Prof. Chinua Achebe
In this interview with American novelist, Bradford Morrow, Chinua Achebe, who died on Friday, talks about his work, the necessity for a Biafra Republic and his view on politics in literature In your essay “The Truth of Fiction,” you define a difference between fiction and what you term beneficent fiction. Given how central politics is to your novels, do you think that there must always be a political element for beneficent fiction to be truly beneficent?
The notion of beneficent fiction is simply one of defining storytelling as a creative component of human experience, human life, as something we have always done which has positive purpose and a use. Whenever you say that, some people draw back. Why should art have a purpose and a use? But it seems to me that from the very beginning, stories have been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound. Still, I think that behind it all is a desire to make our experience in the world better, and once you talk about making things better you’re talking about politics.
How do you define politics?
Anything to do with the organisation of people in society; that is the definition. Whenever you have a handful of people trying to live harmoniously, you need some organisation, some political arrangement that tells you what you can do and shouldn’t do, tells you what enhances harmony and what brings about disruption.
So there is a politics of family, politics of love relationships, politics of religion, politics of walking across the street.
Exactly. What we’re talking about is power, the way that power is used.
Do you think that a novel that does address state politics, the politics of organising a country or culture, is less beneficent than a political novel?
No, I wouldn’t try to exclude any work. My purpose is not to exclude. If a book qualifies, I wouldn’t exclude it because it doesn’t deal with politics on the state or world level. I would simply say that’s one way of telling a very complicated story. The story of the world is complex and one should not attempt to put everything into one neat definition, or into a box. But also I want to insist that nobody can come to me and say, your work is too political. My instinct is to talk about politics in my work and that is your instinct too. That is the sense in which Come Sunday, too, is a very powerful story. An effective, powerful and moving depiction of the modern world with its politics in all its various dimensions.
One should not attempt to avoid that because of this superstition that politics somehow is inimical to art. There are some who cannot manage politics in their fiction, so let them not. But they must not insist that everybody else must avoid politics because of some superstition built up in recent times that defines art as only personal, introspective, away from the public arena. That’s nonsense. Fiction in the West has suffered in recent times by that limitation. When I see a book which is grappling with the big issues – violence, injustice, victimisation -that also has the scope of the whole world, that goes from the centre to the periphery and back, that’s great. It’s difficult to do, but difficulty is no reason not to do it.
Given how thoroughly world politics in the last several years has charged and even changed the atmosphere of our personal lives, one wonders how it is possible that so many contemporary American novelists have eschewed politics in their work.
That’s something I would like to understand myself. All I can say is that an apolitical stance was not there at the beginning of the novel. It is something that’s happened during the last two hundred years. I don’t think it has been a good thing for the world or for fiction. We can hope for the beginning of a reversal of that belief on the part of artists. I think they’ve been conned into apoliticism by those who have a vested interest in keeping us out. The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor’s domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes. When the poet is pleased to do that, the emperor is happy and will pay him money to stay within his aesthetic domain. But you and I don’t have to agree with the emperor. We have to say no. Our business involves the peace, happiness and harmony of not just people but the planet itself, the environment. How we live in the world is extremely important. How we see our relationship with the environment is important. If we see it in terms of conquest, if we go out and conquer Mount Everest, what are we doing? Even the language becomes significant. If somebody climbs a mountain, they conquer it.
You were an active participant in Biafra’s bid for secession from Nigeria. How do you view the lost dream of Biafra, what your vision was for Biafra, and where you think Biafra might have been today?
At the time, Biafra was a necessity because it stood for the right of people to say no to victimisation, to genocide. On the other side of the argument, there are those who think that the unity of a nation is paramount, that the boundaries of a nation are sacrosanct, that sort of thinking. For me, when you put one against the other, there’s only one position to take. The sanctity of human life, the happiness of people and the right to pull out of any arrangement that doesn’t suit them stands above all. But at the same time one lives in the practical world in which power and force are real and therefore your desire to be left alone will lead to your extinction, lead to bloodshed like what we had, the loss of perhaps millions, we don’t even know how many.
And mostly civilians, of course.
Civilians, yes. Then one ought to say, okay, we’ll make peace.
And yet the war in Biafra lasted for three years.
Yes, nearly three years. Because it was a very bitter experience that led to it in the first place. And the big powers got involved in prolonging it. You see, we, the little people of the world, are constantly expendable. The big powers can play their games, and this is what happened. So in the end, when Biafra collapsed, we simply had to turn around and find a way to keep people alive. Some people said let’s go into the forest and continue the struggle. That would have been suicidal, and I don’t think anybody should commit suicide.
Is secession part of the natural process of the history of any nation or group of people?
The problem with history is that once a whole lot of things have happened, it’s hard to speculate. Nigeria was really a British creation and lasted under the British for no more than fifty years. At the end of British rule, we accepted the idea of Nigeria but the country wasn’t working very well, which is why the whole Biafran thing came about. The British had such a vested interest in keeping this unit together, not for our benefit, but for their own.
