I bought this slim book because Chinua Achebe is a favorite author and I wanted to learn more about him. I had planned to put it into my Memoir category. However, although he gives a brief glimpse into his early life as a child in Africa, the main thrust of this book is how literature has impacted western readers’ view of Africa and its people. He makes a strong case for seeing both the nonfiction and the literature written about Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries and even into the 20th century was written by Western authors and was greatly influenced by the desire to justify first the Slave Trade and later the colonization of Africa by Europeans. It has only been since the advent of authors who are African that the “real stories” of Africa can be told. The style of this book is like a friendly chat with examples offered which made it an enjoyable and quick read. However, it has made an impact on me and I will be rethinking my Africa category and extending it into next year as I now am anxious to discover other African authors, both fiction and nonfiction, to get a better understanding of this fascinating area of our world. Highly recommended. ( )

A reflection on Africa (mostly through the lens of Nigeria), colonialism, literature and history. Elegant, poetic, erudite and rightheaded, this is an entertaining and thought-provoking little short book (at just over 100 pages). Achebe stresses the power of stories – we see how colonialism’s skewed view if Africa and Africans had not only a history, but therein a purpose: to justify, even portray as merciful, the slave trade and later colonialism, which saved the savages from their own murderous destructiveness. Just as communities need stories for a sense of identity, colonialism needed its own mythology to facilitate “the heavy task of dispossession”. Post-colonialism, Africans and others need to reclaim their narrative in resistance to “the colonisation of one people’s story by another.” African proverb: “Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.” In contrast to Conrad’s “suspicion of their [Africans] not being inhuman”, Achebe highlights “the thread” running through African literature, that of “a shared humanity linking the author to the world of his creation…[he] remains painfully aware that he is of the same flesh and blood, the same humanity as its inhabitants.” The task of writers in postcolonial countries, as Achebe sees it is to highlight the universality of humans in their (as in and with Western) countries through “the curative power of stories”.

Initially a partial memoir of his early life in Ogidi, Nigeria among the Igbo people. Described as closer to a nation than a tribe, its settlements linked (by markets, culture and kin) but determinedly decentralised and autonomous, placing a high value on individualism, which he contrasts with colonialism’s aggressive imperialism. Achebe contrasts his father’s longstanding work as a Christian missionary and its “levelheadedness” with the “religious imperialism” and “self-righteousness and zealotry” of Europeans in Africa. Achebe describes absorbing the folk-history, myths and stories (a few of which he engagingly relates), handed down and preserved among the Igbo, outside the structures of formal education, largely based on the English model.

Next Achebe describes his partial awakening, as a writer and as a nationalist, in 1952 at University College, Ibadan. When told to read ‘Mister Johnson’, a Joyce Cary novel domestically acclaimed in Britain, Nigerian students could, for the first time, directly recognise the denigrating incongruities in the Nigeria it claimed to portray. Referencing one book in particular, Achebe identifies a western literary tradition (though not totally ubiquitous) that presents Africans as savages, base, squalid, even inhuman (cf. ‘The Africa That Never Was’ by Hammond and Jablow). Even the most highly regarded writers, “Conrad, Cary, Greene and Huxley” (Elspeth not Aldous) are guilty, if more subtle and artistically gifted. Huxley comes in for particular critical scrutiny: she dismisses African art (p.56) and even embraces nineteenth century theories of racial ‘science’ (specifically the lesser brain capacity of Africans, p.61) and maintained Kenya belonged to the white man. Here, though, Achebe points the finger more squarely at Lord Delamere, who organised the white farmers of Kenya and its surroundings to deny Africans rights to land or political participation from 1902. Very different to Jomo Kenyatta’s ‘Facing Mount Kenya’, which includes the fable of dispossession ‘The Gentlemen of the Jungle’ (see pp.64-7).

Achebe and his fellow students’ reaction to ‘Mister Johnson’ prefaced wider political and literary events along the lines of African liberation. In 1957 independent Ghana rose from the ashes of the colonial Gold Coast, the vanguard in the whirlwind decolonisation of Africa. African literature blossomed in the ‘50s and ‘60s, spearheaded by Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ of 1952, and was given a wider audience for the first time by pioneering publisher Alan Hill. The reaction was favourable among some, including Dylan Thomas, who praised Tutuola’s book in print (p.55), but the old contempt persisted in some like Elspeth Huxley, who dismissed it as “the grotesque imagery of the African mind”. Achebe contends that Huxley’s hostility came from her intrinsic knowledge that she was trying to validate dispossession: “the price is…fear and hostility.” Achebe stresses the responsibility of integrity an artist has; he quotes Dylan Thomas in 1953, “There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is, upright.”

Achebe cites Salman Rushdie’s pithy description of the flowering of postcolonial literature, “The Empire Writes Back”, in voicing his hope that the 21st century “will see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world’s peoples…the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession.” However, this process was dogged by the persistent “trauma of a diminished existence” the dispossessed suffer can push them into denying their own culture, buying into the myths of another. Nigerian students, living in England, scorned Tutuola for his bad English and lack of literary value, one without having read him; Buchi Emecheta in 1986 dismissed African writing as “plodding”, while English writing was superior “because the language is so academic, so perfect.” A “badly damaged sense of self…an erosion of self-esteem” are symptoms of colonialism’s lasting damage in Achebe’s eyes. Then there is Vidiadhar S Naipaul, who in a lecture entitled ‘Our Universal Civilisation’. He locates civilisation in Europe and America, and describes it as universal because it has made “extraordinary attempt to accommodate the rest of the world”. Achebe describes Napiaul’s contempt for the poverty of India and Africa, for “men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing” who “have no place”, fuelled by his ignorance and insensitivity. Naipaul: “I don’t count the African readership and I don’t think onwe should. Africa is a land of bush, again, not a very literary land.” About Trinidadians: “I can’t see a Monkey – you can use a capital M, that’s an affectionate word for the generality – reading my work…purely physical…brutes”. Naipaul advises rejection of history by people living in postcolonial countries, to overcome it: “You trample on the past, you crush it.” Achebe goes on to discuss western artists who live or work abroad, and how their counterparts in poorer countries have neither the money nor the passport-given authority to do the same, but they have a more pressing mission: to write about their own countries’ pasts and cultures, to make them visible, to stand up for their largely voiceless populations at home and abroad and to advance a true universality of civilisation that included and treated as equal all those in it.