Late Professor Chinua Achebe
The death last Thursday in the United States of Professor Chinua Achebe, 82, has brought a tragic loss to Nigeria, Africa and indeed all humanity. Here was a man who blazed the trail in African literature. Here was a man who dedicated himself to the relentless task of re-educating the continent alongside the world about the burden of its history from the first contact with Western civilization; through the challenges of independence and the immediate post-colonial politics of democratic adaptation. Here, above all, was a man who, through his writings, brought respect to the black man and lightened the complexion of the so-called 'dark continent'.
It is, however, a permanent indictment on the state of social services in our country that Professor Achebe lived most of his later life literally in self-exile. A road traffic accident in the early 1990s in Nigeria had paralysed him from the waist down. Yet his mind remained fecund. He needed an environment in which the medical facilities and infrastructure could support persons that are physically challenged. That is mostly why he remained in the United States for decades until he died Thursday night. America honoured him with well-endowed professorial chairs at premium universities. The system gave him the atmosphere to keep his sanity, nurture his creativity, and impart his deep knowledge to successive generations of their students.
It was therefore fitting that Corey D.B. Walker, chair of the Department of Africana studies at Brown University where Achebe was a highly revered professor until he died said: “He was more than just a colleague, faculty member, and teacher at Brown. He was a gift to the world. We are very privileged to have had him with us for the last four years and even more so for allowing us to get close to him and his family. At a time like this we could draw many words of wisdom and comfort from the deep wells of various African cultures and traditions to honour him. The most fitting is the simple and elegant phrase, ‘A great tree has fallen’.”
With his novel, “Things Fall Apart” which has been translated into over 50 languages, among several other books, Achebe was certainly the leading cultural ambassador for the country. Yet for the respected writer, Nigeria's enormous human and natural resources have been mismanaged by a visionless, selfish and corrupt leadership. Consistently irked by the ills of post-colonial Nigeria, Achebe for most of his life preoccupied himself with interrogating “the trouble with Nigeria”.
For Achebe, the crux of that trouble was a certain crisis of leadership with which he consistently refused to do business. His principled rejection of national honour awards from successive administrations was a loud rebuke on bad governance in our land. He just could not bring himself into accepting what he considered perverted honours; instead he brought honours to Nigeria with his works. In a way, Nigeria acknowledged him mostly because it could not do otherwise. It had no choice. His skill and reputation spanned the universe while his stature could not but be a source of pride to his home country and his compatriots.
It is noteworthy that Achebe's art and his politics came to fuse as his career progressed. Not for him the creative aloofness of the Western writer as he engaged the challenges that confronted his Nigerian society at every stage of its development. Quite significantly, this engagement was often simultaneously artistic as well as polemical and even politically pragmatic.
So, just as his art traced the trajectory of African and Nigerian history, so did his politics and social engagement as part of the pioneer elite that sought to make Nigeria work. When the Civil War broke out, he found himself dedicating his skills to the cause of the ill-fated Republic of Biafra.
With his profound impact on our culture, politics and society, Achebe was duly celebrated in his lifetime as an accomplished man of letters whose works will forever remain enduring monuments.
But his progressive politics was hardly acknowledged. He was the National Vice Chairman of the Aminu Kano-led Peoples Redemption Party in the Second Republic. His membership of the radical party was decidedly an ideological choice. Unlike many writers who maintain neutrality in the affairs of their countries, Achebe never hesitated to take positions even if controversial. He wrote powerfully on critical issues, no matter how unfashionable. He challenged cants and spoke truth to power.
Achebe’s legacy has already been written for posterity by his own hand and in his own words. He was an extraordinary writer, a premium patriot, a savant, an avatar and a global citizen. He deserves a good rest. May his dream of a great Nigeria come true.
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