Chinua Achebe: Father of African Literature 1930 - 2013

Lecture 10http://viennachinuaachebe.wordpress.com/

Derek Barkerwww.derekbarker.info

Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com

Agingbe I

“Assessing the Dilemma of a Nation at the Crossroads - Protest as Landscape in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah” by Niyi Akingbe

Agingbe II

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines protest as “a solemn declaration of opinion and [usually] of dissent […] the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval […] organized public demonstration of disapproval […] a complaint, objection, or display of unwillingness [usually] to an idea or a course of action.

Agingbe IIIRandom House Unabridged Dictionary

defines ‘protest’ in similar terms as “an expression or declaration of objection, disapproval, or dissent, often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid.”

Agingbe IV

From the two dictionary definitions given above, it can be seen that protest is clearly related to assertive demonstrations of commitment to the continued growth, development, and progress of any society.

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Akingbe V

Protest is the main instrument for the accomplishment of “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.” (Paulo Freire)

Agingbe VI

Protest and literature are seen to be closely related in the way in which human beings perceive of their society and the actions that they take as a result of those perceptions. Social protest can be said to refer to those mass movements, private initiatives, demonstrations, and other activities which support or oppose specific developments or situations in a given society, with a view to changing it for the better.

Agingbe VII

In considering the nature of protest in Anthills of the Savannah, it is apparent that Achebe considers all protest as essentially the contestation of meanings. The disagreements between His Excellency and people such as Chris, Ikem, Beatrice, and the others over the direction of Kangan stem from their differing perceptions of how the country can best make progress:

Agingbe VIII

the former (Sam and his cohorts) believe in an authoritarian, top-down approach because they feel they have all the answers; the latter (Chris/Ikem/Beatrice) argue that such an approach has failed, and must give way to more inclusive approaches that take the ordinary citizen into greater consideration.

Agingbe IXThe novel is full of disagreements and arguments, to such

an extent that the narrative is a virtual war of wills. - The book opens with Chris and His Excellency, with their

eyes combatively locked in a dangerous outward manifestation of a personality-clash.

- Ikem engages a taxi-driver in a grim battle for a few inches of space in a traffic jam, and argues with Elewa over the necessity of her going home in the dead of night; Chris and Ikem argue over the latter’s editorial comments.

Agingbe X- Beatrice engages a female American journalist over

her seemingly inappropriate behaviour towards His Excellency, and quarrels with Chris over his seeming lack of concern for her well-being.

- Ikem has a brush with a traffic policeman over alleged illegal parking.

- Ikem turns his lecture at the university into a dialogue so that he and his audience can “exchange a few blows” (154).

Agingbe XIPart of the contestation of meanings in the novel takes

place on the level of social class and occupation. Ikem’s stubborn desire to maintain a low profile in spite of his enviable status as editor of a major newspaper is seen by himself as a rejection of the crass materialism of Kangan society and a demonstration of his determination to remain true to himself, but the taxi-driver he has an encounter with re-interprets it as the unedifying miserliness of a man who is too selfish to give employment to those who desperately need it.

Agingbe XIII

Perhaps the most explicit argument over meanings is that triggered by the murderous soldier who nearly runs over a trader in the market:

Agingbe XIV‘Does he mean that after killing me he will go and

kill a dog?’‘No, he means that to kill you is like to kill a dog.’‘So therefore you na dog … Na dog born you.’But the victim stuck to his far more imaginative

interpretation. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘If I kill you I kill dog means that after he kill me he will go home and kill his dog.’ (48)

Agingbe XV

It is interesting that this disagreement takes place on a secondary level: namely, that of exactly what the soldier meant by his contemptuous retort, rather than questioning the propriety of the soldier’s behaviour (primary).

Agingbe XII

Achebe seems to be making the point that since protest is essentially about the contestation of meanings, the meanings that are open to such contestation should be properly identified so that the resultant contestations are not misdirected or meaningless.

Agingbe XVI

She concludes that in this novel, Achebe attempts to draw together many of the ideas and opinions that were evident in his previous novels. As a result of this, the novel displays a depth of meaning which influences all of its major themes, including protest.

Agingbe XVII

Thus, instead of depicting protest in ways that have become conventional in African literature, Achebe chooses to examine it in a much more authentic context. Protest is therefore seen to be much more problematical and complicated in the novel than at first seems to be evident.

Agingbe XVIII

Is Niyi Agingbe correct? What do you think?

Franklin I

There is danger in relying on someone else to speak for you: you can trust that your message will be communicated accurately only if you speak with your own voice

Franklin II

"Things Fall Apart," one of the first works of fiction to present African village life from an African perspective, Achebe began the literary reclamation of his country's history from generations of colonial writers.

