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Achebe: the writer as
conscience of the age
By Dan Amor
Given his sturdy intellectual
bulwark and intimidating moral authority, Professor Chinua Achebe�s
rejection of Federal Government�s offer to award him Commander of the
Federal Republic (CFR), easily the second highest national honour of the
land, has taken to the cleaners whatever modicum of image the Obasanjo
administration may have garnered since the past five miserable years. In a
two-page letter to President Olusegun Obasanjo penultimate Friday, Achebe
avers: �Nigeria�s condition under your watch is, however, too dangerous
for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to
accept the high honour awarded me in the 2004 Honours List.� And yet, in a
tone laden with scrupulous candour, the literary icon, arguably Africa�s
greatest novelist has asserted, �I write this letter with a very heavy
heart. For some time now, I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and
dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra
where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high
places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless
fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence,
if not connivance of the Presidency�.
To all intents and purposes, Achebe�s protest,
like his monumental literary output, dwarfs all superlatives. Supposing
this government had an iota of conscience in its moral tea cup, it would
have paused a little to take an honest review of its actions and inactions
after the last warning strike by organised Labour and civil society groups
against its anti-people policies. But in its usual style of cutting
corners and taking Nigerians for a ride, the government rather decided to
roll out its honours list to give dubious awards to some credible
Nigerians and also to some of its court jesters, circus clowns and
intellectual acrobats, just to buy their support and gain credibility.
Indeed, in its current ranking of corrupt nations of the world,
Transparency International has only last week placed Nigeria behind
Bangladesh and Haiti as the third most corrupt nation in the world. Yet,
in spite of Achebe�s follow-up interview with the British Broadcasting
Corporation, BCC, on the issue, where he said that he is too overwhelmed
by the deplorable plight of Nigerians to accept award from the Federal
Government, last Monday, the government still managed to deny knowledge of
Achebe�s rejection of the award. In the interview with the BBC, the
eminent novelist and great teacher had listed nation-wide insecurity, the
comatose economy, bad roads and a wobbly healthcare delivery system as
evidence of the excruciating condition of the people and the abysmal
performance of the Obasanjo administration.
Expectedly, the author of
Things Fall Apart, the classic novel which has
been interpreted into more than 60 languages in 52 countries and sold over
15 million copies, has lived up to his billing as foremost African writer.
In 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. For Achebe, the African novelist as
teacher has three primary functions in relation to his society: as
historian, rescuing its past; as a critic, analyzing its present; as
mentor, helping to guide it towards its future. A careful study of his
writings shows that they highlight the above commitments and motivations.
Those set in the past espouse the African cultural heritage while his more
recent writings, have aimed at ascertaining �where we went wrong�, �where
the rain began to beat us� as a prerequisite to �knowing where to begin to
dry ourselves�. But in all his writings, Achebe has been consistent in the
role he has chosen to play- that of the teacher. And he has not spared the
rod as an instrument of chastisement where necessary.
Achebe has deemed it fit
sometimes to change the focus and direction of his message but the
fundamentals have remained consistent and intact: �Having fought with the
nationalist movements and been on the side of the politicians, I realized
after independence that they and I were now on different sides, because
they were not doing what they had agreed they should do. So I became a
critic �. I was still doing my job as a writer � I think what you do as a
writer depends on the state of your society�, he told Benth Lindfors and
others in Palaver:Interview with Five African Writers, in 1972. It is
therefore this social consciousness and the added complication of a civil
war (the result of the nationalists not doing what they had agreed they
should do} that induced the hiatus in Achebe�s literary career. His early
fiction adequately represented by the enigmatic Things Fall
Apart, tries
to manifest the abuse of power in the persona of its tragic hero, Okonkwo,
who is no less a sheer murderous dictator as contemporary Nigerian rulers.
Achebe�s disillusionment at post-colonial irresponsibility of African
rulers who have shamelessly squandered a promising legacy, is graphically
illustrated in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the
People. And
in Anthills of the Savannah, his major work in 21 years, the doyen of
African novel mirrors, with an unusual candour and wit, satire and humour,
and in a language that is lucid, poignant, natural and overtly poetic, the
sordid reality and erosion of popular will among African countries by
military adventurers, who have reduced the continent to a theatre of war
and a guinea pig for the experimentation of failed economic theories of
Western nations.
It is therefore lamentable
that this generation has failed to heed Achebe�s proposal for the
resolution of his society�s post-colonial tensions which is the most
efficacious for the nation. But he still speaks the thoughts and speaks to
the perplexities and misgivings of his own age. In essence, Achebe has
made us to appreciate more and more the golden truth that the greatness of
any artist or his work, depends on his/its ethical significance, the
extent to which he or his work provides noble grounds for noble emotions.
Surface realism is not enough in itself, though it is important; in
faithfully transcribing and defending his perceptions, the artist must at
the same time educe the ideal truth and beauty which inhere in all
phenomena. The newt-headed ruler might feel pained by the writer�s view
but, like W.E.H Lecky the celebrated 18th century English historian has
observed, men of letters must assume the place of �the clergy in the
direction of the thought of England�. �It is our lay writers�, he says,
�who are moulding the characters and forming the opinions of the age�.
Achebe�s often quoted proverb, that �the man who brings ant-infested
faggots into the hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a
visit�, became manifest when the Second Republic politicians snobbed his
warning and paid dearly for it. As a seer, Achebe is still the custodian
of regenerative wisdom in his society. He is indeed the conscience of the
age. Ignore him to your peril.
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