THINGS FALL APART: Why Chinua Achebe is still the Father of African Literature

Chielo Zona Eze, author of The Trial of Robert Mugabe, blogs frequently on African Literature News & Review, and I follow his news updates on African literature. His latest post is on Chinua Achebe’s rejection of the label “Father of African Literature,” which The Guardian picked up based on an interview conducted by the Brown University newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald.

Eze’s blog chronicles other news about African literature, with interesting reviews on such books as Harare North, An Elegy for Easterly, The Thing Around Your Neck, and many others. Although short, his entries show a devotion to African literature, sometimes founded in pure excitement, as when Oprah selected Uwem Akpan’s short story collection for her book club. Eze’s entry celebrated her choice as a great moment for African writers, pointing out that Western agents and editors might finally realize that they can profit from African writing. And indeed, Say You’re One of Them featured on The New York Times bestseller list, is a good indicator that the book is actually being bought.

To return to Chinua Achebe, I used to teach Things Fall Apart in San Francisco. I would ask my students to first read Heart of Darkness and excerpts of other books on Africa first. Then we would dissect W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” before moving on, ultimately, to Things Fall Apart. It was a composition class, so the depth we could delve into the literature was limited, but Things Fall Apart never failed to interest the students, despite the initial cultural distance. The students response, first, to Conrad was a perfect segue, because through Conrad’s novella they saw how literature was used to argue contrary perspective, and they had fun (in my faithful judgment) writing a comparative paper on the two authors’ approach to colonization. But specifically I enjoyed talking about Achebe, and sharing my childhood experience reading him.

When we read, we associate the book’s setting with places we actually know. In my case, I often remember the place I first read a novel. When I originally encountered William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I was at Machipisa in Highfield, Harare, waiting for an Emergency Taxi to Glen View. That was in January, 1988. Later, when I went back to the rural areas during school break (I was in Form 5), my friends asked me how A-Level was, and my answer was to share with them passages from Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and a little Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, I recall specifically), ignoring the fact that some of them had failed O-Level literature. But I recall vividly walking along the Gwavachemai Mountain range, headed for the small hill that was popular for its sweet baobabs, and holding court there with my friends.

Regarding Things Fall Apart, the setting of the novel was not too different from Mazvihwa, the place I was when I opened the cover for the first time. So when I think of reading it initially, I also remember the associations I made between its characters and real people in my town. There was an Okonkwo in the village, a Nwoye, an Obierika, and so on. And all the spirituality in the novel was quite routine for the townspeople; we may not have had egwugwus, but we had masvikiro (spirit mediums), and there was nothing to stop us from calling them egwugwus. The book depicted things I witnessed.

Interestingly enough, I read Things Fall Apart later in my literary career. The Dickens and the Hardys, whom I encountered first, in the same village setting, had transported me to distant places. But with Things Fall Apart, which I read at university, I pictured the characters walking around my village. Beside Achebe I read books like Toward a Decolonization of African Literature, or Decolonizing the Mind, or the West and the Rest of Us. In the midst of those treatises, Achebe became to me the father of African literature (in English). In school, the syllabi of the courses I took accorded Achebe’s work a prominent position. After Things Fall Apart, I devoured No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, Francophone God’s Bits of Wood, Xala, and The Old Man and the Medal. Pouring over Achebe led me to Ngugi waThiongo’s The River Between, The Grain of Wheat, and Devil on the Cross, which led in turn to Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel.

This exploration went on for a while, until I finally reached Zimbabwean literature. If one hadn’t read our country’s novels already (shame on you, the academics would say) these were my new authors: Chenjerai Hove, Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera, and Musaemura Zimunya. Were these the Fathers of Zimbabwean literature? Why not? In my poem “Like the Poets,” which I wrote that first year of university, I called them “fathers of the literature.” Some of the authors worked in publishing and were intimately involved in the shaping of the literature as it was known then. And yet when I thought of the bigger picture—African Literature-I went back to Achebe. He (as well as Ngugi) wrote essays defining the continent’s aesthetic. I took to hear the lovely phrase: afrocentic sensibility. The syllabi I worked from argued Achebe’s point: All along you have been reading Eurocentric literature, and now is the time to return home to these writers, the fathers, and the occasional mothers [Mariama Ba, Ama ata Aidoo], of African literature.

Now African literature has expanded. We have a new generation of writers and publishers (This should by now be obvious, but I really feel the need to stress that there’s a rennaissance in African Literature). The debates are changing. While the literature is not necessarily seeking to decolonize the mind—to reinvigorate the African languages, even if it occasionally does—at the center of this renaissance is a new African (though not necessarily Afrocentric) sensibility; modern African writers are aware of the dangers of parable, or “the single story,” and increasingly the message I hear touted is, “we’re no different than them.” African literature is no longer a creature strange from other literary creatures, but rather an animal that can stand erect with others during consideration for the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Booker, or even the Nobel. Of course, this is not to say it has never stood there before. It has many times, but there were times when it stood there because it was shockingly African. The creature, though still African, is also simply literary.

And in spite of this all, Achebe is rejecting his recent endorsement as the “Father of African Literature.” He told the Brown Daily Herald recently: “It’s really a serious belief of mine that it’s risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature…I don’t want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us—many, many of us.” Meanwhile, universities have begun to set up Chinua Achebe Institutes, intiatives, etc, and Things Fall Apart is required reading for many high schoool students in the United States. You don’t have to be a father of a literature for all this to happen. You just have to be, as they say, a good writer.

By Emmanuel Sigauke

Emmanuel Sigauke is a Zimbabwean writer based in Sacramento. He teaches composition and creative writing at Cosumness River College, and is a member of the Sacramento Poetry Center Board, where he hosts poetry readings every second Monday. He also runs the blog Wealth of Ideas.