My interest in Christie grew rapidly into a desire to get to know her better. I discovered, for instance, that she was from the ancient town of Awka, the present-day capital of Anambra state. Awka held a soft spot in my heart because it was my mother’s hometown, and it was known throughout Igbo land and beyond for its skilled artisans and blacksmiths, who fashioned bronze, wood, and metal carvings of a bold and haunting beauty.
Two years into our friendship, Christie and I were engaged.
—
Christie was from a very prominent Awka family. She was the daughter of one of the most formidable Igbo men of the early twentieth century, Timothy Chukwukadibia Okoli, and Mgboye Matilda Mmuo, who unfortunately died not long after Christie was born.
“T. C. Okoli,” as he was widely known, was the son of a famous dibia, or traditional medicine man, known from Arochukwu to Nri and from Onitsha to Ogoja for skills that encompassed herbal medicine, mysticism, divination, and magic. After a lifetime in the service of the ancient medical practice, Okoli gave his son the name Chukwukadibia, which means “God is greater than a traditional medicine man.” He encouraged his newborn son to seek a Christian life.
An early convert to Christianity in Igbo land, T. C. Okoli was one of the few educated men of his time to attain the position of senior post- master in the colonial Posts and Telecommunications (P&T) Department. He was a profoundly generous man, and used his resources—which were quite outstanding for a Nigerian at that time—to sponsor the education of gifted children from scores of families in Awka. When he died at 102, in the mid-1980s, all thirteen villages of the town celebrated his life for several days, through both traditional and Christian rites and festivities.
Meeting Christie’s father for the first time was a great thrill for me. His compound in Awka was always full of laughter. People visited constantly, some to drink and make merry, others for favors and to pay their respects. I belonged to the latter category.
We arrived, and Christie promptly took me to meet her dad.
“Papa” she said, “meet Chinua Achebe.”
We shook hands, and then the pleasantries gave way to a brief interview: “Where are you from, young man?” “What do you do?” “Where did you go to school?” “Who are your parents?” I quickly discovered that T. C. Okoli was an Anglophile: He took pleasure in reciting passages in English from scripture, Shakespeare, and poetry; and he had sent several of his children off to England to advance their education. He was also a deeply respectful and kind man who left me with a lasting lesson that I have never forgotten.
Christie and I were talking one evening when Okoli walked into the living room. We exchanged greetings. He sat down and listened to our conversation while sipping wine, watching the two of us talk. By this time I could say confidently that he liked me. We got along very well. But in the course of the conversation he missed something Christie said and asked for clarification. At this prompting I responded by saying jestfully in Igbo: “Rapia ka ona aghaigha agba,” or in English, “Don’t mind her . . . wagging her jaw. . . .”
T. C. Okoli sat up and rebuked me. He said: “Don’t say or imply that what someone else has to say or is saying is not worth attending or listening to.” It immediately struck me that I had to be careful about the way I handled someone else’s words or opinions, especially Christie’s. Even when there was strong disagreement, one had to remember to be discordant with respect.
Discovering Things Fall Apart
Soon after this educational encounter with my future father-in-law I moved to Lagos to interview for a new position at the headquarters of what was now called the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). The Talks Department hired me to maul over scripts and prepare them for broadcast. A tedious job, it nevertheless honed my skill for writing realistic dialogue, a gift that I gratefully tapped into when writing my novels.
In my second or third year at University College, Ibadan, I had offered two short stories, “Polar Undergraduate” and “Marriage Is a Private Affair,” to the University Herald, the campus magazine. They were accepted and published. I published other stories during that time, including “The Old Order in Conflict with the New” and “Dead Men’s Path.” In my third year I was invited to join the editorial committee of the journal. A bit later I became the magazine’s editor.
At the University College, Ibadan, I was in contact with instructors of literature, of religion, and of history who had spent several years teaching in England. Studying religion was new to me and interesting because the focus went beyond Christian theology to encompass wider scholarship—West African religions. One of my professors in the Department of Religion, Dr. Parrinder, was a pioneer in the area. He had done extensive research in West African religions and cosmology, particularly in Dahomey, present-day Republic of Benin. For the first time I was able to see the systems—including my own—compared and placed side by side, which was really exciting. I also encountered another professor, James Welch, in that department, an extraordinary man, who had been chaplain to King George VI, chaplain to the BBC, and all kinds of high-powered things before he came to University College, Ibadan.
