“I think story telling was my life…I was curious…attempting to remember the first one is like attempting to remember the day we were born…I was absolutely fascinated by books and I had a school that understood the value and importance of books and the library. We were not allowed to read text books after classes on a number of days. The principal called it the Textbook Act and we were forbidden to pick up our geography and history books,” says Chinua Achebe, the celebrated Nigerian author in an interview recorded a few months before his death in 2013.
Achebe’s encounters with English literature left him thinking, “… the white man was good, intelligent, reasonable and courageous and the savages were sinister and stupid. I hated their guts. That was my recollection of my encounter with English literature…they had been depicted definitely as not European…they were incapable of creating a civilization and a sustaining one. They saw them in bad light and this was consistent. When I came to a certain age, I was able to draw a line between a good story and a story that is contrived for the public… a story that puts me in the position of a savage jumping up and down the riverside having created nothing…when I began to see that…then it dawned on me one morning that there is something in this story telling…It is my ambition to distinguish between good and bad novels…I am talking about making a human a human.”
Achebe says his parents did not protest when he said he wanted to be a writer, but, “…there was not any rejoicing either. I was lucky in the family I had and have. We do not impose on others…” Achebe agrees that this is not common in Nigerian families to be able to “pursue one’s passions, especially when described as a passion. For me there are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you have an overpowering urge to tell a story. The second is you have the information for a unique story waiting to come out and third, which you learn in the process of becoming, is that you consider the whole project worth the considerable trouble. I have sometimes called it terms of imprisonment you have to endure to bring it to fruition…”
Achebe was in his mid-twenties when he wrote his most famous novel “Things Fall Apart” which tells of the story of a prosperous farmer in the early 1900s and his downfall as the colonial powers captured his country. “I had absolutely no idea…I simply had this strong feeling that there is story waiting to be told….I became famous and I had no idea of fame and things like that…or what the success of a book meant. I had written only one book at that time and so everything that happened to it was the first to me.”
Achebe wrote many books later, became rich, married and had four children. But then the Biarfran war broke out in the sixties and, “Some soldiers went to my office and said they wanted this man Achebe…we hear his pen is very strong we want to compare it to our guns…and the reason is that I wrote a book which ended with a military coup for the first time in Nigeria and two days after the book was published in London there was a military coup in Nigeria…it was mere coincidence but they thought I was the organizer of the coup. There was no point in telling them that if I was planning a coup I would not write a novel…but such humour would be lost on them. I had two children then. I took them and ran away.”
Describing the writing process under duress Achebe says, “It is difficult and the kind of writing you do is different.” At that time he wrote many short stories and poems. He ends the interview poetically, “I think therefore I represent the European individualistic aspiration. A human is human because of other humans represents the African communal aspiration,” says the African author and poet.
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