Now, the extraordinary thing about this is that a few years later I was to hear the very same testimony again, except that this time around it came from a very distinguished black American—James Baldwin, no less. He was responding to a question put to him at the African Literature Association Conference in Gainsville, Florida, in 1980:
When I read Things Fall Apart in Paris … the Ibo tribe in Nigeria … a tribe I never saw; a system, to put it that way, or a society the rules of which were a mystery to me … I recognized everybody in it. That book was about my father… How he got over I don’t know but he did.1
No one can suggest that every reader or indeed that many readers of Things Fall Apart should come up with similar recognitions. That would make Okonkwo Everyman, which he certainly is not; he is not even Every-Igbo-Man. But it does suggest that in spite of serious cultural differences it is possible for readers in the West to identify, even deeply, with characters and situations in an African novel.
The young women from Korea responded to a very wide range of topics in the book, but I can only touch upon a few key issues which, in a way, are also representative of responses that have come to me from other quarters over the years. But there was also something I was hearing for the first time—that Koreans can draw a parallel between the colonization of the Igbo people by the British in the nineteenth century and that of their own country by Japan in the twentieth. I must say that the depth of bitterness I could glimpse from several of these letters concerning colonization was more profound than anything one encounters in Africa today. And it must have worked to unlock to these youngsters the door to Okonkwo’s suffering mind and bring close a tragedy that happened so far away and long ago. And issuing out of that shared community of pain, some of them wanted to know from me why, in their own words, I let Okonkwo fail.
This question in one form or another has been repeatedly asked of me by a certain kind of reader: Why did you allow a just cause to stumble and fall? The best I can do for an answer is to say that it is in the nature of things. Which leads me directly into the carefully laid ambush of the doctrinaire: “Well, we knew you would say that. But it is not enough for us that our art should merely report the nature of things; it should aim to change it.”
I agree of course about good art changing things. But it doesn’t go about it with the uncomplicated, linear equivalency of sympathetic magic that would send its practitioner scouring the forest for spotted leaves to cure a patient who has broken out in spots. That is not medicine but charlatanism.
Good causes can and do fail even when the people who espouse and lead them are not themselves in one way or another severely flawed.
This is of course the stuff of tragedy in literature, with its many intricate ways of affecting us which I cannot get into here. But I do want to suggest that the concepts of success and failure as commonly used in this connection are inadequate. Did Okonkwo fail? In a certain sense, obviously yes. But he also left behind a story strong enough to make those who hear it even in faraway Korea wish devoutly that things had gone differently for him. More than one Korean student took issue with me over the manner of his dying. Again this is a matter that has come up before in discussions and in criticism. I don’t know what Korean traditional culture teaches about suicide. Western culture, we know, views it as a species of moral cowardice, or simply as a “copping out,” thus trivializing it into a matter between an individual and his problems. In Okonkwo’s world it is a monumental issue between an individual on the one hand and, on the other, society and all its divinities, including titulary gods and ancestors—indeed, the entire cosmos. A suicide puts himself beyond every conceivable pale. Okonkwo is a rash man, and it is unlikely that he has reasoned out the Igbo saying that the thought which leads a man to kill himself cannot be merely one night old. Events have been urging him towards total rupture with his world.
Finally, when this world crumbles so miserably and so disgracefully under attack, Okonkwo, who has never learnt to live with failure, separates himself from it with ultimate eschatological defiance.
While on the subject of last things, I might as well bring up in conclusion the question of the very last words of the novel, which, as I recall, used to embroil critics in considerable argument. The distinguished American scholar and teacher Jules Chametzky opens his book Our Decentralized Literature with a discussion of that aspect of the novel. Since his point agrees completely with what I might call the narrative intention of the story’s ending, I shall save my breath and quote somewhat lengthily from it:
In the last paragraph of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart—perhaps the most memorable account in English of an African culture and the impact on it of white European encroachment—the voice and language of the book shifts with startling abruptness… Anyone who has read or taught this novel can testify to the outrageous reductionism of this last paragraph, especially its last sentence. It is chilling, but ultimately fulfills the enlightening effort of the whole book. Obviously it forces us to confront the “Rashomon” aspect of experience—that things look different to different observers and that one’s very perceptions are shaped by the social and cultural context out of which one operates.2
That about sums up the mission of Things Fall Apart, if a novel could be said to have a mission.
