And talking of dispossession, what about language itself? Does my writing in the language of my colonizer not amount to acquiescing in the ultimate dispossession? This is a big and complex matter which I discuss elsewhere and do not wish to go into fully here, nor evade completely. Let me simply say that when, at the age of thirteen, I went to that school modeled after British public schools, it was not only English literature that I encountered there. I came in contact also for the first time in my life with a large number of other boys of my own age who did not speak my Igbo language. And they were not foreigners but fellow Nigerian youth. We lived in the same dormitories, attended the same morning assembly and classes, and in the evenings gathered in the same playing fields. To be able to do all that, we had to put away our different mother tongues and communicate in the language of our colonizers. This paradox was not peculiar to Nigeria. It happened in every colony where the British put diverse peoples together under one administration.
Some of my colleagues, finding this too awkward, have tried to rewrite their story into a straightforward case of oppression by presenting a happy monolingual African childhood brusquely disrupted by the imposition of a domineering foreign language. This historical fantasy then demands that w
e throw out the English language in order to restore linguistic justice and self-respect to ourselves.
My position is that anyone who feels unable to write in English should, of course, follow his desires. But we must not take liberties with our history. It is simply not true that the English forced us to learn their language. On the contrary, British colonial policy in Africa and elsewhere generally emphasized its preference for native languages. We saw remnants of that preference in the Bantustan policies of South Africa. The truth is that we chose English not because the British desired it but because, having tacitly accepted the new nationalities into which colonialism had forced us, we needed its language to transact our business, including the business of overthrowing colonialism itself in the fullness of time.
Now, that does not mean that our indigenous languages should be abandoned. It does mean that these languages which coexist and interact with the newcomer will increasingly do so now and into the foreseeable future. For me, it is not either English or Igbo, it is both. In 1967, when Christopher Okigbo, our finest poet, fell on the Biafran battlefield, I wrote for him one of the best poems I have ever written, in the Igbo language, in the form of a traditional dirge sung by young people when a member of their age group died. Some years later I wrote a different kind of poem, in English, to mark the passing of the Angolan poet and president Agostinho Neto. The ability to do both is in my view a great advantage and not the disaster some of my friends insist on calling it.
It is inevitable, I believe, to see the emergence of modern African literature as a return of celebration. It is tempting to say that this literature came to put people back into Africa. But that would be wrong, because people never left Africa, except, perhaps, in the wishful imagination of Africa’s antagonists.
I must now emphasize the point I opened with. Celebration does not mean praise or approval. Of course praise and approval can be part of it, but only a part. Anyone who is familiar with contemporary African writing knows how strongly we stand in this matter; we are no flatterers of the Emperor. Some years ago at an international writers’ meeting in Sweden, a Swedish writer and journalist said to a small group of us Africans present: “You fellows are lucky. Your governments put you in prison. Here in Sweden nobody pays any attention to us no matter what we write.” We apologized profusely to him for his misfortune and our undeserved luck!
The running battle between the Emperor and the Poet in Africa is not a modern phenomenon, either. Our ancestral poets, the griots, had their way of dealing with the problem, sometimes direct, at other times oblique.
I shall end by telling you my adaptation of a very short Hausa tale, from Nigeria: a miniature masterpiece of the story as a two-edged sword.
The Snake was once riding his horse, curled up, as was his fashion, in the saddle. As he passed the Toad, who was walking on the road, the Toad said: “Excuse me, sir, but that is not how to ride a horse.”
“It’s not?” asked the Snake. “Can you show me, then, how it’s done?”
“With pleasure,” said the Toad.
The Snake slid out of the saddle down the side of the horse to the ground. The Toad jumped into the saddle, sat bolt upright, and galloped most elegantly up and then down the road. “That’s how to ride a horse,” he said.
“Very good,” said the Snake. “Very good indeed. Please descend.”
The Toad jumped down and the Snake slid up the side of the horse, back into the saddle, and coiled himself up as before. Then, lowering his head and looking down at the Toad on the roadside, he said: “To know is very good, but to have is better. What good can superb horsemanship do a man without a horse?” And he rode away.
Everyone can see in that simple tale the use of story to foster the status quo in a class society. The Snake is an aristocrat, who has things like horses because of who he is and not because he can ride well. The Toad is a commoner, whose horsemanship, acquired no doubt through years of struggle and practice, does not entitle him to ride in this hierarchical society. The Hausa who made this story are a monarchical people, and the ethos of the story accords well with the ruling values of their political system. One can imagine the emir and his court laughing boisterously at the telling of it.
