Day I invited Achebe to Taifa Hall

Chinua Achebe has been dead for one year. When he died, we all praised him and said the legendary father of African literature has passed on.

Achebe died at the age of 82, the same age at which another famous writer, Leo Tolstoy, died; and some scholars wondered whether there were parallels to be drawn from the coincidence.

On this first anniversary, I want to add a personal touch to his memory even as I reflect on his legacy.

In 1988, in my capacity as chairman of the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi, I received a call from Henry Chakava of the East African Educational Publishers.

Chakava asked me if the University of Nairobi and EAEP could co-host Chinua Achebe. “We will pay for his air ticket,” he said, and added, “He doesn’t like flying economy; he prefers first class.” Chakava suggested the University of Nairobi pay for his accommodation in Kenya; and could we book the writer at the Norfolk Hotel?

In order to justify the expense, I wrote to Shem Wandiga, the then Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration and Finance), requesting if we could formally appoint Achebe as visiting professor.

I promised in my memo that the department would ask the Nigerian novelist to give a few lectures to our students. Luckily, my request was granted and the DVC agreed to pay for Achebe’s accommodation. I can’t recall what happened with the Norfolk, but I do remember we ended up booking the author at the Nairobi Safari Club.

When he paid me a courtesy call, Achebe struck me as singularly warm, friendly and unpretentious. I must confess, I had reason to be apprehensive about this encounter with a famous Nigerian.

Long before, I had met Wole Soyinka in America, and this gentleman who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature treated me literally as a non-person.

With Achebe, it was different; it was a pleasant surprise to meet a man, nay, a Nigerian, who turned out to be so charming and so personable.

He made me feel we had been friends all along. I had gone through school reading his books, and here he was, flesh and blood, talking to me like a long-lost brother. The experience was unforgettable.

I walked him to Taifa Hall, where a large audience had gathered to listen to the celebrated writer. And as we were entering the hall, I couldn’t help noticing that there were as many people inside as there were outside.

A banker friend of mine who had never before given me the impression he cared about literature rang me later and told me he stood outside. The only other time I saw such a crowd was when the then Senator Barack Obama spoke at the same venue in 2006.

I sat next to Achebe on the stage. And before I stood to invite him to speak, he leaned towards me, fished out a journal from his briefcase, and asked me in low tones: “Have you read this?”
“Yes,” I whispered.

I had read the journal in which Achebe’s friend Chinweizu had written an article pouring cold water (if you can excuse the cliché) on the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Wole Soyinka.

Chinweizu believed Achebe was the more deserving; but in the same breath he argued that the Nobel Prize was not an African prize, and we shouldn’t pay too much attention to it.

The reason I recall this incident is that it revealed a side of the fabled writer that still makes me cringe. Arrogance, vanity and lack of modesty that are ironically borne of artistic success.

Okay, Soyinka got the Nobel Prize and Achebe didn’t. Soyinka was the first black African to get this prize and he remains the only one to have got it. Nigeria and Africa rejoiced.

So, why was Achebe feeling bad about it? The world is full of many fine writers who for one reason or another will never get the prize. Why this mean-spiritedness in the famous writer?

When he spoke in Taifa Hall, Achebe did something a Kenyan audience couldn’t have expected. He read sections of his newly published novel ­Anthills of the Savannah.

With a somewhat noticeable Nigerian accent, he wasn’t a particularly good reader. But what made some listeners uneasy was the mere fact of reading: they were clearly not used to it.

I didn’t have a problem with that. Having lived and studied in the West, I was used to seeing authors read from their books in order to give their listeners a sense of the intonations and rhythms of their works.

However, the then principal of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Onesmus Mutungi, told me he wasn’t impressed.

Achebe gave lectures in other parts of the country. The one recurrent theme during his lecture tour was the language of African literature.

The Nigerian novelist had taken issue with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s view that African writers should write only in African languages. And to dramatise his rejection of English, Ngugi had, in Decolonizing the Mind, demonised Achebe.

Besides, the Kenyan writer had reinvented the English language and was now referring to our ethnic and tribal languages as national languages; and this was something that didn’t sit comfortably with Achebe.

