hung around the "Ikoro,” that was the reason why it was destroyed by the order of the Government during the invasion of Umuchu; since then the use of "Ikoro” ceased. At any rate, during this day of enlightenment and culture, sons of Umuchu, at the request of the elders, approved the recon¬ struction of the "Ikoro” during the annual conference of January

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I952> when it was definitely clear to all that it was never intended for evil purpose but rather for a medium of general information for the town’s interest, (pp. 17-18) In Arrow of God, Achebe writes of the Ikoro (which he changed to Ikolo) thus: The Ikolo was fashioned in the olden days from a gaint iroko tree at the very spot where it was felled. The Ikolo was as old as Ulu himself at whose order the tree was cut down and its trunk hollowed out into a drum. When the Ikolo was beaten for war it was decorated with skulls won in past wars. But now it sang of peace, (pp. 79-80) One other minor detail must be noted here. My town, Umuchu, about which S. A. Nnolim wrote, was invaded by Europeans around 1912. When the town was subdued, according to oral sources, J. G. Lotain, who was the District Commissioner living in Awka, invited the town to bring in their spokesmen so that peace terms could be ironed out. As it turned out, when the elders and leaders were assembled, in¬ stead of discussing peace terms, they were handcuffed, shaved, carted to Awka, and forced to collect heavy fines in addition to collecting all the guns in the village. The alternative to surrendering all arms was death in prison. This last threat thoroughly alarmed the town, which complied in every detail. (A similar situation is described in Things Fall Apart when Okonkwo and other leaders are manacled and detained in jail.) The elders of Umuchu then began to refer to J. G. Lotain as the "Gun Breaker." Below are two versions—first Nnolim’s, then Achebe’s: On page 10 of his book, Nnolim says: The outward might of a nation comes from the inward strength of its people. Before and after the local amalgamation, Umugama and Ugwuakwu were exceedingly feared; the former were the hard hearted gunners, Nkeregbe, often appealed to and hired by oppressed persons, villages and towns against the adver¬ saries. It is they who surrendered their cap guns as well as other villages for destruction at the order of Mr. J. G. Lotain District Commissioner Awka about 1913: their method was to lay ambush in the enemies’ quarter by night and open fire at their first sight of them. And on page 18, he adds: For the purpose of immediate defence all bold youths liable to

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stand firm or march forward to the rescue of the town must own or purchase arms of precision, matchets, swords or flint lock guns; these were used in place of the unreliable and risky clubs, bows, and arrows, shield and spears. These arms were latter collected for destruction at the order of Mr. J. G. Lotain, District Commis¬ sioner in 1913. This was done in the presence of all the people concerned or their respective headmen, and some three thousand arms of various descriptions plus over two thousand flint lock guns received from the available males were thus treated. For Achebe’s own fictional purposes and to provide for some con¬ tinuity in the story he began telling in Things Tall Apart about the Dis¬ trict Commissioner who was writing a book on The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower, he represents Winterbottom as destroy¬ ing the guns in Umuaro to prevent further conflicts between Umuaro and Okperi. But the story that Nnolim tells is part of that pacification— by destroying all the guns in Umuchu and similar towns, the white man made sure of total conquest and total subjugation of the entire Southern Nigeria. On page 133 of Arrow of God, Achebe refers to Winterbot¬ tom as "The Destroyer of Guns.” Elsewhere he had said that Winterbottom "gathered all the guns in Umuaro and asked the soldiers to break them in the face of all, except three or four which he carried away” (P- 31 )• The Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves As far as I know, Umuchu, my hometown, is the only village that celebrates publicly, and with a great deal of fanfare, the feast of throw¬ ing the first tender pumpkin leaves at its Chief Priest. People from sur¬ rounding towns—Achina, Uga, Akokwa, Umuomaku, Akpo, Amesi, and so on—troop to Nkwo-Uchu (our local market—held on the same mar¬ ket day in Arrow of God) to observe this curious phenomenon. In re¬ lating the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves, Achebe was artlessly faithful to his source—Nnolim’s The History of Umuchu. This is how Nnolim writes of "The Feast of Throwing First Tender Pumpkin Leaves”: This is one of the general feasts performed by the whole Umuchu annually. It usually takes place in April or May according to native method of calculation. The feast must be on Nkwo Uchu Market Day, being the seat of the amalgamation, and the appoint¬ ment is pronounced by the Uchu juju priest and his messengers will ring the Ogene in the Nkwo market to the hearing of all, pointing out the feast "TA-BU-ATO" meaning 8 days from the date of announcement. On the day, as women were the only peo*[sic] The Pacification of the Primitiue Tribes of the Lower Niger

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pie to throw the leaves, all the women will dress very attractively in their best dresses, plait their hair, and each when coming to the market that day must have in her possession, two or more pumpkin leaves tied together. The men also will wear their best clothes and each with one or more pots of palm wine. Every grown-up Umuchu must attend market that day. Immediately each person enters the market they start drinking with friends and inlaws, etc. When it is known that every one is well satisfied and the market is well filled, the juju priest and his messengers will start beating the famous 'Ikoro” (wooden drums) and also star^ making a big hollow square around the market to enable all the attendants to watch the ceremony. When a sign is given that the juju priest is approaching to run across the square, all the women, men, and spectators, as it always happens, will fall in lines around the market square; the women each carrying the pumpkin leaves in their right hand, flagging them across her head and murmuring several words of prayers to Uchu juju individually. Head Juju Priest’s Arrival: On the arrival of the head juju priest from Ugwuakwu side as it usually happens, he will dress in the official juju dress as follows: Big staff called “Nne Ofo," Ojii sword, in his two hands, part of his face and both his eyes rubbed with white chalk, with an eagle's feather on his head. The head juju priest jumps out half dancing, half leaping, and half running; he starts going round the market square. Each woman aiming at him will throw her tender pumpkin leaves in such a way as not to touch his body; these will continue till he goes round the square, and by then all the women will throw out all the pumpkin leaves in their hands, and at the same time the juju messengers will pick very few leaves for purpose of ceremony. Afterwards, the rest [of the] leaves [are] trodden by people at the close of [the] head juju priest’s appearance. Women then begin to run merrily in the mar¬ ket square, each town at its own scheduled time. Ugwaukwu, Umugama, and Akukwa will run first called "Ihite Nato,” then comes Amanasa and Okwu na Achalla, called "Ezinato.” No town con¬ travenes its neighbours' time and the atmosphere seems happy throughout. The feast lasts till night, and that marks the full start of the farming season. It is noteworthy to understand that the feast is still in progress to this present time. It is also important as it commemorates the unification of the town. From my youth I have for times without

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number been an eye witness to this feast and I strongly recommend the continuation of this feast, (pp. 24-25) Achebe began discussing the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves on page 3 of Arrow of God. Here he says: "The festival of the Pumpkin Leaves would fall on the third Nkwo from that day'’ (a transliteration of Nnolim’s TA-BU-ATO: third market day or 8 days). Under the exigencies of fiction, Achebe spreads out his description of the festival, but he still follows his source faithfully. On page 78 he mentions in detail how Nwaka’s wives decorated themselves and on their legs wore "enormous rollers of ivory" so that "their walk was perforce slow and deliberate, like the walk of an Ijele Mask lifting and lowering each foot with weighty ceremony." He adds that, when Ugoye was prepared for the market, "she went behind her hut to the pumpkin which she spe¬ cially planted after the first rain, and cut four leaves, tied them together . . . and returned to her hut" (p. 77). Then Achebe continues: Soon after, the great Ikolo sounded. It called the six villages of Umuaro one by one in their ancient order: Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani, Umuogwugwu, Umuisiuzo and Umuachala. . . . The Ikolo now beat unceasingly; sometimes it called names of important people of Umuaro . . . but most of the time it called the villages and their deities. Finally it settled down to saluting Ulu, the deity of all Umuaro. (p. 79) A big ogene sounded three times from Ulu’s shrine. The Ikolo took it up and sustained an endless flow of epithets in praise of the deity. At the same time Ezeulu’s messengers began to clear the centre of the market place. Although they were each armed with a whip of palm frond they had a difficult time. The crowd was ex¬ cited and it was only after a struggle that the messengers succeeded in clearing a small space in the heart of the market place. From this central position they worked furiously with their whips until they had forced all the people back to form a thick ring at the edges. The women with their pumpkin leaves caused the greatest difficulty be¬ cause they all struggled to secure positions in front. The men had no need to be so near and so they formed the outside of the ring. The ogene sounded again. The Ikolo began to salute the Chief Priest. The women waved their leaves from side to side across the face, muttering prayers to Ulu, the god that kills and saves. Ezeulu s appearance was greeted with a loud shout that must have been heard in all the neighbouring villages. He ran forward, halted abruptly and faced the Ikolo. ... He wore smoked raffia which descended from his waist to his knee. The left half of his body—from forehead to toes_was

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painted with white chalk. Around his head was a leather band from which an eagle’s feather pointed backwards. On his right hand he carried Nne Ofo, the mother of all staffs of authority in Umuaro, and in his left he held a long iron staff which kept up a quivering rattle whenever he struck its pointed end into the earth. He took a few long strides, pausing on each foot. Then he ran for¬ ward again as though he had seen a comrade in the vacant air. (p. 80) By now Ezeulu was in the centre of the market place. He struck the metal staff into the earth and left it quivering while he danced a few more steps to the Ikolo which had not paused for a breath since the priest emerged. All the women waved their pump¬ kin leaves in front of them. Ezeulu looked round again at all the men and women of Umuaro, but saw no one in particular. Then he pulled the staff out of the ground, and with it in his left hand and the Mother of Ofo in his right he jumped forward and began to run around the mar¬ ket place. All the women set up a long, excited ululation and there was renewed jostling for the front line. As the fleeting Chief Priest reached any section of the crowd the women there waved their leaves round their heads and flung them at him. It was as though thousands and thousands of giant, flying insects swarmed upon him. (p. 82) The six messengers followed closely behind the priest and, at intervals, one of them bent down quickly and picked up at random one bunch of leaves and continued running. . . . As if someone had given them a sign, all the women of Umunneora broke out from the circle and began to run round the market place, stamping their feet heavily. At the beginning it was haphazard but soon everyone was stamping together in unison and a vast cloud of dust rose from their feet. . . . When they had gone round they rejoined the standing crowd. Then the women of Umuagu burst through from every part of the huge circle to begin their own run. Then others waited and clapped for them; no one ran out of turn. By the time the women of the sixth village ran their race the pumpkin leaves that had lain so thickly all around had been smashed and trodden into the dust. (pp. 83-84) To add comment to the above is to gild gold. Achebe did not miss one detail, including such minute observations as the Nne Ofo (which he did not care to change or translate in the first instance). Nor did he

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miss the eagle’s feather, the white chalk with which the priest paints his body, the flinging of pumpkin leaves by women, the "half dancing, half leaping” that Nnolim describes, and the picking up of a few leaves for ceremony by the priest’s attendants, or even the run around the market by women of the six villages. The Sacrifice of Coverture One of the ceremonies performed on behalf of a newly wedded woman in Umuchu is, according to S. A. Nnolim, the Nkpu (or cover¬ ing-up ) ceremony wherein all evils committed by her as a single girl are covered over in order to give her a clean slate as she enters the married state. This is what Achebe translates as the "Sacrifice of Coverture” in Arrow of God. As a prefatory remark I will say this: the words pro¬ nounced by the priest during the Nkpu ceremony are written in Igbo by S. A. Nnolim. I have taken the liberty to translate them, after render¬ ing the Igbo words as Nnolim wrote them. The reason for my translat¬ ing these words is to show how faithfully Achebe followed his source: he actually renders his source verbatim. At the end, Nnolim says that the hen used for the sacrifice is at the discretion of the priest "either to bury or take to his house.” It would be interesting to see how Achebe treats this episode: he makes Obika raise a doubt about the propriety of the priest taking the hen home, and his mother tries to resolve it by say¬ ing it is done, although she had never seen it happen before. Now, to Nnolim: Once the woman goes to live as wife to her husband she must perform a ceremony or sacrifice called (Nkpu). It is a sacrifice done by woman after she had been married and the attached likely meaning is to cover all the probable evils that might follow or might have followed her from youth to the state of married life. This is done towards the direction of the road or lane leading to where she came from, and is performed in the evening time when it is sure that she will not come out through that path till the following morning. In this case a hen, 4 small yams, 4 cowries that is 24 cowries known as (ego nano), tender palm leaves, 4 white chalks, one native pot, the "Olodu” flower, and etc., etc., form the ingredients of the sacrifice. A juju priest officiating to¬ gether with the woman and husband must be present with another small pot of water. When all are ready, a hole will be dug in the centre of the path and with various appeasing words being pronounced by the juju priest thus—"Ife ijili anya fu; tike ikwutelu na onu; nke

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inutalu na nti mobu nke izotalu na ukwu; nke nne metalu; nke nna metalu; Ekpudom fa nebea.” The whole articles will then be buried in the hole with the exception of the hen which will be at the dis¬ cretion of the juju priest either to bury or take to his house, though it must be killed. It will be buried that the back of the pot will be seen outside; after this, the woman will retire to her room and will not pass through that path till next day. (p. 22) In Igbo the word Nkpu means Covering Up and the word "Olodu” flower means Lily flower. My translation of the priest’s "appeasing words” reads: Whatever [evil] you might have seen with your eyes, or spoken with your mouth, or heard with your ears, or trodden with your feet; whatever evil else your mother might have committed, or your father might have committed, I cover them up here. In Arrow of God the sacrifice of Coverture was performed for Okuata, Obika’s new wife. This is how Achebe tries to fictionalize his source: Her mother-in-law took her away into her hut where she would stay until the Sacrifice of Coverture was performed. The medicine-man and diviner who had been hired to perform the rite soon arrived and the party set out. In it were Obika, his elder half-brother, his mother and the bride. . . . They made for the highway leading to Umuezeani, the village where the bride came from. It was now quite dark and there was no moon. . . . The bride had a bowl of fired clay in one hand and a hen in the other. Now and again the hen squawked the way hens do when their pen is disturbed by an intruder at night. . . . On his left hand Obika held a very small pot of water by the neck. His half-brother had a bunch of tender palm frond cut from the pinnacle of the tree. Before long they reached the junction of their highway and another leading to the bride’s village along which she had come that very day. They walked a short distance on this road and stopped. The medicine-man chose a spot in the middle of the way and asked Obika to dig a hole there. .. . While Obika was scooping out the red earth with both hands the medicine-man began to bring out the sacrificial objects from his bag. First he brought out four small yams, then four pieces of white chalk and the flower of the wild lily. "Give me the omu." Edogo passed the tender palm leaves to him. He tore out four leaflets and put away the rest. Then he

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turned to Obika’s mother. "Let me have ego nano [four cowries].’’ She untied a bunch of cowries from a corner of her cloth and gave them to him. He counted them carefully on the ground as a woman would before she bought or sold in the market, in groups of six. There were four groups and he nodded his head. He rose to his feet and positioned Okuata beside that she faced the direction of her village, kneeling on Then he took his position opposite her on the other hole, with the sacrificial objects ranged on his right.

the hole so both knees. side of the The others

stood a little back. He took one of the yams and gave it to Okuata. She waved it round her head and put it inside the hole. The medicine-man put in the other three. Then he gave her one of the pieces of white chalk and she did as for the yam. Then came the palm leaves and the flower of the wild lily and last of all he gave her one group of six cowries which she closed in her palm and did as for the others. After this he pronounced the absolution: "Any evil which you might have seen with your eyes, or spoken with your mouth, or heard ivith your ears or trodden with your feet; whatever your f at her might have brought upon you or your mother brought upon you, 1 cover them all here.” As he spoke the last words he took the bowl of fired clay and placed it face downwards over the objects in the hole. Then he began to put back the loose earth. Twice he eased up the bowl slightly so that when he finished its curved back showed a little above the surface of the road. . . . "Do not forget,’’ said the diviner [to Okuata] . . . "that you are not to pass this way until morning even if the warriors of Abam were to strike this night and you were fleeing for your life." "This hen will follow me home," he said as he slung his bag on one shoulder and picked up the hen by the legs tied together with banana rope. ... "I alone will eat its flesh. Let none of you pay me a visit in the morning because I shall not share it. . . . Even diviners ought to be rewarded now and again. . . . Do we not say that the flute player must sometimes stop to wipe his nose?” As soon as he was out of earshot Obika asked if it was the custom for the diviner to take the hen home. "I have heard that some of them do,” said his mother. "But I have never seen it until today. My own hen was buried with the rest of the sacrifice.” (pp. 132-36 passim)

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The Arrest of Ezeulu and Offering a Seed Yam Feast There are two dramatic centers in Arrow of God: first, the arrest and detention of Ezeulu by the District Commissioner; and, second, Ezeulu’s refusal to roast two sacred yams in one month. As will soon be demonstrated, S. A. Nnolim’s A History of Umuchu provided both to Achebe. Achebe was so carried away at this point in his novel that he forgot even to attempt to disguise his source. As usual, I shall begin with Nnolim’s story of "Offering a Seed Yam Feast" and lead up to the arrest of Ezeulu, which he discussed under the heading, "Method of Re¬ cording the Months”: OFFERING A SEED YAM FEAST Offering of the seed yam feast is the second general feast per¬ formed by the whole town; the pumpkin leaves are done by women while the seed yam feasts are done by men. Every grown up man who would be able to discharge a gun must offer one seed yam annually. This feast is done always in January or February accord¬ ing to the native method of months calculation. The feast is done on Nkwo-Uchu market day and the announcement is also made eight days in advance. On the day of the feast, Well Dinner Par¬ ties are common, because since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, much depends on dinner; men will invite their kindreds and benefactors, early before the time of going to the market. Each man will put on his best clothes; young boys even decorate their bodies with dyewood (Uli). The women on the other hand will appear in the best robes and ornaments, plait their hair, decorate all their bodies with "Uli," Ogalu, and "Nkirisiani”; they always appear very attractive on such occasion. No importance is attached to any article of trade on this day; the only articles of trade carried by women are corn cake, melon cakes and women portable calabash for their drinking purposes (Nwonya). The feast is most enjoyable and interesting because of the occasion that favours its performances, (a) It is done in dry season and at times when every one has less work to do. (b) It is done when everyone is at ease and when palm wine is produced in abundance in the town. Inside the juju seat, the six towns have their stalls in the round wall where the Uchu seat stands. Inside there each village comes in turn to offer one seed yam. As one puts down his yam, prayers are muttered to the Uchu juju, touching his forefinger on the ground chalk in a pot and rubbing same on his forehead and went away. This will be going on till the whole towns laid their yams down, and the place will be full of seed yams

236

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carefully arranged in groups. When this is finished almost in the afternoon, drinking will be going on in almost every corner of the market till the famous IKORO is sounded. The trumpeters of each section of the villages will be busily engaged in calling brave men and noble women of the town. The Town Announcer, the women singers (Elile), the flute blowers all will be busy keeping the occasion warm. The eldest daughter of the juju priest will appear in a hanging hand¬ bell and one line of leopard skin across her belly, jumping from one place to another with [a] lot of women servants following her and addressing her in various honourable names. There were men who act as cavalry in the market, who will dress in some gorgeous and peculiar war dresses, and will jump out from one section of the market to another in merriment, after being addressed by various men and women war singers. DOLLS AND STATUES The dolls and statues from all other juju seats in those six villages will be lined up with carriers who will fall in behind them at Ugwuakwu lines of stalls. These dolls receive the presents from the interested parties; the presents were some times four cowries, and some times chalks, and etc. Then after several number of beat¬ ing Ikoro wooden drum, the Ihite nato will start [the] merry run, as that usually happens, with both their wives and daughters, those who have, of course, done the marketing ceremony. They will in addition sing several traditional war and civil songs and dance. Then followed Okw'u na Achalla and Amanasa. After all these the feast will continue till many foreign friends followed their invitees home. While all these were going on, the two sided juju priests from Ugwuakwu and Osete who were al¬ ready in the juju seat, when yams were being offered, will then count the yams of each village separately and keep the number secret until another four days time when a sacrifice consisting only the juju priests and one of the elders from each of the six villages. On that day the head of the Uchu juju priest will reveal to each man the number of grown up men in his quarter for the past year, after the sacrifice. They renew their loyalty to their goddess in harmony. THE YAMS—Twelve yams will be selected by the elders and handed over to the head juju priest; he will keep those twelve yams very carefully because he will use [them] in counting the moons of the year. Other seed yams which usually number several thousand

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will be kept and planted for Uchu juju under communal and volun¬ tary labour at the juju priest supervision. METHOD OF RECORDING THE MONTHS First new moon the head juju priest will see on the sky after the seed yam feast, he removes one yam from those twelve yams and roasts it in the fire and eats without oil. When that moon fin¬ ishes, he watches for the next new moon. When he sees the second new moon he again removes another yam from the remainder and roasts it as explained above. When he sees that the yams remain eight, he pronounces first pumpkin leaves. These he uses to count the moon throughout the year, and on the month he eats the last of the yams, he pronounces the seed yam feast, and marks the end of Umuchu one calendar year. There was confusion in the year about 1913, during the con¬ tact with Europeans when our head juju priest named "Ezeagu Uchu” met Mr. J. G. Lotain D. C., and started to claim superiority above the D. C. on account of his Uchu goddess. The District Commissioner as they were called by then did not understand him, and ordered escorts to bring him to Awka for official interrogation as to know whether he was entitled to be a chief. He remained at Awka for two months and bluntly and blindly refused to accept the appointment of a warranted chief. He said that such would be contrary to the wishes of his goddess. While at Awka for two months, the two yams he would have roasted remained untouched. On his return, he refused to roast two yams in a month, saying that such has never been done to his hearing in the history of his god¬ dess; then from that time the first month of Uchu instead of fall¬ ing on January each year some times falls on February. At the same time too one carved doll, known as Nwobiala Uchu, was carried away by soldiers and destroyed, (pp. 25-27) Now to Achebe. It must first be pointed out that Achebe changed Nnolim’s "Offering a Seed Yam Feast” to the "Feast of the New Yam,” for his own fictional purposes. It must be emphasized, too, that the strong, stubborn character of Achebe’s Ezeulu is a mere carryover from the stubborn Ezeagu-Uchu in Nnolim’s History—a man who would neither kowtow to the District Commissioner nor accede to his own people’s advice that he roast two sacred yams in one month. For fictional purposes, Captain Winter bottom’s illness becomes the motivation or fictional excuse to keep Ezeulu at Okperi (which, in reality, is Awka divisional headquarters). But where Nnolim says that Ezeagu-Uchu was detained for two months, Achebe reduces it to thirty-two days (which,

