Last week Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was awarded the 2018 PEN Pinter prize, given to someone who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world. For her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun , Adichie set her eyes on a difficult moment in the modern history of Nigeria, when after independence from the British, the Igbo tribes of the southeast established the Republic of Biafra.
After three years of civil war, Biafra was cornered into submission by violence and starvation. Over a million people died, including Adichie’s grandfathers. One of the writers who “emboldened” her to speak in her voice was fellow Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart , published in 1959, is surely the most widely read and loved African novel. For the title, he used words from W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ (‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold... ”), and went on to write what was at once “a celebration and an interrogation of the mores and culture of the southeastern Igbo people.”
A local storm
Achebe grew up in the Igbo town of Ogidi, speaking Igbo at home and English in school, this doppelgänger existence informing his writing. He tells two interwoven stories around clan leader Okonkwo who was “well known throughout the nine villages and beyond” of Umuofia for his personal achievements, not least because at 18 he threw the great wrestler Amalinze the Cat. His fame “grew like bushfire” — he became rich, was “clearly cut out for great things,” unlike his father Unoka who “died... heavily in debt.” The first story traces the rise and fall of Okonkwo, who was most afraid of resembling his father, hating everything that he had loved, like “gentleness” or “idleness”. Soon, there is conflict between the individual — Okonkwo — and society, caught as it is in myriad rituals and norms.
Clash of cultures
The second story surrounds the ‘clash of cultures’ that follows after the arrival of European missionaries. Achebe explores the moment when “European culture and military power began to take over the world of his ancestors.” As Kwame Anthony Appiah says in his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition, Achebe draws “a compelling picture of life in one part of Iboland before the arrival of Christianity and colonialism; he manages to convey to all of us, Ibo or not, both the tragedy of the loss of that world and the possibilities created by the new situation”.
Adichie felt Achebe belongs to a generation of African writers who were “writing back”, questioning stereotypes about Africa. Achebe would famously take on Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness “worried” him in college, which he came later to think of as “racist.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