So, wherever he went, the Nigerian novelist kept harping on what he saw as Ngugi’s dogmatism. “Where one thing stands, another one can also stand,” he would cite the Igbo proverb.

When Achebe’s views were published in an essay called The Politics of Language, the following words rang a bell:

“As long as Nigeria wishes to exist as a nation it has no choice in the foreseeable future but to hold its more than two hundred component nationalities together through an alien language, English. I lived through a civil war in which probably two million people perished over the question of Nigerian unity.”

The irony of criticising Ngugi in his home country when the Kenyan author was in exile did not seem to bother Achebe; he sounded too infuriated to worry about our national sensibilities and sensitivities.

In that year, 1988, Things Fall Apart was a set book for the KCSE exam. Achebe visited a number of schools fielding questions about the book.

This was the third time Achebe’s famous novel had been selected. In 1967, when I sat the Cambridge School Certificate examination, Things Fall Apart was a set text; and it is needless to add that was my first time to engage seriously with the writing of this famous novelist.

In 1978, I was pleasantly surprised when the English teacher at Iten Secondary School invited me to talk about Things Fall Apart to the Form Four class. Reason: the novel was a set book. So, in 1988 Achebe had a captive audience in the schools he visited.

We organised a farewell party for Achebe at the Pan-Afric Hotel, and again I had yet another chance to interact with the novelist. In him I saw a man who was very careful about what he ate and how much he ate; and I also noticed the author did not touch any alcohol, even as he watched a number of us getting drunk.

I bought one of his children’s books which were on display; and when I took it to him for an autograph and told him I was buying it for my son, he asked: “What’s the name of your son?”

“Joseph,” I answered.

I didn’t tell him I had named my son after Joseph Conrad, the man he had called a “bloody racist” in reference to the novella Heart of Darkness.

My son Joseph was born in 1980, the year I obtained my PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, having written a dissertation on Conrad.

I was passionate about the Polish-born English novelist; so, I thought the way to signal my enduring love for him was to give his name to my son. But Achebe would probably have spat on me if I had told him this.

And I didn’t tell Achebe that he was part of the reason I chose to do my doctorate on Conrad. In 1976, when I was a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, I came across a paper Achebe had delivered at Amherst in which he called Joseph Conrad a “bloody racist.”

The paper had no context and Achebe had not done any research in order to write it. Besides, the Nigerian novelist, himself a master of irony, had missed this important stylistic feature in Heart of Darkness.

So, part of my agenda when I embarked on my doctoral research was to argue with the celebrated novelist and to prove him wrong. My other agenda was to disagree with Western critics who had, in my opinion, downplayed Conrad’s impassioned opposition to colonialism.

Generations of Kenyans have engaged with Chinua Achebe. If they weren’t reading Things Fall Apart as a set text, they were reading No Longer at Ease, or Arrow of God, or A Man of the People.

It was, therefore, not surprising that when he visited in 1988, he was treated like a state guest. And when he died, our nation was in mourning.

I began this discussion by referring to the coincidence that Achebe died at the same age as Tolstoy, the greatest novelist that ever lived. But this coincidence of dying at 82 should not mislead us into thinking Achebe was a great writer.

The Nigerian novelist had the potential to be great: but great he was not.

First, he dealt only with one theme, politics or variations of it, leaving out vast areas of human experience unexplored. His justification: writers must tackle the big issues of their society; and that they shouldn’t be like the absurd man who leaves a burning house in pursuit of a rat.

Picture this: after a near-fatal car accident in 1989, Achebe was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But instead of writing about this defining experience as a cripple, he revisited the historically tired theme of Biafran secessionism in a poorly written book called There Was Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

Second, in his later years, this extraordinarily gifted writer was pandering to the vulgar sociologism of the Post-colonial Theory and Cultural Studies, two conceptual constructs championed by scholars who missed out on traditional literary appreciation.

Achebe wasn’t great, but he was the finest writer in Anglophone Africa.

The writer is a professor of stylistics in the Department of Literature, the University of Nairobi [email protected]