238

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technically, will still leave Ezeulu two yams to roast in one month!) I must point out, also, that in my town, Umuchu, offering the Seed Yam Festival marks the end of the year, a point Achebe did not miss; nor did he fail to include Nnolim’s account of the gifts given: small and almost inconsequential dolls and statues. Achebe’s account of the Feast of the New Yam starts as follows: After a long period of silent preparation Ezeulu finally re¬ vealed that he intended to hit Umuaro at its most vulnerable point —the Feast of the New Yam. This feast was the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. ... It reminded the six villages of their coming together in ancient times and of their continuing debt to Ulu who saved them from the ravages of the Abam. At every New Yam feast the coming together of the villages was re-enacted and every grown man in Umuaro took a good-sized seed-yam to the shrine of Ulu and placed it in the heap from his village after circling it round his head; then he took the lump of chalk lying beside the heap and marked his face. It was from these heaps that the elders knew the number of men in each village. If there was an increase over the previous year a sacrifice of gratitude was made to Ulu; but if the number had declined the reason was sought from diviners and a sacrifice of appeasement was ordered. It was also from these yams that Ezeulu selected thirteen with which to reckon the new year. (P- 231) And following rather too closely what he found in his source, Achebe goes on to describe the smaller gods and goddesses lined up during the ceremony. Where Nnolim says: The dolls and statues from all other juju seats in those six villages will be lined up with their carriers who will fall in behind them at Ugwuakwu lines of stalls. These dolls receive the presents from the interested parties. The presents were some times four cowries, and some times chalks. ... (p. 26) Achebe says: If the festival meant no more than this it would still be the most important ceremony in Umuaro. But it was also the day for all the minor deities in the six villages who did not have their own special feasts. On that day each of these gods was brought by its custodian and stood in a line outside the shrine of Ulu so that any man or woman who had received a favour from it could make

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a small present in return. This was the one public appearance these smaller gods were allowed in the year. (pp. 231-32) The arrest of Ezeulu and what Achebe did with it need no longer take up our time here. As I mentioned earlier, it is at the core of the novel. But for purposes of demonstration, it is dealt with by Achebe, starting on page 136 of Arrow of God. The offer made to Ezeulu by the District Commissioner’s deputy, Mr. Clarke, and Ezeulu’s stubborn re¬ fusal to accept it, is recorded on page 196. But further dramatic interest is provided by the way Achebe depicts Ezeulu watching for the moon and playing games with it. How Ezeulu roasts and eats his sacred yams without oil is taken directly, and without garnishing, from Nnolim. Nnolim says on page 27: "When he sees that the yams remain eight, he pronounces first pumpkin leaves." Earlier on the same page he had said: "First new moon the head juju priest will see on the sky after the seed yam feast, he removes one yam from those twelve yams and roasts it in the fire and eats without oil" (italics mine). Here is how Achebe recreates Ezeulu’s watching of the moon, roast¬ ing and eating the yams, and using the yams to record the year’s events. Arrow of God actually opens with Ezeulu looking for the new moon. When he found it, Ezeulu went into his barn and took down one yam from the bam¬ boo platform built specially for the twelve sacred yams. There were eight left. He knew there would be eight; nevertheless he counted them carefully. He had already eaten three and had the fourth in his hand. . . . As he waited for the yam to roast he planned the coming event in his mind. It was Oye. Tomorrow would be Afo and the next day Nkwo, the day of the great market. The festival of the Pumpkin Leaves would fall on the third Nkwo from that day. To¬ morrow he would send for his assistants and tell them to announce the day to the six villages of Umuaro. (p. 3; italics mine) But having used Nnolim to establish the month of the festival of Pump¬ kin Leaves, Achebe did not stop there. He felt he must explain also that the roasted sacred yams are eaten without oil, just as he found it in his source. On page 6 of Arrow of God, he lets us watch Obiageli, Ezeulu’s little daughter, who looks steadily at her father in hopes he might give her a piece of the sacred yam he was consuming: She should have known by now that her father never gave out even the smallest piece of the yam he ate without palm oil at every new moon, (italics mine)

240

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Finally, it must be stressed that the fact that Achebe owes so much to Nnolim’s booklet merits neither praise nor censure. My interest has been purely literary and in the service of criticism of African literature. This said, and with all the preceding discussion in mind, it would only be fair to conclude that Achebe’s Arrow of God is little more than a fictional expansion of The History of Umuchu by Simon A. Nnolim; that the entire setting of Achebe’s novel is Umuchu, which is not too far away from his own village, Ogidi; that the customs, ceremonies, and feasts he describes are those of Umuchu and not eclectically gathered from diffuse sources; and, finally, that his treatment of the night Mask he owes, by his own admission, to watching them perform for the team from E.N.B.S. which he headed. But the above does not preclude other sources. His long oral inter¬ view with Nnolim must have yielded sources that are not traceable to one who has no access to Achebe’s diary. Secondly, Nnolim mentions C. K. Meek’s Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (1937)5 as one of the sources he used while preparing The History of Umuchu. It is only natural to expect that Achebe traced Nnolim’s sources, including intelligence reports and social anthropologists’ reports. For example, in his Introduction, C. K. Meeks speaks of "the widespread hatred of the system of Native Administration conducted through the artificial channel of Native Courts, the members of which, under the name of 'Warrant Chiefs,’ had come to be regarded as corrupt henchmen of the Govern¬ ment, rather than as spokemen and protectors of the people’’ (p. ix). Meek was writing, here, of the cause of the women’s riots of 1929—a riot that seemed to have taken the administration, which had thought everything was going beautifully, by surprise. Meek, whose anthropo¬ logical study of the Igbos was regarded as a very authoritative one, goes on to say that Indirect Rule was a mistake in Igboland where "there were no chiefs at all, and there was no higher unit of government than the commune or small group of continguous villages’’ (p. x). The un¬ fortunate result of Indirect Rule which created these Warrant Chiefs, Meek further admits, was the creation of "chiefs” who were "armed with an authority far in excess of that possessed by the village-councils in former times. This and their venality as judicial officials had made them feared and disliked” (p. x), until the Secretary of State for the Colo¬ nies set up a Commission of Inquiry "with a view to setting up Native Administrations which would be more in accordance with the institu¬ tions and wishes of the people than the bureaucratic system which had so signally failed” (p. xi). The point of the above is that it seems to have provided some fuel for Achebe’s depiction of Winterbottom’s discontent with the Lieuten-

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ant-Governor’s memorandum because "the tragedy of British colonial administration was that the man on the spot who knew his African and knew what he was talking about found himself being constantly over¬ ruled by starry-eyed fellows at headquarters" (Arrow of God, p. 63); hence, the Lieutenant-Governor, to Winterbottom’s chagrin, reinstated the corrupt Warrant Chief Ikedi, whom Winterbottom had deposed. Achebe seems to have owed further debts to Meek in writing Ar¬ row of God and Things Fall Apart. As a native of Umuchu, which is the setting of Arrow of God, I must confess that Ikenga is not possessed by our people and by those of surrounding towns. It is known only in Owerri Division, which is far removed from Achebe’s setting. When, therefore, Akukalia split Ebo’s Ikenga in two (p. 27), causing the latter to kill Akukalia, one must conclude that Achebe borrowed this peculiar custom from elsewhere. In explaining the cause of the war between Umuaro and Okperi to Clarke, Winterbottom felt obliged to explain why Ebo felt justified in killing Akukalia, for, in splitting his Ikenga, he had committed the worst sacrilege. Winterbottom says: "I may ex¬ plain that Ikenga is the most important fetish in the Ibo man’s arsenal, so to speak. It represents his ancestors to whom he must make daily sacrifice. When he dies it is split in two; one half is buried with him and the other half is thrown aw a).” In C. K. Meek, the Ikenga is de¬ scribed thus: "Ikenga is the personification of a man’s strength of arm, and consequently of his good fortune. At Owerri the symbol occurs only ... in the form of a forked piece of wood some 6 to 8 inches long, with a flat bottom. . . . The owner offers sacrifice when he feels inclined, and on his death the symbol is thrown into the 'bush of evil’ ” (p. 39; italics mine). The italicized words point to a familiar trend we found in this study. Achebe must have looked at Meek’s comprehensive study of Igbo culture before he wrote both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, as I shall try to demonstrate further with one more quotation. We are all familiar with the passage in Things Fall Apart where there is a rare ex¬ change between the Masked Spirit—Egwugwu—and Uzowulu. It went on like this: When all the egwugwu had sat down and the sound of the many tiny bells and rattles on their bodies had subsided, Evil For¬ est addressed the two groups of people facing them. "Uzowulu’s body I salute you,” he said. . . . Uzowulu bent down and touched the earth with his right hand as a sign of submission. "Our father, my hand has touched the ground,” he said.

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"Uzowulu’s body, do you know me?” asked the spirit. "How can I know you, father? You are beyond our knowl¬ edge.”8 Compare this with Meek’s record of such an exchange. Whenever a Masked Spirit appears before humans, Meek observes: Falling down before the masker, he saluted by putting his hand to the ground and then to his forehead . . . murmuring: "Father, Owner of land.” Meek continues: A member of the society brings a plantain stalk and begins beating it on the floor of the hut and shouting "Egugu, oh!” . . . The summoner then hails the arrival of the ghosts, saying, "Our father, our father.” The masker, speaking through his voice disguiser, says in reply, "Do you know the Mmo?” The summoner replies, "Nay, father, the Mmo can never be known.” (p. 68) Here, again, the similarities are incontrovertible, suggesting a borrow¬ ing by Achebe from Meek’s work published in 1937. One more word: as I said earlier, G. D. Killam’s remark to the effect that "much of the background in Arrow of God is there for its own sake, that it has come to dominate the book and has in a sense be¬ come the subject of the book,” is a very perceptive one. As Achebe him¬ self might have said, in writing Arrow of God he had his kernels half cracked for him not by his chi, but by Simon A. Nnolim. In conclusion, the reader must be warned that the foregoing is in no way intended to denigrate the great artistic achievements of Achebe as a creative writer and novelist. But my study does establish a few facts about Achebe and his sources. First, we must admit that Achebe is a careful researcher of his facts, which shows great intelligence, for no one has been able to complain that his depiction of Igbo society is dis¬ torted or falsified. Secondly, one must admit that it takes painstaking and diligent research to organize and bring alive such complex material. Thirdly, though Achebe is a great observer of Igbo cultural life, the evidence tends to show that his sources are not solely oral; Achebe did not write from personal observation alone, nor merely from a combina¬ tion of personal observation and the great stories told him by his father and grandfather. He definitely made use of printed sources in writing Arrow of God. Here is a diagram of what I term the "Watering Trough of Ideas” that influenced him:

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NOTES 1. Richard D. Altick, The Art of Literary Research, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975). 2. Ibid., p. 94. 3. G. D. Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1969), p. 61. 4. See Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (New York: Anchor/Dou¬ bleday, 1969), p. 52, and S. A. Nnolim, The History of Umuchu (Enugu: Eastern Syndicate Press, 1953), pp. 32-33. All quotations are taken from these editions. A few minor typographical errors in Nnolim’s book have been corrected, but no words have been ^hanged. Anything added to the original text has been placed in brackets. 5. C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937). 6. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: 1958), p. 82.

Heinemann,

A Source for Arrow of God: A Response

C. L. Innes In his article “A Source for Arrow of God” Charles Nnolim makes some rather bold claims: “the single most important source—in fact, the only source—for Arrow of God,” he declares, “is a tiny, socio-historical pamphlet,” entitled The History of Umuchu by Simon Alagbogu Nnolim, although Achebe has “never admitted it publicly.” He promises to provide “overwhelming” evidence that Achebe “had Nnolim’s book before him as he wrote Arrow of God,” and further maintains that “Achebe did not merely take the story of the High Priest and blow life into it as Shakespeare did when borrowing material for Julius Caesar from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; Achebe went much further, he lifted every¬ thing in The History of Umuchu and simply transferred it to Arrow of God without embellishment.” (Nnolim’s italics) Such claims led me to read on with great interest and, indeed, some concern for the reputation of Achebe, against whom these accusations of artlessness, lack of creativity and failure to “admit sources publicly” were being levelled. The evidence, however, was far from “overwhelming.” Despite repeated statements by Nnolim that passages from The History of Umuchu were rendered “verbatim” or “set down almost verbatim” in Arrow of God, or were “lifted from Nnolim” or were “artlessly faithful” to their source, or showed that Achebe “forgot even to disguise hisource” or simply “defied comment,” a quick reading of the passages compared revealed that they were neither “verbatim” nor “almost verbatim” copies. On the contrary, they varied significantly in detail, structure, length and phraseology. In one instance only could it be argued that Achebe uses words very similar to those in The History of Umuchu, and these are the words used in the prayer spoken by Okuato at the Sacrifice of Coverture, words given by Simon Nnolim in Igbo. This comparison between Charles Nnolim’s translation and Achebe’s might seem more telling if one were not aware that such a ritual prayer would be widely known and also that Charles Nnolim has considerably altered his original’s translation in order to make his point. In the 1976 edition of The History of Umuchu revised by Charles Nnolim, the translation is given thus as a footnote to page 45: “All the evils ypu committed with your eyes; all evils you did by talking; all the evils you heard with your ears or the evils you tramped upon by your feet; the evils from your mother; the evils from your father; I cover them up here.” On the evidence of Nnolim’s article alone, then, the charges of faith¬ fulness to sources and of “lifting everything . .., without embellishment,” were clearly disproved by the very examples compared. In general, the passages placed side by side did not “defy commentary,” but rather sug¬ gested a whole range of comments on the degree to which Achebe’s skill as a writer was underlined by contrast with Nnolim’s accounts of the ceremonies described and also on Achebe’s concern with the significance

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of the ceremonies in contrast to Nnolim’s bare descriptions of the ritual movements. Nor were those passages similar enough to prove conclusively that The History of Umuchu must have been even one source, although they do suggest it as a possibility. In view of that possibility, and thinking that Charles Nnolim’s apparent ignorance of the meaning of “verbatim,” his inability to think of comments on passages to be compared and his failure to notice that Achebe’s Ulu is a masculine deity might be indicative of a more general failure to communi¬ cate his case clearly, I read The History of Umuchu in both the original (1953) and revised (1976) versions. It is a fascinating history, full of details which one feels would have been of great interest to Achebe and which he might well have included in his novel had he known about them—the story of the six sons of Echu and the founding and history of the original six villages prior to amalgamation, an account which takes up a good half (ca. 17 pages) of Nnolim’s History, various power names and stories attached to them; the salutations expected between man and wife; ceremonies such as “The Risky Feast” preceding marriage; the foods forbidden women and certain men; the burial ceremony and mourning customs; the New Yam Festival. Only those passages quoted by Charles Nnolim—a total of five pages—have any relevance to the rituals and events described in the 230 pages of Arrow of God. That simple fact alone makes nonsense of the claim that Achebe “lifted everything in The History of Umuchu and simply transferred it to Arrow of God without embellishment.” What Simon Nnolim’s book does indicate is that the story of Ezeulu and the duties he was entrusted with are based on the story and role of the head priest of Umuchu, “Ezeagu Uchu,” who in 1913 rejected an ap¬ pointment as warrant chief because “such would be contrary to the wishes of his goddess,” was consequently jailed for two months, and then refused to eat two yams in one month, so that the feast of the Seed Yam was delayed. But Achebe many years ago declared that Arrow of God was based on an actual incident and that he had long been fascinated by the story of the priest who refused the appointment as warrant chief. As Charles Nnolim himself tells us, Achebe “admitted” that he had met Simon Alagbogu Nnolim in 1957 and interviewed him in Umuchu where he spent three days with the Eastern Nigerian Broadcasting Company. Given Achebe’s interest in Igbo history and culture, one can assume that his questions and notes during that visit were not limited to the formal subject—Night Masks. It is probable that it was on this visit that Achebe heard further details of the story of Ezeagu, of the founding of Umuchu and of local ceremonies such as the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves (still performed, Simon Nnolim tells us, in 1952) from Nnolim and others. From this germ, the novel must have taken shape over the years with the addition of a multitude of other sources, oral and written. One of these sources might have been The History of Umuchu, but Charles Nnolim’s claims that it is the only source and that Achebe must have had it before him as he wrote are unconvincing and irresponsible. Like Achebe’s Ofoedu at the meeting to discuss the road labor, he appears to have “opened his mouth and let out his words alive without giving them as much as a bite with his teeth.”

A Man of the People

Achebe’s African Parable Bernth Lindfors

Chinua Achebe’s most recent novel, A Man of the People, details the rise and demise of “Chief the Honourable Dr. M.A. Nanga, M.P., L.L.D.”, a corrupt, wheeling-dealing, opportunistic semi-literate who elbows his way to a lucrative ministerial post in the Government of an unnamed independent African country, uses his power and newly-acquired wealth to ensure his reelection, and is shaken from his lofty, befouled perch only when a group of idealistic young military officers topples the “fat¬ dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime” by launching a sudden coup d’etat. The novel, published just nine days after the first military coup in Nigeria, has been hailed by many reviewers1 as a “prophetic” work, one in which Achebe predicted with uncanny accuracy the end of his country’s First Republic. Certainly the accuracy of Achebe’s vision cannot be disputed. It was a rather eerie experience to read the last chapter of this novel in the early months of 1966 when Achebe’s descriptions of fictional events seemed to correspond so closely to newspaper accounts of what was happening in Nigeria. For example, the coup was said to have been touched off by post-election turmoil: — What happened was simply that unruly mobs and private armies having tasted blood and power during the election had got out of hand and ruined their masters and employers (p. 162)2. The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over. (p. 165)

The aftermath of the fictional coup corresponded with reality too.

.. .the military regime had just abolished all political parties in the country and announced they would remain abolished until the situation became stabilized once again. They had at the same time announced the impending trial of all public servants who had enriched themselves by defrauding the State. The figure involved was said to be in the order of fifteen million pounds (pp. 165-6). Overnight everyone began to shake their heads at the excesses of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt governmentnewspapers, the radio, the hitherto silent intellectuals and civil servants—everybody said what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion the next morning, (p. 166)

It was passages such as these that made Achebe appear a seer.

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249

Yet I would like to argue that despite these seemingly clairvoyant passages, A Man of the People is not and was not meant to be a prophetic novel. Indeed, given the circumstances in Nigeria during the time Achebe was writing, A Man of the People should be recognized as a devastating satire in which Achebe heaped scorn on independent Africa by picturing one part of it just as it was. I believe Achebe ended the novel with a military coup in order to enlarge the picture to include Nigeria’s neighbors, many of which had experienced coups. By universalizing the story in this way, Achebe could suggest to his countrymen that what had happened in other unstable independent African countries might easily have happened in Nigeria too. The coup was meant as an African parable, not a Nigerian prophecy. The manuscript of A Man of the People was submitted to Achebe’s publisher in February, 19653 and the book was published in London eleven months later on January 24, 1966. Achebe’s third novel, Arrow of God, had been submitted to his publisher in February, 19633 and had been published March 3,

1964. Since it is unlikely that Achebe began A Man of the People until he had completed Arrow of God, it is probably safe to assume that A Man of the People was written sometime between February, 1963 and February, 1965. There is good evidence that he was at work on the novel early in 19644. During this period he was also working as Director of External Broadcasting for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, a job that would have kept him abreast of the latest news. Politics dominated the news in Nigeria at this time. By February, 1963 the seven-month state of emergency in the Western Region had ended, and Chief Obafemi Awolowo and twenty-nine others had been arrested and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Federal Government by force. In September, 1963, Awolowo and nineteen others were convicted of treasonable felony and imprisoned. On October 1, 1963 Nigeria became a Federal Republic. Then, because of the doubtful accuracy of the official results of the 1962 census, which were never publicly released, a new census was taken in November, 1963. Since regional representation in the Federal Government was to be determined by the results of this census, politicians were eager that every one of their constituents be counted at least once. When the bloated preliminary results of the census were released in February, 1964, they were rejected by the Eastern and Midwestern Regions and protest demonstrations were held. On March 25, 1964, an editorial in the Lagos Daily Times warned that “The Federal Republic of Nigeria faces the grave danger of disintegration” because of the census crisis.

250

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Worse times were yet to come. A Federal Election was due before the year was out, and political campaigning gradually grew more and more vicious. One observer reports that “countless acts of political violence and thuggery occurred almost daily through¬ out the campaign, but notably increased during the last few weeks.” 5 Electioneering irregularities were so frequent and wide¬ spread that one of the major political parties, the United Progres¬ sive Grand Alliance, announced that it would boycott the elections. This precipitated another crisis, for President Nnamdi Azikiwe, judging the election invalid, refused to call upon victorious Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to form a new government. For five days the country teetered on the brink of political chaos. On January 4, 1965, Azikiwe and Balewa finally reached a compromise and Azikiwe announced to the country that Balewa would form a “broadly-based national government.” By-elections were to be held in constituencies where elections had been totally boycotted, and allegations of fraud and intimidation were to be reviewed by the courts. It should be remembered that Achebe’s publisher received the manuscript of A Man of the People one month after this period of crisis and compromise. Achebe must have been working on the last chapters of the novel, which dramatize the turbulence and violence of an election campaign, during the months just preceding the Nigerian election. He was obviously drawing much of his inspiration from daily news reports. The last pages of the novel, those which describe the coup, must have been written very close to the time of the five-day crisis following the election. What relevance this has to my argument I shall attempt to demonstrate in a moment. First, however, let us look at the role of the Nigerian military forces before, during and immediately after the 1964 election campaign. Before the campaign, they had been used to restore civil order both at home and abroad. In December, 1960 Nigerian troops had been sent to the newly-independent Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) to help United Nations forces keep order, and in April, 1964 they had been dispatched to Tanganyika to relieve British troops who had put down a Tanganyika Army mutiny. In Nigeria, Army troops had quelled a Tiv riot in 1960 and had maintained order in the Western Region during the 1962 state of emergency. During the 1964 election campaign they were ordered to put down another Tiv riot and did so at the cost of 700 lives6. Throughout the campaign, large squads of riot police were deployed to battle the thugs and hooligans hired by political candidates to terrorize their opposition. During the post-election crisis, troops were called out to safeguard the residences of

CHINUA ACHEBE

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Azikiwe and Balewa in Lagos and the cell of Awolowo in Calabar. Thus, before, during and after the 1964 election campaign the Nigerian Army played a prominent role as a peace-keeping force in Nigeria and abroad. During the same period, armies in many other African countries had acted as a disruptive force. In 1963 there were military coups in Togo, Congo-Brazzaville and Dahomey, and a military plot to assassinate President Tubman was uncovered in Liberia. In 1964 there were army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya, a revolution in Zanzibar, attempted coups in Gabon and Niger, and continued confusion and disorder in Congo-Leopoldville. On February 21, 1964 an editorial in the Lagos Daily Times deplored the use of bullets instead of ballots in French West Africa, and four days later the same paper remarked that “The constant cataclysms which have recently disrupted peace and order in Africa have produced a dangerous trend towards replacing the growing pattern of parliamentary rule with military juntas.” Notice that at this time the trend toward military coups was regarded as “dangerous.” By the end of the year the mood of the country had changed considerably. The electioneering abuses, the breakdown of law and order, the numerous crises and compromises had produced a general distrust of politicians and disillusionment with democratic processes of government. In a nationwide broadcast on December 10, 1964, President Azikiwe himself predicted the end of democracy in Nigeria: ... I have one advice to give to our politicians; if they have decided to destroy our national unity, then they should summon a round-table conference to decide how our national assets should be divided, before they seal their doom by satisfying their lust for office. . . Should politicians fail to heed this warning, then I will venture a prediction that the experiences of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) will be child’s play if it ever comes to our turn to play such a tragic role.1

After the elections, Azikiwe lamented that People in this country now evince a mood of weariness and frustration that is a sad contrast to the elation and confidence with which we ushered in independence barely four years ago. Far from presenting a united front, our country now shows a pattern of disintegration.8

The people themselves expressed their discontent with politicians in no uncertain terms. During the election crisis, Lazarus Okeke wrote a letter to the Lagos Daily Express asserting that

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

252

. . .no well-wisher of Nigeria would recommend a blow-up of the country just because certain politicians cannot have their demand (sic) met. The welfare of the people as a nation definitely superceeds (sic) in importance the various vain and sectional claims of erring politicians.9

An unsigned article in the Lagos Sunday Express of January 3, 1965, went a step further: Democracy has bred corruption in our society on a scale hitherto unknown in human history. Nigeria needs a strong man with a strong hand. By this I mean, that Nigeria needs to be disciplined. Nigeria needs to be drilled. The leadership we want is the leadership of a benevolent dictator who gets things done; not that of ‘democractic administrators’ who drag their feet.

