Chinua Achebe: The lord of misrule

The Igbo have a vast range of proverbs.

The central one is this: “Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.”

In other words, nothing is final or absolute, there is always some other version to consider.

So, when we judge another society from the moral perspective of our own, we should be aware that it is only a perspective; something else stands beside it.

The proverb lies at the heart of Achebe’s ethics.

“What I demand is very difficult: if we are going to pass judgment on fellow humans, we must be really hard on ourselves as well, so that we don’t pass over equivalent horrors in different societies.”

Achebe points to horrors in contemporary American society.

He sees them in the savage populism of the Republican right, in Sarah Palin and in the radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh, who, when we met, had just dismissed American aid to Haiti as some kind of Obama gambit.

Or there’s Pat Robertson, the television evangelist, who said the earthquake happened because the Haitians had sold their souls to the devil.

It may not be twin-chucking, but how far off is it?

“It is dangerous. What I find unbearable is how much of this there is, especially in concealed form. Even your friends are not always aware of what’s going on.”

Always, there is the poorly concealed assumption that there is something wrong with black people.

Worst of all, as he has said, there is an almost therapeutic satisfaction for westerners in contemplating Africa.

“The West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilisation and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.”

Battered by the postcolonial years, some Africans are now attempting, in the glib, self-help phrase, to “move on” by abandoning the charge that the colonisers were the villains and blaming Africans themselves. Achebe, true to that great proverb, sees the strength of this argument, but also, standing alongside, its dangers.