My professors were excellent people and excellent teachers, but they were not always the ones I needed. James Welch said to me, “We may not be able to teach you what you need or what you want. We can only teach you what we know.” I thought that was wonderful. Welch helped me understand that they were not sent there to
translate their knowledge to me in a way that would help me channel my creative energies to tell my story of Africa, my story of Nigeria, the story of myself. I learned, if I may put it simply, that my story had to come from within me. Finding that inner creative spark required introspection, deep personal scrutiny, and connection, and this was not something anybody could really teach me.1
I have written elsewhere of how I fared when I entered a short story competition in the Department of English, and how my teacher, who supervised this competition, announced the result, which was that nobody who entered the competition was good enough. I was more or less singled out as someone with some promise, but the story I submitted lacked “form.” Understandably, I wanted to find out more about what the professor meant by form. It seemed to me that here was some secret competence that I needed to be taught. But when I then applied some pressure on this professor to explain to me what form was, it was clear that she was not prepared—that she could not explain it to me. And it dawned on me that despite her excellent mind and background, she was not capable of teaching across cultures, from her English culture to mine. It was in these circumstances that I was moved to put down on paper the story that became Things Fall Apart. I was conscripted by the story, and I was writing it at all times—whenever there was any opening. It felt like a sentence, an imprisonment of creativity. Through it all I did not neglect the employment for which I earned a salary. Additional promotions came at NBC, and very swiftly, particularly after most of the British returned to England; I was appointed director of external broadcasting.
I worked on my writing mostly at night. I was seized by the story and I found myself totally ensconced in it. It was almost like living in a parallel realm, a dual existence not in any negative sense but in the way a hand has two surfaces, united in purpose but very different in tone, appearance, character, and structure. I had in essence discovered the writer’s life, one that exists in the world of the pages of his or her story and then seamlessly steps into the realities of everyday life.
The scribbling finally grew into a manuscript. I wanted to have not just a good manuscript but a good-looking manuscript, because it seemed to me that that would help to draw readers’ and publishers’ attention to the work. So I decided, on the strength of a recommendation of an advertisement in a British magazine or journal that described a company’s ability to transform a manuscript through typing into an attractive document, to send it off for “polishing.”
What I did next, in retrospect, was quite naïve, even foolish. I put my handwritten documents together, went to the post office, and had them parcel the only copy of the manuscript I had to the London address of the highly recommended typing agency that was in the business of manuscript preparation. A letter came from this agency after a few weeks. They confirmed that they had received my document and wrote that the next thing I should do was send them thirty-two pounds, which was the cost of producing my manuscript. Now, thirty-two pounds was a lot of money in 1956, and a significant slice of my salary, but I was encouraged by the fact that I had received this information, this feedback, and that the people sounded as if they were going to be of great value to me. So, I sent off the payment as instructed.
What happened next was a near catastrophe. The typing agency, obviously having received the money I sent, went silent. One week passed, then two, three, four, five, six weeks, and I began to panic. I wrote two letters inquiring about the status of the manuscript preparation and I got no answer.
One had a great deal of confidence and faith in the British system that we had grown up in, a confidence and faith in British institutions. One trusted that things would get where they were sent; postal theft, tampering, or loss of documents were unheard-of. Today one would not even contemplate sending off materials of importance so readily, either abroad or even locally, by mail.
The good luck was that at that point in my career I was working very closely with a British former BBC Talks producer, Angela Beattie. Beattie was seconded to the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, for which she served as head of our two-person department. She was the head of Talks and I was the Talks producer, and we had a secretary, I believe, also from the BBC. It was to Beattie that I now went to and told my story about the British typing agency. Ms. Angela Beattie was shocked—she was a no-nonsense person.
“Give me their name and address,” she insisted.
Fortunately, she was about to go to England on leave, so she became the perfect vehicle to carry my anguish to the typists in London. And she did it in her distinctive way.
She arrived at the offices of the typing agency and asked to speak to the manager, who showed up swiftly. Angela Beattie asked the manager sternly what she had done with the manuscript that her colleague in Lagos, Nigeria, had sent. Here, right before them, armed with a threat, was a well-connected woman who could really make trouble for them. The people there were surprised and shaken. “Now, I am going back to Nigeria in three weeks,” Angela Beattie said as she left the agency’s office, “and when I get there, let us hope that the manuscript you took money to prepare has been received by its owner, or else you will hear more about it.” A few weeks later I received a handsome package in the mail. It was my manuscript. I look back now at those events and state categorically that had the manuscript been lost I most certainly would have been irreversibly discouraged from continuing my writing career.
Later that year, in the fall of 1956 or thereabouts, I was selected to travel to the British Broadcasting Corporation school in London where its staff were trained. Bisi Onabanjo, a good friend of mine and the future governor of Ogun state, was also among the small group of Nigerians attending this course. I had not up to this time traveled outside Nigeria. In those days such trips were done by boat, as commercial air flights from Lagos were not commonplace. London was a brand-new and pleasant experience. I took advanced technical production skills courses during my time at the BBC staff school, and in between my classes was able to take in the sights and sounds of London, a city that remains one of my favorite international capitals.
I took along my typed manuscript, hoping to bump into a number of writers and publishers who could provide me with some advice about how best to get the book published. I was fortunate to meet and make the acquaintance of Gilbert Phelps, a British writer, who read the manuscript and was quite enthusiastic about its literary merit and prospects for publication. When Mr. Phelps kindly suggested that I hand over the manuscript to him to pass on to some publishers he knew; I hesitated and told him that I needed some more time to work on the novel. I was still wondering whether to publish it in three parts or divide the work into three separate books.2