Introduction

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1975, Chinua Achebe, regarded then and now as the father of African literature, presented a Chancellor’s Lecture on the University of Massachusetts campus titled “An Image of Africa”; the subtitle, “Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” was added later. It was one of those rare moments that changed the nature and shape of literary criticism; it was also a rare moment in which literary criticism changed the shape and perception of the world. It was always Chinua Achebe’s gift to do this — to conjoin disparate spheres of discourse, to shift perspectives, to change the conception of what it was not only possible but necessary to say. He had done so in his fiction, and here he was doing it in his social, cultural, and literary commentary.

The lecture had an instant impact in a quite literal respect. Some in the hall were shocked and horrified; others, as it dawned on them what Achebe was actually saying, were exhilarated. The Massachusetts Review published the essay, and the rest was not only history but a legacy for the future. Now you can barely find any discussion on Heart of Darkness which does not feature Chinua Achebe’s challenge. Much of the commentary in the voluminous Norton edition of Conrad’s novel derives from and revolves around the perspectives he introduced.

When Chinua Achebe gave his lecture, he was taking on one of the un-contested greats of English literature. It would have taken some courage to do so. Achebe was nothing if not courageous, nothing if not forthright; he was someone who permitted no gap between what he thought and what he did. Invariably what he did was elegant, graced with humor and inimitable insight. That was true of his lecture as well, although the humor may have been more pointed, more sardonic than usual. Achebe was saying what he urgently felt needed to be said. If there was courage, there was also outrage.

Of course it is quite possible to disagree with Chinua Achebe, or not to agree with him wholly. It is entirely in Achebe’s own spirit to say that there are many ways of seeing the world. As he himself wrote, “Where one thing stands, another will stand beside it.” Yet no matter how one regards the case he made on that day forty years ago, it is remarkable that he had to be the first to make it — that until then the question of racial representation in Heart of Darkness had been consigned to the collective unconscious of Western readers of the novel. In making his case, Chinua Achebe changed the framework in which works of art would be judged, and in which the discussion of Africa would be sustained. That in itself was an act of enormous significance.

Our symposium, “Forty Years After: Chinua Achebe and Africa in the Global Imagination,” drew together writers and thinkers from across Africa and its diaspora to address some of the questions, challenges, and commitments Achebe offered in his own time. The intention in hosting it was to honor and revere, but not to turn Chinua Achebe into a monument. Monuments don’t breathe, but Achebe’s legacy is a living one, and living legacies continue to shift and provoke. Our purpose then was twofold: to commemorate Achebe’s lecture, but also to bring the discussion into the present by reconsidering the shape of things now in terms of the issues he raised. When Achebe was in Amherst, he was one of a relatively small number of African writers in the United States, if the most authoritative. Now we have a new generation of writers and thinkers, female and male, who have their own perspectives and are reimagining the order of things. Forty years ago the question was how the Western world saw Africa; now it is also how Africa sees the rest of the world. We live in a globalized environment, in which images, perceptions, allegations, defenses fly around the ether in the blink of an eye. How, in these circumstances, are our eyes seeing? How far can we still draw on Achebe...