It is clear that a number of Nigerians would have welcomed a military coup in January, 1965. Indeed, several days after Azikiwe and Balewa had worked out their compromise, one disgruntled Easterner writing in Enugu’s Nigerian Outlook expressed regret that the compromise had not been forestalled by military intervention: If civil strife had broken out on December 30, the armed forces might have gone into action as a last resort, and the President and the Prime Minister might never have had an opportunity for negotiations.10

If further evidence is required to prove that many Nigerians had entertained the notion of a military coup during the election crisis, one need only turn to the Lagos Sunday Times of February 28, 1965 and read the text of an interview with Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi who on February 15th of that year had been appointed the first Nigerian Commander of the Nigerian Army11The interviewer tried to draw out Ironsi’s views on the desiribility of military intervention in State affairs in times of political turmoil, but Ironsi carefully side-stepped the questions. Q: Had you been the Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army during the constitutional crisis resulting from the Federal elections last December, what would you have done? Ironsi: Q:

You mean, militarily or what?

Both military or otherwise.

Ironsi: I think what we should get clear is that the crisis was a political crisis. . .It did not require military action. . .It was a political thing, solved in a political way.

CHINUA ACHEBE

253

Q: Tell me, if there’s war, would you fight out of conviction or would you carry out the orders of the government regard¬ less as to which side is right or wrong? Ironsi: ... I think it is true to say that any Army goes to war for justification.. .The job of the Army is to defend the coun¬ try, no questions asked. Q:

Now, suppose it’s an internal war. . .

Ironsi: I don’t know what you’re trying to get at. . . Whatever you might have in mind, THE ARMY SUPPORTS THE GOVERNMENT THAT IS! Q: If you were General Mobutu, how would you effect a solution [to the Congo impasse]? Ironsi: I’m not. I should wait till I’m confronted with such a situation.

That such questions could be asked and such cautious answers given eight weeks after the crisis suggests that the idea of a mili¬ tary resolution to Nigeria’s political problems had occurred to many Nigerians other than Achebe and that it was still quite a live issue. Seen in this light, Achebe’s “prophecy” appears much less prophetic. He had only foreseen what many others, including President Azikiwe, had foreseen or had hoped to see. A military coup was not necessarily “inevitable” in 1964-5 but it was regarded by a number of intelligent observers12 as one of the few options left for a nation on the brink of anarchy. In a recent interview Achebe put it this way: . . .things had got to such a point politically that there was no other answer, no way you could resolve this impasse politically. The political machine had been so abused that whichever way you pressed it, it produced the same results; and therefore another force had to come in. Now when I was writing A Man of the People, it wasn’t clear to me that this was going to be necessarily military intervention. It could easily have been civil war, which in fact it very nearly was in Nigeria.12

Achebe chose a military coup as the most appropriate ending for his story, and eleven months later Nigeria happened to make the same choice to close one of the ugliest chapters in its history. To interpret the military coup in A Man of the People as a prophecy is to suggest that Achebe meant the novel to relate only to Nigeria. This, I think, is a mistake. While it is evident that the

254

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

novel owes much to what Achebe had observed in his own country, many of the events described had happened and were happening in other independent African countries. By ending with a coup, an event anticipated yet still unknown in Nigeria but familiar elsewhere in Africa, Achebe added a dimension of universality to his story. It was no longer merely a satire on Nigeria but a satire on the rest of independent Africa as well. If the coup had a special meaning for Nigeria in the mid-sixties, it also contained a relevant moral for other emerging African nations wracked by internal upheavals. The ending was meant to be true to Africa and not merely truthful about Nigeria. The coup was an African parable, not a Nigerian prophecy. One of the most remarkable features of Chinua Achebe’s fiction is that it never fails to transcend the local and particular and enter realms of universal significance. Achebe once said: . . .After all, the novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality, it is to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history.14-

The ending of A Man of the People reveals that Achebe has a proper sense of contemporary African history. Footnotes 1. See Robert Green, Nation, April 18, 1966, pp. 465-6; D.A.N. Jones, New Statesman, January 28, 1966, pp. 132-3; Times Literary Supplement. February 3, 1966, p. 77; Time, August 19, 1966, p. 80. 2. All quotations are taken from A Man of the People, London, Heinemann, 1966. 3.

Letter from W. Roger Smith of William Heinemann Ltd., London.

4. Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Niqeria, 81 (June 1964) , 158. 5. Richard Harris, “Nigeria: Crisis and Compromise,” Africa Report, 10, 2 (March 1965) , 27. 6. Billy Dudley gives this figure in “Violence in Nigerian Politics,” Transition, 5, 21 (4-1965), 22. 7.

Nigerian Outlook, December 11, 1964, p. 3.

8.

Nigerian Outlook, January 4, 1965, p. 4.

9.

January 1, 1965, p. 4.

10. January 16, 1965, p. 3. 11. It is perhaps significant and—considering what happened in January, 1966— certainly ironic that during the election crisis Ironsi led the troops that guarded Prime Minister Balewa’s home. 12. See Billy Dudley, op. cit., p. 33. 13. Cultural Events in Africa, 28 (March 1967), ii. 14. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria, 81(June 1964), 157.

A Man of the People

T

HE careers of Achebe’s two strongminded heroes, Okonkwo and Ezeulu, covered the period just before and after the arrival of the Europeans among the Ibo. The careers of his two alienated modem heroes fall on either side of political independ¬ ence in West Africa: Obi’s schizophrenia reached its climax in the 1950’s before independence when the influence of Africa and Eu¬ rope seemed nicely poised, while the narrator of Achebe’s next novel, A Man of the People (1966), views with distaste an un¬ named, newly independent West African country in the 1960’s where Africanization is the order of the day. All four are political novels, but when we group them in this way it is apparent that the two set in the earlier period describe attacks, both internal and external, upon the traditional Ibo way of life, while the two later novels, far more pessimistic in tone, diagnose the aftereffects of this conflict in the modern state. In No Longer at Ease, the conflict was embodied rather diagrammatically in the makeup of the hybrid hero; when the two cultures he attempts to reconcile are shown to be contradictory, he succumbs halfheartedly. In A Man of the People, the conflict between different values is delineated by means of a central dra¬ matic relationship far more vital and convincing than the dismem¬ berment of Obi Okonkwo. The main characters are Chief Nanga, the minister of culture, and the schoolmaster, Odili Samalu. The two men occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, and their relationship defines the basic problems of political morality. Odili has a fastidious, theoretical view of public morality derived from his European type of education, and we find him at the beginning of the novel thoroughly disillusioned with political affairs in his own country. He has rejected all local, political allegiances— “primitive loyalties” he calls them—and refuses to acknowledge that these might have value for other people. From his detached, alienated point of view he condemns the corruption he sees around him and remains aloof. Nanga, the politician in power, occupies the other end of the political spectrum. He is a realist whose morality is one of sur¬ vival. Unconcerned with the theory of politics, he has an instinc¬ tive grasp of what the electorate want. They want, he says, their share of the national cake. But he is not simply “a man of the people” in this cynical sense. He also has a genuine sympathy and rapport with the people he represents, and this comes across to the reader as an infectious bonhomie which it is difficult to resist. He does not discount the people’s primitive loyalties; even as he exploits them he remains sensitive to their demands, so that there

256

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is an ironical half-truth in his assertion that he represents govern¬ ment “of the people, by the people, for the people. The relationship between these two men, a strange blend of fascination and repulsion, dramatically and colorfully defines the problems of public and private morality in a society which has lost sight of its past and looks to the future for material rewards. The decline in public values is implicit in the incident of Josiah and the blind beggar. Josiah is a village trader who makes several appearances in the course of the novel. On one occasion he steals a blind beggar’s walking stick “to make,” as one old woman says, “a medicine to turn us into blind buyers of his wares. This un¬ scrupulous act is too much for the villagers who boycott his store: “Within one week Josiah was ruined; no man, woman, or child went near his shop” (ix). In the village there is still some kind of social code which can mobilize the people for effective action. The phrase the villagers use to justify their action—“Josiah has taken away enough for the owner to notice”—takes us back to the com¬ munities of Umuofia and Umuaro resisting the first erosions of their traditional values. But by now the erosion is so far advanced that this communal village act is only a vestigial remnant of a social ethic we have witnessed in its full vigor. The incident comes as a revelation to the alienated Odili: I thought much afterwards about that proverb, about the man taking things away until the owner at last notices. In the mouth of our people there was no greater condemnation. It was not just a simple question of a man’s cup being full. A man’s cup might be full and none be the wiser. But here the owner knew, and the owner, I discovered, is the will of the whole people, (ix)

The proverb runs through the novel like a refrain reminding us of what has been lost and asserting that the turgid problems of the present cannot be solved by any recourse to the general will. The uncertainties of the first-person method of narration which Achebe uses in this novel for the first time reflects this absence of stable values. We have come a long way from the wise ancestral voice of Things Fall Apart. The novel is narrated from the fastidi¬ ous point of view of the schoolteacher Odili who is, of course, intent on justifying his own values and actions at the same time as he jnaligns the motives of Nanga. This is a new departure for Achebe, but with the earlier novels in mind it comes as no sur¬ prise. The most persistent feature of those works was the juxtapo¬ sition and conflict of different systems of value, African and Euro¬ pean, either in the mind of the hero as in No Longer at Ease or in the dramatic confrontation of colonialists and villagers in Arrow of God. Now the conflict of values is reflected in the technique of narration. In A Man of the People, the dialectic is pressed upon us

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continuously as we seek to balance the unreliable narrator against the flawed title-hero he is seeking to denigrate. We are required to examine the object and the point of view from which it is pre¬ sented, making the adjustments necessary to counteract the dou¬ ble refraction of malice and self-justification. In the last resort, subject and object are inseparable; there is no detached stand¬ point from which we may isolate and assess the characters with confidence. This is the relativity of experience which the unrelia¬ bility of first-person narration represents. The only guidance is to be found in the later, more mature comments of the narrator as he looks back at his earlier actions. I

The Protagonists

The first few chapters of the novel present the relationship be¬ tween the two main characters before they become openly hostile. Here they explore each other’s character, and Achebe begins to suggest in each case how political ideology is inseparable from personal psychology. The novel opens in 1964 with the official visit of Chief the Hon¬ ourable M.A. Nanga M.P. to Anata Grammar School where he himself used to be a teacher and where the narrator Odili is now teaching. The visit is seen through the skeptical eyes of Odili, who has been thoroughly disillusioned by the political events of the last few years. His disillusionment embraces both the politicians and the electorate who have cynically entered into a conspiracy of self-interest. The politicians safeguard their own interests by pro¬ viding their local supporters with a slice of “the national cake." Things have finally fallen apart in this general moral decay: As I stood in one corner of that vast tumult waiting for the arrival of the Minister I felt intense bitterness welling up in my mouth. Here were silly, ignorant villagers dancing themselves lame and waiting to blow off their gun-powder in honour of one of those who had started the country off down the slopes of inflation. I wished for a miracle, for a voice of thunder, to hush this ridiculous festival and tell the poor contemptible people one or two truths. But of course it would be quite useless. They were not only ignorant but cynical. Tell them that this man had used his position to enrich himself and they would ask you— as my father did—if you thought that a sensible man would spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth, (i)

But the bustle and vitality of the scene, with the women dancing, the hunter’s guild in full regalia, and old “Grammar-phone” herself singing, make themselves heard above the narrator’s dis¬ approval. His concern over economic inflation and political immo¬ rality pale into academic insignificance. Here is the tribal chief making a triumphal return and this surely merits a local celebra-

258

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tion. And yet, for Odili it is precisely the success of this attempt to turn a national politician into a clan leader which causes dismay and disillusionment. It means that national interest will always come second, that government resolves itself into a squabble of local loyalties and interests. The singing, the hunter’s guild, the dancing which he dislikes, the minister’s “ever-present fan of ani¬ mal skin which they said fanned away all evil designs and shafts of malevolence thrown at him by the wicked”—all these are sym¬ bols, for Odili, of the vitiation of government by local allegiances. Consequently, Odili has opted out of politics, and he describes in a flashback how this occurred. His adolescent hero worship of Nanga, dating from 1948, was finally destroyed by the 1960 eco¬ nomic crisis in which his hero first came to the public notice. On his first and last visit to Parliament he witnessed the political as¬ sassination of the minister of finance, “a first-rate economist with a Ph.D. in public finance,” by a government unwilling to face up to the stringent and unpopular measures he proposed. Nanga was well to the fore in hounding and condemning. But what was so disillusioning to Odili, an undergraduate at the time, was the form taken by the discrediting of the minister of finance. The minister and his colleagues were attacked for being un-African, “decadent stooges versed in text-book economics and aping the white man’s mannerisms and way of speaking.” The quotation from the official party organ continues: “We are proud to be Africans. Our true leaders are not those intoxicated with their Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard degrees but those who speak the language of the people. Away with the damnable and expensive university education which only alienates an African from his rich and ancient culture and puts him above his people . . .” (i). If it is a choice between parliamentary democracy with all its European associations and self-interest masquerading as Africanization, then Odili prefers the former. But then the episode of Josiah and the blind man’s stick again raises the question: What if there is no such thing as a national consciousness but only a conglomeration of clan or vil¬ lage loyalties? In this case, Odili’s European political concepts could be irrelevant, even dangerous, and he, like the minister of finance, could be labeled a member of “the hybrid class of West¬ ern educated and snobbish intellectuals who will not hesitate to sell their mothers for a mess of pottage” (i). And Odili is a hybrid who views with distaste not only the corruption but many other features of his society. His ambition is to take a postgraduate di¬ ploma in London and be accepted in a European society. At this point in his analysis, Achebe moves almost impercepti¬ bly from the political to the personal. Odili’s political views are shown to be inseparable from his character. The personality which adheres to these highminded yet disillusioned concepts is

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by nature coldblooded, egocentric, and alienated. The narrator, of course, does not describe himself in these terms. As far as he is concerned he is simply unwilling “to lick any Big Man’s boots”: In fact one reason why I took this teaching job in a bush, private school instead of a smart civil service job in the city with car, free housing, etc., was to give myself a certain amount of autonomy” (ii). Autonomy in the political sphere may be admirable but when it is transferred to the local community and to personal rela¬ tions it becomes alienation and selfishness. He exemplifies his personal selfishness most clearly in his rela¬ tions with his girl friend, Elsie. She is his proudest trophy, the biggest boost to his self-esteem. He admits that he is not usually lucky with women, but with her it was different: “she was, and for that matter still is, the only girl I met and slept with the same day—in fact within an hour” (ii). Elsie’s main attraction, apart from providing proof of his sexual powers, is her undemanding availability: “I can’t pretend that I ever thought of marriage. . . . Elsie was such a beautiful, happy girl and she made no demands whatever” (ii). This is what autonomy becomes in the world of Odili’s private affairs. Achebe has not yet completed the search for the private origins of his narrator’s public values. As in No Longer at Ease he sends his character on an unwilling visit to his home village of Urua, to see his estranged father whom he despises. The two major clues uncovered here are that his mother died at his birth and that his father was a district interpreter. Both circumstances fostered the loneliness and alienation of the sensitive child. He was known as the “bad child that crunched his mother’s skull”: Of course as soon as I grew old enough to understand a few simple proverbs I realized that I should have died and let my mother live. Whenever my people go to console a woman whose baby had died at birth or soon after, they always tell her to dry her eyes because it is better the water is spilled than the pot broken. The idea being that a sound pot can always return to the stream, (iii)

The second clue means that Odili was the son of the most unpopu¬ lar man in the district. In the days of his childhood, “the D.O. was like the Supreme Deity, and the Interpreter the principal minor god who carried prayers and sacrifice to Him. ... So Interpret¬ ers in those days were powerful, very rich, widely known and hated” (iii). In the manner of a Dickensian hero Odili’s alienation dates from the moment of his birth, and he grows up in a world full of enemies. We can now see the paradoxical relationship between his public values and character. Odili’s political views can be so immacu-

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lately highminded, so uncontaminated by personal allegiance be¬ cause his detachment from his fellow human beings is virtually total. It is through this contradictory, dissatisfied mind that the events of the novel are mediated. Nanga’s values are equally ambiguous. At first sight he is a po¬ litical opportunist whose only concerns are survival and self-inter¬ est. Without detachment of any kind he has no concept of politi¬ cal morality or of the national good. As the narrator realizes, his concerns are local and immediate: “people like Chief Nanga dont care two hoots about the outside world. He is concerned with the inside world, with how to retain his hold on his constituency and there he is adept” (ii). Nanga has an instinctive grasp of how to do this, and he is prepared to call to his assistance bribery, corrup¬ tion, and intimidation. Political opportunism of this kind controls the public world of the novel. Unlike the village where the unscrupulous Josiah is quickly and effectively outlawed, the country as a whole has no kind of political morality by which to judge and condemn a Nanga. And so he and his ministerial colleagues pursue their vari¬ ous forms of self-interest with an occasional return to the constitu¬ ency with promises of a slice of the national cake for everyone. The results of this are the recurrent political and economic crises with which the events of the novel are punctuated. Certainly in this political sphere Odili’s disillusionment seems the only re¬ sponse. In the context of the local scene, however, Nanga assumes a vitality and stature which are very compelling. As we see him speaking and joking with the villagers in pidgin English, sharing their values and expressing their political hopes, he becomes a man of the people in a less ironical sense. In contrast, the narrator appears debilitated by superciliousness. One is forced to look again at the earlier demotic denunciation of the “hybrid class of Western-educated” Africans and wonder if there is some truth in the charges leveled against them. Nanga, in contrast, does speak “the language of the people” and has not undergone “a university education which only alienates an African from his rich and an¬ cient culture and puts him above his people.” The alienated Odili and his friend sneer at Nanga’s parochialism: “Just think of such a cultureless man going abroad and calling himself Minister of Cul¬ ture. Ridiculous. This is why the outside world laughs at us” (ii). But in his own vulgar, vital way he possesses more culture than the disinherited class to which they belong. His culture manifests itself spontaneously in gesture, dance, language, and dress. It is through these that Nanga comes to life, for his culture is insepara¬ ble from his electric personality. This is the quality which enables

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him to adapt his new role, which the villagers only dimly under¬ stand, to their traditional needs, and although, as we have seen, this constitutes the main threat to any kind of parliamentary de¬ mocracy, the continuity preserved by such an adaptation carries with it meaning and vitality. Nanga is welcomed back to his con¬ stituency like a chief who will always safeguard the interests of his people:

As soon as the Minister s Cadillac arrived at the head of a long motor¬ cade the hunters dashed this way and that and let off their last shots, throwing their guns about with frightening freedom. The dancers ca¬ pered and stamped, filling the dry-season air with dust. Not even Grammar-phone’s voice could now be heard over the tumult. The Min¬ ister stepped out wearing damask and gold chains and acknowledging cheers with his ever-present fan of animal skin. . . . (i)

It is a triumph of style unaffected by the sneers of the narrator. Nanga becomes increasingly attractive as we move from his doubtful political ideals to his personality. The reverse was true of the narrator who consequently has some difficulty in diagnosing the cause of Nanga’s success. Eventually he too begins to succumb to the infectious charm: “The man was still as handsome and youthful-looking as ever—there was no doubt about that. . . . The Minister had a jovial word for everyone. You could never think—looking at him now—that his smile was anything but gen¬ uine. It seemed bloody-minded to be sceptical” (i). Odili is taken further aback when the Minister recognizes him from his school¬ days, embraces him, and offers assistance. For Nanga, this is where values and ideals come alive. Now Odili’s comment on current political corruption—“A common saying in the country after In¬ dependence was that it didn’t matter what you knew but who you knew”—seems far less sinister in its implications. Nanga works through local allegiances and, whatever the shortcomings, he does speak for the people he represents. These are the two main characters. When the necessary adjust¬ ments have been made to counter the narrator’s prejudices, it is clear that there is a symmetry in their juxtaposition. At the public level, the self-interest of the political opportunist is contrasted with the ideals of the disillusioned narrator; at the private level, the opportunist’s warmth and vitality are contrasted with the al¬ ienation and selfishness of the idealist. The choice seems to be between idealism protected by irony and detachment, and in¬ volvement denied a wider view of political realities. The rest of the novel plots the implications, the ironies, and the resolution of this choice.

