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‘The Chinua I know was also the dreamer and thinker; Nwoye’

Thursday March 28 2013
chinua

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Photos/FILE

China Achebe’s home inside the wild fields that surround Bard College outside New York City, was a simple house. A bungalow. No servants. Simple sofas, plants. Cosy, frank and unpretentious.

I cannot remember any giant portraits of himself, small or big – any sense even of his home as a frame for his importance. For the first year as director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Writers and Artists, I always looked for complicated excuses to be invited to come over. He always made it clear I was always welcome, and I was always newly startled to knock, walk in and have tea and chat for hours on his sofa, no secretary, no PA, no daunting edifice blocking access.

That home, its modesty, was not an act of gentleness. It was a fierce palace of the kind of truth he lived, wrote and stood for. The first time I sat next to him on his sofa, my thumbs twiddling nervously, my head wondering whether to bow, kowtow, opine, make jokes, look writerly and intellectual, laugh nervously.

I found myself immediately at peace with myself in his presence. Unlike Okonkwo, this was a man who knew himself, strong enough to doubt himself, who knew fully what power he wielded. He knew in all I saw him do over three years that power, real power needed no private jets, castles, moats and soldiers. Power is given, not taken.

That day, new in my job deciding the fate of an institution that bears his name, I asked him, tip-toeing delicately, how I was to report to him. I wanted a sense, from him, what he wanted out of that institution. He laughed gently and said, “You are free to do what you need to do. Call me Chinua, he said.”

Pause. Pause. Pause!

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I did not tell him that I am a Kenyan, and trained to always let my coloniser, teacher, political master, male ahem-ing elder set the terms. My job is to be good – which means I fold inside and follow.

“What if, what if, what if…I asked Chinua, “we do something your profoundly disagree with.”
“ Well, then,” he said, smiling, “I will let you know.”

Here was a man more famous than the college he worked in, and living in a simple custom-built bungalow, simpler than the homes of many of the middle-classes of Lagos that I had met. When one day, a couple of years after meeting him, I wandered into his home to catch up, and he told me that the specially equipped car he used had malfunctioned badly on his way to hospital for a check-up, my insides folded in shock.

He was calm, measured. His wife was not. He felt that the college had not acted fast to secure a new vehicle. They had, in fact, hired an inappropriate one to serve as a stop-gap.

This elderly man who lost use of his legs in a car accident, did not insist on immediate action, as I most certainly would have in his position. He did not use his position to demand what seemed to me his due. There was no Big Man-ness in his manner or action. The sense that he was owed more than others.

A year did not pass, and he left Bard College, after many many years there, and the Achebe Centre lost its guiding spirit. I do not know whether his leaving for Brown had anything to do with that car. I know that in his certain and unshakeable way he had come to need more than was being provided by Bard, and he had, over the years I knew him, demanded much, much less than he could.

Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece. It cannot be said enough. In all his writing, Chinua managed to domesticate the English language and make it our own. A book at once readable by a teenager, at once walking into the dead centre of an African history and a colonial reality we live with today; at once wisely cutting into the deep well of African wisdom, history, wit, past and present.

Things Fall Apart was and is loved by millions of Africans of many classes and languages, of many countries and backgrounds. We are able to hear its local and global wisdom and separate it from Western book learning. Both these things thrived in all his work: A feeling that the world of Okwonko was the centre of a familiar African world looking into itself and out to the world – an act of decolonisation that continues to evolve in us in so many ways.

Umofia is the history of a million villages, many societies around the world. It has, over the years, become a global book. All of us citizens of the world, find ourselves deeply vulnerable to large shifts in power and imperium, greed and progress, gun and dogma.

We see our power to determine even partly, our own fates, distorted and destroyed; but we also see our futures carried forward and rebuilt. We are left at the end of Things Fall Apart knowing that the battle for good is never finished, it is in our homes, our lusts and loves.

Nwoye, today, becomes the gay son of the ambitious and macho African father, who cannot separate the reality of his son from his own self reverence and ego.

Ikemefuna – sacrificed for fear and ambition. What is a good father? What is a good leader? Okonkwo wishes his daughter was a son – and Chinua allows us to contemplate a world where Ezinma becomes a woman of power and authority. We are always asked by Chinua Achebe to remember that acting out of fear of change makes us tyrants – that we are powerful enough to live with change, with increasing complexity. We can be diverse and aggressive, should never be dogmatic and aggressive.

As Kenya tries to deal with overheated political desires, our future cannot lie in brittle machismo, governed by fear that feeds bloodlust. That way we break and destroy ourselves. Okonkwo had decided to never be his father, the financial failure, the lazy man. He did not know how to listen to history and poetry, the real food for the human soul.

The Chinua I knew, saw and loved — and was a little bit also — the pacifist poet Unoka, Okonkwo’s father. The Chinua I know was also the dreamer and thinker, Nwoye: Okonkwo’s son whose effeminate ways, and quiet defiance could not be silenced by his father’s ambitions.

The Chinua I knew was also the writer who celebrated and chided his tragic warrior son, Okwonko, a man who promised so much, a man who let down his family and his society because he had power but no grace or wisdom, no generosity of spirit, no vision to see what was coming.

Here we see the warnings of fate to our warlords, and our elected leaders. Africa is moving again, and fate is speaking loud and fast.

History will judge you now, not when you are dead. We live in those sorts of times. Chinua Achebe led. He was a man of the people. Fearless and good. The African I want to be, one who fights for the best of all of us, and not the lusts of some.

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