Franklin III

In the course of a writing life that has included five novels, collections of short stories and poetry, and numerous essays and lectures, Achebe has consistently argued for the right of Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and has attacked the representations of European writers

Franklin IV

Achebe writes that carrying the full weight of African experience requires "a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings." Or, as he later put it, "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it.“

How does Achebe adapt English for his own ends?

Franklin V

In contrast to European modernism, with its embrace of "art for art's sake" (a concept that Achebe, with characteristic bluntness, once called "just another piece of deodorized dog shit"), Achebe has always advocated a socially and politically motivated literature.

Franklin VI

Since literature was complicit in colonialism, he says, let it also work to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. "Literature is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair because we are fashioning a new man," he declared in a 1980 interview.

Franklin VII

The "situation in the world," fifty years after "Things Fall Apart," is not as altered as one might wish.

But the power of Achebe's legacy cannot be discounted. Adichie has recalled discovering his work at the age of about ten. Until then, she said, "I didn't think it was possible for people like me to be in books."

Achebe I

In an article published in 1999 by Chinua Achebe called "Africa is People", he tells us about an invitation he received to speak at an anniversary of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He had no idea why he was invited, and no idea what he would say. Years later, he was invited again, this time to speak at a forum of the World Bank chaired by Wolfensohn (1995-2005; not to be confused with Bush’s Wolfowitz).

Achebe II

Achebe: They talked in particular about the magic bullet of the 1980s, structural adjustment, specifically designed for those parts of the world where economies had gone completely haywire. The most recurrent prescriptions for this condition were the removal of subsidies on food and fuel and the devaluation of the national currency.

Achebe III

The Governor of Kenya asked the experts to consider the case of Zambia, which according to him had accepted, and had been practicing, a structural adjustment regime for something like 10 years, and whose economic condition was now worse than it had been when they began their treatment.

Achebe IV

At that point I received something like a stab of insight. It suddenly became clear to me why I had been invited, what I was doing there in that strange assembly. I signaled my desire to speak and was given the floor. I told them what I had just recognized. I said that what was going on before me was a fiction workshop, nor more and no less!

Achebe V

"Here you are, spinning your fine theories to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories. You are developing new drugs and feeding them to a bunch of laboratory guinea pigs and hoping for the best. I have news for you. Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people. Have you thought of that?

Achebe VI

You are brilliant people, world experts. You may even have the very best intentions. But have you thought, really thought, of Africa as people? I will tell you the experience of my own country, Nigeria, with structural adjustment. After two years of this remedy we saw the country's minimum wage fall in value from the equivalent of 15 British pounds to 5 pounds a month.

Achebe VII

This is not a lab report; it is not a mathematical exercise. We are talking about someone whose income which is already miserable enough, is now reduced to one-third of what it was two years ago. And this flesh-and-blood man has a wife and children. You say he should simply go home and tell them to be patient.

Achebe VIII

Now let me ask you this question. Would you recommend a similar remedy to your own government? How do you sell it to an elected president? You are asking him to commit political suicide, or perhaps to get rid of elections altogether until he fixed the economy. Do you realize that's what you are doing?

Achebe IX

The point of all this is to alert policymakers in such institutions as the World Bank to the image burden that Africa bears into the 21st century and make them recognize how that image had molded contemporary attitudes, including perhaps their own, to that continent.

Achebe X

Do I hear in my mind's ear someone sighing wearily: there we go again; another session of whining and complaining! Let me assure you that I personally abhor and detest whiners. No, I am not an apologist for Africa's many failings. And I am hard-headed enough to realize that we must not be soft on them, must never go out to justify them.

Achebe XI

But I am also rational enough to realize that we should strive to understand our failings objectively and not simply swallow the mystifications and mythologies cooked up by those whose goodwill we have every reason to suspect.

Achebe XII

My request to the World Bank goes to the very root of the problem: the looting of the wealth of poor nations by corrupt leaders and their cronies. This crime is compounded by the expatriation of these funds into foreign banks where they are put into the service of foreign economies. Consequently the victim country is defrauded twice if my economics is correct: it is defrauded of the wealth that is stolen from its treasury, and also of the development potential of that wealth.

Achebe XIII

Let me round this up with a nice little coda. Africa Is People has another dimension. Africa believes in people, in cooperation with people. If the philosophical dictum of Descartes - I think therefore I am - represents a European individualist ideal, the Bantu declaration - umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a human is human because of other humans) - represents an African communal aspiration.

Achebe XIV

Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone. We rise above the animal together, or not at all. If we learned that lesson even this late in the day we would have taken a millennial step forward."

Post Post Post-colonialism is an academic discipline featuring methods of

intellectual discourse that analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and of imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, Post-colonial Studies analyse the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by analysing the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neo-colonialism — the how and the why of an imperial régime’s representations (social, political, cultural) of the imperial coloniser and of the colonised people.

Post Post Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in

the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought.