262

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II

At Chief Nanga’s Feet

At the first meeting of the two men their characteristic styles are contrasted. The narrator is disapproving and on the defensive. “I held out my hand somewhat stiffly. I did not have the slightest fear that he might remember me and had no intention of remind¬ ing him” (i). When Nanga does recognize him his need for affec¬ tion and popularity makes him secretly delighted. Already he be¬ gins to wonder if he “had been applying to politics stringent standards that didn’t belong to it.” Nanga, free from such hesita¬ tions, slaps the narrator on the back and chides him for not having sought his help: “Don’t you know that minister means servant? Busy or no busy he must see his master.” He quickly invites him to stay at his house in the capital, Bori, and offers assistance with his scholarship to England. Then, without a pause, he delivers a speech to this Anata “family reunion” which even Odili acknowledges “sounded spontaneous and was most effective.” Then the natural impresario mixes with the people: “Outside, the dancers had all come alive again and the hunters—their last pow¬ der gone—were tamely waiting for the promised palm-wine. The Minister danced a few dignified steps to the music of each group and stuck red pound notes on the perspiring faces of the best dancers” (i). Watched by the detached, critical narrator, the ex¬ trovert man of power moves with a political instinct that has be¬ come second nature. Achebe manages the contrast excellently. His most effective means of contrast is the speech of the two men. The sophisticated narrator employs correct English usage to formulate his disapproval of Nanga and the society he represents; the man of the people uses West Coast pidgin of varying inten¬ sity. The conclusion of the first encounter between the two men suggests what a fine expression of character is provided by Nanga’s vigorous colloquialisms. Later on in the Proprietor’s Lodge I said to the Minister: “You must have spent a fortune today.” He smiled at the glass of cold beer in his hand and said: “You call this spend? You never see some thing, my brother. I no de keep anini for myself, na so so troway. If some person come to you and say “I wan’ make you Minister” make you run like blazes comot. Na true word I tell ypu. To God who made me.” He showed the tip of his tongue to the sky to confirm the oath. “Minister de sweet for eye but too much katakata de for inside. Believe me yours sincerely.” “Big man, big palaver,” said the one-eyed man. (i)

In Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God pidgin was used sparingly to signify the meretriciousness of the forces seeking to erode tradi¬ tional Ibo values which were expressed through a simple yet dig-

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nified English. By the time of A Man of the People there has been a reversal. When Nanga employs pidgin in this flexible, colorful way we are compelled to see it as an African means of combating European, cosmopolitan values. Certainly in this case the lan¬ guage, the exaggerations, the gestures, all disturb Odili’s meas¬ ured, self-conscious narration. They dramatize the vital force of a man who draws his strength, however unscrupulously, from the people and who is unconcerned about the disapproval of the squeamish intellectuals. The two schoolteachers make subtly waspish comments in an attempt to deflate the minister: when these are ignored in the general adulation, they turn their irony against each other. Despite his criticisms, Odili accepts Nanga’s invitation and his few days spent in the minister’s household form a crucial stage in his political education: “sitting at Chief Nanga’s feet I received enlightenment; many things began to crystallize out of the mist— some of the emergent forms were not nearly as ugly as I had sus¬ pected but many seemed much worse. However, I was not mak¬ ing these judgements at the time, or not strongly anyhow” (iv). The final comment reminds us that the novel as a whole is ar¬ ranged in retrospect by the mature narrator who has had time to digest the significance of the events he is describing. In the uncer¬ tain world of the first-person novel the narrator’s comments upon his earlier self exercise the chief control on the trajectory of the novel as a whole. Achebe is not consistently successful in his ma¬ nipulation of this fictional device. At times the distinction between the narrator and his earlier self is blurred and with it the nature of his education. Then suddenly the author seems to remember the important function of this narrative strategy and become exces¬ sively explicit: The difficulty in writing this kind of story is that the writer is armed with all kinds of hindsight which he didn’t have when the original events were happening. When he introduces a character like Elsie for instance, he already has at the back of his mind a total picture of her; her entrance, her act and her exit. And this tends to colour even the first words he writes. I can only hope that being aware of this danger I have successfully kept it at bay. As far as is humanly possible I shall try not to jump ahead of my story, (ii) This has no apparent dramatic function; it simply reminds the reader that this is a novel narrated in retrospect by one of the characters. This absence of clear focus occasionally blurs the sig¬ nificance of events in the Nanga household. At first, the narrator experiences admiration and envy as he sees the minister at close quarters and his earlier detachment disap¬ pears. “All I can say is that on that first night there was no room in

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my mind for criticism. I was simply hypnotized by the luxury of the great suite assigned to me ... I had to confess that if I were at that moment made a minister I would be most anxious to re¬ main one for ever. And maybe I should have thanked God that I wasn’t” (iii). Odili has come under the influence of the Nanga charisma so that he now begins to explain sympathetically the temptations of the men of power: A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation—as I saw it then lying on that bed—was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say “to hell with it.” We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us—the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best—had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. (iii) The shift from the first- to the third-person pronoun in the final sentence suggests an ambiguity in the narrator’s loyalties. But clearly his disapproval of the politicians is now tempered by a closer insight into the temptations and problems of power. Life at the Nangas’ during the next few days further undermines Odili’s clear-cut views. His earlier ideals begin to look rather at¬ tenuated in the midst of the whirl of activity created by Nanga’s indefatigable energy. He wonders if it is unrealistic “to bring into politics niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere” (i). And yet this suggests that the world of ideals and the world of power are quite unrelated. Is it not possible, then, to pass judg¬ ment on the political world? Odili is discovering the paradox that detachment implies lack of understanding, while involvement precludes objectivity. A series of conversations juxtaposed in an apparently arbitrary manner explore this predicament and ques¬ tion not only any simple judgment of Nanga but also the reliabil¬ ity of the novel’s narrator. The paradox of detachment and involvement is defined by means of the relations between Africans and Europeans. The two cultures meet at Nanga’s house, and the relativity of values be¬ comes the theme which links the separate incidents. First, there is the cook who comes for a job and can only prepare European food. His wife cooks the African food he eats: “How man wey get family go begin enter kitchen for make bitterleaf and egusi? Unless if the man no get shame” (iv). He doesn’t get the job because Nanga prefers African food, but the narrator sympathizes with him amid die general amusement: “But I must say the fellow had a point. As long as a man confined himself to preparing for¬ eign concoctions he could still maintain the comfortable illusion

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that he wasnt really doing such an unmanly thing as cooking” (iv). This is a shrewd but unwitting comment on Odili himself and the stratagems he employs to maintain similar illusions, both political and personal. The second variation on this theme is more overt. After Nanga’s departure, the guests are discussing a recent piece of sculpture, the wooden figure of a god carved by a local artist. An English¬ man is convinced that it is “bad or un-African”: he has seen an old woman shaking her fist at it in a rage in the public square. She is in a position to judge, not because she has been trained in Euro¬ pean art schools, but because she “most probably worshipped this very god herself.” At this point, Odili experiences his “flash of in¬ sight”:

“Did you say she was shaking her fist?” I asked. “In that case you got her meaning all wrong. Shaking the fist in our society is a sign of great honour and respect; it means that you attribute power to the person or object.” Which of course is quite true. And if I may digress a little, I have since this incident, come up against another critic who committed a crime in my view because he transferred to an alien cul¬ ture the same meanings and interpretation that his own people attach to certain gestures and facial expression, (v)

The cook was seeking to preserve his self-respect by adopting su¬ perior European customs; the Englishman shows his superiority by adopting what he thinks are African criteria. The narrator’s comment shows the difficulty of attributing correct motives in an alien culture and presumably alerts him to the simplifications of his own European-style assessment of Nanga. When the other guests leave, Odili is alone with the American hostess, Jean. They dance a highlife together, and we are treated to a further variation of cultural misunderstanding: I must say she had learnt to do the highlife well except that like many another foreign enthusiast of African rhythm she tended to overdo the waist wiggle. I don’t say I found it unpleasant—quite on the contrary; I only make a general point, which I think is interesting. It all goes back to what others have come to associate us with. And let it be said that we are not entirely blameless in this. I remember how we were outraged at the University to see a film of breast-throwing, hip-jerking, young women which a neighbouring African state had made and was showing abroad as an African ballet. Jean probably saw it in America, (v) Not only do we find it necessary to impose stereotypes on other people; they in turn strengthen the stereotypes by acting as we

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want them to act. An additional irony in this case is that Jean’s husband, Odili tells us, is away on business, “advising our govern¬ ment on how to improve its public image in America.” The permutations multiply. Jean wrongfully attributes sexual motives to Odili which he is delighted to acknowledge, and next we see them in bed together. But the chapter ends in complete misunderstanding. Jean takes him on a tour of the city as she drives him home: “She certainly knew the city well, from the fresh¬ smelling modem waterfront to the stinking, maggoty interior.” Despite their intimacy, Odili begins to mistrust her motives: Was it simply for curiosity’s sake or was there “some secret reason, like wanting me to feel ashamed about my country’s capital city?” He laughs uneasily at the signs of corruption and inequality in Bori, signs which he had enjoyed with unconcealed pleasure when alone in the previous chapter. Now his suspicions and pride are aroused: “Who the hell did she think she was to laugh so selfrighteously. Wasn’t there enough in her own country to keep her laughing all her days? Or crying if she preferred it?” (v). He sup¬ presses his anger, and the episode ends uneasily without an open quarrel. This sequence of incidents has two effects on the narrator. He now understands the difficulty of trying to interpret or judge any alien culture or area of experience in which one has not partici¬ pated directly and intimately. And secondly, as he has sought to correct the most blatant errors of the Europeans, Odili has be¬ come increasingly protective and defensive about his own African society. He is beginning to see his earlier detachment for what it was: a means of avoiding contamination in a society of which he is necessarily a part. It should be added that the reader has at times some difficulty in determining the precise attitude of the author toward his narrator. On some occasions as the theme of this section of the novel is developed Odili seems to speak directly for the author. He introduces his “flash of insight” over the piece of sculpture for example by saying, “I made what I still think was a most valid and timely intervention.” In other words, the narrator agrees with his earlier self, and the author presumably agrees with both. The reason could be, of course, that Odili’s education is really getting under way; the more plausible explanation is that the author wants to make a point about cultural relativism and that for the moment the dramatic function of the first-person method of narration is in abeyance. The trouble is we are not certain. The focus which the character of the narrator should pro¬ vide is not sufficiently clear.

CHINUA ACHEBE

III

267

Hostilities

Odilis growing sympathy for Nanga and uncertainty about his own loyalties end abruptly when he takes his girl friend Elsie to stay at Nanga s house. Characteristically, he has given the minis¬ ter the impression that she is simply a good-time girl”: “I suppose what happened was that Chief Nanga and I having already swopped many tales of conquest I felt somehow compelled to speak in derogatory terms about women in general” (vi). In the absence of his wife, Nanga doesn’t wait for niceties of definition to be cleared up. He is in Elsie’s bedroom before the narrator “could muster up sufficient bravado to step into the sitting-room and up the stairs.” Then, when he hears “as from a great distance Elsie deliriously screaming my name,” Odili suffers a crisis of iner¬ tia: I find it difficult in retrospect to understand my inaction at that mo¬ ment. A sort of paralysis had spread over my limbs, while an intense pressure was building up inside my chest. But before it reached raging point I felt it siphoned off, leaving me empty inside and out. I trudged up the stairs in the incredible delusion that Elsie was calling on me to come and save her from her ravisher. But when I got to the door a strong revulsion and hatred swept over me and I turned sharply away and went down the stairs for the last time. Elsie’s desperate screams become ambiguous when we recall that “She was one of those girls who send out loud cries in the heat of the thing” (ii). What she usually calls out is the name of her pre¬ vious lover. Odili no longer finds it amusing. Humiliated and angered, he leaves the house in the small hours of the morning, but despite what has happened he retains his pre¬ vious cold detachment: As dawn came my head began to clear a little and I saw Bori stirring. I met a night-soil man carrying his bucket of ordure on top of a bat¬ tered felt hat drawn down to hood his upper face while his nose and mouth were masked with a piece of black cloth like a gangster. I saw beggars sleeping under the eaves of luxurious department stores and a lunatic sitting wide awake by the basket of garbage he called his posses¬ sion. The first red buses running empty passed me and I watched the street lights go off finally around six. I drank in all these details with the early morning air. The politician has acted decisively, the fastidious intellectual has been outmaneuvered and now observes exactiy the details of the scene. This is the moment of clearsighted disenchantment; after the period of disdain and the period of sympathy with Nanga,

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comes this detachment. The later Odili comments in retrospect: “It was strange perhaps that a man who had so much on his mind should find time to pay attention to these small, inconsequential things; it was like the man in the proverb who was carrying the carcass of an elephant on his head and searching with his toes for a grasshopper. But that was how it happened. It seems that no thought—no matter how great—had the power to exclude all others.” He now returns to confront and denounce Nanga in a characteristically halfhearted way: “ ‘What a country?’ I said. You call yourself Minister of Culture? God help us/ And I spat; not a full spit but a token, albeit unmistakable, one” (vii). Nanga, un¬ derstandably baffled by his reaction, offers Odili other girls in ex¬ change for Elsie, but the break has now occurred and open hostil¬ ity continues for the rest of the novel. This blow to his pride at last forces Odili to act, but not imme¬ diately. At first he seeks to rationalize the insult in what the narra¬ tor now realizes was an unworthy manner: “But I suppose it was possible (judging by the way things finally worked themselves out) that these weak and trivial thoughts might have been a sort of smoke-screen behind which, unknown to me, weighty decisions were taking shape” (viii). The decision, when it comes, is unchar¬ acteristically violent: “What mattered was that a man had treated me as no man had a right to treat another—not even if he was master and the other slave; and my manhood required that I make him pay for his insult in full measure.” He will “seek out Nanga’s intended parlour-wife and give her the works, good and proper.” The “parlour-wife” who is to supplement Nanga’s legal wife is Edna, in whom Odili has been showing considerable inter¬ est since the opening episode of the novel. Now this interest turns into a vicious form of revenge. Nanga is no longer simply a politi¬ cian whose values he despises; he is a rival who has taken Elsie by force. As we have been led to expect, Odili is capable of acting viciously and selfishly on the level of personal relations. Unexpectedly he gains support for his revenge from his friend in Bori, Max, who is about to form a new political party, the Common People’s Convention, to rescue their “hard-won freedom” from corruption. Odili agrees to become a founder member: “It would add a second string to my bow when I came to deal with Nanga” (viii). From here to the end of the novel the narrator’s public concern and his private vendetta intermingle in a double campaign against the minister. Apparently it is a failure at both levels, but it brings self-knowledge to the narrator. Both the planned seduction of Edna and the political campaign begin rather unsteadily. Odili first insults Edna’s father, who is delighted with the prospect of Nanga as a son-in-law, while in the

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political sphere the conspirators shed nostalgic tears over Max’s piece of poetry written “during the intoxicating months of high hope soon after Independence.” When they turn to political ac¬ tion one of the first things Odili discovers is that their new party is backed by a junior minister in the present government. He won¬ ders why he does not resign: “ ‘Resign?’ laughed Max. ‘Where do you think you are—Britain or something?” ” (viii). Odili does not want to appear naive, and yet his early idealism persists: “I would have thought it was better to start our new party clean, with a different kind of philosophy.” But now he begins to realize that philosophies and principles have to fight desperately for sur¬ vival. At this point occurs the village boycott of Josiah and the episode underlines the fact that he is now trying to operate in a political world devoid of any accepted code of conduct. The uncovering of the trade scandal gives a strong fillip to both of the narrator’s campaigns: The country was on the verge of chaos. The Trade Unions and the Civil Service Union made loud noises and gave notice of nation-wide strikes. The shops closed for fear of looting. The Governor-General according to rumour called on the Prime-Minister to resign which he finally got round to doing three weeks later, (x) He now returns to the attack with Edna and also, to everyone’s amusement, announces that he is going to contest Nanga’s seat at the imminent election. Ominously at this point the outlawed Jo¬ siah comes to offer his services in the election campaign. He sees their positions as analogous: they are both outlaws. The irony is, of course, that Josiah is outlawed because of his low principles in the village, Odili because of his excessively high principles in na¬ tional politics. Odili turns him down. Even now Odili makes very little headway against Nanga’s pri¬ vate and public popularity. At the inaugural meeting of his con¬ stituency Nanga’s hirelings make a fool of him to the great delight of the crowd, and then he is threatened by Edna’s father first with a matchet and then with an allegory: “My in-law is like a bull, and your challenge is like the challenge of a tick to a bull. The tick fills its belly with blood from the back of the bull and the bull doesn’t even know it’s there” (x). In addition and in quick succes¬ sion, he is sacked by his headmaster, abused by Mrs. Nanga, and intimidated by Nanga’s supporters. But this low point in his for¬ tunes leads to what is so far his most important piece of selfdiscovery. He begins to see that the danger and insults he has been prepared to undergo in his pursuit of Edna are significant: “And at tihat very moment I was suddenly confronted by a fact I

270

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

had been dodging for some time. I knew then that I wanted Edna now (if not all along) for her own sake first and foremost and only very remotely as part of a general scheme of revenge (xi). Beginning to see through the stratagems of his alienated self, Odili can now move away from his defensive posture and ac¬ knowledge his love for Edna. He then turns to his political motives: “Having got that far in my self-analysis I had to ask myself one question. How important was my political activity in its own right?” The answer to this isn t clear: “It was difficult to say; things seemed so mixed up; my re¬ venge, my new political ambition and the girl. And perhaps it was just as well that my motives should entangle and reinforce one another.” But in his self-analysis Odili is clearly beginning the dis¬ entanglement. His love for Edna has already been separated from his desire for revenge, and now his political ambition is at last recognized as a genuine desire to destroy Nanga and the corrup¬ tion he represents. “Although I had little hope of winning Chief Nanga’s seat, it was necessary nonetheless to fight and expose him as much as possible. . . .” Then perhaps some kind of rudimen¬ tary political morality might revive and condemn him. Odili ex¬ presses this hope in terms of the proverb which is repeated so many times: “and maybe someone would get up and say: ‘No, Nanga has taken more than the owner could ignore!’ But it was no more than a hope” (xi). Odili has thus begun to disentangle and purify his motives. As he does so the two halves of his character move closer toward a reconciliation. The private self emerges from its defensive cocoon and declares itself, while the public self comes down from its impossibly high and disillusioned standards and seeks to achieve the possible. As he sets off on his political campaign, Odili looks back on the earlier stages of his career and sees them as a reflection of the changes in the country as a whole. “I could not help thinking also of the quick transformations that were such a feature of our coun¬ try, and in particular of the changes of attitude in my own self.” He recalls that on entering university his one ambition was to become “a full member of the privileged class whose symbol was the car.” After an “intellectual crisis” he rejected this in favor of the disillusioned idealism he displays at the beginning of the novel: “Many of us vowed then never to be corrupted by bour¬ geois privileges of which the car was the most visible symbol in our country.’ Now as he drives off in his new car acquired through party funds he scrutinizes his present position: “And now here was I in this marvellous little affair eating the hills like yam— as Edna would have said. I hoped I was safe; for a man who avoids danger for years and then gets killed in the end has wasted

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his care.” This does not represent a reversion to his earlier materi¬ alism, but rather a difficult attempt to synthesize the two earlier stages of his development. He stands a far better chance of bal¬ ancing involvement with some kind of political idealism now that he has disentangled the complex motives controlling his actions. It soon becomes apparent that it is going to be difficult to keep his idealism untarnished during the campaign. First, he must have bodyguards. Then reluctantly he agrees to their carrying weap¬ ons. Finally he has to provide money for bribing important offi¬ cials. His objections are answered very firmly by his guard: “Look my frien I done tell you say if you no wan serious for this business make you go rest for house. I done see say you want play too much gentleman for this matter . . . Dem tell you say na gentlemanity de give other people minister . . . ?” (xi). His father too, convinced as he is “that the mainspring of political action was material gain,” expects some material advantage from his son’s new career. He imagines the big opportunity has come when Nanga, who wants to be re-elected unopposed, appears with £250 to bribe his son to stand down: “Take your money and take your scholarship and go and learn more book; the country needs experts like you. And leave the dirty game of politics to us who know how to play it . . .” (xi). These are the contradictory pressures at work on Odili; the one seeking to drag him into the political rat race and make him suc¬ cumb to the forces which have molded a Nanga, the other trying to push him back into his earlier, detached disillusionment. He rejects Nanga’s offer with scorn (“I see the fear in your eyes”) and presses on with his campaign. His only cause for concern is that Max has accepted a similar offer. Max confirms this and reassures the disturbed Odili by saying that he does not consider it legally binding: “Now you tell me how you propose to fight such a dir^y war without soiling your hands a little” (xii). Odili stands firm. Involvement requires realistic political methods but not capitula¬ tion to the national cake ethic and all it stands for: The real point surely was that Max’s action had jeopardized our moral position, our ability to inspire that kind of terror which I had seen so clearly in Nanga’s eyes despite all his grandiloquent bluff, and which in the end was our society’s only hope of salvation, (xii) There is, however, enough of the self-opinionated earlier Odili left for him to feel rather hurt that Max’s bribe was larger than the sum he was offered. This political setback and his subsequent rebuff by Edna make him realize sadly that Nanga had won the second round in his

272

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double campaign to win “a beautiful life with Edna and a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country.” Perhaps he should abandon his political plans along with Edna who had helped to crystallize them. Then comes Odili’s final flash of insight. He will not succumb but make one final attempt to realize his ideals in action. The knowledge that Chief Nanga had won the first two rounds and, on the present showing, would win the third and last far from suggest¬ ing thoughts of surrender to my mind served to harden my resolution. What I had to accomplish became more than another squabble for political office; it rose suddenly to the heights of symbolic action, a shining, monumental gesture untainted by hopes of success or reward, (xii) The gesture when it is made is neither shining nor monumental but certainly symbolic of a changed Odili who has through his own chastening experiences learned something of the political re¬ alities he scorned at the opening of the novel. IV

A Shining, Monumental Gesture

The final events of the novel begin with the capitulation of the Urua constituency to Nanga’s chicanery. The village is helpless in the sphere of national politics: it elects but does not control. Two nights later we heard the sound of the Crier’s gong. His message was unusual. In the past the Crier had summoned the village to a meeting to deliberate over a weighty question, or else to some accus¬ tomed communal labour. His business was to serve notice of something that was to happen. But this night he did something new: he an¬ nounced a decision already taken, (xiii) Odili’s question—“if the whole people had taken the decision why were they now being told of it?”—points to the perversion of the communal ethic which, thanks to the Josiah episode, Odili has come to understand. Unlike the traditional communities of Umuofia and Umuaro, this constituency is at the mercy of the politicians who claim to represent it, and Odili feels sympathy rather than anger: “In the afternoon the radio, our national Crier, took up the message, amplified it and gave it in four languages including English. ... I couldn’t say I blamed my village people for recoiling from the role of sacrificial ram. Why should they lose their chance of getting good, clean water, their share of the na¬ tional cake?” (xiii). This new kind of resigned understanding is not restricted to Odili’s public values. His father unexpectedly supports him at this juncture and he begins to wonder if here too he has been rash and

