Other Books by Rose Ure Mezu

Women in Chains: Abandonment in Love Relationships in the Fiction of Selected West African Writers (1994) / Songs of the Hearth (1993) /

Homage to My People (2004) / A History of Africana Women's Literature (2004)

 Black Nationalists: Reconsidering Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. & Nkrumah (1999) Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works (2006)

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Books by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart  /  Arrow of God  /  No Longer at Ease  /  A Man of the People,  /  Anthills of the Savannah  / Morning Yet on Creation Day

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Introduction

to Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works (2006)

Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works is not a biography (even though it contains some biographical materials), but a critical analysis of Chinua Achebe’s novels and other writings, evaluating them for themes, and their relevance to the problems besieging Africa and African peoples in the global community. Achebe confesses that he did not set out to validate African civilization in any conscious way, but the circumstances of his birth, family upbringing, and training at the University College of Ibadan impelled him towards the eventual defense and reconstructive validation of Africa’s pristine civilization. Born on November 16, 1930 at Ogidi to parents who were evangelical Protestants, he received his religious formation from his father, a teacher in a missionary school, while his mother, sister and maternal great-grandparents inculcated in him a love of the traditional culture.

His essay, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England” published in his 1975 Morning Yet on Creation Day (MYOCD), contains autobiographical information necessary to understand the novelist’s familial and cultural background. Receiving education of the best kind that colonial society had to offer, Achebe was well-equipped to do a critical reevaluation of the role of colonialism in Africa and this with Europe’s own critical tools. Most of the essays in Morning Yet on Creation Day : “Colonialist Criticism,” “Africa and Her Writers,” “The Novelist as a Teacher,” “The African Writer and the English Language“ expound on the writer’s multiple functions, while also explaining the urgent necessity for the new kind of language employed in Things Fall Apart which inaugurated a new tradition of Cultural Nationalism, Black aesthetics and Colonialist criticism. His later novels, short stories, poetry, and essays speak for themselves and explain his present enormous stature as one of the world’s greatest writers, with a towering, but reasoned intellect and versatility.

His pace-setting first book, Things Fall Apart is a great and important resource book used to teach across disciplines. For its multi-faceted utility, teachers of Political Science, African Economic System, African and Diasporan History, Agricultural Science, Religion, Literary Studies, Linguistics, and Fine Arts, to name but a few, find the book an indispensable quarry. It is required reading not just in Africa but also in the United States, especially in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and some Ivy League Colleges, with Cornell University recently adopting it as required text. The book is read all over the world and translated into many different languages of the world.

Teaching Achebe’s novels in class is always a rewarding venture and involves challenging strategies. Students largely empathize with Okonkwo as a cultural nationalist who fiercely defends and dies for the authentic values of his community. Because some students appear shocked at Okonkwo’s misogyny, this becomes a fertile ground for a discussion of gender politics, at the end of which some come to see that Okonkwo, removed from his specific cultural context and transported to their era and environment, looks like many of their fathers, uncles and other people they have known.

I have had groups of students dramatize modern adaptations of selected incidents in Things Fall Apart in which the rebellious Ojiugo, for instance, ends up profiting from current principles of gender equality to tame her macho husband into a more accommodationist Okonkwo – which is quite a feat. A particularly imaginative adaptation had provided a Joanna [Johnny] Cochran who debates with the District Commissioner in a court of law as to the merits / evils of both the native Umuofia culture and the supplanting alien colonial administration, even though historical accuracy dictates that Okonkwo dies, anyway. A comparison with Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Beloved has one of my classes imagining Ezinma, intrepid and freedom-loving just like her father Okonkwo, being transplanted to the shores of America as Sethe’s grandmother. Faithful to her culture, she totally rejects all children born of her white captors to preserve and nurture only the child she conceived freely with a black man. The book Things Fall Apart is thus easily the most-taught novel in schools, for between it and Arrow of God, Achebe’s hope that his tradition-based novels could also serve peoples of African descent finds fruition as he earnestly wanted:

In my Elementary and Secondary School in Port Harcourt in Nigeria, a semi-cloistered convent environment where books on European literature and history were the norm as it was when the young Achebe received his education, we were taught by Irish Catholic missionary sisters of the Holy Rosary Congregation and it was inconceivable that books like Things Fall Apart could be used as a teaching text:

As later happened to me, Achebe discovered that he and members of his generation (Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, John Pepper Clark, Kole Omotoso and others) at the University College of Ibadan were actually those denigrated, stereotypical “primitives” being devalued in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). This and Joyce Carey’s African Witch (1936) and Mr. Johnson (1939) impelled Achebe to use his personal story to attempt a revalorization of Africa’s history and culture. Thus, the fictional Umuofia provides the cosmological prism through which Achebe tells his own story as counterfoil to the prevalent image of peoples of African origin and as an indigenous African, he was better qualified to tell his and Africa’s story.

