Magazine
Chinua Achebe: The lord of misrule
Chinua Achebe and former South African president Nelson Mandela. Photo/REUTERS
Posted Monday, February 15 2010 at 00:00
This brings me to shiver number three. There are no accidents.
In 1990, in Nigeria, his car flipped over.
He was in the back seat with his son, who climbed out and stopped traffic simply by shouting: “Chinua Achebe is here.” People rushed to the car and lifted it, freeing Achebe. His back was broken. He was sent to a hospital in Britain.
“A friend of mine came to the hospital where I was being sort of put together again by doctors, and he said, ‘Why would this happen to you?’ I said, ‘Do you have somebody else in mind?’ It was not a good time for jokes, but I couldn’t resist that one.”
The friend’s remark resonated, and he is now inclined to believe the accident was fated.
In a good way? “Yes.
Who knows all the things the divinities that surround us plan for you?
I talk about this deliberately because I think it’s not something we can just ignore and get away with it.
If we want to ignore the arena of the gods, I think we will pay a big price.” Shiver.
The British doctors told him he should go to America for the best care, and so here he is at Bard, exiled by the gods.
Yet even in Nigeria, he was an exile — from his country as a colony of Britain or, later, the oppressor of the Igbo people in the civil war over Biafra or, still later, a cold and corrupt tyranny.
In 1966, his novel A Man of the People satirised corruption in a newly independent African country.
The climax of the book is a military coup.
By an astonishing coincidence — although, remember, there are no accidents, no coincidences — there was an attempted coup in Nigeria almost on the day of the novel’s publication.
Government goons thought Achebe must be in on the plot and went looking for him, saying they wanted to try their guns against his books. The books won. Achebe escaped.
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