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shortsighted in his judgments: “I realized that I had never really been close enough to my father to understand him. I had built up a private picture of him from unconnected scraps of evidence.” He wonders if he has got everything terribly, lopsidedly wrong,” but postpones for the moment any new assessment. The climax of the novel, Odili’s opportunity for the grand ges¬ ture, occurs at Nangas inaugural campaign meeting. There he sees Nanga in full regalia, his wife, and Edna, and there he expe¬ riences again the desire to denounce this man of the people. The novel has come full circle, and we are back at the opening episode with the narrators angry fantasy: What would happen if I were to push my way to the front and up the palm-leaf-festooned dais, wrench the microphone from the greasy hands of that blabbing buffoon and tell the whole people—this vast contempt¬ ible crowd—that the great man they had come to hear with their drums and dancing was an Honourable Thief. But of course they knew that already, (xiii) As he is exercising his fancy in this way, he is spotted, despite his disguise, by Josiah now an ally of Nanga. He tries to escape but as he hears the cry “Stop thief!” he pauses: “I wanted to know who called me a thief.” Nanga summons him to the dais and, sur¬ rounded by his supporters, ridicules the narrator whom he now sees as a ludicrous rather than a dangerous figure. Odili, his fastid¬ ious detachment a thing of the past, reacts unexpectedly: “My panic had now left me entirely and in its place I found a rock-cold fearlessness that I had never before felt in my heart. I watched Nanga, microphone in one hand, reeling about the dais in drunken jubilation. I seemed to see him from a superior, impreg¬ nable position.” At this final confrontation, they each recognize the other with complete clarity as the antagonist. Nanga begins with his own account of the events of the novel: “This is the boy who is thrusting his finger into my eye. He came to my house in Bori, ate my food, drank my water and my wine and instead of saying thank you to me he set about plotting how to drive me out and take over my house.” From the point of view of someone with Nanga’s values this and what follows is a substan¬ tially true version of events. Our view on the other hand has been controlled by the anguished uncertainties of the narrator in the context of which Nanga is an unmitigated villain. Abruptly, we are freed from these uncertainties and confronted with Nanga’s straightforward account: “He was once my pupil. I taught him ABC and I called him to my house to arrange for him to go to England. Yes, I take the blame.” Unencumbered by ideals or prin¬ ciples, Nanga sees everything in terms of personal loyalty and mu-

274

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tual self-interest. We get a glimpse of the narrator’s crises of iner¬ tia and ineptitude from his point of view, and we understand his contempt. At the same time, of course, we witness the meeting from Odili’s point of view. In the logic of his development this is the moment for the grand gesture which will at last point out to the people the corruption of their leaders. In place of the withdrawn and skeptical schoolmaster of the opening chapter we have the experienced participant who is no longer on the defensive either in his private or public life. In the perspective of his values the meeting looks quite different. When Nanga jeeringly offers him the microphone (“Come . . . and tell my people why you came”), Odili knows this is his opportunity: “I come to tell your people that you are a liar and. . . He pulled the microphone away smartly, set it down, walked up to me and slapped my face. Immediately hands seized my arms, but I am happy that he got one fairly good kick from me. He slapped me again and again. . . . The roar of the crowd was now like a thick forest all around. By this time blows were falling as fast as rain on my head and body until something heavier than the rest seemed to split my skull. The last thing I remembered was seeing all the policemen turn round and walk quietly away, (xiii) This is the climax of the novel, and we are encouraged to see it from the two extreme points of view represented there. For Nanga, immersed in the roughhouse of politics, Odili’s act is both ludicrous and trivial and presumably confirms all his suspicions of the educated hybrids who ought to leave politics to the profes¬ sionals. But from the more familiar point of view of the narrator this moment is the culmination of an ambition nurtured and ma¬ tured throughout the novel. His idealism, now tempered by expe¬ rience, has led him to perform this one selfless public act, unthink¬ able at the beginning of the novel. While the narrator is in hospital, the novel ends in the confusion of political melodrama. Max is killed by an election jeep belong¬ ing to Chief Koko, one of Nanga’s ministerial colleagues, who is in turn shot and killed by Eunice, Max’s girl friend. Fighting then breaks out between the bodyguards. Nanga tries to disband his private army, which goes on the rampage. In this state of anarchy the prime minister cynically reappoints his old cabinet back to office. The thuggery becomes so extreme that the army stages a coup and locks up the Government. Odili is at the same time recovering from a broken arm and a cracked skull. The anarchy into which society is declining corre¬ sponds to the crisis of his illness:

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I remember the first time I woke up in the hospital and felt my head turbanned like an Alhaji. Everything seemed unreal and larger than life and I was sure I was dreaming. In the dream I saw Edna and my father and Mama standing around my bed. I also saw, through a gap in the screen, two policemen. But the only thing that was immediate and in focus was that pressure trapped inside the head pounding away in a panic effort to escape, (xiii) The gesture of denunciation was the end as well as the culmina¬ tion of Odifi’s attempt to enforce his ideals in society. He recovers consciousness in a world beyond political redemption where the only realities are those of personal affection. When the military coup overthrows the Government he refuses the easy consolation of ascribing it to the will of the people. The only ethic is that of the national cake. No, the people had nothing to do with the fall of our Government. What happened was simply that unruly mobs and private armies hav¬ ing tasted blood and power during the election had got out of hand and ruined their masters and employers. And they had no public reason whatever for doing it. Let’s make no mistake about that, (xiii) In this political turmoil, in the midst of which Nanga is arrested trying to escape disguised as a fisherman, Odili at last commits himself fully to his personal relations. Edna’s covert sympathy and support turn out to be an index of her true feelings, so that when he insists she succumbs and acknowledges she had never wished to marry Nanga. Public events come to his assistance. After Nanga’s convenient arrest, the opposition to the marriage from Edna’s father crumbles. Finally, politics provides the means of paying back all the money Nanga had spent on Edna’s education: “I had already decided privately to borrow the money from C.P.C. funds still in my hands. They were not likely to be needed soon, especially as the military regime had just abolished all polit¬ ical parties in the country . . .” (xiii). This is a new realism with a vengeance. For the moment we wonder if a new Nanga is in the making; the extent of the irony is difficult to assess. Perhaps it is that amid the final welter of hypocrisy and selfishness Odili knows that everything is subordinate to his love for Edna. There is hope here as well as disillusionment, and this is reflected in Odili’s final mature diagnosis of the society in which he fives. Despite the military coup Odili knows that everything has re¬ mained the same. The fickle public has deserted the deposed lead¬ ers—“Chief Koko in particular became a thief and murderer”— and again switched its allegiance in the service of self-interest. The murdered Max has become overnight a hero of the revolu-

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tion. Now Odili understands the full, disturbing significance of the story of Josiah the trader: in this political context the story is ut¬ terly irrelevant. No matter how many shining, monumental ges¬ tures are made, the gap between the traditional social ethic and the national cake ethic will not be bridged. When his father, musing piously on the reason for Koko’s downfall, repeats once more the refrain of the novel—“Koko had taken enough for the owner to see”—Odili objects. He has just been to visit Eunice, Koko’s murderer, in jail: My father’s words struck me because they were the very same words the villagers of Anata had spoken of Josiah, the abominated trader. The owner was the village, and the village had a mind; it could say no to sacrilege. But in the affairs of the nation there was no owner, the laws of the village became powerless. Max was avenged not by the people’s collective will but by one solitary woman who loved him. Had his spirit waited for the people to demand redress it would have been waiting still, in the rain and out in the sun. The politicians may take over tribal and village trappings to prove that their present roles are a continuation of traditional ones. But however much regalia is displayed, however many times the radio is called the National Crier, there is a disastrous fracture between the morality of the village and the political affairs of the nation. The narrator ends the novel by pointing to this, not as a sudden revelation, but as a truth which has now been experienced. As the narrator seeks to diagnose the events in which he has been involved, the significance of Josiah’s eventful career again becomes evident. Outlawed by the village, Josiah quickly became one of Nanga’s most trusted henchmen in a regime which re¬ versed village values, “a regime in which you saw a fellow cursed in the morning for stealing a blind man’s stick and later in the evening saw him again mounting the altar of the new shrine in the presence of all the people to whisper into the ear of the chief celebrant.” The “altar of the new shrine” is, of course, the election platform, and Josiah is informing the “chief celebrant” Nanga that a heretic, Odili, is present. With this new religion in power and the laws of the village powerless, justice has to be left to individuals acting alone. Max was avenged in the only way possible, by someone who loved him. Private loyalties become the ultimate values in the absence of public moral sanctions. This is how the narrator’s disillusioned political idealism and his private alienation have realigned themselves by the end of the novel. In his final sentences he draws the extreme contrast between public and private values. Against the background of self-interest created by political anarchy, any

CHINUA ACHEBE

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gesture of love or loyalty is of inestimable value. This is why the dead Max is “lucky”: And I don’t mean it to shock or to sound clever. For I do honestly be¬ lieve that in the fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat regime just ended —a regime which inspired the common saying that a man could only be sure of what he had put away safely in his gut, or in language ever more suited to the times: “you chop, me self I chop, palaver finish”; ... in such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest—without asking to be paid, (xiii) Here at the end, the author clearly endorses the depressing final analysis of his mature narrator. Achebe began with the premise that the politician’s role is inevi¬ tably divided. He must serve both the constituency which has elected him and the Government of the country as a whole. This is a difficult task at any time, but in the novel’s anonymous African state which is a conglomeration of local loyalties it is virtually impossible. These loyalties are too strong ever to be transcended by the needs of the country as a whole. This fracture between local and national interests is dramatized very effectively in the opening hostilities between the two main characters: the alien¬ ated young graduate who, having jettisoned his “primitive loyal¬ ties,” despairingly compares the politics of his own with those of other countries, and the successful, middle-aged politician who, having abandoned his youthful ideals in the pursuit of power, can with great facility translate the affairs of state into the immediate interests of himself and his constituents. In the working out of this relationship Achebe’s bitterness is turned against the minister who masquerades as a man of the people. His charade is the final betrayal of the communal ethic which has been subjected to a variety of pressures in the previous three novels. Other characters like Okonkwo and Ezeulu were baffled by conflicting loyalties within the clan: Nanga is the first to play his two loyalties off against each other with charming, coldblooded calculation so as to exploit both and fulfil neither. Parading the trappings of tribalism in the villages, Nanga can pre¬ tend to represent his constituency, but the people no longer have control over their leaders. When he leaves the village he is free to follow his own interests in the anarchy of national politics. If he is attacked in the constituency he can always provide another slice of the national cake; if he is accused of political immorality by the intellectuals he can label them European stooges and demand more and quicker Africanization. By the end of the novel, Nanga’s very success in the constituency, his bonhomie, his rapport, have

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come to be an index not of his humanity but of his hypocrisy. In the final analysis, the story of Josiah the trader must be seen as a parable which anticipates the final destruction of a way of life which has been celebrated with pride, affection, and concern throughout the novels. Josiah steals the blind man’s only support, his stick, to concoct a juju medicine which will turn his already exploited customers into “blind buyers of his wares.” He is stopped and punished by the villagers in the one effective social gesture in the novel. But his national counterpart, Nanga, is re¬ warded for his crime. He has stolen from the constituency its tra¬ ditional ethic, its only guide in the complexity of the modem state. He has turned this against the people by cynically corrupting it into the ethic of the national cake. Now they are completely de¬ pendent upon him, their representative, for their welfare and sur¬ vival. What was once their strength has become their weakness, for this man operates in the sphere of national politics where they can neither understand nor control him. “In the affairs of the na¬ tion there was no owner, the laws of the village became power¬ less.” The traditional reciprocal relationship between leader and people has become a parody of itself and no longer is it true to say that “no man ever won judgement against his clan.” The only lan¬ guage the villagers now understand is that of self-interest, and they assess their representative in his own terms, by the amount of loot he brings back to the constituency. In their apathy and cyni¬ cism the people have become the blind buyers of the politicians’ wares. David Carroll

Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People' In 1964 Mr Chinua Achebe told a conference on Commonwealth Litera¬ ture at Leeds that part of his business as a novelist was to teach, to re¬ educate his society out of their acceptance of racial inferiority. ‘Here, then,’ he said, ‘is an adequate revolution for me to espouse - to help my society regain its belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-denigration.’ The European presence in Africa is, of course, the origin of those complexes. Inflated with holy zeal, the missionaries rooted out their prose¬ lytes from African societies. Christian bigotry and misguided altruism was here at work. African society was labelled savage, and the destiny of those who dwelt therein wTas hell. The administrator, clearing the way with fire and sword - for the settler and other commercial interests, held a similar attitude to the conquered races. In Things Fall Apart the District Commissioner, who, in the words of one of the characters, has driven Okonkwo, the greatest man in Umuofia, to kill himself, is a typical Crusoe blind to the possibility that Friday could be a complex being with a com¬ plex culture. Notice the title he has chosen, after much thought, for the book he is planning to write: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger. Things Fall Apart is Achebe’s answer to years of Christian bigotry and Crusoe’s naive view of Friday. The counterpart of the District Commissioner in modern Nigeria is Mr Greene, another administrator, who, in No Longer At Ease, believes that the African is corrupt through and through. This novel, in which Achebe explores the pressures, within and without, that cause a sensitive individual to fall from great heights and in the end succumb to the corruption he condemns, is another answer to the colonizer’s over-simplifications. In the two novels, Achebe is reacting to the European presence and naive view of Africa. Such an approach to society had its limitations: or, the limitation lay in the novelist’s attitude to his society rather than in the actual content and presentation. The teacher’s prime concern was to correct the bias by re¬ creating the society - its strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, failures - for his pupils and a deluded world to see and learn. Here was a particular African society as it really was, he seemed to point out. The pupils rejoiced in their

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society’s triumphs and mourned with its failures: they anxiously watched Obi Okonkwo gradually succumb to corruption despite his admirable principles and held back their tears with difficulty. They sighed and nodded their heads - in sympathy of course: they understood, where the District Commissioner and Mr Greene had failed to understand. Note that Achebe was not concerned with merely dishing out blame: ‘It is too late in the day,’ he told the Conference, ‘to get worked up about it or to blame others, much as they deserve such blame and condemnation. What we need to do is to look back and try to find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us.’ Achebe’s new novel, A Man of the People, attempts to do that: to find where the rain began to beat us. Hence it is doubly significant, for apart from confirming the author’s mastery of technique and his succinct use of language (this time it has a relaxed warm flow), it marks a break with his earlier attitude. He has turned his back on the European presence. He no longer feels the need to explain, or point out mistakes, by merely recreating. The process, I believe, started with Arrow of God. But even there (though the teacher is not reacting to the colonizer’s view of Africa he is in fact more interested in problems of power and responsibility) the teacher took his time, was patient with his pupils. What has happened in A Man of the People - the change in attitude to his audience - is something which can only be felt by following, through the earlier novels, Achebe’s creative response to a rapidly changing society. Now, in the new novel, the teacher talks to his pupils, directly. He has lost patience. He retains self-control in that he does not let anger drive him into incoherent rage and wild lashing. Instead he takes his satirical whip and raps his pupils - with anger, of course, sometimes with pathos verging on tears, but often with bitterness, though this is hardly discernible because below it flow compassion and a zest for life. His pupils are - or ought to be - disturbed. For in A Man of the People the teacher accuses them all of complicity in the corruption that has beset our society. Your indifference and cynicism has given birth to and nurtured Chief Nanga, he says. Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P., is a corrupt, uncultured Minister of Culture in a corrupt regime in an independent African State. In a country where the majority of the peasants and workers live in shacks and can afford only pails for excrement, the Minister lives in ‘a princely seven bathroom mansion with its seven gleaming, silent action, waterclosets’. He only arranges for particular roads to be tarred, with an eye to votes in the next election, to ensure the arrival of his buses - ten luxury buses supplied to him by the British Amalgamated on the ‘never-never’. Elections are a mockery of democracy, with thuggery, violence and rigging

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allied to British commercial interests. The relationship between the masses and the neo-colonial elite, so aptly described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, as a pitfall of national consciousness is here brilliantly captured in the image of the rain and the house. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us - the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best - had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase - the extension of our house - was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house.2 Everybody is caught up in this complicity with evil: the masses with their cynicism - ‘Tell them that this man had used his position to enrich himself and they would ask you if you thought a sensible man would spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune had placed in his mouth’ - and hardened indifference; and the elite - even people like Odili are shown as being perilously close to Nanga - with their greed, lack of creativity and pitiable dependence on their former colonial rulers. It is left to the army, in the novel, to halt what has become an intolerable position. But is this a solution? Achebe-cum-teacher has left too many questions unanswered. Or maybe he has levelled his accusation, has raised questions, and left it to the pupils to find the answers. Can people like Obi Okonkwo, Nanga, Odili, Max - or political parties even like the Common People’s Convention - behave in a radically different way while operating within and in fact espousing the same economic and social set-up? Here we are brought back to the image of the house. For what people like Odili, Max and the army have to offer is not the possibility of building a new house on a different kind of foundation, but of extending the old one. The novel seems to suggest the possibiltity of individual honesty, integrity and maybe greater efficiency in building the extension. However, a given organization of material interests dictates its own morality. Which do you change first in a society - its politico-economic base (new foundations for a new house of a different nature) or the morality of individual men and women? The pupils, and the teachers as well, must define their attitude - and find solutions - to these questions. What Achebe has done in A Man of the People is to make it impossible or inexcusable for other African writers

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to do other than address themselves directly to their audiences in Africa not in a comforting spirit - and tell them that such problems are their concern. The teacher no longer stands apart to contemplate. He has moved with a whip among the pupils, flagellating himself as well as them. He is now the true man of the people.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

REFERENCES 1 A review of A Alan of the People which appeared in Omen (October, 1966), a student magazine in Leeds University, edited by Grant Kamenju. 2 Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (Heinemann, London, 1966), p. 42.

Poetry

Chinua Achebe’s Poems of Regeneration PHILIP ROGERS

In Chinua Achebe’s view, the African writer of our time must be accountable to his society; if he fails to respond to the social and political issues of his age, to espouse the ‘right and just causes’ of his people, he is no better than ‘the absurd man in the proverb who deserts his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames’.1 To Achebe, it is ‘simply madness’ to think of art as pure and autonomous, happen¬ ing by itself in an aesthetic void. He is not ashamed to call his writing an ‘applied art’.2 Each of Achebe’s four novels has had an obvious (but never obtrusive) purpose. Things ¥ all Apart and Arrow of God both aim to show that the African past ‘with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans, acting on God’s behalf, delivered [Africans]’.3 The public problems of bribery and the osu caste are examined in No Longer at Ease; A Man of the People, his most purposeful novel, was written with the deliberate aim of providing ‘a serious warning to the Nigerian people’ about corruption in govern¬ ment and the cynicism of the masses.4 In ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, Achebe speaks of the writer’s role in terms that illuminate his more recent achievement, the poems of Beware, Soul-Brother :5 ‘Here, then, is an adequate revolution for me to espouse - to help my society regain its belief in itself . . . Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of my society meet.’6 Written during and shortly after the Nigerian Civil War, the poems are centrally concerned with the regeneration of belief after the blight of war. Amid the psychological debris of an un¬ successful political revolution, Achebe mounts a revolution of spirit to clear a place for ‘the dance of the future’.7 His aim of teaching his readers and helping his society ‘regain its belief in itself’ is no less apparent here than in his novels. In ‘Beware, Soul-Brother’ and im¬ plicitly throughout the collection he identifies the enemies of the public spirit and admonishes his readers to beware. And in the more personal poems of the collection, which dramatize the rebirth in the poet himself of hope for love, new life, and order, Achebe creates a representative spokesman, an exemplary persona whose experience realizes the goal Achebe seeks for his society as a whole, ‘the regeneration of its deepest aspirations’. But his teaching is neither comforting nor conventionally ‘inspiring’; his persona is not at all the blandly confident, moralizing mask one

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might expect of a poet who sets out earnestly to teach his people. Achebe’s recovery of spirit is sustained more through dessicating irony and indignation than a positive faith, and in the sequential ordering of the poems, is achieved only after an ordeal of horror, disgust, and cynicism. The poems are arranged so as to suggest a chronological unfolding of perceptions, beginning with ‘The First Shot’ of the revolution. The memorable shot is distinguished by its unbulletlike pace; ‘striding’ ‘through a nervous suburb at the break / of our season of thunders’, its human motion suggests the steady accretion of purposes and acci¬ dents which make up wars’ beginnings, but ultimately accelerate, and find expression in a sudden, inhuman bullet. The poem sharply contrasts the human time of historical ‘first shots’ with the mechanical time of real bullets. The first shot moves so slowly that as the poet writes it has not yet struck its target. But its movement is inexorable, and Achebe foresees the moment when it will lodge ‘more firmly than the greater noises ahead’ (real bullets) ‘in the forehead of memory’, where of course, it will resume the pace of human ‘striding’ in the ‘nervous suburb’ of the mind. The contrast of historical and mechanical forces announces a central concern of these poems, exploring the kinship of things human and inhuman. ‘Air Raid’ further defines the contrasting modes of time seen in ‘The First Shot’. ‘A man crossing the road / to greet a friend / is much too slow’. ‘His friend [is] cut in halves’ by the ‘bird of death’ from the ‘evil forest’ of technology. The poem’s juxtapositions are immediately and simply effective: the potential unity of two men coming together, cross¬ ing the road that separates all men, is set off against abrupt, literal division as the friend is cut in half; the flying shadow from technology’s evil forest eclipses the full light of noon; human slowness is contrasted with the dreadful quickness of mechanism. The poem is one of several in Beware, Soul-Brother that bear a specific date, January 1969. Although the reader is invited to see the poem in relation to specific events, and may remember a much-publicized incident of strafing in which six people were killed on 8 January 1969 at the Awo Omamma hospital, the poem avoids specific reference, focusing instead, with the clarity and distinctiveness of a proverb (as in ‘The First Shot’), on a single, representative air raid. Achebe’s dates are perhaps his way of insisting on the literal reality of his representative images. ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ and ‘Christmas in Biafra’ are longer, more ambitious poems that attempt to evoke pathos through direct description of civilian casualties - mothers and starving children. They are too restrained in tone to be called sentimental, yet they demand

