Chinua Achebe: A Biography, and: Chinua Achebe und Joyce Cary. Ein postkoloniales Rewriting englischer Afrika-Fiktionen (review)

Chinua Achebe: A Biography, by Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. 326 pp.

Chinua Achebe and Joyce Cary. Ein postkoloniales Rewriting englischer Afrika-Fiktionen, by Tobias Döring. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996. 231 pp.

The two books under review here differ widely in perspective and approach, to a large extent conditioned by the different cultural and biographical backgrounds of the two authors. The two critical texts thematize and exemplify the continued debate about "discourse on or about Africa."

Ezenwa-Ohaeto writes as Achebe's countryman and fellow Igbo, but also as one of Achebe's former students, as a fellow poet, critic, and academic. Ezenwa-Ohaeto's aim is not another book of criticism on Achebe's work, but a record of the writer's life. In this respect, his writing perspective is involved, sympathetic, but definitely not hagiographic. In writing this biography, Ezenwa-Ohaeto achieves for African literary criticism something that he attests Achebe has achieved through his writing: an equal valorization of an author from the South by the same means and methods usually applied to renowned authors of the North or West. Ezenwa-Ohaeto celebrates Chinua Achebe as the ingenious mediator between two worlds and two cultural traditions--the oral and the literate--and the same dichotomy--or symbiosis--informs Ezenwa-Ohaeto's methodology and insight as a biographer. He has accumulated an enormous amount of written documents, newspaper articles, reviews, and the like from which he can easily reconstruct Achebe's life history, as would be the case with any other literary personality throughout the world. Because Achebe is not only at home in a literate universe, Ezenwa-Ohaeto has to supplement the information about (external) events and biodata with information gleaned from oral sources of personal history. This information that rounds the picture of Achebe's personality with views, insights, opinions that put flesh onto the skeleton of pure written data was gathered mostly by interviews with Achebe himself, but also with many friends, colleagues, "age-group fellows." The interview seems to be a particularly appropriate methodology for the investigation of this delicate topic, "Achebe's life," because it is a form that occupies an intermediate space between the oral and the written, a form that translates the less formal oral statement into the codified literate form.

Ezenwa-Ohaeto follows Achebe's life chronologically in chapters that are mostly determined by external, historical, and political events. The first chapters about Achebe's youth, education at Umuahia Government school, Ibadan College, and the BBC training center reveal one aspect that has so far been mostly neglected in the intertextuality-oriented criticism: the factual base of the first three novels. In Achebe's village of Ogidi, the events of the arrival of the white men had been carefully recorded and preserved in oral tradition and through his father Isaiah, one of the first and faithful disciples of Reverend Basden, Achebe had access to the first written records about the beginnings of colonial history in his home area--the two main sources that informed Things Fall Apart as a historical novel rather than an ethnotext (with an invented precolonial history). As director of NBC Eastern region, Achebe broadcast a short feature about a village priest being arrested by colonial authorities. In the form of investigative journalism, Achebe traced the policeman who had arrested the priest, interviewed him, and gathered additional information that then became the base for the plot of Arrow of God. Obi's experiences in No Longer at Ease bear resemblance to Achebe's own trip to and from London for training at the BBC and his return home to work with NBC in Lagos. Chapters 9-12, treating the period from the first military coup in 1966, ethnic tension in the federation, the secession of Biafra and its eventual defeat, reveal another side of Achebe's biography...