Chinua Achebe: The lord of misrule

Names matter. He was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, a member of the Igbo nation, in Nigeria in 1930.

His father had been converted from the religion of his ancestors by Christian missionaries and had become a missionary himself.

Hence the British Christian name.

At university, 18 years later, the son dropped the Albert and adopted the abbreviation Chinua as his first name.

The long version means “may Chi fight for me.” “Chi” is one’s personal god.

Achebe now has a four-year-old grandson, also called Chinua.

Brought up in America, Chinua Jr recently asked his father what his exotic name meant.

His dad translated it as “may God fight for me.”

The boy looked puzzled. “But,” he said, “God is good, he doesn’t fight.”

Achebe smiles, broadening and deepening the thick creases that bracket his mouth.

The story, with its theme of identity and religious confusion, combined with its persistence down the generations, satisfies him.

No story ever really ends.

“So this story is not nearly ended, and I am not unhappy about that. I’m not one of those people who wants to see the end of contests over religion.” I shiver as he says this.

To be honest, he makes me shiver about every five minutes.

You don’t interview this man, you sit at his feet and listen.

Carefully. He is one of the giants of our age.

In 1958, he produced Things Fall Apart, one of the great novels of the 20th century.

It tells the story of Okonkwo, a brilliant, brutal, fatally proud Igbo warrior who is brought down by his confrontation with white missionaries.

The book made Achebe, in Nadine Gordimer’s words, the “father of modern African literature.”

Here’s another, bigger shiver.

His father made one attempt to convert his own uncle from the polytheistic Igbo faith to Christianity.

The uncle was a man of immense authority, bearing three out of four of his clan’s most senior titles.

At his nephew’s approach, the uncle gestured at the elaborate regalia that went with the titles.

“Look at these regalia,” he said. “What would I do with them if I converted?”

His father was crushed and never tried again.

But the question burned in the imagination of his son.

“I have extended that question throughout my life. What do I do with my regalia, my history? What do I do with who I am?” No story ever really ends.

We are sitting in a “multi­purpose room” in snowbound Bard College, 90 miles north of New York, where Achebe has been teaching for 20 years.

Amazingly, he is in the process of moving to a new job at Brown University, in Rhode Island.

He is in a wheelchair, which is why he is in America and not Nigeria.

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.

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.”

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.

“It sounds quite appropriate to say, ‘Let’s not blame others, let’s take responsibility’, and I’m all for that, but I don’t go as far as to say the colonial experience had nothing to do with it, because that’s not the case. Just look at the history — it is both, it is one thing and another stands beside it.”

He knows Africa has to ask itself some hard questions, but he also knows Africans do not seem to want to do it.

In a flash of insight in his new collection of essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child, he sees that Nigeria is neither a motherland nor a fatherland, it is a childland.

Nigeria needs to be taught. “Nigeria,” he writes, “is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward... Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting.”

The essays, like his conversation and, indeed, his novels, are models of clarity, care and thoughtfulness.

They are the product of a western-educated mind, but are suffused with an Igbo sensibility.

Proverbs abound, as well as a sense of surrounding divinities.

He concludes with a Bantu saying: “A human is a human because of other humans.”

Achebe has just started a new novel, and he’s moving to Brown.

He bears his age and his handicap with astonishing lightness, perhaps because of the first thing he said to me — he has noticed, with age, that both the Igbo religion and language seem to be reasserting themselves.

It is a confusing consolation.

“Maybe as one grows older, or for some other reason, there are moments in one’s life when the things I liked, rejected or feared as a child come back and regain some of the energy they seemed to have lost between childhood and now, and my own position becomes a little confusing...”

He struggles to pull on an anorak as I go to look for the man who will wheel him away.

The man appears, then, haloed by divinities, Chinualumogu Achebe is gone. No story ever really ends.

The Sunday Times