admin
Lovemore Ranga Mataire
I was one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the river bank, making horrid faces . . . That is when I realised that stories are not innocent.“THINGS Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe is a classic novel by one of Africa’s foremost literary gurus, which chronicles the clash of cultures and belief systems as colonialism entrenched itself in Africa.
The book was recognised as one of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, mainly because of its pioneering exploration of the collision of African and European cultures in people’s lives on the continent.
The main protagonist is Okonkwo, a heroic figure in Igbo traditional society, who fails to adapt to the profound changes brought about by British colonial rule.
Okonkwo’s eventual demise is as much as a result of his own traits as much as it is contrived by external factors.
In an introduction of the 2008 edition published by Pearson Education Limited in London, Mpalive-Hangson Msiska says the book was conceived by Achebe as a response to the denigration of Africa in colonial novels such as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1889) and Joyce Cary’s “Mister Johnson” (1939).
He says that the novel is an attempt by Achebe to create a space for the authentic African subject and his or her world.
“It seeks to go beyond the colonial depiction of grunting ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ with no language or cultural and historical links to their physical environment and, as such, it reverses the colonial gaze in order to reveal an essential humanity that the colonial novel either deliberately elided or repressed or was incapable of articulating,” says Msiska.
He asserts that the fathomed ignorance to the African reality was not natural, but a result of an ideological legitimation of the colonial project. Indeed, in his own words in African Literature as Restoration of Celebration, Achebe says of the colonialist: “You construct a very elaborate excuse for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs . . . If the worse comes to worst, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human.”
But Achebe’s intellectual arrival and re-awakening started at some later stage after uncovering some unsavoury underlying ideological sub-text in colonial literature.
Achebe says during his early contact with English books, he identified himself with the white men against the African “savages” but a time came when he realised that he was not part of Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo River in “Heart of Darkness”.
“I was one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the river bank, making horrid faces . . . That is when I realised that stories are not innocent,” he said.
Achebe’s shift in attitude could have been influenced by the rise of nationalist consciousness during the war period in Nigeria of 1918 to 1939. The novel thus derives its status as a classic from its narrative of a historical movement especially the transition from one phase of cultural and political formation to another. The novel is a classic in its response to the colonial literature’s depiction of Africans in that it “re-evaluates the colonial moment, recasting it as a significant but particular phase in the long historical development of an African people over a millennia”.
If, for example, the district commissioner reduces Okonkwo’s story to a paragraph, Achebe appeals to the historical emergence of Western values and institutions in Africa, reflecting the various forces motivating both resistance and acceptance, through the osu, outcasts, who are excluded from traditional society and regard the new colonial set-up as a panacea to their predicament.
The case of Nwoye is also telling in that his maladjusted personality that disallows him from fitting in hegemonic culture represented by his warrior father drives him to have some affinity to the new faith.
It is through the portrayal of Nwoye that and the use of stream of consciousness that the reader enters the minds of an African subject, showing the difference between Conrad’s and Cary’s cardboard characters with Achebe’s complex mental space. According to Msiska the narrative does not plead the case for humanity of the African but rather dramatises it as a natural feature of verisimilitude, of being true to life, of covering a believable personality in its mental milieu.
He says the problem with colonialist writers was not essentially their racist attitudes but rather their lack of appreciation in imitating reality sufficiently, discarding Aristotle’s doctrine of mimesis. The universality of characterisation is achieved through an intense particularity.
The infectious power of “Things Fall Apart” lies in its hybrid form, its synthesis of the universal and the particular, and above all in its successful rendering of pre-colonial Africa as a familiar world, with characters and value systems which in their individuality may appear unfamiliar but whose broad “contours resonate with our”.
It is a novel that humanises Africa and presents it as an intriguing, profound and elaborate enough to inspire the most considered literary treatment.
Online Reporter