Abstract
Achebe’s own life merits examination as part of an analysis of language and politics in his narratives because he personally navigated, competing politically volatile structures of power. He demonstrated along the way a combination of respect and defiance toward tradition and authority that his fiction dramatizes. Achebe’s role as a late colonial and postcolonial African artist and spokesman, his perspectives on Metropolitan culture and Nigerian politics to a vast African and international audience, and his creation of a narrative counterpoint comprising African and Western traditions, paralleled the negotiations, and bridging, of contested spheres of discourse and influence in his fictional narratives. Achebe’s direct yet dignified efforts to speak truth to power earned him lasting international acclaim.
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Notes
- 1.
Concerning the articulation of the African viewpoint, as well as other elements of the present discussion, see Achebe’s comment in There Was a Country: A Memoir:
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time [the independence era] was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective—in full earshot of the world.… It was important to us [writers] that a body of work be developed of the highest possible quality that would oppose the negative discourse in some of the novels we encountered. By “writing back” to the West we were attempting to reshape the dialogue between the colonized and the colonizer. Our efforts, we hoped, would broaden the world’s understanding, appreciation, and conceptualization of what literature meant when including the African voice and perspective. (53, 55)
- 2.
See Elleke Boehmer: “The death of the African literary giant Chinua Achebe, at the age of eighty-two, on 21 March 2013, will do nothing to dim his assured status as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.… Here was a writer whose vision had shaped not only [Nigeria’s] understanding of itself but also, and as profoundly, Anglophone world letters” (“Achebe” 237).
- 3.
In There Was a Country Achebe states that “the Igbo are a very democratic people” (246) and recalls that, as a member of Biafra’s National Guidance Committee,
[he] preferred democratic institutions not in the purely Western sense but in a fusion of the good ideas of the West with the best that we had produced in our ancient African civilizations.… It was not enough in my view to state that we wanted to be radical and create a left-wing manifesto, but we also certainly did not want to be right wing. It was that ancient traditional virtue I wanted to channel into the Ahiara Declaration. (There Was a Country 146–47)
He also asserts in that volume that “it is [now] a time to work at developing, nurturing, sustaining, and protecting democracy and democratic institutions” (247).
- 4.
In The Education of a British-Protected Child, for example, Achebe characterizes “Fanaticism” as “The One Way, One Truth, One Life menace” (5). For other comments by Achebe that challenge unreflective adherence to a single point of view, see in Chapter 8 the quotation from his interview with Robert Serumaga and the related endnote.
- 5.
Achebe himself makes a related point: “So we were very much a people of the Church.… But you see I took it [Igbo cultural traditions such as dancing, singing, and masquerades] all in. And in retrospect that was really what created the tension in me that a story needs to come about” (Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Voice ch. 6).
- 6.
Booker would also include Michel Foucault’s critique of such thinking as one of the most important. Also, Booker rightly stipulates that dualistic thinking is not embraced in the West alone (“Beauty” 992). With regard to the subordinating effects of colonial dualistic concepts, an essential contribution is that by Frantz Fanon, who, according to Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, “was able to characterize the colonial dichotomy (colonizer–colonized) as the product of a ‘manichaeism delerium’ [a term used in his book Black Skin, White Masks], the result of which condition is a radical division into paired oppositions such as good–evil; true–false; white–black, in which the primary sign is axiomatically privileged in the discourse of the colonial relationship” (Empire 124–25).
- 7.
Sources consulted for this overview of Chinua Achebe’s life and education include his memoir, There Was a Country; Egejuru; Ezenwa-Ohaeto.
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Lynn, T.J. (2017). Introduction. In: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51331-7_1
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