Chinua Achebe: The lord of misrule

Later, as a supporter of the breakaway Igbo republic of Biafra, he was again a target for the goons and was again forced into exile, this time abroad.

It is a grim history, made grimmer by the litany of dashed hopes.

Achebe remembers the night in 1957 when Ghana gained independence.

In Lagos, they celebrated all night.

The optimism crumbled through the subsequent years of conflict and corruption across the continent.

He uses the word “disappointed” dozens of times in our conversation.

Why did postcolonial Africa fail?

Why, Mandela apart, did it produce such poor leaders?

Achebe does not have an answer — although, tentatively, he suggests the fact that the cold war was often fought in Africa had something to do with it — but his analysis of the question is profound and requires careful unpacking, as it lies at the centre of his life and work.

Two books by white men about Africa — Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — represented Africans as, in the first case, dumb losers and, in the second, as subhuman.

Yet both, especially the Conrad, are hailed as great exposés of the evils of colonialism.

Africa seemed, even in the imagination of the most liberal whites, to be a dark emptiness, devoid of culture and civilisation.

Things Fall Apart, with its depiction of the intricacies of Igbo culture and religion, reveals the absurdity of the idea.

On the other hand, I say, it was a brutal society that oppressed women, sacrificed humans and even abandoned newborn twins as some kind of evil.

“Brutality certainly occurred, but I would say that is the nature of all societies. You look at the Igbo and see something vicious, like the throwing away of twins — do you then say this is a savage society that has no right to be heard? My answer is, you can’t, because if you look at any society fully, you won’t find one that can be excused on all these issues. It boils down to what we call evil.”