Homage to Chinua Achebe

The publication in 1958 of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was experienced as a significant literary and cultural event in Africa, probably no more so than in his own country, Nigeria, and at his alma mater, University College, Ibadan. I was an undergraduate there at the time, and have retained a vivid memory of its enthusiastic reception by the handful of students and Nigerian faculty who represented what we had then of an "interpretive community" for what was just beginning to emerge as a new literature in Africa. Achebe's work could not have appeared at a more propitious time, confirming with the force of its achievement a development for which the signs seemed encouraging and yet, at the same time, undecidable.

It is important to recall the specific local context in which Achebe's work appeared, in order to understand the intensity of the response it elicited. The year before its publication, Olumbe Bassir, a professor of Biochemistry at Ibadan, had ventured outside his professional field to bring out, under the imprint of the university press, a slim volume entitled West African Verse, an anthology that included poems by both English-speaking and French-speaking poets. It is of considerable interest to observe that it was in this anthology that students at Ibadan first encountered the poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor and the work of other Negritude poets that he had himself brought together in his historic Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, published in Paris by Presses Universitaires de France in 1948.

As part of the early cultivation of a native literary awareness signaled by Bassir's anthology, one of the first graduates of Ibadan, Phebean Itayemi, had also brought out a collection of African folk tales published in England as a Pelican volume, a work that served as a valuable complement to Amos Tutuola's The Palmwine Drinkard, published in 1950. While Tutuola's novel did not go wholly unnoticed and unappreciated in Nigeria, as it has so often been asserted, the best known Nigerian writer at the time was undoubtedly Cyprian Ekwensi, whose People of The City had been serialized in the early 1950's in The Daily Times--Nigeria's leading newspaper at the time--and was considered a notable literary achievement. One might add that Camara Laye's The Dark Child had come to us from beyond our ambiguous borders, in a translation by James Kirkup that helped to powerfully fix its lyrical evocation of childhood in an African universe in our emotions.

As young, aspiring bearers of an emerging modern culture, the creation of a national literature that reflected the new shape the African world was assuming became a major concern for students at Ibadan, so that the thin stream of works that pointed in the direction of our hopes were gratefully welcomed as pointers to new possibilities. It was to the sense of new beginnings registered by these works that Things Fall Apart brought a striking dimension. It provided the sign of that profound re-ordering of the imaginative consciousness in a new register that the presence among us of the European languages and their undoubted functional significance had made possible in an Africa that was delivering itself of the colonial yoke and entering upon a new mode of existence. It was inevitable that this epochal meaning should have been attached to Achebe's novel.

In the more than forty years since its publication, Things Fall Apart has lost none of that compelling force upon our attention that derives not only from its engagement with the colonial encounter, but also from its reformulation of the inherited imperial language, a reformulation that lent a special expressiveness to the novel's enactment of a decisive moment of the African experience. But if Achebe's acute insight into the historical process, combined with his keen sense of the creative potential of language as a necessary dimension of the...