Post Post – Ekpo I The crisis of the subject and its radical and violent

deflation – the focal point of postmodern critique – are logical consequences of the absurd self-inflation that the European subjectivity had undergone in its modernist ambition to be the salt of the earth, the measure and master of all things. For cultures (such as ours in Nigeria) that neither absolutized, i.e. deified, human reason in the past nor saw the necessity for it in the present, the postmodern project of de-deification, de-absolutization of reason, of man, of history, etc.,

Post Post – Ekpo II on the one hand, and of a return to, or a rehabilitation of,

obscurity, the unknown, the non-transparent, the paralogical on the other hand, cannot at all be felt like the cultural and epistemological earthquake that it appears to be for the European man. In fact, it cannot even be seen as a problem at all. . . . [W]hen such a being settles for the indeterminate, the paradoxical, the strange and absurd, it is probably because he bears no more resemblance to the man as we know him, especially here in Africa;

Post Post – Ekpo III he is a post-man whose society, having overfed him and

spoilt him, has delivered him over to irremediable boredom. Nothing therefore, stops the African from viewing the celebrated postmodern condition a little sarcastically as nothing but the hypocritical self-flattering cry of the bored and spoilt children of hypercapitalism. (Ekpo, 1995)

Post Post

For Ekpo postmodernism has to be seen as the hubristic consequence of a desire to dominate the world, one that, linked to the universalizing rationality of science and anthropology, has to face its own unraveling when confronted by the loss of empire.

Post Post

Quayson suggests that postmodernism can never fully explain the state of the contemporary world without first becoming postcolonial and vice versa. (There is mutual dependence)

Post Post

ModernismRomanticism/symbolism

Form (closed)

Purpose

Design

Hierarchy

Mastery / Logos

Art object / finished work

Distance

Creation/totalization

PostmodernismAbsurdism / dadaism

Antiform (open)

Play

Chance

Anarchy

Exhaustion / silence

Process / performance / happening

Participation

Decreation / antithesis

Post Post

ModernismPresence

Centering

Genre / boundary

Root /depth

Interpretation / reading

Narrative / ‘grande histoire’

Master code

Paranoia

Origin/cause

Determinacy

God the Father

Transcendance

PostmodernismAbsence

Dispersal

Text / intertext

Surface

Against interpretation / misreading

Anti-narrative / petite histoire

Idiolect

Schizophrenia

difference-differance/ trace

Indeterminacy

The Holy Ghost

Immanence

Post Post

Postmodernism

Related to a literary and philosophical tradition of representation, no reality outside the way it is represented, no “reality outside the text”

Postcolonialism

Concerned with representational discourses, often takes colonialism’s representations as its primary target

Post Post

Both share the prefix “post” – aligns them both to the similar problematics of temporal sequence and transcendance in relation to their second terms (colonialism / modernism)

The relation of temporal or other supersession raise problems of continuity and rupture – ironically reproducing elements of Rationalistic / Enlightenment notions of progress which it seems to challenge

Post Post

The “-ism” indicates their shared mutuality as second order meditations – even though they are not clear-cut ideologies, nonetheless they seek to distinguish themselves from central positions (of colonialism/modernism)

Both are second-order meditations upon real (and imagined) conditions in the contemporary world and are to be taken seriously as contributing to an understanding of the world in which we live.

Post Post

Postmodernism

Can be typified as a vigorously anti-systemic mode of understanding, with pluralism, multiple perspectives highlighted as a means of disrupting the centralising impulse of any system

Postcolonialism

Can be typified as a vigorously anti-totalitarian / metanarrative / with a particular emphasis on addressing past injustices

Post Post

PostmodernismLyotard: central feature of “postmodern condition” is an incredulity towards metanarratives produced by science, Marxism and Enlightenment theories of progress

“Scientific universalism comes at the price of a distortion of specificities”

PostcolonialismSame anti-totalizing agenda, anti-prescriptive, anti-hegemonic

Post Post Quayson: The fear of being thought prescriptive and

hegemonic is one that most people no longer think worth risking in a world of pluralism. I happen to think otherwise. Recognizing that there is much destitution, poverty, and sheer despair in the world, it seems to me increasingly imperative that the risk of appearing prescriptive is one worth taking if one is not to surrender completely to a debilitating anomie brought on by the comprehension of persistent social tragedies.

Post Post

Quayson: Those who lose their limbs to landmines, are displaced due to refugee crises, or merely subsist in the intermittent but regularly frustrated hope that the world can become a better place, cannot wait for complete moral certitude before they take action to improve their existence.

Post Post Quayson: It is partly in the implicit (and often real)

alliance with those who, to appropriate a phrase from Julian Murphet, “keep running all the time simply to keep pace with events,” that we ought to take courage to make ethical judgments even in the full knowledge that we may be proved wrong. To this larger picture, and in the service of this larger affirmation we ought to commit our critical enterprises. Both postmodernism and postcolonialism have a part to play in this.

•January 31: Exam

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