Chinua Achebe

“Two men look out through the same bars;

One sees the mud, and one the stars.”

Fredrick Langbridge, 1849 – 1923

 The dust raised by his last controversial book There was a Country has not settled. A former Military Governor of North Western State during the Nigerian Civil War, Alhaji Usman Faruk has just published his own version of the war in which he casts the Northern leaders who executed the war as patriotic heroes. On the very day he died, alarming statements were being made by people who were not even born before the Nigerian civil war, most of them threatening mayhem, revenge and even another civil war following the bombing of buses in Kano which, as it turned out, mostly took the lives of people from the same stock as the presumed bombers. One or two prominent writers even hinted that the bombing in Kano may have hastened his death. Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria is falling apart at a rate no one could have imagined. The tragedy is that history will record him as a symbol of its cultural wealth, as well as a symptom of its failure to utilize its assets.

 The last book published by Achebe will not be the one best remembered by the world. But that book reminds us that we have fought many battles, and it unearthed feelings and sentiments which remind us that we are today very much still in the past. That past had produced the Achebes and Soyinkas and Abubakar Imams and Zungurs, heroes of the literary world, activists who dared authorities and broke down walls, yet unable to  live entirely above their social contexts. The world will mourn him for his classics such as Things Fall Apart, but Nigerians will always argue over whether he is an icon which the nation should cherish and honour, or an ethnic champion whose last hurrah was to open up old wounds in a nation desperate to move on. The world will mourn a great African writer, and many Nigerians will miss a man who had stirred nests with his defiance and courage to ruffle feathers.

 Achebe would appear to have been born with a complimentary set of gifts: the gift of expression, and the gift of using the expressed word to assess his social and political environment and attempt to change it. From Things Fall Apart, which captured the effect of major social upheavals and changes engendered by colonialism, to other works which parody post-colonial efforts to build a nation out of many conflicting value systems, to his last novel which was a personal history of the Nigerian Civil War, Achebe was at once participant observer with a keen eye on social change, as well as a historian who took liberties with a personal perspective on such changes. There are not many equals of Achebe in the use of a foreign language to speak to his society, and the contemporary and peer such as Soyinka who were elevated above him by an international award have been pilloried for being better at addressing foreign audiences than their fellow Africans, or taking away an honour Achebe deserved. Fewer writers have shown a more consistent disdain for the decline in values and the failure to utilize potentials in their nations as Mr Achebe. Even when he was comfortably esconsed in foreign lands, his heart was always with his people and his country. Twice he rejected being honoured by Nigerian governments he felt were not good enough to honour him, having partaken in the demolition of what could have been a great edifice for all Nigerians and the black race.

 The controversy generated by his last book will sadly be the most lasting memory among Nigerian of this great writer, particularly those too young to know or remember the tragic civil war. His take on key aspects of the conflict, and his successful exorcism of old ghosts on alleged genocide and role the of Chief Obafemi Awolowo resurrected some dormant sentiments and bitter quarrels from the past. Achebe must have known that his book will generate massive controversy, and while this is good for books because they get sold in larger quantities, a rendition of a painful history in a manner guaranteed to deepen the nation's faultlines is difficult to defend in terms of patriotism. It will certainly tap into an existing residue of sentiments and resonate with contemporary realities and conjectures; but by no stretch of imagination can Achebe’s last work be described as a heroic contribution to healing past wounds.

 It is possible that Achebe’s last work was never intended to heal wounds and move the nation forward. The major wounds of the civil war had been healed a long time ago by an enlightened leadership which made reconciliation possible, desirable and quick. There were also organic elements at play in the quick healing process: a popular realization of the fact that many mistakes had been made by the military since the January 1966 coup, for which millions paid massive penalties, including the loss of more than a million lives; a thriving economy which created possibilities for economic reintegration; and the realization that every section of the country was vital to the other. Since then, periodic agonies are triggered when the horrendous suffering by the civilian population is revisisted; or when it appears that the nation is forgetting that one million lives had to be sacrificed to keep it united.

 In spite of dozens of books on the genesis and execution of the war, controversies were sustained by arguments over who was right, what went wrong, and what lessons the nation should draw from the war. This in itself is not a problem. It becomes a problem when comments on a sad chapter in our history tend to shed light on contemporary realities, and reveal a tragic failure to move on from that tragic period. This was, going by the reactions of many Nigerians to There Was a Country, what Achebe did. His last comment on his country played into the hands of people who thought the Igbo should never forgive Awolowo; people who thought Awo has always been maligned by Igbo people who will not accept to pay a just price for their follies; people who thought that Igbo people have never recovered from an orchestrated genocide, and are still paying a price in political terms; and even people who think the dream of Biafra is not dead, and can and should be vigorously reactivated.

 It will be interesting to know if Mr Achebe had been availed of even the tiniest peak into conversations among younger Nigerians on cyberspace which followed the release of his last book. It will be uncharitable to say he had triggered a major setback in the unity of the country, but it will be fair to say he lit up the dark and frightening chasms which separate  many younger Nigerians and equip them the horrible stereotypes with which they see each other.  If he did have a glimpse at this level of our national psyche, it is doubtful if he would not have felt some pain that his fellow citizens harbor such sentiments and feelings towards each other. He may even have asked if he and his generation are justified in enjoying their smug comfort in the belief that they had discharged their obligations to their nation. Chinua Achebe left this world pretty much as he found it: troubled and troubling. But history will say of him, here is one who couldn't live with it.