Those were not jet days, and my journey home entailed an overnight stop in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. The manager of the rather nice hotel where I stayed spotted me at dinner, came over and introduced himself, and sat at my table for a chat. It was a surprise; I thought he was coming to eject me. He had been manager of the Ambassador Hotel in Accra, Ghana. From him I learnt that Victoria Falls was only twenty-odd miles away and that a bus went there regularly from the hotel.
So the next morning I boarded the bus. From where I sat—next to the driver’s seat—I missed what was going on in the vehicle. When finally I turned around, probably because of a certain unnatural silence, I saw with horror that everyone around me was white. As I had turned round they had averted their stony gazes, whose hostility I had felt so palpably at the back of my head. What had become of all the black people at the bus stop? Why had no one told me? I looked back again and only then took in the detail of a partition and a door.
I have often asked myself what I might have done if I had noticed the separate entrances before I boarded; and I am not sure.
Anyhow, there I was sitting next to the driver’s seat in a Jim Crow bus in Her Majesty’s colony of Northern Rhodesia, later to be known as Zambia. The driver (black) came aboard, looked at me with great surprise, but said nothing.
The ticket collector appeared as soon as the journey got under way. I did not have to look back anymore: my ears were now like two antennae on each side of my head. I heard a bolt move and the man stood before me. Our conversation went something like this:
TICKET COLLECTOR: What are you doing here?
CHINUA ACHEBE: I am traveling to Victoria Falls.
T.C.: Why are you sitting here?
C.A.: Why not?
T.C.: Where do you come from?
C.A.: I don’t see what it has to do with it. But if you must know, I come from Nigeria, and there we sit where we like in the bus.
He fled from me as from a man with the plague. My European co-travelers remained as silent as the grave. The journey continued without further incident until we got to the falls. Then a strange thing happened. The black travelers in the back rushed out in one huge stampede to wait for me at the door and to cheer and sing my praises.
I was not elated. A monumental sadness descended on me. I could be a hero because I was in transit, and these unfortunate people, more brave by far than I, had formed a guard of honor for me!
The awesome waterfall did not revive my spirits. I walked about wrapped in my raincoat and saw the legendary sight and went back to the terminal and deliberately walked into the front of another bus. And such is the speed of hopeful news in oppressed places that nobody challenged me. And I paid my fare!
And so I never did go to South-West Africa (Namibia) in 1961. And neither did Wolfgang Zeidler twenty-five years later, for very different reasons. It is a curious little story, which came my way in 1988 when I went to lecture at the University of California at Berkeley.
A librarian there showed me a letter she had received from a friend of hers in Germany to whom she had once introduced my book Things Fall Apart. This friend, according to the letter, had then loaned the book to his neighbor, who was a distinguished judge. The reason for the loan was that the judge was planning with much enthusiasm to immigrate to Namibia after his retirement and accept the offer made to him to become a constitutional consultant to the Namibian regime. He planned to buy a big farm out there and spend his retirement in the open and pleasant air of the African veldt.
His neighbor, no doubt considering the judge’s enthusiasm and optimism rather excessive, if not downright unhealthy, asked him to read Things Fall Apart on his flight to or from Namibia. Which he apparently did. The result was dramatic. In the words of the letter shown to me, the judge said that “he had never seen Africa in that way and that after having read that book he was no more innocent.” And he closed the Namibia chapter.
Elsewhere in the letter, the judge was described as a leading constitutional judge in Germany; as a man with “the sharpest intelligence.” For about twelve years he had been president of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the highest constitutional court in Germany. In short, he was the kind of person the South Africans would have done much to have in their corner, a man whose presence in Namibia would give considerable comfort to the regime there. His decision not to go was obviously a triumph of common sense and humanity over stupidity and racial bigotry.
But how was it that this prominent German jurist carried such a blind spot about Africa all his life? Did he never read the papers? Why did he need an African novel to open his eyes? My own theory is that he needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others.
I offer the story of the judge, Wolfgang Zeidler, as a companion piece to the fashionable claim made even by writers that literature can do nothing to alter our social and political condition. Of course it can!
1989
Spelling Our Proper Name
In the year 1962, even as gale-force winds of decolonization were sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa, a truly extraordinary meeting convened at Makerere University, Uganda, in East Africa.
No such conference had ever happened before; nor will its like happen again. Young African writers from newly independent nations and from countries yet to achieve freedom gathered together to discuss the goals of literature in the beautiful city of Kampala. We were all so young, so new to our task, so full of zeal and optimism.
