Revising the
Colonialist Damage
"Here, then, is an adequate revolution for me to
espouse--to help my society regain its belief in itself and put away the complexes of the
years of the denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of
education, in the best sense of that word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest
aspirations of my society meet. For no thinking African can escape the pain of the wound
in our soul [. . .] The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education
and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front . . . I for one
would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones
set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past--with all its
imperfections ---was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting
on Gods behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from
pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind. And
I dont see that the two need be mutually exclusive."
-- "The Novelist as Teacher" (1965)
"It is inconceivable to me that
a serious writer could stand aside from this debate, or be indifferent to this argument
which calls his full humanity into question. For me, at any rate, there is a clear duty to
make a statement. This is my answer to those who say that a writer should be writing about
contemporary issues--about politics in 1964, about city life, about the last coup
detat. Of course, these are legitimate themes for the writer but as far as I am
concerned the fundamental theme must first be disposed of. This theme--put quite
simply--is that African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans,
that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and
value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity. It is this
dignity that many African peoples all but lost in the colonial period, and it is this
dignity that they must now regain. The worst thing that can happen to any people is the
loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writers duty is to help them regain it
by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost. There is a saying in
Ibo that a man who cant tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he
dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. After
all the novelists duty is not to beat this mornings headline in topicality, it
is to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless
he has a proper sense of history."
-- "The Role of a Writer in a New Nation"
Achebe understands his role as a novelist to
be educational but also reformational. He wants to set the records straight about
the complexity and nobility of the Igbo people and their traditional way of life. He
wants to correct his people's misconceptions about themselves, ones enforced by years of
British imperialist education that has taught them that they are inferior.
The Colonialist Mind & Education
"To the colonialist mind it was always of the utmost importance
to be able to say: I know my native, a claim which implied two things at once:
(a) that the native was really quite simple and (b) that understanding him and controlling
him went hand in handunderstanding being a precondition for control and control
constituting adequate proof of understanding. Thus is the heyday of colonialism and
serious incident of native unrest, carrying as it did disquieting intimations of slipping
control, was an occasion not only for pacification by the soldiers but also (afterwards)
for a royal commission of inquirya grand name for yet another perfunctory study of
native psychology and institutions. Meanwhile a new situation was slowly developing as a
handful of natives began to acquire European education and then to challenge Europes
presence and position in their native land with the intellectual weapons of Europe itself.
To deal with this phenomenal presumption the colonist devised two contradictory arguments.
He created the man of two worlds theory to prove that no matter how much the
native was exposed to European influences he could never truly absorb them; like Prester
John he would always discard the mask of civilization when the crucial hour came and
reveal his true face. Now, did this mean that the educated native was no different at all
from his brothers in the bush? Oh, no! He was different; he was worse. His abortive effort
to education and culture though leaving him totally unredeemed and unregenerated had none
the less done something to him it had deprived him of his links with his own people
whom he no longer even understood and who certainly wanted none of his dissatisfaction or
pretensions. I know my natives; they are delighted with the way things are.
Its only these half-educated ruffians who dont even know their own
people. How often one heard that and the many variations of it in colonial
times!"
-- "Colonialist Criticism" (1974)
One of the problems with colonialist education is
that the colonizers often assume they understand and know the people they have colonized,
and this assumption of knowledge reinforces the oppressive institutions and claims of the
oppressors. The colonizers often assume an inherent superiority on their part.
Achebe describes the particular problem of being African and yet educated in the
transplanted European institutions of education. Note how an estimation of someone
also allows a certain continued kind of control.
Living at the Cultural Crossroads
"We lived at the crossroads of cultures. We still do now today;
but when I was a boy one could see and sense the peculiar quality and atmosphere of it
more clearly. I am not talking about all that rubbish we hear of the spiritual void and
mental stresses that Africans are supposed to have, or the evil forces and irrational
passions prowling through Africas heart of darkness. We know the racist mystique
behind a lot of that stuff and should merely point out that those who prefer to see Africa
in those lurid terms have not themselves demonstrated any clear superiority in sanity or
more competence in coping with life.
"But still the crossroads does have a certain dangerous
potency; dangerous because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed
spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic
vision.
"On one arm of the cross we sang hymns and read the Bible night
and day. On the other arm my fathers brother and his family, blinded by heathenism,
offered food to idols. That was how it was supposed to be anyhow. But I knew without
knowing why it was too simple a way to describe what was going on. Those idols and that
food had a stronger pull on me in spite of my being such a thorough little Christian that
often at Sunday services at the height of the grandeur of Te Deum Laudamus I would
have dreams of mantle of gold falling on me while the choir of angels drowned our mortal
song and the voice of God Himself thundering: This is my beloved son in whom I am pleased.
Yes, despite those delusions of divine destiny I was not past taking my little sister to
our neighbors house when our parents were not looking and partaking of heathen
festival meals. I never found their rice to have the flavour of idolatry. I was about ten
then. If anyone likes to believe that I was torn by spiritual agonies or stretched on the
rack of ambivalence he certainly may suit himself. I do not remember any undue distress.
What I do remember was a fascination for the ritual and the life of the other arm of the
crossroads. And I believe two things were in my favourthat curiosity and the little
distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step
which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully.[. . .]
Although I did not set about it consciously in that solemn way I know now that my first
book, Things Fall Apart, was an act of atonement with my past, the ritual return
and homage of a prodigal son."
-- "Named for Victoria, Queen of England" (1973)
Stop and ask yourself why Achebe understands his
novel as "an act of atonement" for his past. Are you comfortable with his
vision of a cultural crossroads where both sides of his upbringing (Christian and pagan)
are held together without any tension?
A Real Human Story
"But let me first make one general point that is fundamental
and essential to the appreciation of African issues by Americans. Africans are people in
the same way that Americans, Europeans, Asians, and others are people. Africans are not
some strange beings with unpronounceable names and impenetrable minds. Although the action
of Things Fall Apart takes place in a setting with which most Americans are
unfamiliar, the characters are normal people and their events are real human events. The
necessity even to say this is part of a burden imposed on us by the customary denigration
of Africa in the popular imagination of the West. I suspect that, in any class of thirty
American students who are reading Things Fall Apart, there are a handful who see
things in the light of a certain young reader from Yonkers, New York, who wrote to thank
me several years ago for making available to him an account of the customs and
superstitions of an African tribe! It should be the pleasant task of the teacher, should
he or she encounter that attitude, to spend a little time revealing to the class some of
the quaint customs and superstitions prevalent in America.
"Fortunately, not everyone in that class would be a hidebound
ethnocentrist. Indeed I hope that at least one person would resemble not the Yonkers
student or worse but another young man who, having read Things Fall Apart in a
course, came up to me while I was visiting the University of Massachusetts. He wore a very
intense look, and all he wanted to say was, 'That Okonkwo is like my father.' And he was a
white kid."
-- "Teaching Things Fall Apart" (1991) |