Meanwhile our present work is not entirely without its blessing and reward. This wayward child can show now and again great intimations of affection. I have seen this flow towards me at certain critical moments.
When I was in America after the Biafran war, an army officer who sat on the council of my university in Nigeria as representative of the federal military government pressured the university to call me back home. This officer had fought in the field against my fellow Biafrans during the civil war and had been seriously wounded. He had every right to be bitter against people like me. I had never met him, but he knew my work and was himself a poet.
More recently, after a motor accident in 2001 that left me with serious injuries, I have witnessed an outflow of affection from Nigerians at every level. I am still totally dumbfounded by it. The hard words Nigeria and I have said to each other begin to look like words of anxious love, not hate. Nigeria is a country where nobody can wake up in the morning and ask: what can I do now? There is work for all.
2008
In its original form, this essay was delivered as the keynote address at The Guardian’s Silver Jubilee, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, on October 9, 2008. It was subsequently reprinted in the Nigeria Daily News on October 14, 2008.
Traveling White
In October 1960, I enjoyed the first important perk of my writing career: I was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to travel for six months anywhere I chose in Africa. I decided to go to east, central, and southern Africa.
I set out with high hopes and very little knowledge of the real Africa. I visited Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, and then Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. I had had vague notions of going to South-West Africa as well, and even South Africa itself. But Southern Rhodesia proved more than enough for me on that journey and I turned around after a little more than a week there.
The chief problem was racism. The only African country I had visited before was Ghana, the flagship of Africa’s independence movement. Ghana had been independent for a few years and was justly the pride of emergent Africa. Nigeria had won her own freedom from Britain just before my journey, on October 1, 1960, and I set forth with one month’s worth of ex-colonial confidence—the wind of change, as it were, behind my sails.
The first shock came when we were about to land in Nairobi, and we were handed immigration forms to fill out. After your name, you had to define yourself more fully by filling in one of four boxes: European, Asiatic, Arab, Other! At the airport there were more of the same forms and I took one as a souvenir. I was finding the experience almost funny.
There were other minor incidents, as when the nice matronly British receptionist at the second-class hotel I checked in to in Dar es Salaam told me she didn’t mind having Africans in her hotel and remembered a young West African woman who had stayed there a year or so ago and had “behaved perfectly” all the time she was there and spoke such beautiful English.
I read in the papers that a European Club in Dar was at that time debating whether it ought to amend its rules so that Julius Nyerere, who was then chief minister, might be able to accept the invitation of a member to drink there.
; But as the weeks passed, my encounters became less and less amusing. I shall recount just two more, which happened in Rhodesia (modern Zambia and Zimbabwe).
I was met at Salisbury Airport by two young white academics and a black postgraduate student from the new University of Rhodesia. The Rockefeller Foundation, apparently knowing the terrain better than I did, had taken the precaution of enlisting the assistance of these literature teachers to meet me and generally keep an eye on my program. The first item on the agenda was to check in to my hotel. It turned out to be the new five-star Jameson Hotel, which had just been opened in order to avoid such international incidents as the refusal of accommodation to a distinguished countryman of mine, Sir Francis Ibiam, governor of Eastern Nigeria, president of the World Council of Churches, and a British knight!
I was neither a knight, a governor, nor president of any council, but a poor, unknown writer, traveling on the generosity of an enlightened American foundation. This generosity did not, however, stretch so far as to accommodate the kind of bills the Jameson Hotel would present.
But that was another story, which would unfold to me later. For the moment, my three escorts took me to my hotel, where I checked in and then blithely offered them a drink. It was the longest order I had or have ever made. The waiter kept going and then returning with an empty tray and more questions, the long and short of which was that the two bwanas could have their beer and so could I because I was staying in the hotel but the other black fellow could only have coffee. So I called the entire thing off. Southern Rhodesia was simply awful.
Those were not jet days, and my journey home entailed an overnight stop in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. The manager of the rather nice hotel where I stayed spotted me at dinner, came over and introduced himself, and sat at my table for a chat. It was a surprise; I thought he was coming to eject me. He had been manager of the Ambassador Hotel in Accra, Ghana. From him I learnt that Victoria Falls was only twenty-odd miles away and that a bus went there regularly from the hotel.
So the next morning I boarded the bus. From where I sat—next to the driver’s seat—I missed what was going on in the vehicle. When finally I turned around, probably because of a certain unnatural silence, I saw with horror that everyone around me was white. As I had turned round they had averted their stony gazes, whose hostility I had felt so palpably at the back of my head. What had become of all the black people at the bus stop? Why had no one told me? I looked back again and only then took in the detail of a partition and a door.
I have often asked myself what I might have done if I had noticed the separate entrances before I boarded; and I am not sure.
Anyhow, there I was sitting next to the driver’s seat in a Jim Crow bus in Her Majesty’s colony of Northern Rhodesia, later to be known as Zambia. The driver (black) came aboard, looked at me with great surprise, but said nothing.
The ticket collector appeared as soon as the journey got under way. I did not have to look back anymore: my ears were now like two antennae on each side of my head. I heard a bolt move and the man stood before me. Our conversation went something like this:
TICKET COLLECTOR: What are you doing here?
CHINUA ACHEBE: I am traveling to Victoria Falls.
T.C.: Why are you sitting here?
C.A.: Why not?
T.C.: Where do you come from?
C.A.: I don’t see what it has to do with it. But if you must know, I come from Nigeria, and there we sit where we like in the bus.
He fled from me as from a man with the plague. My European co-travelers remained as silent as the grave. The journey continued without further incident until we got to the falls. Then a strange thing happened. The black travelers in the back rushed out in one huge stampede to wait for me at the door and to cheer and sing my praises.
I was not elated. A monumental sadness descended on me. I could be a hero because I was in transit, and these unfortunate people, more brave by far than I, had formed a guard of honor for me!