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more of the reader’s emotions than he is apt to give, even if they do not carry him beyond the harrowing photographs and arouse only a sense of guilt and dismay that such scenes have become familiar. Although ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ and ‘Christmas in Biafra’ are perhaps the least successful poems in the collection, they are nonetheless important to its central themes. The contrasts of ‘The First Shot’ and ‘Air Raid’ are deepened in Achebe’s juxtaposing the starving babies, ‘arms and legs cauterized by famine’ and the ‘Child Jesus plump wise-looking and rose-cheeked’. The Holy Family and Madonna and Child are pretty and serene, but remote: the ‘heart of the divine miracle’ is frozen in con¬ vention - ‘a fine plaster-cast scene at Bethlehem’, around which ‘figures of men and angels’, ‘the usual animals’, and a single black mage (‘in keeping with legend’) stand at ‘well-appointed distances’. Seen against the plaster immortality of the rosy-cheeked Jesus, the perishing child becomes ‘a miracle of its own kind’: his mortality emphasizes the vital humanity of his mother’s devotion. The spectacle arouses in Achebe a ‘pure transcendental hate’. ‘Pure’ and ‘transcendental’ are more than casual intensifiers; they suggest a loftiness of feeling from which any hint of self-blame is absent. As in ‘Air Raid’, evil is perceived as exter¬ nal ; the poet sees that war cuts men in half and starves babies, but he believes in the purity of the man’s friendship and the mother’s love. In the poems that follow, his confidence steadily wanes. In ‘Mango Seedling’, first published in 1968 in The New York Review of Books, similar themes appear, but in a different and more effective mask. The poem is loosely allegorical. A mango seedling sprouts in¬ congruously on the concrete ledge of a modern office building. A suggestive emblem of vital, human birth, ‘purple, two-leafed, standing on its burst black yolk’, the seedling is doomed because it cannot put down roots. Like the starving babies, perhaps the revolution, or even the persona himself, it feeds on its own substance, ultimately starves, and dies. The office building nicely suggests modern places, thoughts, and predicaments: ‘a rainswept sarcophagus’, a ‘slab’ of concrete and glass, the product of ‘this day beyond fable, beyond faith’, it is as dead as the plastercast Jesus. The precipice where the seed tries to sink its roots images a state of mind - ‘objectivity, mid-air in stone’. For the first time in Beware, Soul-Brother the persona stands inside the world of the poem. He, too, is entombed in the sarcophagus, remote from the nourishing earth, his tone as detached and distant as his vantage point two stories above, where he observes the seedling through a glass pane. In this sterile place and age, he can believe none of the myths of fertility; he considers them in turn, but neither ‘the holy man of the forest . . . powered for eternal replenishment’, nor ‘Old Tortoise’s miraculous

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feast’ of ‘one ever recurring dot of cocoyam’ can be expected in such a setting. Even the assembly of rain-drop dancers parts when it comes to the isolated seedling, and will not wash the seedling to the earth. The seedling, of course, dies, drying into a ‘headstone’, ironically assuming the form of the concrete slab that starved it. But in the concluding line, the last two words, ‘passionate courage’, suddenly break the emotional distance the persona has maintained so far. A ‘tiny debris’ is all that remains of the seedling’s ‘passionate courage’, but the poet’s commit¬ ment to the significance of perishing courage is unequivocal. Like the dying babies, the withered seedling represents a last vestige of rapidly diminishing human values. Achebe’s confidence in such redeeming human values disappears completely in the next two poems. ‘Vultures’ and ‘La2arus’ reveal the nadir of the poet’s spirits. Both explore the idea that good and evil are inextricably linked; the very germ from which new growth may come is tainted with evil. In ‘Vultures’ Achebe re-examines the theme of love’s persisting in spite of the external evils that threaten it. With disquieting coolness (the more dreadful the perception the more de¬ tached the voice) he considers the persistence of love in the perpetrators rather than the victims of evil. The vultures who yesterday ‘picked the eyes of a swollen corpse’ and ‘ate the things in its bowel’ today incline affectionately together on their shared branch. ‘Fumes of human roast clinging rebelliously to his hairy nostrils’, the Commandant at Belsen Camp brings chocolates home to his child. Like the mothers of‘Refugee Mother and Child’ and ‘Christmas in Biafra’, the professional agent of genocide (the significance of the allusion is obvious) is also a devoted parent. Achebe ironically offers the reader alternative interpretations of these events: if we will, we may ‘praise bounteous providence’ ‘that grants a tiny glow-worm tenderness’ even to an ogre, or else despair that in love’s very germ ‘is lodged the perpetuity of evil’. ‘Lazarus’ further dramatizes the inseparability of good and evil. The ‘luckless people of Ogbaku’ are trapped in ‘twin-headed evil’ when they right¬ eously avenge the death of a kinsman and then discover that he has miraculously revived. Deprived of their ‘plea and justification’ for slaying the killer, they themselves (to balance the account) are obliged to kill their kinsman a second time as he stands, like Lazarus, on ‘the thresh¬ old of a promising resurrection’. Justice itself requires the killing of an innocent man. As in ‘Mango Seedling’, the moment of birth is blighted, but now the blighting force can no longer be dismissed as external. The poet’s recovery from this spiritually arid, cynical cast of mind is seen in ‘Love Song’ and ‘Answer’. The transition is marked by two significant changes in the persona’s stance: unlike the earlier poems,

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which relate to public scenes and historical moments of the recent past, ‘Love Song’ is personal in tone, addressed to ‘my love’ rather than ‘my people’, and looks to the future. The persona is in hiding with his love; above them, evil flourishes ‘the air: is criss-crossed by loud omens’, ‘purple-headed vultures . . . stand sentry on the roof-top’, but these dangers are less threatening than in ‘Air Raid’ and ‘Vultures’. The poet’s defence against ‘loud omens’ is a strategy of ‘waiting silence’ (the poem forms contrasting patterns of sound and silence) in which he praises his love’s ‘quiet eyes’ and her power to make songs for him. A sense of quiescent hopefulness is conveyed in metaphors of conceal¬ ment and preparation; like the poet, songbirds ‘have hidden away their notes / wrapped up in leaves / of cocoyam’. Like the birds, the poet’s love providently wraps ‘the dust of their blistered feet’, transforming it, through the power of her love, into ‘golden anklets ready / for the return someday of our / banished dance’. It is consistent with the meta¬ phor of ‘Mango Seedling’ that hope for rebirth is represented as grow¬ ing out of the dust of the earth, the nourishing source of regeneration, rather than in a metaphor of ascent. The moment of recovery looked forward to in ‘Love Song’ takes place in ‘Answer’, which dramatizes ‘a dramatic descent’, the rooting of a new conception of the persona’s self in the ‘trysting floor’ of the earth. ‘In a miracle of decision’, he breaks away from ‘the terrorfringed fascination / that bound [his] ancient gaze / to those crowding faces / of plunder’, seizes his ‘remnant life’ ‘between white collar hands’, shakes it ‘like a cheap watch’, and throws it down to the earth floor of his hut. Having rejected a cheaply mechanical, white collar identity, he is able to rise to his feet. The metaphor of his re-emergence into ‘proud vibrant life’ is that of the seedling, bursting out of the darkness of its confining hull and sending the ‘twin cotyledons’ of his hands upward, his feet as roots downward to the earth. Once again in possession of himself, he celebrates his regeneration in a ritual flinging open of the ‘long-disused windows and doors’ of his hut, a further bursting out of confinement. The implications of the symbolic action in ‘Love Song’ and ‘Answer’ are elaborated more discursively in the title poem of the collection. ‘Beware, Soul-Brother’ shapes the personal experience of these poems into a warning to writers, the ‘men of soul’.8 In the central metaphor of the poem, writers are dancers; the earth of the dancing ground is their inspiration and their responsibility. In Ibo religion, as Achebe interprets it, the arts are governed by the earth: ‘our ancestors . . . gave Ala, great goddess / of their earth, sovereignty too over / their arts.’9 The dancer’s foot begins on the ground and must return to the ground:

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‘whatever beauties / it may weave in air . . . it must return for safety / and renewal of strength.’ If the writer succumbs to ‘the lures of as¬ cension day / the day of soporific levitation’, he will lose touch with the reality that sustains his art and forfeit his birthright to the enemies of soul, here more specifically named than in any of the other poems, as materialists, the ‘leaden-footed, tone-deaf’ ones, whose only passion is ‘the deep entrails of our soil’. If the earth is deserted by ‘soaring’ men of soul, it will fall ‘spoil to the long ravenous tooth / and talon of their hunger’. The meaning of both the writer’s soaring away from the earth and returning to it is suggested in Achebe’s recent speeches, in which he expresses the fear that African writers, in their preoccupation with defending and displaying the past, have become disengaged from the earth, ‘that zone of occult instability where the people dwell’, where ‘customs die and cultures are born’, and where ‘the regenerative powers of the people are most potent’.10 Like a dance, the earth moves in time; if the writer falls behind, he will suffer the fate of the mango seedling trapped in elevated objectivity with no place for his roots. Or in the metaphor of ‘Beware, Soul-Brother’, he will ‘become / a dancer dis¬ inherited in mid-dance / hanging a lame foot in the air like the hen / in a strange unfamiliar compound’. ‘Beware, Soul-Brother’ may seem too confident in its laying down the law for the arts, but it can easily be seen that Achebe has himself experienced the sense of disinheritance he warns against. He numbers himself among the soul-brothers, and in ‘Answer’ reveals a moment when he felt obliged to try to recover a lost vitality. Other poems in the collection also betray the uneasiness of (me who cannot simply draw away from the ‘departed dance’ of the African past, even though he has committed himself to catching up to ‘the dance of the future’. In three poems, ‘Penalty of Godhead’, ‘Lament of the Sacred Python’, and ‘Dereliction’ Achebe looks back to the world of his ancestors, not to worship at their shrines, or even to lament their passing, but only to express the pain he feels in abandoning them. The inevitable penalty of Godhead is to be left behind. In a time of crisis the living present separates itself from the frozen past: a sick old man escapes his burning hut; the rats rush out to nearby farmlands; even roaches, ‘that grim tenantry that nothing discourages’ flee ‘on wings they only use in deadly haste’. But the household gods, ‘frozen in ritual black with blood’ of tribute (ironically described as ‘endless’) are consumed in the blazing pyre. They are more revered, but not more alive than the plastercast Holy Family, their Christian counterpart. The sacred python, too, is left behind to weep in the shadows when a ‘wandering god’ of Christianity seduces his followers with his ‘charlatan bell’ and ‘tawdry

290

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gifts’. But the lament is spoken by the python, not Achebe, who refuses to assume a stance that will seal him, in Frantz Fanon’s phrase, into ‘the materialized Tower of the Past’." At the same time, however, Achebe takes no pleasure in escaping the past. If his need to put down new roots is paramount, the uprooting of past ties is still painful. In ‘Dereliction’, the persona confesses his sense of guilt in leaving his father’s world at the moment of its collapse: ‘I quit the carved stool / in my father’s hut to the swelling / chant of . . . termites.’ He compares himself first to one who fails through incapacity, the runner ‘whose oily grip drops / the baton handed by the faithful one / in a hard, merciless race’, and finally, to the priestly elder ‘who barters / for the curio collector’s head / of tobacco the holy staff / of his people’. Where do such men go to hide or expiate their betrayal ? ‘Eet them try the land / where the sea retreats.’ The low-tide beach of derelicts belongs to the same moral geography as ‘the zone of occult instability where the people dwell’, but it is the region where ‘customs die’ rather than where ‘cultures are born’, a sobering reminder that new birth entails the death of the old, and that ‘the dance of the future’ is necessarily accompanied by loss. But the uneasy sense of having betrayed the past is balanced in the final poems of Beware, Soul-Brother by a healthy scorn for the uncommit¬ ted, whose prudence and insensitivity shield them from the ambivalent emotions of engagement. The restored Achebe asserts his judgments to bring his collection to an angry close. In contrast to the ‘pure trans¬ cendental hate’ of ‘Christmas in Biafra’, the emotion of these con¬ cluding poems is ‘seminal rage’, a committed hatred that fertilizes and sustains his regenerated spirit. ‘NON-commitment’ and ‘We Laughed at Him’, the most important of these poems, are built on contrasting images of defence and penetration. The uncommitted are represented as emotionally sterile, cut off quite literally in the metaphor of ‘NONcommitment’ from the possibility of regeneration because their hearts are fitted with prudence like a diaphragm across womb’s beckoning doorway to bar the scandal of seminal rage. But the eye, not the womb, is the primary metaphor of these poems. The uncommitted do nothing and feel nothing chiefly because their imagination is timorous and they find sight excruciatingly painful. In ‘We Laughed at Him’ the blind men voice their dismay at ‘the hungryeyed fool-man’, the ‘visionary missionary revolutionary’ (the term nicely defines Achebe’s sense of his role), whose vision threatens their

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‘quiet sober blindness’. To them, the visionary’s sight is gained at the cost of self-mutilation: With his own nails he cut his eyes, scraped the crust over them peeled off his priceless patina of rest. . . They are scandalized that the visionary would see ‘what eyes are for¬ bidden’, and would ‘drag / into daylight fearful signs / hidden away for our safety / at the creation of the world’. Related entirely from the perspective of the blind, the poem affords only one, ironic glimpse of what the visionary actually sees: . . . sights You and I know are as impossible for this world to show as for a hen to urinate . . . he raved about trees topped with green and birds flying - yes actually flying through the air - about the sun and the moon and stars and about lizards crawling on all fours . . . The unreasonableness of this vision confirms the blind men in their judgment that the visionary is ‘stark mad’. The final poem of Beware, Soul-Brother is, of course, a defence of poetry and the poet’s role in a society blinded by conventionality and contemptuous of the arts. State University of New York at Binghamton

NOTES 1 Achebe made these statements in a speech at Syracuse, N.Y., during his American lecture tour of November 1969; a shortened version of his remarks appears in his interview with B. Lindfors, ‘Achebe on Commit¬ ment and African Writers’, Africa Report (New York), XV (Mar. 1970), pp. 16-18. 2 An interview with E. and P. Emenyonu, ‘Achebe: Accountable to Our Society’, Africa Report, XVII (May 1972), pp. 21-7. 3 Chinua Achebe, ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, Commonwealth Literature, ed. J. Press, Ileinemann, 1965, p. 202. 4 Achebe in his November 1969 lecture; see Note 1. 5 Nwankwo-Ifejika, Enugu, Nigeria, 1971; reprinted with revisions and additions as Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, Doubleday, New York, 1973; I have quoted from this revised edn., but I discuss only the poems in the first edn.

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6 ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, op. cit., p. 201. 7 From the title poem of Beware, Soul-Brother. 8 ‘Men of soul’ is obviously intended to suggest artists, intellectuals, teachers, perhaps even politicians; the sense of the poem suggests, how¬ ever, that he has his fellow-writers chiefly in mind. 9 Achebe’s relating Ala to the arts recalls Wole Soyinka’s similar use of the Yoruba god, Ogun; see ‘And after the Narcissist?’, African Forum (New York), I (Spring 1966), pp. 59-64. 10 ‘Achebe on Commitment and African Writers’, op. cit., p. 16; Achebe notes that the ‘zone of occult instability’ is a ‘beautiful expression’ bor¬ rowed from Frantz Fanon. The necessity of moving away from the past is, of course, a central idea in Fanon’s writings; it should be noted too that ‘Beware, Soul-Brother’ was first published in Dimension, the journal of the Frantz Fanon Research Centre, Enugu. 11 Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press, New York, 1967, p. 226.

Bibliography

A Checklist of Works By and About Chinua Achebe

Works By Achebe

BOOKS Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958; New York: Astor-Honor, 1959. No Longer at Ease. London: Heinemann, 1960; New York: Obolensky, 1961. ‘

The Sacrificial Egg and Other Short Stories. Onitsha: Etudo Ltd., 1962. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann, 1964; New York: John Day, 1967. Chike and the River. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. [Children’s book]

A Man of the People. London: Heinemann; New York: John Day, 1966. Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems. Enugu: Nwankwo-Ifejika, 1971; revised and enlarged ed. London: Heinemann, 1972; reprinted as

Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems. Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973. (Ed.) The Insider: Stories of War and Peace from Nigeria. Enugu: Nwankwo-Ifejika, 1971.

Girls at War and Other Stories. London: Heinemann, 1972; Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973. (Includes stories in The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories.) (with John Iroaganachi). How the Leopard Got His Claws. Enugu: Nwamife, 1972; New York: The Third Press, 1973. [Children’s book.]

Morning Yet on Creation Dap: Essays. London: Heinemann; enlarged ed. Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975.

CHINUA ACHEBE

295

SHORT STORIES “Chike’s School Days,” Rotarian, 96, 4 (1960), 19-20. “Sugar Baby,” Okike, 3 (1972), 8-16. All other stories have been collected in The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories and Girls at War and Other Stories.

POEMS “There Was a Young Man in Our Hall,” University Herald (Ibadan) 4, 3 (1951-52), 19. “Flying,” Okike, 4 (1973), 47-48. “The Old Man and the Census,” Okike, 6 (1974), 41-42. All other poems have been collected in Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems.

ESSAYS AND MISCELLANEOUS PIECES “Philosophy,” The Bug (Ibadan), 21 February 1951, p. 5. (Defends philosophy lectures which had been attacked by “Holy Devil” in preceding issue of The Bug.) “An Argument Against the Existence of Faculties,” University Herald (Ibadan), 4, 1 (1951), 12-13. “Editorial,” University Herald (Ibadan), 4, 3 (1951-52), 5.

“Editorial,” University Herald (Ibadan), 5, 1 (1952), 5. “Mr. Okafor Versus Arts Students,” The Bug (Ibadan), 29 November 1952, p. 3. [Attack on a science student at University College Ibadan.] “Hiawatha,” The Bug (Ibadan), 29 November 1952, p. 3. “Eminent Nigerians of the 19th Century,” Radio Times (Lagos), January 1958, p. 3. [Preview of a New Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation series.]

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“Listening in the East,’ Radio Times (Lagos), January 1959, p. 17; February 1959, p. 17; March 1959, p. 18; April 1959, p. 18; May 1959, p. 33; June 1959, p. 22; July 1959, p. 22. [About Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation programming in Eastern Nigeria.] “Two West African Library Journals,” The Service, 6 May 1961, p. 15. “Amos Tutuola,” Radio

Times

(Lagos),

23-29

July

1961,

p.

2.

[Introduction to radio talk by Wole Soyinka on Amos Tutuola and D. O. Fagunwa.]

“Writers’ Conference: A Milestone in Africa’s Progress,” Daily Times (Lagos), 7 July 1962, p. 7; “Conference of African Writers,” Radio Times (Lagos), 15 July 1962, p. 6. [Conference held at Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda.]

“Introduction” to Delphine King, Dreams of Twilight: A Book of Poems (Apapa: Nigerian National Press [ca. 1962]), p. 5. Review of Christopher Okigbo’s Heavensgate, Spear (Lagos), December 1962, p. 41.

Review of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo’s Twenty-Four Poems, (Lagos), January 1963, p. 41.

Spear

“A Look at West African Writing,” Spear (Lagos), June 1963, p. 26. “Voice of Nigeria—How It Began,” Voice of Nigeria, 1, 1 (1963), 5-6. “Are We Men of Two Worlds?” Spear (Lagos), December 1963, p. 13. “On Janheinz Jahn and Ezekiel Mphahlele,” Transition, 8 (1963), 9. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigerian Libraries, 1, 3 (1964), 113-19; Nigeria Magazine, 81 (1964), 157-60. “Foreword” to A Selection of African Prose, Vol. 1, ed. W.H. Whiteley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. vii-x.

“The Black Writer’s Burden,” Presence Africaine, 31, 59 (1966), 13540.

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“Editorial,” Nsukkascope (Nsukka), 1 (1971), 1-4. “Editorial,” Nsukkascope (Nsukka), 2 (1971), 1-5. “Editorial,” Nsukkascope (Nsukka), 3 (1972), 4-5. “Introduction” to Kofi Awoonor, This Earth, My Brother.. .(Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1972), pp. vii-xii. [Rpt. as a review in Transition, 41 (1972), 69.] ‘Introduction” to Keorapetse Kgositsile, Places and Bloodstains [Notes for Ipelang] (Oakland, California: Achebe Publications, 1975), p. 7. “An Image of Africa,” The Chancellor’s Lecture Series, 1974-75 (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, [ ca. 1976]), pp. 31-43. [On racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.] All other essays and miscellaneous pieces have been collected in Morning Yet on Creation Dag: Essays.

Works About Achebe

Achebe is discussed in nearly every book and survey article written on African literature in English. This selected bibliography lists only those books and articles that deal exclusively or primarily with him and his works. Asterisks precede essays collected in this book.

Bibliographies Hanna, S.J. “Achebe: A Bibliography,” Studies in Black Literature, 2, 1 (1971), 20-21. McDaniel, Richard B. “An Achebe Bibliography,” World Literature Written in English, 20 (1971), 15-24. Severac, Alain. “Chinua Achebe: I. Notes biographiques; II. Bibliographie, Annales de la faculte des lettres et sciences humaines, Universite de Dakar, 2 (1972), 55-56. Silver, Helene. See under Biography and Autobiography below.

298

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Biography and Autobiography Achebe, Chinua. “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,” New Letters, 40, 1 (1973), 15-22; rpt. in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann; Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975. Pp. 11524. Herdeck, Donald. “Achebe, Chinua.” African Authors: A Companion to Black African Writing, Volume I: 1300-1973. Washington, D.C.: Black Orpheus Press, 1973. Pp. 22-25. Jahn, Janheinz, Ulla Schild and Almut Nordmann. “Achebe, Chinua.” Who’s Who in African Literature: Biographies, Works, Commentaries. Tubingen: Erdmann, 1972. Pp. 19-21. O., V. O. “Profile: The Man Who Looks Ahead.” Radio Times (Lagos), March 1955, p. 14. [Brief biographical description.] Severac, Alain. See under Bibliographies above. Silver, Helene. “Biography: Chinua Achebe.” Africana Library Journal, 1, 1 (1970), 18-22. [Includes select bibliography of works and criticism.] Skurjat, Ernestyna. “Chinua Achebe—Nigeria.” Afryka w Tworczosci jej Pisarzy. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1973. Pp. 28-32. Wright, Robin. “Achebe Writes about Developing Nigeria the Way Faulkner Did About the South.” Christian Science Monitor, 26 December 1974, p. 9; rpt. as “Chinua Achebe” in Black Times, 5, 9 (1975), 11. Zell, Hans, and Helene Silver. “Chinua Achebe.” A Reader’s Guide to African Literature. London: Heinemann; New York: Africana Publishing Corp., 1972. Pp. 117-19.

Interviews Anon. “Entretien avec Chinua Achebe.” Afrique, 27 (1963), 40-42. -“Chinua Achebe on Biafra.” Transition, 36 (1968), 31-37. -“BBB Interviews Chinua Achebe.” Black Books Bulletin, 3, 2 (1975), 20-22. Baugh, Lawrence E. “An Interview with Chinua Achebe.” Drum (Amherst), 5, 3 (1974), 18-22. Duerden, Dennis, and Cosmo Pieterse, eds. “Chinua Achebe.” African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews. London: Heinemann; New York: Africana Publishing Corp., 1972. Pp. 3-17. Emenyonu, Ernest and Pat. “Achebe: Accountable to Our Society.” Africa Report, 17, 5 (1972), 21, 23, 25-27. Felton, M. “An Interview with Chinua Achebe,” Spectrum: A Magazine of Peace Corps Nigeria, 1, 1 (1967), 4-7.

