A few years ago, in West Africa, a woman came up to me and said, ‘You know what’s wrong with our men? They go crazy once they get power. Crazy and bad.’ Chinua Achebe’s saving has been the fact that he never sought power, at least not of the kind that leads to conflict and the cutting off of heads. His curse has been to observe things that most of us should be happy never to have seen.
Now 82, Achebe has done what many elderly people do when they have seen remarkable things: he has borne witness and set down his version of the rise and fall of the short-lived state of Biafra.
Achebe’s masterpiece came early in his writing life: Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 when he was still in his twenties, has since sold some 12 million copies and is one of the key texts of any mid-century literature course. In the novel, the protagonist discovers that his people, the Igbo, will not fight to defend their heritage. In real life, things turned out differently.
That book earned Achebe a special place in African letters and in newly independent Nigeria, where he became a cultural and political commentator. Some might have seen something inevitable about this, as Achebe is an Igbo, a tribe that benefitted more than most from the missionaries and their church schools. Their success has had an unfortunate by-product, as Achebe is well aware, for he recognises that ‘there is a strand in contemporary Igbo behaviour that can offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness’. In other words, not only do they do well, they want everyone to know it.
In 1960s Nigeria this was a problem.
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