An American visitor walked into our deliberations—venerable, even avuncular. The better informed amongst us said he was a famous writer, but just how famous we had no way really of knowing; our education had not run along those lines. His name was Langston Hughes. Without saying much, he seemed to preside naturally over our debate and bless our youthful zealousness with a wise benevolence. Actually, there were two visitors; the other was the tall, scholarly Saunders Redding.
A couple of years after the historic Makerere University meeting, I was awarded an open travel fellowship by UNESCO and I elected to go to the United States and Brazil. I think that the strong impression made on me by Langston Hughes—his deus ex machina appearance at that critical moment in the intellectual and literary history of modern Africa, and that unspoken message of support and solidarity after three hundred years of brutal expatriation—I think all that played a part in my choice of countries to visit. I wanted to see something of the situation of the African diaspora in its two major concentrations in the New World.
Langston Hughes showed me one more benign gesture of friendship when he heard I was in New York and invited me, a completely unknown apprentice writer, to a meal and a seat of honor beside himself at a performance of the opera Street Scene, for which he had written the lyrics.
There is a thread running through these introductory, anecdotal ramblings. That thread is the African/American connection. I mean “African/American” in two senses: first, as a definition of a peculiar intercontinental relationship between Africans and Americans, and second, and more importantly, as the current appellation for that person created out of mankind’s greatest crime against humanity—the slave trade. There is no scale for weighing human suffering, but in sheer horror of size and scope, in its duration and the continuity of its consequence, the transatlantic slave trade was “as infinite as man may undergo.” The victims of this catastrophe have been struggling for centuries now against their cruel fate on both sides of the Atlantic: on one side, scratching the soil of ruined farms in a devastated continent; on the other, toiling in the sweltering aftermath of captivity.
The nightmare lasted so long and the distances traversed were so vast that communication was breached between home and diaspora; even memory lapsed, and the two sides lost each other; they forgot who they were, their proper name. One side earned the name of slaves, and the other of savages. Oppression renames its victims, brands them as a farmer brands his cattle with a common signature. It always aims to subvert the individual spiri
t and the humanity of the victim; and the victim will more or less struggle to remove oppression and be free.
Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman’s bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means an awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!
I should like at this point to refer to two stories told by the ancestors of two different peoples in two widely separated parts of the world, perhaps more widely separated in contemporary imagination than in reality.
You remember that episode in The Odyssey where Odysseus tricks the Cyclops Polyphemus into calling him Noman, and how that mistake costs Polyphemus the help he might have received from his neighbors when he raises “a great and terrible cry.” Of course we are not expected to shed tears for Polyphemus, for he is after all a horrible, disgusting cannibal. Nevertheless the story does make the point that in any contest—leaving aside who is right or who is wrong—an adversary who fails to recognize his opponent by his proper name puts himself at risk.
From Homer and the Greeks to the Igbo of Nigeria. There is a remarkable little story which I took the liberty of adapting to my use in Things Fall Apart, and which I am going to go on and adapt still further here. It is the story of Tortoise and the Birds. I will summarize it for those not familiar with my novel. The birds have been invited to a great feast in the sky, and Tortoise is pleading with them to take him along. At first they are skeptical, because they know how greedy and unreliable he is. But Tortoise manages to convince them that he is now a changed person, a born-again Tortoise, no less. So the birds agree and donate a feather each to make him a pair of wings. Not only that, they let themselves fall for Tortoise’s story that it is customary on such an important outing for people to take new names. The birds have, of course, never heard of this custom but consider it rather charming and adopt it. They all take fanciful, boastful praise-names like Master of the Sky, Queen of the Earth, Streak of Lightning, Daughter of the Rainbow, and so on. The Tortoise then announces his own choice. It is very strange indeed; he is to be called You All. The birds shriek with laughter and congratulate themselves on having such a funny man on their trip.
When they arrive in the Sky and the Sky people set a great feast before them, Tortoise jumps up and asks: “Who is this feast intended for?”
“You All, of course,” reply the hosts. “You heard them,” says Tortoise to the birds. “The feast is for me. My name is You All.”
The birds do take their revenge by repossessing their feathers and leaving Tortoise high and dry in the Sky. But that does nothing to assuage their hunger as they fly all the way back to earth on growling empty stomachs.
So the message is clear: we must not let an adversary, real or potential, assume a false name even in playfulness. It makes little difference to the victim whether the trickster calls himself Nobody, as in the Greek story, or Everybody, as in the Igbo.