CHINUA ACHEBE

299

Hall, Tony. “I Had to Write on the Chaos I Foresaw.” Sunday Nation, 15 January 1967, pp. 15-16. Kitchen, Paddy. “A Relevant Art: Paddy Kitchen Talks to Chinua Achebe.” Times Educational Supplement, 14 April 1972, p. 19. Lawson, William. “Chinua Achebe in New England: An Interview.” Yardbird Reader, 4 (1975), 99-110. Lindfors, Bernth. “Achebe on Commitment and African Writers.” Africa Report, 15, 3 (1970), 16-18. [Incorporated in Palaver below.] -“Chinua Achebe: An Interview.” Studies in Black Literature, 2, I (1971), 1-5. [Incorporated in Palaver below.] -, Ian Munro, Richard Priebe, and Reinhard Sander, eds. “Interview with Chinua Achebe.” Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers in Texas. Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, 1972. Pp. 5-12. [Morell, Karen L., ed.] “Class Discussion.” In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington. Seattle: African Studies Program, Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies, University of Washington, 1975. Pp. 33-58. [At the University of Washington, 6 April 1973.] _“Televised Discussion.” In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington. Seattle: African Studies Program, Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies, University of Washington, 1975. Pp. 24-32. [At KCTS/9 Television Studio in Seattle, 6 April 1973.] Nkosi, Lewis. “Conversation with Chinua Achebe.” Africa Report, 9, 7 (1964), 19-21; Topic, 1 (1965), 8. [Rpt. in Derden and Pieterse above.] Serumaga, Robert. “Chinua Achebe Interviewed by Robert Serumaga.” Cultural Events in Africa, 28 (1967), i-vi supp. [Rpt. in Duerden and Pieterse above.] Smith, Michael and Harry Cowen. “A Man of the People: Interview with Chinua Achebe.” McGill Reporter, 23 February 1970, pp. 1-2. Wilmer, Valerie. “Chinua Achebe and the African Novel.” Flamingo, 4, II (1965), 27-29.

Literary Criticism Ackley, Donald G. “The Male-Female Motif in Things Fall Apart.” Studies in Black Literature, 5, 1 (1974), 1-6. Adebayo, Tunji. “The Writer and the West African Present: Achebe’s Crusade against Cynicism and Apathy.” African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletin, 7 (1974), 3-16. _“The Past and the Present in Chinua Achebe’s Novels.” Ife African Studies, 1, 1 (1974), 66-84. Adejumo, M.A., and Oladapo Adelusi. Notes and Essays on Chinua

300

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Ibadan: Onibonoje Press, 1966; rpt. 1972 as Things Fall Apart: Notes and Essays. Amaizo, Eliane. “L’ecrivain negro-africain et le probleme de la langue: L’exemple de Chinua Achebe.” Bulletin de I’Enseignement Superieur du Benin (Lome, Togo), 13 (1970), 41-56. Angogo, R. “Achebe and the English Language,” Busara, 7, 2 (1975), 114. Anozie, Sunday O. “The Problem of Communication in Two West African Novels.” Conch, 2, 1 (1970), 12-20. [Includes analysis of A Man of the People.] Benot, Yves. “Un romancier nigerien: Le realisme tragique de Chinua Achebe.” Pensee, 153 (1970), 122-30. Bicanic, Sonia. “Three Circles of Reality in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, 33-36 (1972-73), 251-64. Bjorkman, Ingrid. “Samhallsbild och mansklig tragedi i Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” Den ny verden, 5,4(1970), 53-80; 5, 5 (1970), 5780. ~ Boafo, Y.S. Kantanka. “Okonkwo or the Triumph of Masculinity as a Determinant of the Fall of a Hero.” Asemka, 1, 1 (1974), 7-15. _“Arrow of God: A Case Study of Megalomania.” Asemka, 1, 2 (1974), 16-24. Bottcher, Karl H. “The Narrative Technique in Achebe’s Novels.” Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts, 13/14 (1972), 1-12. _Tradition und Modernitat bei Amos Tutuola und Chinua Achebe: Grundzuge der westafrikanischen ErzahUiteratur englischer Sprache. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1974. Brambilla, Cristina. “L’Africa e una maschera che danza.” Nigrizia, 88, 9 (1970), 26-30. *Brown, Lloyd W. “Cultural Norms and Modes of Perception in Achebe’s' Fiction.” Research in African Literatures, 3 (1972), 21-35. Brown, Raymond. “Aspects of Things Fall Apart." Mambo Review of Contemporary African Literature (Salisbury), 1 November 1974, 11-13. Bruchac, Joseph. “Achebe as Poet.” New Letters, 40, 1 (1973), 23-31. -“Chinua Achebe.” Contemporary Poets. Ed. James Vinson and D.L. Kirkpatrick. London: St. James Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Pp. 13-15. Burness, Donald B. “Solipsism and Survival in Achebe’s ‘Civil Peace’ and ‘Girls at War.’ ” Ba Shiru, 4, 1 (1972), 64-67. Butts, Dennis. “The Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Stand, 8, 4 (1967), 62-

68. *Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe. (Twayne World Authors Series, 101.) New York: Twayne, 1970. Champion, Ernest A. “The Story of a Man and His People: Chinua

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301

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." Negro American Literature Forum, 8 (1974), 272-77. Chukwukere, B. Ibe. “That ‘Wet-eared New Graduate. . . ” Transition, 23 (1965), 7-8. [Response to comments by Shelton on No Longer at Ease in Transition, 20.] Dale, James. “Chinua Achebe, Nigerian Novelist.” Queen’s Quarterly, 75 (1968), 460-75. Dedenuola, J. “The Structure of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." Nigeria Magazine, 103 (1969/70), 638-39. DeMott, Benjamin. “Oyiemu-o?” American Scholar, 32 (1963), 292, 294, 296, 298, 300, 302, 304, 306. [Achebe and “the world turned upside down.”] Djangone-Bi, N’guessan. “Obi Okonkwo ou l’intellectuel desempare.” Annales de I’universite d’Abidjan, 8D (1975), 229-45. Echeruo, M.J.C. “Chinua Achebe.” A Celebration of Black and African Writing. Ed. Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan. Zaria and Ibadan: Ahmadu Bello University Press and Oxford University Press, 1975. Pp. 150-63. Eko, Ebele. “Chinua Achebe and His Critics: Reception of His Novels in English and American Reviews.” Studies in Black Literature, 6, 3 (1975), 14-20. Ekwem, B. C. “The Offended ‘Chi’ in Achebe’s Novels—A Reply.” Horizon, 3, 3 (1965), 34-36. [Response to Shelton in Transition, see below.] Emenyonu, Ernest. “Ezeulu: The Night Mask Caught Abroad by Day.” Pan African Journal, 4 (1971), 407-19. [Arrow of God.] Engelstad, Carl F. “Chinua Achebe.” Stemmer fra den tredje verden. (Gyldendals Fakkelboker 206.) Ed. Yngvar Ustvedt. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1970. Pp. 44-50. Ezuma, Ben. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in Questions and Answers. Onitsha: Etudo Ltd., 1965; rev. ed. entitled Questions and Answers on Things Fall Apart with List of Suggested Questions, Phrases, and Difficult Words Fully Explained. Onitsha: Tabansi Bookshop, n.d. Ferris, William R., Jr. “Folklore and the African Novelist: Achebe and Tutuola.” Journal of American Folklore, 86 (1973), 25-36. Gachukia, Eddah W. “Chinua Achebe and Tradition.” Standpoints on African Literature: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Chris L. Wanjala. Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1973. Pp. 17287. Gale, Steven H. Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease: A Critical Commentary. (Monarch Notes, 00967.) New York: Monarch Press, 1975. Gerard, Albert. “Chinua Achebe, chroniqueur des effondrements.” La Revue Nouvelle, 23 (1967), 350-53. Gere, Anne Ruggles. “An Approach to Achebe’s Fiction.” Africa Quarterly (New Delhi), 16, 2 (1976), 27-35.

302

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Gowda, H.H. Anniah. “The Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Literary HalfYearly, 14, 2 (1973), 3-9. Green, Robert. “Nigeria’s New Man.” Nation, 19 April 1966, pp. 465-66. [A Man of the People.] ^Griffiths, Gareth. “Language and Action in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” African Literature Today, 5 (1971), 88-105. Hedberg, Johannes. “Chinua Achebe—A Presentation.” Moderna Sprak, 58 (1964) 435-38. [Introduction to Achebe and his works.] Heywood, Christopher. “Surface and Symbol in Things Fall Apart. Journal of the Nigerian English Studies Association, 2 (1967), 41-45. Higo, Aigboje. “Introduction” in Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1965. Pp. v-xii. Ige, Seun. “Morning Yet on Creation Day.” Afriscope, 5, 10 (1975), 3334, 36. Ike, Rosaline. “Tragedy and Social Purpose: The Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Something, 5 (1966), 3-13. *Irele, Abiola. “The Tragic Conflict in Achebe’s Novels.” BO, 17 (1965), 24-32; rpt. in Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing from “Black Orpheus.” Ed. Ulli Beier. London: Longmans; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Pp. 167-78. *Iyasere, Solomon O. “Narrative Techniques in Things Fall Apart.” New Letters, 40, 3 (1974), 73-93. *Jabbi, Bu-Buakei. “Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart.” Obsidian, 1, 3 (1975), 22-36; Sheffield Papers on Literature and Society, 1 (1976), 64-84. Jeppesen, Bent Haugaard. “Chinua Achebe og den Politiske Roman.” Den ny uerden, 3, 4 (1966), 29-31. Jervis, Steven. “Tradition and Change in Hardy and Achebe.” Black Orpheus, 2, 5/6 (1971), 31-38. Johnson, John W. “Folklore in Achebe’s Novels.” New Letters, 40, 3 (1974), 95-107. Jones, Eldred. “Language and Theme in Things Fall Apart.” Review of English Literature, 5, 4 (1964), 39-43. Jordan, John O. “Culture Conflict and Social Change in Achebe’s Arrow of God.” Critique, 13, 1 (1971), 66-82. Kemoli, A.M. “The Novels of Chinua Achebe: A Prophecy of Violence.” Joliso, 2,1 (1974), 47-66. -Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Heinemann Educational Books, 1975.

Things Fall Apart.

Nairobi:

Killam, G.D. The Novels of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann; New York: Africana Publishing Corp., 1969. -“Chinua Achebe’s Novels,” Sewanee Review, 79 (1971), 51441. . “Notions of Religion, Alienation and Archetype in Arrow of

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God. Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Ed. Rowland Smith. New York: Africana Publishing Co. and Dalhousie University Press, 1976. Pp. 152-165. Klima, Vladimir. “Chinua Achebe’s Novels.” Philoloqica Praaensia, 12 (1969), 32-34. Kronenfeld, J.Z. “The ‘Communalistic’ African and the ‘Individualistic’ Westerner: Some Comments on Misleading Generalizations in Western Criticism of Soyinka and Achebe.” Research in African Literatures, 6 (1975), 199-225. Landrum, Roger. “Chinua Achebe and the Aristotelian Concept of Tragedy.” Black Academy Review, 1, 1 (1970), 22-30. [Things Fall Apart.] Leach, Josephine. “A Study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in Mid America,” English Journal, 60 (1971), 1052-56. Leopold, Wanda. “Chinua Achebe i narodziny powiesci nigeryjskiej (Chinua Achebe and the Birth of the Nigerian Novel).” Przeglad Socjologiczny, 19 (1965), 208-43. [English summary, 309-12.] Leslie, Omolara. “Chinua Achebe: His Vision and His Craft.” Black Orpheus, 2, 7 (1972), 34-41. _“Nigeria, Alienation and the Novels of Achebe.” Presence Africaine, 84 (1972), 99-108; Black World, 22, 8 (1973) 34-43. Lewis, Mary Ellen B. “Beyond Content in the Analysis of Folklore in Literature: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.” Research in African Literatures, 7 (1976), 44-52. Lewis, Maureen W. “Ezeulu and His God: An Analysis of Arrow of God.” Black World, 24, 2 (1974), 71-87. _“Priest of a Dead God.” African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletin, 7 (1974), 39-53. *Lindfors, Bernth. “Achebe’s African Parable.” Presence Africaine, 66 (1968), 130-36. _“The Palm Oil with Which Achebe’s Words are Eaten.” African Literature Today, 1 (1968), 3-18; rpt. in Folklore in Nigerian Literature. New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1973. Pp. 73-93. [Proverbs in Achebe’s fiction.] _“The Folktale as Paradigm in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.” Studies in Black Literature, 1, 1 (1970), 1-15; rpt. in Folklore in Nigerian Literature. New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1973. Pp. 94-104. _“Chinua Achebe’s Proverbs.”Nigerian Field, 35 (1970), ISO85; 36 (1971), 45-48, 90-96. [Annotated list.] _“Maxims, Proverbial Phrases, and Other Sententious Sayings in Achebe’s Novels.” Nigerian Field, 36 (1971), 139-43. [Annotated list.] _“Chinua Achebe and the Nigerian Novel.” Studies on Modern Black African Literature. Ed. Pal Paricsy. (Studies on Developing Countries, 43.) Budapest: Center for Afro-Asian Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1971. Pp. 29-49; published in

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Hungarian in Helikon, 16 (1970), 22-32; rpt. in Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, 15 (1973), 34-51. _“Ambiguity and Intention in Arrow of God." Ba Shiru, 5, 1 (1973), 43-48. _“Chinua Achebe.” Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century. Vol. 4. Ed. Frederick Ungarand Lina Mainiero. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1975. Pp. 4-7. _“The Blind Men and the Elephant.” African Literature Today, 1 (1975), 53-64. Macebuh, Stanley. “On the Question of Theme in Nigerian Literature: A Rejoinder to an Address by Chinua Achebe.” Horizon, 3, 4 (1966), 1416. [Answers Achebe’s “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation.”] Madubuike, Ihechukwu. “Achebe’s Ideas on Literature.” Black World, 24, 2 (1974), 60-70; New Letters, 40, 4 (1974), 79-91; Presence Africaine, 93 (1975), 140-52; Renaissance 2, (1975), 14-19. Maxwell, D.E.S. “Landscape and Theme.” Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture. Ed. John Press. London: Heinemann, 1965. Pp. 82-89. [On Things Fall Apart and Randolph Stow’s To the Islands.] McDaniel, Richard B. “The Python Episodes in Achebe’s Novels,” International Fiction Review, 3 (1976), 100-06. McDowell, Robert. “Of What Is Past, Or Passing, or to Come.” Studies in Black Literature, 2, 1 (1971), 9-13. [Reply to Shelton in same issue, see below.] Melamu, M.J. “The Quest for Power in Achebe’s Arrow of God." English Studies in Africa, 14 (1971), 225-40. Melone, Thomas. “Architecture du Monde: Chinua Achebe et W. B. Yeats.” Conch, 2, 1 (1970), 44-52. _Chinua Achebe et la tragedie de 1’histoire. Paris: Presence Africaine, 1973. Meyers, Jeffrey. “Culture and History in Things Fall Apart." Critique, 11, 1 (1969), 25-32. _Fiction and the Colonial Experience. Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1972. [Includes remarks on Achebe in “Conclusion,” pp. 117-19.] Mezu, S. Okechukwu. “Litterature biafraise: Le tragique heros de Chinua Achebe.” L’Afrique Litteraire et Artistique, 4 (1969), 22-25. Mills, Peter. Notes on Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. H.E.B. Study Guide. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974. Milne, E.M. Sixth-form English: Notes and Examples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. [Includes analysis of Things Fall Apart, pp. 87-102.] Moore, Gerald. “Chinua Achebe: Nostalgia and Realism.” Seven African Writers. London: Oxford University Press, 1962; rev. ed., 1966. Pp. 5872. -Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann Educational Books for

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British Broadcasting Corporation and British Council on behalf of the British Ministry of Overseas Development, 1974. Mpondo, Simon. L Univers existentiel de l’intellectuel africain chez Chinua Achebe.” Presence Africaine, 70 (1969), 172-80. [No Longer at Ease.] Nance, Carolyn. “Cosmology in the Novels of Chinua Achebe ” Conch 3, 2 (1971), 121-36. Nandakumar, Prema. “Chinua Achebe.” The Glory and the Good: Essays on Literature. London: Asia Publishing House, 1965. Pp. 285304. N’Diaye, Jean-Pierre. “Le monde s’effondre.” Jeune Afrique, 18 May 1971, pp. 59-61. [On French translation of Things Fall Apart.] *Ngugi wa Thiong’o, [James], “Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People.” Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics. London: Heinemann, 1972; New York and Westport, Conn: Lawrence Hill, 1973. Pp. 51-54. Niven, Alastair. “Another Look at Arrow of God.” Literary Half-Yearly, 16, 2 (1975), 53-68. Nnolim, Charles E. “Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: An Igbo National Epic.” Black Academy Review, 2, 1/2 (1971), 55-60; rpt. in Modern Black Literature. Ed. S. Okechukwu Mezu. Buffalo, N.Y.: Black Academy Press, 1971. Pp. 55-60. *_“A Source for Arrow of God.” Research in African Literatures, (1977), 1-26.

8

Nwoga, Donatus I. “The Chi Offended.” Transition, 15 (1964), 5. [Comment on Shelton in Transition, see below.] Obiechina, Emmanuel. “Structure and Significance in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” English in Africa, 2, 2(1975), 39-44. *Ogungbesan, Kolawole. “Politics and the African Writer: The Example of Chinua Achebe.” Work in Progress (Zaria), 2 (1973), 75-93; African Studies Review, 17 (1974), 43-54. Ogunmola, M.O. Study Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Oyo: Alliance West African Publishers, n.d. Okafor, Clem A. “The Inscrutability of the Gods: Motivation of Behavior in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.” Presence Africaine, 63 (1967), 20714. Okafor, Raymond N. “Individual and Society in Chinua Achebe’s Novels.” Annales de I’universite d’Abidjan. 5D (1972), 219-43. _“Alienation in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Annales de I’universite d’Abidjan, 6D (1973), 329-41. Oko, Emelia A. “The Historical Novel of Africa: A Sociological Approach to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God.” Conch, 6, 1/2 (1974), 15-46. Okunnuga, Yemi. “The Tragic Conflict in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease.” Journal of the Nigerian English Studies Association, 2 (1968), 141-42.

306

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Olney, James. “The African Novel in Transition: Chinua Achebe.’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 70 (1971), 229-316. Parasuram, A.N. Minerva Guide to Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, Madras: Minerva Publishing House, 1967. _Minerva Guide to Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease. Madras: Minerva Publishing House, 1971. Penfold, Jill. “Chinua Achebe—His Reaction to Change in Nigeria. Mambo Review of Contemporary African Literature (Salisbury), 3 August 1974, pp. 10-11. Ponnuthurai, Charles Sarvan. “The Pessimism of Chinua Achebe.” Critique, 15, 3 (1974), 95-109. Post, K.W.J. “Introduction.” A Man of the People. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1967. Pp. v-xvii. _“Introduction.” Arrow of God. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1969. Pp. vii-xiv. Povey, John. “The Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Introduction to Nigerian Literature. Ed. Bruce King. Lagos: University of Lagos; New York: Africana Publishing Corp.; London: Evans, 1971. Pp. 97-112. Priebe, Richard. “Fate and Divine Justice in Things Fall Apart.1’ NeoAfrican Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz John. Ed. Bernth Lindfors and Ulla Schild. Mainzer Afrika-Studien 1. Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976. Pp. 159-66. Ratcliffe, Michael. “Africa Begins: Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe.” The Novel Today. London: Longmans for the British Council, 1968. Pp. 2831. Ravenscroft, Arthur. Chinua Achebe. (Writers and Their Work, 209.) Essex: Longmans, Green for the British Council and the National Book League, 1969. _“Chinua Achebe.” Contemporary Novelists. Vinson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972. Pp. 17-20.

Ed. James

Richard, Rene. “Le Monde s’effrondre (C. Achebe).” Annales de I’universite dAbidjan, 3D (1970), 41-42. _“No Longer at Ease (C. Achebe) et People of the City (C. Ekwensi).” Annales de I’universite dAbidjan, 3D (1970), 47-48. _“A Man of the People (C. Achebe) et Iska (C. Ekwensi).” Annales de I’universite d’Abidjan, 3D (1970), 67-68. *Riddy, Felicity. “Language as a Theme in No Longer at Ease.’’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9 (1970), 38-47. *Rogers, Philip. “Chinua Achebe’s Poems of Regeneration.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 10, 3 (1976), 1-9. Scheub, Harold. “ ‘When a Man Fails Alone.’ ” Presence Africaine, 74 (1970), 61-89. [Okonkwo’s alienation in Things Fall Apart.] Seitel, Peter. “Proverbs: A Social Use of Metaphor.” Genre, 2 (1969), 143-61. [Uses proverbs in Achebe’s works as examples.]