1991
Martin Luther King and Africa
I did not have the good fortune of meeting Martin Luther King, but his work, his thought, and his death left a strong feeling that this man belonged to Africa in a very special sense—a sense that goes far beyond the fact that his ancestors were brought to America from Africa, important as that fact may be. Martin Luther King had no choice in his involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, but he did make a choice—and an emphatic one—to embrace the pain and suffering of the African continent. His vision of an America in which the structures of racism must be challenged and brought down by sheer moral force began early in Dr. King’s life to incorporate the problems of Africa and its people.
In preparation for his work, Dr. King had cultivated many friendships and personal relationships with African students in America. In 1957, he and his wife journeyed to Africa to be present at the independence celebrations of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, that flagship of modern Africa’s voyage into political freedom. Dr. King was only twenty-eight years old at that time. I shall return shortly to the often forgotten fact of Dr. King’s youth and precocity. For the moment I want to stress his eagerness to forge close ties with African leaders in all parts of the continent: Albert Luthuli in South Africa, Ahmed Ben Bella in the north, Kwame Nkrumah in the west, Tom Mboya in the east, Kenneth Kaunda in south-central, and so on. Dr. King had gone for progressive leaders in strategic locations.
In 1957, the same year that he attended Ghana’s independence, Dr. King, with Eleanor Roosevelt and Bishop James Pike, sponsored a document signed by 130 world leaders urging the international community to protest against apartheid. In 1962, he sponsored with Albert Luthuli an “Appeal for Action Against Apartheid,” an early call for sanctions against South Africa, whose political system he described as “a medieval segregation organized with twentieth-century efficiency and drive; a sophisticated form of slavery.”
Why was it that Martin Luther King, in preparation for his great work in these United States, made so much commitment so early to the fortunes of Africa? Why did he not evince that debilitating ambivalence which so many African-Americans show towards Africa or suffer that awkwardness which so many of us Africans and African-Americans suffer in each other’s presence, that historical alienation which James Baldwin in his early days had called “the African conundrum,” with the suggestion of a bitter, immemorial grievance.
I bring in James Baldwin to these reflections because he was so uncompromisingly brilliant and clear-eyed, with such an uncommon gift of eloquence in defining our condition and for spelling our proper name. But even he had had this “problem” with Africa and had been so exasperated by it that in his earlier days
he once lamented the “fact” that his African ancestors did nothing but sit around waiting for white slavers to arrive!
If that picture of African history was anywhere close to what happened, quite clearly Africa would have to accept the responsibility for an unnatural and indescribable crime for which “conundrum” would be a generous understatement. For we are talking about the transatlantic slave trade, that horrendous event which Basil Davidson, the distinguished British historian, has called “the greatest and most fateful migration—forced migration—in the history of man,” and which others might go further and call the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world.
Some time ago, in a heated TV discussion on multiculturalism and curriculum content, a professor of history from a prestigious American university in an abrupt switch of focus declared that it was Africans who captured their own people in the hinterland and sold them to white people on the coast. He didn’t say what the whites were doing on the African coast thousands of miles from their own homes. Perhaps we are to believe that the whites were holidaying on Africa’s sunny beaches! We must put fairy tales aside and resume our search for the truth. Not only from excellent schools and schoolmen, for they can be so disappointing. Basil Davidson frankly admits the problem. “The records are copious,” he writes, “but mainly they are European records and they are colored indelibly by the myth and prejudice which the [slave] trade itself did so much to promote.”1
It is that problem that has bequeathed to the world the conventional wisdom in which we have all been “educated”: a scenario in which the victim is blamed for the crime—either for his inferiority, which once was held to justify it, or his participation, which is now touted as the cause of it.
Fortunately, truth is rarely completely lost or irrecoverable. Even in the very archives of Europe, there are entries here and there that point us in more hopeful and rational directions. In the archives of Portugal, for example, there are moving appeals from the king of Congo to his “royal brother” the king of Portugal to restrain Portuguese slavers in the African kingdom.
Through the long night of the slave-trading centuries, skeptical voices questioning the conventional wisdom of their times also lightened the darkness in sporadic flashes. For example, when Thomas Jefferson compared Negroes to whites and concluded that Negroes were inferior in all but memory, that Euclid was beyond their reasoning powers, and that in imagination they were “dull, tasteless and anomalous,” another American, one Imlay White, told him respectfully that nothing could be
more uncertain and false than estimating and comparing the intellect and talents of two descriptions of men: one enslaved, degraded and fettered … the other free, independent and with the advantage of appropriating the reason and science which have been the result of the study and labors of the philosophers and sensible men for centuries back.2
That unequal exchange, favoring Jefferson in fame and public esteem and Imlay White in quality of argument, demonstrates in my view the hope and attractiveness of American life, its stubborn promise, not always fulfilled but ready to reenter the fray between reason and canon.