They, and not just the British, but the Soviet Union and the Americans as well, were interested in holding it together because of the possibilities of commercial exploitation. What they didn’t understand is that if people are unhappy, commerce is meaningless. What would Biafra have become? We wanted the kind of freedom, the kind of independence, which we were not experiencing in Nigeria. Nigeria was six years free from the British, but in all practical ways its mind, its behaviour, the way its leaders looked up to the British, the way that British advisers continued to run the country, worried the more radical elements in our society. Most importantly, the fact that a government stood by while parts of the population were murdered at will in sections of the country went against our conception about what independence from the British should mean. So, Biafra was an attempt to establish a nation where there would be true freedom, true independence.
But do you really believe that there is any nation on earth that enjoys true freedom and independence?
Some do better than others. Let me give one more dimension of what we were hoping to do in Biafra, and what this freedom and independence was supposed to be like. We were told, for instance, that technologically we would have to rely for a long, long time on the British and the West for everything. European oil companies insisted that oil technology was so complex that we would never ever in the next five hundred years be able to figure it out. Now, we thought that wasn’t true. In fact, we learned to refine our own oil during the two and a half years of the struggle because we were blockaded. We were able to show that it was possible for African people, entirely on their own, to refine oil.
We were able to show that Africans could pilot their planes. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that a Biafran plane landed in another African country and the pilot and all the crew came out, and there was not white man among them. This other country, which is a stooge of France, couldn’t comprehend a plane landing without any white people. They said, “Where is the pilot? Where are the white people?” arrested the crew, presuming a rebellion in the air.
There was enough talent, enough education in Nigeria for us to be able to arrange our affairs more independently than we were doing. Your question as to whether any nation is truly independent: the answer is no. You can manage certain things, but you do rely on others and it’s a good thing the whole world should be linked in interdependence. As human beings you can be independent but as members of society you are related to your fellows. In the same way, nations can manage certain affairs on their own, and yet be linked with others.
Do you feel that you could have written an even better book than Things Fall Apart if you’d written it in your native language?
The answer is no. I have no doubt at all about that. My countrymen now are Nigerians. Nigerians as a whole are not Igbo-speaking. The Igbos are just one of the major ethnic groups. If I’d written Things Fall Apart in the Igbo language, only the Igbo would have had access; not the Yorubas, not the Hausas, not the Ibibio, not to mention all the other Africans, not the Kikuyus, the Luos, etc., all over the continent who read the book. Things Fall Apart has made a wide impact over the last thirty years. This I know for a fact because I’ve travelled through the continent. So it would not have been the same if I had written it in Igbo. But this is not the only argument one could raise for writing a book in one language or another. There are some people who would say even if only a few people would have had access to it, it still would have been preferable to write it in Igbo because you would have given the power of your talent to an African language, to help to create a new literature. The answer to that would depend upon what kind of person you are and what you think literature is there to do. I have no regrets, especially since I also write in the Igbo language. I have written several things in Igbo. If I thought that a novel in the Igbo language would serve a certain purpose, I would do it.
Have your novels been translated into Igbo?
No, not yet. Which shows, perhaps, that we are not ready for the novel in the Igbo language. I’ve written some poetry in Igbo and intend to do other things. But no matter what, I can assure you that the literature we have created during the last forty years in Africa had enormous influence which would have been much less if we had all retreated into our own little languages.
We once talked about the work of Ben Okri, a Nigerian writer who lives in London. What other African writers are writing books that you find valuable?
One way to answer that would be to look at what I teach in my African literature courses. I concentrate on fiction, if only because to do poetry and drama as well would be too unwieldy. First, what I want to do is demonstrate that Africa is a continent. I’ve met people who think of Africa as if it were Dutchess County.
Africa is a huge continent with a tremendous variety and diversity of cultures, languages and so on. The way I show this is to give samples from different areas and histories of Africa. Now, in doing that, I’m limited by the question of language. I use books either originally written in English or translated into English. I begin with West Africa, an area in which one of the most dynamic literatures is being created and which happens also to be my home base. Then I sweep north to include an area of Africa which some people don’t even know is in Africa – Egypt. Many people think of Egypt as being part of the Middle East, but it’s always been in Africa.
How do you feel about religion, personally?
Well, I’m still in a state of uncertainty, but I’m not worried anymore. I’m not looking for the answers, because I believe now that we will never know. I believe now that what we have to do is make our passage through life as meaningful and as useful as possible, I think our contribution to the creation of the world is important, and I take my bearing in this from a creation story of the Igbo people in which there is a conversation between God and humanity. They are discussing the state of the environment – what to do to lift man from the state of wandering, the state of animals, to becoming human, i.e., agricultural. And this is embedded in a story, a parable. Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if He had wanted. But He made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see. That seems to me to be enough to occupy my time and thoughts, rather than wondering, Does this exist? or, Which came first, the egg or the chicken? One can be involved in those questions forever. They are things that we will never know. It is the things that we can do that seem to me to me far more important.