But quite clearly, whether he was aware of it or not, the ancient griot who fashioned that piece of oral literature had concealed in the voluminous folds of its laughter the hint and the glint of iron. In the fullness of time, that same story will reveal a revolutionary purpose, using what was always there—an unattractive, incompetent, and complacent aristocracy—and exposing it not to permissive laughter but to severe stricture.
The new literature in Africa, like the old, is aware of the possibilities available to it for celebrating humanity in our continent. It is aware also that our contemporary world interlocks more and more with the worlds of others. For, as another character in Ambiguous Adventure says to a Frenchman:
We have not had the same past, you and ourselves, but we shall have strictly the same future. The era of separate destinies has run its course.5
Whether the rendezvous of separate histories will take place in a grand, harmonious concourse or be fraught with bitterness and acrimony will all depend on whether we have learned to recognize one another’s presence and are ready to accord human respect to every people.
1990
Teaching Things Fall Apart
I can see a number of reasons why I should be asked to contribute to the writings on how to teach Things Fall Apart. The first and most obvious is, of course, that I wrote the book. As obvious reasons go, this is perhaps not such a bad one. I have known the book if not more intimately then at least for a longer period than anybody else around. When people come to ask me about it, I’m reminded of journalists who ferret out the mother of a suddenly famous, or infamous, young man.
A second reason might be that I have taught literature in African and American universities for many years and should have learnt a thing or two that I could pass on. That too is a good reason. But there might even be a third and problematic one, namely, that I once gave a paper at a conference in Leeds, England, which I titled rather unwisely “The Novelist as Teacher,” and as a consequence of which everything pertaining to classrooms has been referred to me ever since! And I have kept muttering: “That’s not what I meant; that’s not it at all!” To no effect whatsoever.
Think for a moment of that mother of a young man suddenly in the news; her attitude towards journalists ought to be—if she has sufficient toughness—“When I gave birth to him I fulfilled all my obligations to you. Now get out!” The Igbo wrap it more politely in a nice proverb and place it in the mouth of Mother Monkey. Says she: “I can speak for the little one inside my belly; as for the little one on my back, ask him yourself.”
There is a further complication. Because I wrote Things Fall Apart, I have never taught it. Although I had never felt particularly disadvantaged on that score, I now realize that I cannot bring to this essay actual, concrete classroom experience, as I might do if the book in question was, shall we say, The Palm-Wine Drinkard or July’s People. But my disadvantage is not, I hope, entirely crippling. For I do have other kinds of experience, garnered from years of diverse encounters with readers and critics, students and teachers. I have even, on such occasions as public lectures, attempted to reflect on some of the opinions expressed in these encounters. Letters are, of course, quite special in my view, for when a reader has been sufficiently moved (or even perturbed) by a book to sit down and compose a letter to the author, something very powerful has happened. Things Fall Apart has brought me a large body of such correspondence from people of different ages and backgrounds and from all the continents.
These letters have generally come singly and at leisurely intervals. But I once received a bulky manila envelope which turned out to contain thirty-odd letters from a whole English honors class at a women’s college in South Korea! They had just read Things Fall Apart, and been moved to write individually to me. Although I knew that
the book had been making quite remarkable inroads into the Far East in recent years, I was not quite prepared for such a bumper response as the Korean letters. I hope I may be forgiven if I frame my present thoughts around some of the issues in these letters. But let me make one general point which is fundamental and essential to the appreciation of African issues by Americans. Africans are people in the same way that Americans, Europeans, Asians, et cetera, are people. Africans are not some strange beings with unpronounceable names and impenetrable minds. Although the action of Things Fall Apart takes place in a setting with which most Americans would be unfamiliar, the characters are normal people and their events are real human events. The necessity even to say this is part of a burden imposed on us by the customary denigration of Africa in the popular imagination of the West. I suspect that in any class of thirty American students reading Things Fall Apart there may be a handful who see things in the light of a certain young fellow from Yonkers, New York, who wrote to thank me several years ago for making available to him an account of the customs and superstitions of an African tribe! It should be the pleasant task of the teacher, should he or she encounter that attitude, to spend a little time revealing to the class some of the quaint customs and superstitions prevalent in America.
Fortunately not everyone in that class would be a hidebound ethnocentrist. Indeed, I should hope that there would be at least one person who resembles not the Yonkers lad or worse but another young fellow who came up to me at the University of Massachusetts, having read Things Fall Apart in one course or another and learning that I was on campus. He wore a very intense look and all he wanted to say was “That Okonkwo is like my father.” And he was a white kid.
Now, the extraordinary thing about this is that a few years later I was to hear the very same testimony again, except that this time around it came from a very distinguished black American—James Baldwin, no less. He was responding to a question put to him at the African Literature Association Conference in Gainsville, Florida, in 1980: