For Achebe @ 80: Tulu Ugo

ELECHI AMADI’S COLONIALIST CRITICISM OF ACHEBE

By Biko Agozino, Ph.D.

I enjoyed reading the interview of Elechi Amadi by

James Eze in The Sun in October 2004. I wish to thank Amadi

for sharing the open secret of his success as a

writer: you need to read hundreds, and he repeated,

hundreds of novels before you can master that art form

and venture to become a successful novelist. I hope

that this simple lesson will be encouraged in many

more high schools by requiring students to read for

pleasure beyond their textbooks.

As a high school kid, I read some of Amadi’s novels

and books for pleasure and marveled at his ability to

move my emotion in sympathy with his characters. I

believe that it was his The Great Ponds that nearly

drove me to tears in sympathy with the people dying in

droves after someone swore an oath claiming a piece of

land that was in dispute between two villages. The

oath ended the bloody warfare but the mass suffering

from what we can suspect to be cholera (but which the

author represented as punishment from the gods) was

too much for a kid to take.

In the interview, Amadi was wrong in assuming that he is the first to

accuse Achebe of ‘pandering to the white man’. This

question is raised frequently on the internet by

university students of World Literature who argue that

Achebe did not accomplish his stated objective in

Things Fall Apart. As Achebe stated this objective

shortly after the publication of the novel, his aim

was: "to help my society regain belief in itself, and

put away the complexes of denigration and self

abasement."

Like Amadi, the students point out that the white man

won the struggle and Okonkwo’s people were humiliated

and they wonder how that could be uplifting to the

people of Umuofia. The question is whether Achebe was

pandering to the white man by portraying him as

dominant or whether he was reporting the reality of

the colonial and the neo-colonial situations in

Africa? Is it an insult to Africans for someone to

tell them that we are still under the domination of

Europeans? How do you ‘help’ a people under domination

to regain self-respect if it is taboo to tell them the

home truth that they remain under domination? Is it

more empowering to explain everything in terms of the

anger of the gods?

In the work of Amadi the white man is almost

completely absent but the author panders to

superstitious beliefs in gods and goddesses. Is it not

the case that Achebe was rendering a more urgent

service to the people by telling them a few home

truths? For instance, what if the white man had come

to The Great Ponds of Amadi and diagnosed the cholera

that was wiping them out and advised them to boil

their drinking water and adopt sanitation measures to

save more lives, could that be dismissed by Amadi as

the triumph of Western medicine and therefore an

insult to his people? Achebe wisely saw the need for

us to send our children to the white man’s school to

learn his wisdom for our own purposes.

In other words, why should Amadi keep silent on the

colonial struggle in his own work and now try to

lampoon Achebe for addressing the struggle and

correctly concluding that our people have suffered

major set-backs? Achebe claims that he was named after

the husband of Queen Victoria, Albert, but that when

he went to visit the Victoria Falls in East Africa,

some petty colonial official tried to segregate him on

the tour bus by asking him to move to the back but he

refused and told him that in Nigeria we sit where we

like on a bus. I do not think that such is the

attitude of someone who would pander to racist

Europeans.

Apart from this point on realism, I suspect that Amadi

missed a secret in Achebe’s uses of European

characters in his novels. I suspect that this is also

a clever marketing ploy to get more readers worldwide

beyond the place of origin of the author. Reading

books without a character that you can identify with

could be fun but it could be even more fun when you

find characters that you can identify with. Beyond

Africa, readers might find it difficult to identify

with Amadi’s attempts to mystify the quite common

death of young men at a time that life expectancy was

so low in The Concubine or the senseless blood-letting

in The Great Ponds of interethnic wars that continue

to afflict sections of our society today.

As Biodun Jeyifo argued in The Truthful Lie, we need

more writers who would contribute to the

demystification of our crises and thereby contribute

to our search for solutions. Achebe could have blamed

Okonkwo’s death on some god or goddess, but he made it

clear that he took his own life with his own hands and

severely criticized him for killing Ikemefuna to

appease some god.

I believe that the work of demystification runs

through Achebe’s body of works in such a way that

after reading any of his books, we are encouraged to

seek human solutions to human problems rather than run

to flawed places of worship for answers to mundane

questions. The point of Achebe is that even though we

are a conquered people, the conquerors are not

perfect; even though we should learn the wisdom of the

conquerors, it does not follow that we should abandon

our ancient peace-loving ways either.

I use the occasion of Achebe’s 80 birthday to re-circulate this response as my contribution to the good wishes for our father, Chinualumogu nwa Anichebe! May your days be longer, Odenigbo, more ink to your printers; we are watching those who are watching you; keep on going, no shaking!

Dr. Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.