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Serumaga, Robert. “A Mirror of Integration: Chinua Achebe and James Ngugi.” Protest and Conflict in African Literature. Ed. Cosmo Pieterse and Donald Munro. London: Heinemann; New York: Africana Publishing Corp., 1969. Pp. 70-80. Shelton, Austin J. “The Offended Chi in Achebe’s Novels.” Transition, 13 (1964), 36-37. _“The ‘Palm-Oil’ of Language: Proverbs in Chinua Achebe’s Novels.” Modem Language Quarterly, 30 (1969), 86-111. _“Failures and Individualism in Achebe’s Stories.” Studies in Black Literature, 2, 1 (1971), 5-9. Sibley, Francis M. “Tragedy in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Southern Humanities Review, 9 (1975), 359-73. Soile, ‘Sola. “Tragic Paradox in Achebe’s Arrow of God” Phylon, 37 (1976), 283-95. Spence, James A. “Power in Achebe’s Arrow of God." University Review, 37 (1970), 157-58. *Stock, A.G. “Yeats and Achebe.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 5 (1968), 105-11. [Things Fall Apart.] Swados, Harvey. “Chinua Achebe and the Writers of Biafra.” Sarah Lawrence Journal, (Spring 1970), 55-62; New Letters, 40, 1 (1973), 513. Taiwo, Oladele. “Successful Essays.” Home Studies (Lagos), 36 (1967), 23-24. [Model essays on No Longer at Ease.] Tibbie, Anne. “Chinua Achebe.” African-English Literature: A Short Survey and Anthology of Prose and Poetry up to 1965. Ed. Anne Tibbie. London: Peter Owen; New York: October House, 1965. Pp. 101-11; rpt. in Modern Black Novelists: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. M.G. Cooke. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Pp. 122-31. Truter, H.W. “Uit ‘Donker’ Afrika [From ‘Darkest’ Africa].” Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe, 11 (1971), 186-203. Turkington, Kate. “ ‘This no be them country’: Chinua Achebe s Novels. English Studies in Africa, 14 (1971), 205-14. _Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart. Studies in English Literature, 66. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Urs, S.N. Vikramraj. “Things Fall Apart: A Novel from the ‘Dark’ Continent.” Commonwealth Quarterly (New Delhi), 1, 1 (1976), 28-34. Vavilov, V.N. “The Books of Nigerian Author Chinua Achebe.” Africa in Soviet Studies: Annual 1969. Trans. R.F. Kostiyuk and V.A. Epshtein. Moscow: Nauka, 1971. Pp. 145-61. Vincent, Theo. “The Post-war Achebe.” Nigeria Magazine, 113 (1974), 65-67. [On Girls at War.] _“Register in Achebe.” Journal of the Nigerian English Studies Association, 6, 1(1974), 95-106. Walsh, William. “Chinua Achebe.” A Manifold Voice: Studies in

308

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Commonwealth Literature. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. Pp. 4861. Wanjala, Chris L. “Achebe: Teacher and Satirist.” Standpoints on African Literature: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Chris Wanjala. Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1973. Pp. 161171. Weinstock, Donald J. “Achebe’s Christ-Figure.” Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts, 5/6 (1968), 20-26; rpt. in New African Literature and the Arts, 2. Ed. Joseph Okpaku. New York: Crowell and Third Press, 1970. Pp. 56-65. [Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart.] *_and Cathy Ramadan. “Symbolic Structure in Things Fall Apart." Critique, 11, 1 (1969), 33-41. _“The Two Swarms of Locusts: Judgement by Indirection in Things Fall Apart" Studies in Black Literature, 2, 1 (1971), 14-19. Williams, Philip G. “A Comparative Approach to Afro-American and Neo-African Novels: Ellison and Achebe.” Studies in Black Literature, 7, 1 (1976), 15-18. Wilson, Richard, ed. Chinua Achebe: Miscellaneous Papers. Evanston: Northwestern University Program of African Studies, 1970. [Mimeo. rpt. of various essays by and about Achebe.] *Wilson, Roderick. “Eliot and Achebe: An Analysis of Some Formal and Philosophical Qualities of No Longer at Ease." English Studies in Africa, 14 (1971), 215-23. Wren, Robert M. “Anticipation of Civil Conflict in Nigerian Novels: Aluko and Achebe.” Studies in Black Literature, 1, 2 (1970), 21-32. _“Arrow of God." Afriscope, 5, 9 (1975), 43-44. [On revisions in 2nd ed.] -“Achebe’s Revisions of Arrow of God.” Research in African Literatures, 1 (1976), 53-58. -“Race and Duality: Achebe in the Morning.” Afriscope, 6, 4 (1976), 31-32, 35. [On Achebe’s essays.] Yankson, Kofi. “The Structural Role of ‘Eat’ in A Man of the People." University of Cape Coast English Department Workpapers, 1 (1971), 38-42. -“The Use of Pidgin in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People.” Asemka, 1, 2 (1974), 68-79.

Theses

Mazrui, M. “Aspects of the Relationship between Individual and Society in Some African Fiction with Special Reference to the Works of Chinua Achebe and James Ngugi.” Master’s thesis, Makerere University, 1972.

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309

McDaniel, Richard B. “Stylistic Devices in the Narrative and Dialogue of Chinua Achebe’s Prose.” Master’s thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1970. Murphy, Thomas. “The Novels of Chinua Achebe, with Special Reference to the Theme of Conflict of European and Southern Nigerian Cultures, from the Late Nineteenth Century Onwards.” Master’s thesis, Univer¬ sity of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1967. Okafor, Clement A. “The Relations between Type Situations in Igbo Fables and the Patterns of Characterisation and Motivation in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Master’s thesis, Makerere University, 1970. Solomon, Stuart. “The Pidgin English of Chinua Achebe: A Descriptive Linguistic Analysis.” Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1971. Uhiara, Albert O. “Two Dispensations: A Study of the Impact of Western Culture on Modern Nigeria As Revealed in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Master’s thesis, Queen’s University, Ontario, 1964. Walters, Justine Q. “Igbo Aphorisms in the Novels of Chinua Achebe.” Master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1967. Ward, M.R. “An Analysis of the Ways in which Colonialism, Tribalism and Associated Political Themes are Handled in Novels by the African Authors Peter Abrahams, Chinua Achebe and James Ngugi.” Master’s thesis, University of Leeds, 1969.

Dissertations Abstracts of American and Canadian doctoral dissertations may be found in Dissertations Abstracts International, cited as DAI here.

Barthold, Bonnie Jo. “Three West African Novelists: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ayi Kwei Armah.” DAI, 36 (1976), 4473-74A (Arizona). Boafo, Yaw S. “L’Afrique devant deux romanciers noirs, etude de l’oeuvre romanesque de Chinua Achebe et de Sembene Ousmane. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bordeaux III, 1972. Chargois, Josephine A. “Two Views of Black Alienation: A Comparative Study of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison.” DAI, 34 (1974) 7742A (Indiana). Eko, Ebele Ofoma. “The Critical Reception of Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka, in England and America, 1952-1974.” DAI, 35 (1975), 7902A (North Carolina, Greensboro). Gere, Anne. “West African Oratory and the Fiction of Chinua Achebe and T.M. Aluko.” DAI, 35 (1975), 4519A (Michigan). Githae-Mugo, Micere M. “Visions of Africa in the Fiction of Chinua Achebe, Margaret Laurence, Elspeth Huxley and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.” DAI, 34 (1974), 5968-69A (New Brunswick).

310

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Haddad, Marjorie A. “Pollution and Purification in the Novels and Plays of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and John Pepper Clark.” DAI, 37, (1976), 964A (New York). Innes, Catherine L. “Through the Looking Glass: Achebe, Synge and Cultural Nationalism.” DAI, 34 (1974), 7234A (Cornell). Lynch, Barbara S. “The Collision of Cultures in the Novels of Miguel Angel Asturias, Jacques-Stephen Alexis and Chinua Achebe.” DAI, 34 (1974), 7764-65A (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.) Maduka, Chukwudi Thomas. “Politics and the Intellectual Hero: Abrahams, Flaubert and Wright.” DAI, 37 (1976), 2850A McCartney, Barney C. “The Traditional Satiric Method of Wole and Chinua Achebe.” DAI, 37 (1976), 2862-63A (Texas,

Achebe, (Iowa). Soyinka Austin).

Melone, Thomas. “Le Conflict Culturel dans le roman negro-africain d’expression franyaise et d’expression anglaise: 1. Mongo Beti: L’homme et le destin; 2. Chinua Achebe et la tragedie de 1’histoire.” Ph.D. disser¬ tation, University of Grenoble, 1969. [Achebe section later published as book.] Soile, ’Sola. “The Myth of the Archetypal Hero in Two African Novelists: Chinua Achebe and James Ngugi.” DAI, 34 (1973), 1296A (Duke).

INDEX Achebe, biography, 1-2, 3-5, 47. Achebe, comparisons with other writers. See under Amadi, Beti, Cary, Conrad, Eliot, Fanon, Greene, Okigbo, Oyono, Yeats. Achebe, influence, 5-6. Achebe, prizes and awards, 1. “Africa and her Writers,” 5. “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause,” 40. Ala (Earth Goddess), 2, 11, 288. See also Ani. Amadi, Elechi, 188-189. Ani, 116, 129. Anthropological background, 29, 92, 124. See also under Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart. Arrow of God, 1, 4, 17-20, 42, 47-48, 49, 57-61, 74-76, 169-245, 280; anthropological background, 181, 183-184, 186, 190, 199, 201, 202, 215, 220, 228-242, 245; and Cary, 180, 195, 207-217; characterization, 17, 75, 174, 179, 185, 189; see also Ezeulu, Nwaka, Obika, Oduche, Winterbottom; conflict of cultures in, 17, 19, 57, 170, 172, 178, 180, 191192, 193, 197; and Conrad, 180, 181, 188, 189, 194, 201, 219; Europeans, 182, 185, 187, 192, 195; folktales in, 184-185, 197198; and history, 47-48, 74, 170172, 175, 178-179, 181, 190192, 198, 203, 209, 211, 212, 214-217, 220-228; Ibo culture in 214-217, 220-228; Ibo culture in,

171, 173, 174, 180, 181, 182184, 189, 194, 240-241, 245; imagery, 193, 196. See also sym¬ bolism; irony, 79-80, 175, 188, 200, 201; language, 48, 49, 7577, 79-80, 262; narrative tech¬ nique, 175-196, 200, 201, 204; proverbs in, 49, 57-61, 75-76, 184, 190, 200, 203; religion in, 57, 171-173, 174, 175, 181, 186, 187-188,189,193,197,213-214, 228-242; sources of, 192, 199, 219-245; structure, 175,185,186, 235; style, 196, 201, 202, 203; symbolism in, 19, 74, 76, 193194, 198; theme, 74, 180-181, 185, 211, 212; tragedy in, 17-21, 179, 186, 204. Beti, Mongo, 10, 17. Beware Soul Brother, 1, 284-292. Biafra, 4-5, 40, 44, 204, 284-292 passim. “The Black Writer’s Burden,” 39. Brown, Mr., 30, 109. Cary, Joyce, 3, 4, 180, 195, 207-213. Characterization, 7. See also names of characters and under specific novels. Chi, 2, 8, 51-53, 66n., 102, 205. Chike and the River, 5. Christianity, 13, 20, 25, 27, 29, 30, 109-110, 118-119, 120-123, 129, 130, 139, 143, 152, 289. See also under individual titles. Christmas in Biafra, 1, 5, 284-292. Chukwu, 2.

312

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Conrad, Joseph, 3, 4, 71, 127, 166. See also under Arrow of God. Craftsmanship, 47-65,

201,

255.

Critics, 7-8, 92, 184, 202, 206, 219, 248. Critical Theory, 7, 37-44, 68, 180, 279, 284, 289, 291. District Commissioner, 28, 29, 112, 120, 279. Eliot, T. S„ 15, 26, 27, 28, 160-163, 165-167. “English and the African Writer,” 48. Essays, 7. See also Critical Theory and individual titles. Ezeulu, 7, 17, 18-20, 57-61, 74-76, 170, 173-174, 177, 179, 184, 185, 186, 187-188, 189-190, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202, 204, 213, 235, 237, 245. Fanon, Franz, 22, 23, 41, 281, 290, 292n. Folktales, See under Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart. Girls at War and Other Stories, 5, 44. ‘Girls at War,” 44. Mr. Greene, 71, 157, 165, 279. Greene, Grahame, 4, 166. Hardy, Thomas, 93. “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” 44. History, 10, 21, 25, 27, 37-38, 3940, 47-48, 69, 91, 279. See also under individual titles. How the Leopard Got Its Claws, 5. Ibo Culture and History, 2, 3, 10, 14, 30, 40, 69, 87-88, 94, 205, 278, 288; See also Umuaro, Umuofia, and under individual titles.

49-50, 61-64, 248-282; charac¬ terization in, 255, 257. See also Josiah, Nanga, Odili; conflict of cultures in, 32-34, 255, 256, 258, 264; and history, 40, 48, 248254; imagery, 281; irony, 77, 79, 82, 83, 261, 264, 266, 269, 275; language, 49, 79, 80-82, 262263, 280; narrative technique, 77, 83, 256-257, 263, 266, 274; point of view, 80, 82, 256-257, 263, 264, 266-277 passim; pro263, 264, 266-277 passim; pro¬ verbs in, 49, 50, 61-65, 77, 256, 259; satire, 48, 254, 277, 280; symbolism, 256, 272. See also Josiah; theme, 254, 261, 264265, 270, 271, 276-278, 280. Morning Yet on Creation Dap, 5. See also Essays. “Named for Victoria, Queen of Eng¬ land,” 1-2. Nanga, Chief, 33-34, 61, 79, 82, 255, 260-261, 273, 280. Narrative technique. See under indi¬ vidual titles. No Longer at Ease, 1, 4, 15-17, 2627, 42, 48, 54-56, 150-168, 279; characterization, 26, 54, 71. See also Obi Okonkwo; conflict of cul¬ tures in, 27, 56, 71-74, 78, ISO152, 154, 155, 163-165, 167168, 255; and Eliot, 26, 91, 158, 160-168; and history, 27, 48; Ibo culture in, 152-153,155; language, 71, 72, 150-159, 165; narrative technique, 167, 202; point of view, 202; proverbs in 49, 55-57, 71, 72, 151, 153; structure, 167; theme, 71, 74, 153, 163; tragedy in, 71-74. “The Novelist as Teacher,” 38, 284.

Ikemefuna, 12, 32, 100, 129, 131, 133.

Nwaka, 17, 18, 171, 172, 174, 177.

Imagery, See under titles of works.

Nwoye, 11, 12, 13, 14, 26, 32, 54, 70, 73, 106-107, 118, 130-131.

Josiah, 256, 258, 260, 269, 272, 276, 278. Language, 7, 23-24, 28, 30-31, 4865, 69, 71, 111-112, 150. See also under titles of works. A Man of the People, 1,4, 32,43, 48,

Obi Okonkwo, 4, 7, 15-17, 26, 5456, 70-74, 151, 153, 154, 158159, 161, 164, 166. Obika, 19, 184, 194, 200. Odili Samulu, 7, 33, 61-64, 79-82, 257-260, 263-277 passim, 281.

CHINUA ACHEBE Oduche, 18, 20, 175, 185. Okigbo, Christopher, 7, 43, 44. Okike, 5. Okonkwo, 4, 10-14, 18, 29, 31-32, 51-54, 88, 92, 93, 98-105, 111, 113-116, 117-118, 119-120, 135-137, 212. Oral Tradition, see under Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart. See also folktales, proverbs. Osu, 16, 72. Oyono, Ferdinand, 10, 24, 29. Poetry, 1, 5, 284-292. ‘Air Raid,’ 44, 285, 286; ‘Answer,’ 287, 289; ‘Beware Soul Brother,’ 284, 288; ‘Christmas in Biafra,’ 285, 286, 287, 290; ‘Dereliction,’ 289, 290; ‘First Shot,’ 285, 286; and history, 284, 285; imagery, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290; irony, 285, 287, 291; ‘Lament of the Sacred Python,’ 289; ‘Lazarus,’ 287; ‘Love Song,’ 287-288; ‘Mango Seedling,’ 286287, 288, 289; ‘NON-commitment,’ 290; order, 285-291; ‘Penalty of Godhead,’ 289; per¬ sona, 286, 287-288, 291; ‘Refugee Mother and Child,’ 286, 287; style, 285; themes, 285, 286; ‘Vultures,’ 287, 288; ‘We Laughed at Him,’ 290-291. Point of View, 7. See also individual titles. Proverbs, 6, 7, 47, 49-65. See also under individual titles. Python, 18-19, 193-194, 215, 289. Religion, See under Ala, Chi, Chris¬ tianity, Ibo culture, python, Ulu. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” 5, 37, 65n„ 135,138, 254.

313

Things Fall Apart, 1, 4, 5, 10-15, 2431, 42, 47, 49, 51-54, 86-147, 180, 219, 279; anthropological background, 29, 92, 124; charac¬ terization, 90, 114. See also Dis¬ trict Commissioner, Ikemefuna Nwoye, Okonkwo, Unoka; conflict of cultures in, 29, 31, 67, 70, 89, 90-91, 92, 113, 123, 135, 145, 212; folktales in, 93, 111, 113, 119, 126,128-131,134; and his¬ tory, 28, 47, 68, 86-87, 124-125, 138-139, 161, 212; Ibo society in, 92, 94-98, 112, 116, 118, 123, 134, 135, 138, 141-142. See also Umuofia; imagery, 111-112, 129, 135-137, 140-143, 144; irony, 28, 31, 70, 110, 114, 124-125, 131, 133, 144; language, 31, 67, 111-125, 262; masculine and feminine values, 89, 100-101, 103-105, 115-117, 129-130, 137- 138; missionaries in, 30, 89, 108-110, 120-123. See also Brown and Smith; narrative tech¬ nique, 90, 92-110, 111-112, 114, 124-125, 126, 139; oral tradi¬ tion, 68,111-112,113,114,124, 136; point of view, 68, 98-99, 111-112, 113, 125, 189, 201; proverbs, 49, 52-54, 93, 111, 113, 114, 115, 126; religion in, 89, 116, 118-119, 129, 132, 138- 139, 145; style, 20, 90, 201, 202; symbolism, 127, 129-134, 135-136, 140-143, 145; theme, 92, 93, 127, 135, 136, 161, 212; tragedy in, 24-31, 102, 124, 135, 136; and Yeats, 25-26, 86-91, 124, 160. Ulu, 17, 18, 60, 171, 173, 175, 186, 188, 189, 213-214, 235, 245. Umuaro, 17,18,170, 181,182, 213, 214.

Senghor, Leopold, 28, 31.

Umuofia, 13, 14, 87, 94-98, 110, 135, 174, 211-212.

Short Fiction, 7. See also Girls at War.

University Flerald, 4.

Smith, Rev. James, 31, 109, 122123, 133.

Unoka, 11, 88, 119, 120.

Style, 20. See also under individual titles. Symbolism, 7, 19, 140. See also under individual titles; Josiah, python.

Winterbottom, Captain, 17, 18, 19, 170, 185, 188, 192, 195, 216, 228. Yeats, W. B„ 15, 25, 73, 86, 160.

Notes on Contributors

Lloyd W. Brown is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California where he teaches courses in African and Carib¬ bean literature. He has written books on Jane Austen and West Indian poetry and has edited a collection of essays entitled The Black Writer in Africa and the Americas. David Carroll, formerly a lecturer in English at Fourah Bay College, is now a Professor of English at the University of Lancaster (England). Gareth Griffiths, formerly a lecturer at the University of Missouri, is now Senior Lecturer in English at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He has recently published A Double Exile: African and West Indian Writ¬ ing Between Two Cultures (London, 1978). Catherine Lynette Innes has taught in Australia and North America and is now a lecturer at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Her comparative study of Irish and African Nationalist writing will be published by Three Continents Press in 1979. Abiola Irele is Senior Lecturer in Romance Languages at the University of Ibadan. He has written on a wide range of African and Caribbean liter¬ ary topics and has edited two books: Lectures Africaines and Selected Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor. He has also recently organized the new publishing house, The New Horn Press, Ibadan, Nigeria. Solomon O. Iyasere, an Associate Professor of English at California State University at Bakersfield, has written many essays on critical approaches to African literature. Bu-Buakei Jabbi has been a lecturer in Njala University College, Univer¬ sity of Sierra Leone, since 1970. He is presently on study leave, research¬ ing, at the University of Sheffield, England. Bernth Lindfors is Professor of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, where he edits Research in African Litera¬ tures. He is the author of several studies of popular writing from Nigeria and editor of two previous volumes in the Critical Perspectives Series (Amos Tutuola and Nigerian Literatures). M. M. Mahood has published works on the literature of the English Renaissance and more recently on the colonial period. She is Professor of English at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and previously has held similar posts at Ibadan and Dar Es Salaam. Ngugu wa Thiong’o, formerly a Lecturer in English at Northwestern University and Chairman of the Literature Department at the University of Nairobi, is best known as Kenya’s leading novelist. Ngugi has also written plays in both English and Kikiyu and has published a wide range of critical and socio-cultural essays.

CHINUA ACHEBE

315

Emmanuel Obiechina, Chairman of the Literature Department at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, is the author of many critical studies of African literature, including An African Popular Literature and Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Kolawole Ogungbesan, who teaches at Ahmadu Bello University, has written widely on African literature and has co-edited with Bruce King a collection of essays entitled A Celebration of Black and African Writing. Cathy Ramadan (now C. Shoshana Ramadan), formerly a graduate student at California State University at Long Beach, has recently graduated with honors, first in her class, from the University of LaVerne Law School, La Verne, California, taking the J. D. degree. Felicity Riddy specializes in medieval literature and has taught at Auck¬ land, Ahmadu Bello and Glasgow Universities. Since 1968 she has been a lecturer in English at the University of Stirling in Scotland and is cur¬ rently compiling an Anthology of Longer Middle Scots Poems

1375-1650. Philip Rogers is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghampton, where he teaches African writing and nineteenth and twentieth century British and American literature. He has also taught in Nigeria. Amy G. Stock taught in the English Departments of Dacca, Calcutta and Rajasthan Universities from 1947 to 1965; from 1965-67 she was Professor of English at Makerere University College, Uganda. She is the author of IV. B. Yeats, His Poetry and Thought. Donald J. Weinstock is an Associate Professor of English at California State University at Long Beach, where he teaches courses in African literature and nineteenth century British literature. Roderick Wilson is a lecturer in English at the University of Ghana and has published articles on African literature and English romantic poetry. His poetry may be found in Poetry Review, Poetry and Audience, Country Life, and various anthologies. Robert M. Wren is Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches courses in Shakespeare, African literature, and Ameri¬ can literature. He is now completing a book on Achebe for Three Continents Press.

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Critical perspectives on Chinua Achebe

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Chinua Achebe Chinua Achebe is probably the most widely read of contempo¬ rary African writers, both on the African continent and abroad. His reputation was quickly established with his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which won him the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize as well as scholarships and grants. After the publication of his second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), he was awarded the Nigerian National Trophy for Literature, and for his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), he received the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award. His last novel, A Man of the People (1966), aroused immediate interest because of its seemingly prophetic insight into subsequent political events in Nigeria. In 1972 he was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry prize for his volume entitled Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (enlarged, revised and republished as Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems in 1973). Over the last decade, Achebe’s lectures and essays have provoked much debate about the criteria for assessing African writers, and his influence on younger novelists has been considerable. His novels have been translated into some thirty languages, he has been awarded honorary doctorates by universities in North America and Britain, he has been elected an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association, has in recent years been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, and of course, has been the subject of numerous critical essays published in journals throughout the world. It seems timely, therefore, to bring together the best and most illuminating of these articles so that interested readers, students and teachers might have easy access to them and become aware of the variety of perspectives and approaches that critics have brought to Achebe’s works. Born in Ogidi, in the eastern part of Nigeria in 1930, Achebe was, as he informs us in the autobiographical essay, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,” originally christened Albert Chinualumogu. His father was an evangelist and church teacher, although many of his relatives and neighbors adhered to the Ibo religion and customs. Thus, Achebe writes, he grew up “at the crossroads of cultures.” ISBN:

0-914478-45-1 0-914478-46-x pbk LC. No: 77-9163

This collection of essays by twenty scholars offers full treatment of Achebe’s career from school to England, back to Nigeria in radio, through the tragic Biafran War of Secession from Nigeria to his present position in African literature and culture. Each of his novels is studied in detail and there is one essay on his poetry. Special essays focus on particular aspects of his work: his language and use of proverbs, the problem of politics and the African writer, and the cultural norms and modes of percep¬ tion of Achebe’s fiction. Other Critical Perspectives already available on Amos Tutuola, Nigerian Literatures, V. S. Naipaul. Up-coming volumes will be devoted to Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Thiong’o, Leon Gontran Damas, Wilson Harris, Aime Cesaire and others.