7. from The Empire Fights Back

Chinua Achebe

In the following excerpt from the second chapter of his book Home and Exile (2000), Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe looks at British impressions of Africa as delivered in literature.

I will begin . . . with a question: what did I do with my experience of classroom rebellion over Mister Johnson?¹ Anyone familiar with the gossip in African literature may have heard that it was that book that made me decide to write. I am not even sure that I have not said it somewhere myself, in one of those occasional seizures of expansive ambition we have to sum up the whole world in a single, neat metaphor. Of course we need such moments now and again to stir things up in our lives. But other times we must be content to stay modest and level-headed, more factual. What Mister Johnson did do for me was not to change my course in life and turn me from something else into a writer; I was born that way. But it did open my eyes to the fact that my home was under attack and that my home was not merely a house or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story in whose ambience my own existence had first begun to assemble its fragments into a coherence and meaning; the story I had begun to learn consciously the moment I descended from the lorry that brought me to my father’s house in Ogidi, the story that, seventeen years later at the university, I still had only a sketchy, tantalizing knowledge of, and over which even today, decades later, I still do not have sufficient mastery, but about which I can say one thing: that it is not the same story Joyce Cary intended me to have.

For me there are three reasons for becoming a writer. The first is that you have an overpowering urge to tell a story. The second, that you have intimations of a unique story waiting to come out. And the third, which you learn in the process of becoming, is that you consider the whole project worth the considerable trouble—I have sometimes called it terms of imprisonment—you will have to endure to bring it to fruition. For me, those three factors were present, and would have been present had Joyce Cary never been born, or set foot in Nigeria. History, however, had contrived a crossing of our paths, and such crossings may sometimes leave their footmarks, faint or loud, on memory. And if they do, they should be acknowledged.

Another question. Was there any way Joyce Cary could have written a Nigerian novel that we Nigerian students could have accepted as our story? My answer, in retrospect, must be: not likely. And my reason would not be the obvious fact that Cary was a European, but rather because he was the product of a tradition of presenting Africa that he had absorbed at school and Sunday school, in magazines and in British society in general, at the end of the nineteenth century. In theory, a good writer might outgrow these influences, but Cary did not.

In their Introduction to The Africa That Never Was, Hammond and Jablow tell us that the large number of writers they studied “were not, and could not be, selected for literary merit” and that there were many more “bad” writers than “good” ones in their sample. (Which, I dare say, is hardly surprising.) They then identify [Joseph] Conrad, Cary, [Graham] Greene and Huxley (not Aldous but Elspeth) among the better writers (which is still OK by me—it only tells us how bad the bad ones must be). But when they proceed to praise these four for their handling of Africa in their books, I don’t quite know what to make of it:

The better writers, such as Conrad, Cary, Greene and Huxley . . . use the conventions of the tradition with skill and subtlety. Each of them has an unmistakably individual style in which he or she selectively exploits the conventions, without allowing the writing to become overwhelmed by them. They all have more to say about Africa than the merely conventional clichés, along with the talent to say it well.²

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I suppose we can all differ as to the exact point where good writing becomes overwhelmed by racial cliché. But overwhelmed or merely undermined, literature is always badly served when an author’s artistic insight yields place to stereotype and malice. And it becomes doubly offensive when such a work is arrogantly proffered to you as your story. Some people may wonder if, perhaps, we were not too touchy, if we were not oversensitive. We really were not. And I have a somewhat unusual reason for saying so.

Although my classmates and I would not have known it at the time, the London publishing house of Methuen had brought out the year before, in 1951, a little book titled simply West Africa. Its author, F. J. Pedler, was a highly respected public servant in Britain, with considerable experience of West Africa. Although the book was not entirely free of the stereotypes of contemporary British colonial writing, it was in some ways remarkably advanced for its time, and even for today. One small example will suffice. “It is misleading,” Mr. Pedler wrote, “when Europeans talk of Africans buying a wife.”³ Although he did not mention Joyce Cary by name it is inconceivable that he would not have been aware of him or of his much celebrated novel Mister Johnson, in which that very stereotype was exploited for all it was worth in the episode in which Johnson, after much haggling, buys himself a local girl, Bamu, as wife.

But what I find truly remarkable about Pedler’s book is the prominence he gave to, and the faith he had in, African literature that was not even in existence yet: “A country’s novels reveal its social condition. West Africa has no full-length novels, but a few short stories may serve the purpose. We quote from two recent publications which show how educated West Africans themselves describe some of the features of social life in their own country.” Pedler then proceeded to summarize for his reader two short stories published in a magazine in 1945 in the British colony of the Gold Coast. He devoted almost three pages of his short book to this matter and then concluded as follows: “Here is a dramatic treatment of a contemporary social phenomenon which leaves one with the hope that more West Africans may enter the field of authorship and give us authentic stories of the lives of their own people.”⁴

These brief quotations speak volumes to us on the issue of peoples and their stories. We should note Pedler’s phrases: West Africans themselves; their own country; authentic stories; of their own people. Without calling any names this extraordinary Englishman seemed to be engaged in a running argument against an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another. In sidestepping Joyce Cary and all the other high-profile practitioners of this brand of writing and going, in search of authenticity, to two unpretentious short stories written by two completely unknown West African authors whose names did not ring any bell at all, Pedler was putting himself decisively and prophetically on the side of the right of a people to take back their own narrative. And because he was British, and because we, the students at Ibadan, did not even know of him, nor he presumably of us, our little rebellion in class one year after his book can, in retrospect, assume the status of a genuine, disinterested service to literature, and transcend the troubling impression it might otherwise easily create, of a white/black, British/Nigerian divide.

Incidentally Pedler’s prayer for West African novels was instantly answered. There was already in the works, as we now know, a startling literary concoction from the pen of a Nigerian coppersmith, Amos Tutuola, which Faber would publish in 1952. It may not have been the social realism which F. J. Pedler had presumably hoped for but an odyssey in peculiar English, which roamed about from realism to magic and back again, as in old Africa. But no matter, The Palm-Wine Drinkard opened the floodgates to modern West African writing. Hot on its heels came another Nigerian, Cyprian Ekwensi, with People of the City; Camara Laye of Guinea with L’Enfant Noir; my Things Fall Apart; Mongo Beti of Cameroon and his countryman, Ferdinand Oyono, with Poor Christ of Bomba and Houseboy, respectively; Cheikh Hamidou Kane of Senegal with Ambiguous Adventure.

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Looking back now on that incredible 1950s decade and all the intersecting events I have been describing, each of which seemed at first sight to be about its own separate little errand but then chanced upon these others on a large, open space such as is used to hold a big market once in eight days and abandoned again to a profound and watchful emptiness till another market-day—looking back on all this, it does become easy to indulge a temptation to see History as mindful, purposeful; and to see the design behind this particular summons and rendezvous as the signal at long last to end Europe’s imposition of a derogatory narrative upon Africa, a narrative designed to call African humanity into question.

As we have seen, Captain John Lok’s voyage to West Africa in 1561 provided an early model of what would become a powerful and enduring tradition. One of his men had described the Negroes as “a people of beastly living, without a God, laws, religion.”⁵ Three hundred and fifty years later we find that this model, like the Energizer Bunny, is still running strong, beating away on its tin drum. “Unhuman” was how Joyce Cary, in the early part of our own century, saw his African dancers. One generation before him, Joseph Conrad had created a memorable actor/narrator who could be greatly troubled by the mere thought of his Africans being human, like himself: “Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”⁶