Whoever encounters this man knows that part of Achebe’s great gifts as a story-teller is his ability to accommodate other viewpoints because for him, “[w]herever Something stands, Something Else will stand beside it. Nothing is absolute” (MYOCD 94). Speaking with Chinua Achebe in 1996, and finally meeting him in July 1999 increased my appreciation of the writer’s great intellectual gifts. Achebe as a man is gentle and soft-spoken, with a keen listening ear, rollicking humor, great wit suffused with sensibility and, yes, humility. And yet, one is left in no doubt that Achebe is tough-minded, principled, very resilient and a survivor which reminds his readers of what he thinks of intemperate, single-minded characters like Okonkwo, Ezeulu, or even the hot-headed Obika, the latter’s son.

Cynical critics have wondered why many people who have encountered Achebe seem not to think that Achebe has faults like everyone else. I am sure he has, but it is difficult to have a bad word for the man, precisely because you know from reading his works that even though he is a great artist, indeed an awesome one, he also has great dignity and a self-assurance that is tinged with humility. These are the attributes of a great genius. On meeting him, one feels as if one had known him all along, at least all of one’s adult reading life. This is because through his fictional characters, you heard in his voice the wisdom of traditional African Antiquity, the wit of the storyteller, the pragmatism of the politician, and the idealism of his fictional intellectual heroes.

I have often thought as aptly suited to Chinua Achebe what Weinberg said about W.E.B. Du Bois, quoting the Cuban poet / patriot José Martí (1853-1895): “Mountains culminate in peaks, and nations in men” (cited in Africa and the Diaspora: the Black Scholar and Society 10).

Achebe’s desire to help his “people” regain their pride of Self and Nation to enable them enjoy God’s gift of freedom again reminds one of Martí’s challenge to those who would live free:

Achebe’s literary thoughts have given to all Africans, descendants of enslaved Africans, and all marginalized peoples, the weapon of freedom to defend the historico-cultural values of their homeland. Achebe has embodied in his writings every theme – race and racism, democracy, socialism and capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, neo - and post-colonialism, revolution, war and peace, cultural nationalism, and even more. As I remark in Chapter Ten: “The Mezus Visit with the Achebes,” this writer “has given back to all Blacks in the Diaspora that something which slavery had taken away.”

Chinua Achebe: the Man and his Works has ten chapters. His novels receive full critical discussion and comparative treatment with the works of other writers. Chapters Nine and Ten, being interviews with the writer are self-explanatory. In them, Achebe reiterates and expatiates on many of the themes which inform his writings. I make use of these ideas in the chapter discussions of his novels and essays. At the core of all of his novels, whether tradition-based or urban fiction, is to be found as central preoccupation, the problem and dynamics of proper governance and the place of the human beings within this centrality. Equally, I believe, his stories have yielded good results when dealt comparatively with seminal, groundbreaking texts such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1939) and Olaudah Equiano’s masterpiece, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, Written by Himself (1789).

Achebe himself encourages writers not to sit on the sidelines of urgent national issues, but to be very committed as a guide of the people should. As they say in Igbo, “Ana ekwu ekwu, ana eme eme” or in United States of America political lingo –”You talk the talk and walk the walk.” This Achebe did himself in 1983, during Nigeria’s Second Republic when he joined the People's Redemption Party (PRP) founded by the late crusader, Mallam Aminu Kano. Chinua Achebe was elected deputy national president of the party. Thus, he tried also to put into practice his commitment to change. As Director of Heinemann Educational Books in Nigeria, he helped encourage the publication of the works of dozens of African writers. In 1971, he became founding editor of Okike, a journal of Nigerian writings and in 1984, he founded the bilingual magazine, Uwa ndi Igbo, a valuable source for Igbo studies Presently, Chinua Achebe is the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Literature at Bard College in Upstate New York

Dr. Rose Ure Mezu

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.  New York: Doubleday, 1994.

--- Arrow of God. New York: Random House, 1969.

--- Morning Yet On Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1975.

Marti, José. http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/top/nationality/cuban/ >

Mezu, Rose Ure. "Africana Women: Their Historic Past and Future Activism.”

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Other essays by Dr. Rose Ure Mezu:

An Africana Blueprint for Living in the 3^rd Millennium Global Community: An Essay

Pope John Paul II: A Life with a Mission: A Mission of Grace and Moral Strength

A History of Africana Women's Literature   (Introduction)

Africana Women: Their Historic Past and Future Activism