But Why, Father?: looking back on the legacy of the African Writers Series, fifty years on

In the oil-lamp lit room, the father, sitting across from his British-educated son, attempts to assert his authority on a matter violently testing his faith. We can almost hear his voice tighten:

“You cannot marry the girl.”

“Eh?”

“I said you cannot marry the girl.”

“But why, father?”

“Why? I shall tell you why. But first tell me this. Did you first find out or try to find out anything about this girl?”

“Yes.”

“What did you find out?”

This “anything” about “this girl” (Clara, whom we do not dislike), concerns a resilient pre-colonial taboo. Just as Roman Catholicism had, nearly two millennia before, wound the revolutionary faith from Judea around pagan Roman rites, so too will Christianity not pry loose Obi’s family from old Igbo don’ts. And on this most ancient of ancient matters—passing the family seed—unyielding traction develops. Hence, through the father, who daily rouses the family at dawn for supplication to the new deity, the contradiction wells out into the open:

“My son…I understand what you say. But this thing is deeper than you think.”

Thus, in its single-minded march, Chinua Achebe’s novel, No Longer at Ease (1963), tightens on the theme of displacement-leading-to-eventual-fall; Obi’s fall a caricature of the central leitmotif of his great-grandfather, Okonkwo’s. Obi graduates from the sly “Eh?” to a plaintive “But why, father?” before lurching for the finality of a tautology; as when a failure to broker an agreement breaks down into chair-flinging, or as with the suicidal rope that, climaxing Things Fall Apart (1958), marks the final stringing up of old Africa, we hear the irreversible break in his voice: [End Page B-88]

Daddy’s Little Angel. Linocut 210 × 105cm. ©2010 Motsamai Thabane. Courtesy of iArt Gallery. www.iart.co.za

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Xilo xi n wana ni n wana xi ni nkoka eka nw winyi wa xona. Linocut 210 × 105cm. ©2010 Philemon Hlungwani. Courtesy of iArt Gallery. www.iart.co.za

“But all that is going to change. In ten years things will be quite different from what they are now.”

In ten years things will be quite different. We are not reading Things Fall Apart, and since literary characters don’t know that they are literary characters, we can assume that Obi did not read Things Fall Apart either, for he is threatening his father with a calamity that Achebe’s previous novel already dramatized. In the more than half-century since Christianity gutted the world of his great-grandfather, the times that Obi predicts will come are the times in which he is already living.

Should one require a précis of Africa’s literature from the 1960s, this passage offers all the elements: Obi as Ocol, Obi as Egbo of the smart set of Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965); the type populating that cache of books like spawn stranded outside the moist pool of time. Read No Longer at Ease and you have nearly covered the African Writers Series (AWS) syllabus.

To read the AWS now is to feel how much the awareness of change—things becoming quite different—struck, not only the creators of these books, but the very characters they created. Africans knew their world was going; the unease of Lawino when “Ocol is no longer in love with the old type”; time and events becoming the tyrants, the future which would bring freedom also bringing [End Page B-90] fear, sweeping village and metaphor aside. It was not paranoia. Two generations of writers and books later, we know this change has taken place when the smell of the African world so dear to Lawino no longer appears in today’s African books, when the smell of yams has been replaced with the smell of “Supreme ice cream” and freshly made “strawberry fondant.”

To read these books half a century later, then, is to be aware of the urgency with...