Two decades after Baldwin’s terrible comment on his African ancestors, he and I finally met in 1980 for the first, and sadly last, time at the annual conference of the African Literature Association in Gainesville, Florida. He had obviously come to see the conventional attitudes to his ancestors and their history for what they were. In a public dialogue between us he called me “a brother I have not seen in 400 years” and added emotionally: “It was never intended that we should meet.”3 In other words, there was a third party implicated in our soured relationship.
Martin Luther King either did not suffer Baldwin’s kind of anguish about his African connection or else got over it very early and very fast. And it was just as well, because as we all know now he was not to be allowed too much time. I said at the beginning that we often forget how young King was when he died. Thirty-nine! And we are not talking about a champion athlete or boxer who must achieve his peak early, but a thinker/activist who must grow, meditate on his mission, and mature into action. Mahatma Gandhi at the age of thirty-nine had not even returned to India!
King learned from Gandhi that human beings have a fundamental obligation to respect life even in the thick of a just struggle, for if they should forget or suspend this obligation and violate the lives of others, they would cheapen their own lives and their very humanity. But these thoughts could just as well have come to Martin Luther King out of the great Bantu dictum on humanity’s indivisibility: Umuntu ngumuntu nqabantu, “A human is human because of other humans.” We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: “He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.” How much of African thoughts and memories—half forgotten, disguised, or repressed—lives on in the minds and hearts of African-Americans, we shall never know.
If you ask me what I think makes Martin Luther King worthy of the honor and celebration we accord his memory today, I will say it is two things: what he achieved himself, and what he stands for in a long line of a people’s struggle for freedom and justice.
First, his personal achievement. I am not concerned here about marches and boycotts, great and important though they were, but rather about a man who struggled to conquer in himself both fear and hate, two of humanity’s most destructive and limiting emotions. I want to stress struggled and conquered. The struggling is as important as the conquering, perhaps more, because it is that—the fact that the outcome was never a foregone conclusion, that our hero did not enter the stage fully formed and destined to win; that he began where most of us stand today, vulnerable to fear and prejudice and all the other frailties of our human condition; and yet he struggled and won victories—it is that which makes us kin to the hero and enables us to become beneficiaries of his heroic journey and able to derive from it the energy and hope to dare the obstacles on our own little side roads. That is what Martin Luther King should say to each of us, individually.
Second, he is important as a staging post in a long history of black struggle going back to the first revolts, and as a signpost for future battles. It is important to have this historical perspective, because it is the correct one and because it saves us from the heresy that there was once a golden age of tyranny when its victims were quite happy with their oppression.
A white American missionary, J. Lowrie Anderson, working in Nairobi, reported an incident which took place between him, another American, and a Kenyan soon after King’s assassination:
As a colleague and I sat down to tea with an African friend he said bitterly: “We hate you Americans. You killed our Martin Luther King.” My colleague replied: “Yes, I was ashamed of being an American—until I remembered that Martin Luther King was an American also. Then I was proud.”
It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor.
1992
This essay originated as a talk given at the King Holiday Celebration, January 20, 1992, at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics
There is a story about Bernard Shaw arriving at the New York harbor in the days of sea travel, stepping off the ship, and being immediately mobbed by journalists. But before even the quickest of them could open his mouth, Bernard Shaw had fired off his response and stopped them cold: Don’t ask me what you should do to be saved; the last time I was here I told you and you haven’t done it!
I feel very much like that about this whole national debate business which our military has imposed on us. We know what we should do and we refuse to do it. Instead, we are going about “blowing grammar” all over the place, as if our problem stemmed from insufficient shouting. So I turned down or simply
ignored all invitations to join the charade. But then the University of Nigeria asked me to participate in a debate “organized solely for a university as an integral community in the Nigerian family, expected to be in the mainstream and not in the periphery of Nigerian affairs.” I couldn’t quite say no to this particular call, having coming as it does from my very backyard.
And I was asked specifically to reflect on the problem of leadership, on which my stand is probably well known in Nigeria; so the forum’s organizers seemed to be inviting me to answer some well canvassed criticisms of that stand. It was altogether too enticing!
My little book The Trouble with Nigeria, published on the eve of President Shehn Shagari’s second term, opens with the following words:
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership.
So the question of leadership was and is preeminent, in my mind, among Nigeria’s numerous problems. The little book does go on to identify others, such as tribalism, corruption, indiscipline, social injustice, indulgence for mediocrity, et cetera. But my thesis is that without good leadership none of the other problems stands a chance of being tackled, let alone solved.