Few writers have understood the ways of oppression or written more memorably about them than James Baldwin. “If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go,” he tells his nephew.1An Igbo elder in Nigeria, using different words, might have said exactly the same thing to the youngster: “If you can’t tell where the rain began to beat you, you will not know where the sun dried your body.”
Literal-minded, one-track-mind people have always been exasperated by the language of prophets, as when Baldwin says to his nephew:
You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said: The very time I thought I was lost my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.
A bitter critic of Baldwin, Stanley Crouch, writing in The Village Voice, accused Baldwin of
simplifications … that … convinced black nationalist automatons that they were the descendants of kings and queens brought in slave ships and should therefore uncritically identify with Africa.
Baldwin could never advocate an uncritical identification with anything. His mind was too good for that. He always insisted that people should weigh things for themselves and come to their own judgment:
“Take no one’s word for anything, including mine,” he says to his nephew, “but trust your experience.”
Baldwin felt deeply, instinctively, most powerfully, the need for the African-American to know whence he came before he can know where he is headed.
The simplistic answer would be: he came from Africa, of course. Not for Baldwin, however, any simple answers. He had too much intelligence and integrity for that. “What is Africa to me?” asked an African poet who never left the motherland. Imagine, then, the tumult of questions in the soul of a man like Baldwin after three or four hundred traumatic years of absence. So in his anguished tribute to Richard Wright, he speaks of the Negro problem and the fearful conundrum of Africa.
Fearful conundrum, a terrifying problem admitting of no satisfactory solution. I am not an African-American. It would be impertinent of me to attempt to unravel that conundrum. But let me suggest two strands in its hideously tangled tissue of threads. One: the Africans sold us to Europeans for cheap trinkets. Two: Africans have made nothing of which we can be proud.
I am not sure whether or not Baldwin referred specifically to the allegation of African complicity in the slave trade. But he was seriously troubled as a young man by Africa’s lack of achievement. In the famous statement in “Stranger in the Village” he contrasts his African heritage most adversely with that of a very humble European: a Swiss peasant.
The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances came Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in full glory—but I am in Africa watching the conquerors arrive.
This lament issues from a soul in torment and cannot be ignored. But before we look at it, let me say two things. First, I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety. Flowing from that, it is not necessary for black people to invent a great fictitious past in order to justify their human existence and dignity today. What they must do is recover what belongs to them—their story—and tell it themselves.
The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally. That must change and is indeed beginning to change, but not without resistance or even hostility. So much psychological, political, and economic interest is vested in the negative image. The reason is simple. If you are going to enslave or to colonize somebody, you are not going to write a glowing report about him either before or after. Rather you will uncover or invent terrible stories about him so that your act of brigandage will become easy for you to live with.
About A.D. 1600, a Dutch traveler to Benin in modern Nigeria had no difficulty comparing the city of Benin rather favorably with Amsterdam. The main street of Benin, he wrote, was seven or eight times wider than its equivalent—the Warmoes—in Amsterdam. The houses were in as good a state as the houses in Ams
terdam.
Two hundred and fifty years later, before the British sacked the same city of Benin, they first described it as the “City of Blood,” whose barbarism so revolted their civilized conscience that they simply had to dispatch a huge army to overwhelm it, banish its king, and loot its royal art gallery for the benefit of the British Museum and numerous private collections. All this was done, it was said with the straightest of faces, to end repugnant practices like human sacrifice. No mention whatsoever of a commercial motive—the penetration of a rich palm and rubber hinterland by British trading interests!
British penetration of West Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century was not achieved only on the field of battle, as in Benin, but at home also, in churches, schools, newspapers, novels, et cetera by the denigration of Africa and its people. The frankness of those days was nowhere better demonstrated than in an editorial by The Times of London expressing its outrage at the decision of Durham University to affiliate with Fourah Bay College in West Africa. The Times asked Durham quite pointedly if it might consider affiliating with the zoo!
Apart from the vast quantity of offensive and trashy writing about Africa in Victorian England, there also developed later a more serious “colonial genre,” as biographer and historian Jeffrey Meyers calls it, beginning with Kipling in the 1880s, proceeding through Conrad to its apogee in E. M. Forster and ending with Joyce Cary and Graham Greene, even as colonialism itself began to end.
John Buchan was in the middle ground between the vulgar and the serious in this body of work. He was also interesting for combining a very senior career in the British colonial service with novel writing. What he says about natives in his novels takes on, therefore, an additional political significance. Here is what an “approved” character in his novel Prester John says: