Achebe Critiqued Okonkwo

By Biko Agozino

The interview of Achebe by Soyinka and Nkosi in 1964 goes to show why written reviews and the sort of interviews that James Eze did for The Sun should be accompanied with video documentaries for the archives. I work with video a little and I have won an award in this genre to my credit but we should do more. In this interview, Achebe critiqued the 'aggressive' masculinity of Okonkwo as representing the 'weakness' of an 'unbending' society.

I have always suspected that Achebe identified with Unoka, his fellow artist, more than with Okonkwo, the brute. Very reassuring to hear it from his mouth and see him dressed as a Hausa talakawa or onye nkiti, commoner, for the role. Okey Ndibe once wondered why Achebe presented his fellow poet, Unoka, in such poor lights but it is not the fault of Achebe that we live in a capitalist world where money talks and some talented artists tend to starve to death:

"I visited Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, the one who is responsible for introducing the word “agbala” in Cameroon. Due to him many secondary school children who were not macho enough ended up with the nickname “agbala” which means woman, and, it was a derogatory word for a man in Umuofia who had not taken any titles which was the case with Unoka. If some students did not get “agbala”, they got another name “efulefu” meaning worthless person, another word introduced in the Cameroon language arena from Things fall Apart", reflected Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang, while waiting to interview Achebe on the 50th anniversary of the novel.

This is not a diss against Unoka but a critique of Okonkwo who boasted of his many farms but allowed his single-parent father that raised him to be a strong champion wrestler to die of kwashiokor or malnutrition. It is an indictment against the society for which Unoka performed without charging a fee but they still had the bold face to go and hassle him for little loans whereas he had written on the wall, the bigger debts that his society owed him for his performances. 

When Okonkwo went to the Oracle of the Hill to divine why he was having a hard luck in life, he was told that it was the spirit of his father that was angry because he was yet to sacrifice a goat to him. The Efulefu that he was, Okonkwo did not chew on the proverb carefully but disdainfully asked the Oracle if his father left him a chicken when he was alive, how come he was demanding a goat? Okonkwo ended up dying like an ojugo chicken and was buried like the carcass of a dog because the fly without advisers follows the corpse into the grave.

Here Achebe said that despite the cruelty in colonized Igboland, there were also beauty and arts to be appreciated. Jimanze Ego-Alowes recently announced that Okonkwo was Achebe's alter ego but the honor goes to Unoka, the intellectual. He also tried to revive the allegation that Achebe got the story of Arrow Of God from Mr Nnolim just because the characters in the novel are similar to the characters in Nnolim's pamphlet. That is understandable because the story of Arrow of God is a historical event and Achebe admitted that Mr Nnolim was one of those he interviewed while researching the novel.

In the Arrow of God published the year of the interview, the year of the Civil Rights Act in the US, Achebe again chose to resolve colonialist conflict non-violently through the dialogues led by Ezulu against the historicism of Obierika who warned against confrontation with the white men. Instead of rushing into war with a machete in hand to chop off the head of the African messengers of the invading white men the way Okonkwo did, Ezulu went on a hunger strike as a decolonization strategy. Instead of overthrowing him in a bloody coup and installing a new priest who was ready to eat the sacred yam and declare the new yam festival to enable them to start harvesting their yam, the people of Umuaro simply converted to Christianity and started harvesting their yam in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Yet, Achebe called Okonkwo 'my hero' in the interview for he remained a tragic hero who had lost touch with his people following his alienation in exile in Mbanta, according to Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe. 

Today, African rulers idealize the genocidal masculinity of those that Ali Mazrui lionized as carrying on the 'warrior tradition'. Rather than admire the philosophical Igbo who prefer eating words with the palm oil of proverbs and instead of honoring hero-poets like Chris Okigbo, Mazrui tried the spirit of Okigbo and convicted him in the land of the ancestors after death for the crime of abandoning poetry to take up arms in defense of his people who were threatened with genocide. Unknown to Mazrui was the fact that Okigbo actually saw his participation in the resistance to genocide as a participant-observation methodology through which to gather new materials for his writing being the scholar-activist that he was (recounted by the literary theorist, Ben Obumselu, in an interview with James Eze; though Okigbo may have used that camouflage to avoid being dissuaded from going to the war front by his fellow intellectuals). 

The neocolonial genocidal states imposed on Africa by European colonizers are still in the business of killing Africans en-masse but that should not be called the warrior tradition of Mazrui, it is the genocidist tradition that started with the genocide against 3.1 million Igbo, the foundational genocide of postcolonial Africa orchestrated by the colonizers, as identified by Achebe in There was a Country and in Biafra Revisited by Ekwe-Ekwe and against which the Igbo mounted a heroic resistance just as they did to colonial conquest (Ekumeku War), indirect colonial rule (Ogu Umunwayi), resistance against wage theft (Enugu Colliery massacre), and the ongoing non-violent demand for a referendum on the restoration of Biafra by Igbo youth. Prior to colonization, the neighbors of the Igbo never committed genocide against the Igbo with the aid of such African 'tribes' as Shell BP, The British government led by the left-wing Labour Party, and by the Soviet Union, Walter Rodney observed.

By the way, the interpretation of Ikenga, by Achebe in the interview with Soyinka and Nkosi, as representing male virility is a mistaken patriarchal attempt to monopolize power. Every Igbo person is born with both aka Ikenga, right hand, or aka nri (food hand) and aka ekpe, left hand, or aka nshi (shit hand). The fact that both males and females hold the hoe with aka ikenga leading and aka ekpe following suggests that Ikenga is not exclusively male but that men fashioned an art object, Ikenga, to represent the essence of male dominance. It is only a simulacrum, signifier or sign signifying the referent or signified male authority. 

It does not follow that women lacked authority since Things Fall Apart emphasized the enormous influence of Mbanta, the mother's kindred, where Okonkwo, the child-killer and wife-beater, was schooled by the mother's brother that mother is supreme, Nneka. Moreover, the power of the female deities, Ani or earth mother and Agbala the Oracle of the Hills signifies that there could never be male power and authority without female power and authority among the radically democratic Igbo who say that when one thing stands, another thing stands beside it. 

In other words, the Igbo take it for granted that both men and woman are equally blessed with aka Ikenga even though some Ikenga pass others for strength just as the male hoe (for tilling) tended to be bigger than the female hoe (for weeding). The fact that Africans were forced into colonialism with machetes and hoes as farming implements and have continued to rely on these ancient tools for farming 60 years after the restoration of lumpen independence is part of the evidence indicating How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, according to Walter Rodney.

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.