An Interview with Chinua Achebe

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHINUA ACHEBE Chinua Achebe Chinua Achebe is widely regarded as Africa's foremost writer—the "father" of the modern African novel. He is the author of Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of The People, and Anthills of the Savannah, published in 1988 by Anchor/Doubleday. He is also the author of Girls at War And Other Stories, several children's books, one volume of poetry, Beware Soul Brother, and four volumes of essays. From 1962 until 1987, he was founding editor of the British publisher Heinemann's African Writers Series, which has published several hundred titles. Achebe's first career was in radio broadcasting. It ended abruptly in 1966 with the national upheavals and massacres which led to the Biafran War. He was forced to flee with his family into his native lboland (Biafra) from Lagos, where he had narrowly escaped confrontation with armed soldiers who thought his recently published novel, A Man of The People, implicated him in Nigeria's first military coup. Since then, he has been on faculty at the University of Nigeria at Nssuka, frequently coming to teach in the U. S., where his work has been an enormous influence on Afro-American writers who, like Achebe, are trying to create a literature grounded in black experience instead of white, with language, metaphor, mythology, and imagery which comes—unapologetically—from within that tradition; out of the belief that from true specificity comes true universality. Mr. Achebe's most recent visit to the U. S. was during 1987-88, when he was visiting professor at the University of Mass.—Amherst. Kay Bonetti interviewed Achebe for the American Audio Prose Library during this stay, in June of 1988, at Mr. Achebe's home in Amherst. An Interview with Chinua Achebe /Kay Bonetti Interviewer: When people speak of African literature, they say African literature, as opposed to Nigerian literature, South African literature, Somalian literature. Is there a reason for that? Achebe: We generally talk of Africa as one because that's the way Europe looks at Africa, and many people in Europe and America who have not travelled, or who are perhaps not well educated, probably think that Africa is one small state or something somewhere. Another reason is that the quantity of the literature is not overwhelming yet, so one can put them all together. But it is growing. Suddenly Nigerian literature is a substantial body of literature. Somalian literature is not enough yet to form a body by itself, but it can fit into the general name of African literature. We ourselves do not have any difficulty at all in recognizing regional differences, but there are distinctive qualities—even within Nigeria. The literature which is beginning, just beginning, to come out of the Moslem part of Nigeria is very different from the literature which is coming out of the south. Very few people know of this yet, outside of Nigeria. As time goes on, I think there will be greater and greater and greater emphasis on the differences. Interviewer: Can you tell us about the political and cultural makeup of Nigeria? Achebe: One quarter of the entire population of Africa is in Nigeria, so we say that every fourth African is a Nigerian. During the European scramble for Africa, Nigeria fell to the British. It wasn't one nation at that point; it was a large number of independent political entities. The British brought this rather complex association into being as one nation and ruled it until 1960 when Nigeria achieved independence. Christian missionaries from Europe were active in the southern part of Nigeria, so today there's Christianity The Missouri Review · 63 in the south and Islam in the north. The three major groups in the nation are the Yoruba in the southwest, the Ibo in the southeast, and the Hausa, finally, in the north. This is simplifying it, but thafs roughly the picture. Interviewer: The differences, as I understand it, between the Yoruba and the Ibo was that the Yoruba had a system of royalty, and the Ibo were more egalitarian. Achebe: Yes, yes. The Ibos did not approve of kings. They may have had...