The Novelist as Teacher: Chinua Achebe's Literature for Children

As Nigeria's most prominent novelist and as the most widely read African writer, both on the African continent and abroad, Chinua Achebe has exerted considerable influence over the development of African literature written in English during the past two decades. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, is regarded as a literary classic, and its impact has been so decisive upon contemporary African writers that many critics have begun to generalize about an "Achebe School" of African literature. In 1964, when the West African Examinations Council, the accrediting body for educational systems in English-speaking West Africa, reorganized the school certificate examinations, Things Fall Apart became the first novel by an African writer to be adopted as a required text for African secondary-school students throughout English-speaking Africa. Thus, by 1965, Achebe could point to a significant audience for his works in Nigeria and in other African societies:

I realize that a lot has been made of the allegation that African writers have to write for European and American readers because African readers, where they exist at all, are only interested in reading textbooks. I don't know if African writers always have a foreign audience in mind. What I do know is that they don't have to. At least I don't have to. Last year the pattern of sales of Things Fall Apart in the cheap paperback edition was as follows: about 800 copies in Britain, 20,000 in Nigeria, and about 2,500 in all other places. The same pattern was true also of No Longer at Ease.

Most of my readers are young. They are either in school or college or have only recently left. And many of them look at me as a kind of teacher.¹

Achebe's belief that the modern African writer should teach, that he has a particular responsibility to shape the social and moral values of his society, has been a persistent theme of his various public statements. Speaking to the Nigerian Library Association in 1964, he specifically addressed the role of the writer in modern Nigeria. Before the African writer could write about contemporary issues, Achebe maintained, he had first to resolve the question of his own humanity.

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 self-respect. The writer's 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 can't tell where the rain began to beat him can not know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them.²

Achebe later restated this position in "The Novelist as Teacher":

Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse—to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of the word. . . . I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I 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 God's behalf delivered them.³

Given Achebe's outlook, it is not surprising that his vision of the rehabilitation of Nigerian society should extend to the entire population, not just to adults, and that he—as well as many other contemporary...