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By Jimanze Ego-Alowes

BEFORE embarking on this essay, I thought it wise to carry out some cognate field work, however little. Being reasonably acquainted with Achebe studies and scholarship, I knew that my proposed thesis would upend long held but wrong lore on Chinua Achebe and aspects of his works. So, to firm up on my thesis, I sought out a current Achebe scholar.

The freshly-minted PhD, let us tag him Robert, tells that he wrote his MSc and PhD theses on Achebe’s novels. And being a ”2019 just in time” PhD, it is a defensible supposition that he is on top form on the latest Achebe scholarship. I asked him, if any of Achebe’s fictional characters was an alter ego or double, for Achebe. In other words: is Achebe autobiographical in any of his novels? My friend, Robert, with the smile of a faculty sage attending to a rookie scholar, answered an emphatic “NO!” This was expected. The received or abiding sentiment is that Achebe is a non-autobiographical novelist.

Later, I was out on an intellectual fest with colleagues. We were all writerly types but with variant specialties; political science, history, literature, philology, etc.

“Achebe,” I stated, “Was heavily autobiographical in at least one of his novels; and that novel is Things Fall Apart.”

I refused to name the character.

There were immediate reactions, and expectedly, they came in the guise of, “It is not true,” and “It cannot be true.”

One fellow, easily the best amongst us, said that he was not only so close to Achebe, he had additionally studied all his works in detail, and he could say that my statement was false.

“Achebe never made it into his novels,” he intoned with finality.

And lest we forget, he reminded us that he not only studied all Achebe wrote, he in fact dramatized one of Achebe’s books, Things Fall Apart– I believe. And in the course of researching for that dramatization, he was Achebe’s guest at Achebe’s Ogidi or Nsukka home – I cannot quite recall now. His point, which looked all-reasonable, is that he is on familiar turf and could speak magisterially. But his as we shall soon see, is a case of ”Judicial miscarriage of analytics.”

Now, the scandal is not that Achebe was actually autobiographical in penning Things Fall Apart. The scandal is that Achebe’s readers, scholars, and researchers, have missed out on this largely self-evident fact for sixty odd years. The question is why? Perhaps the explanation is this.

”The white man is very clever…” Achebe writes in Things Fall Apart.

My meta-interpretation of this is that Achebe, like most writers, merely speaks of others while actually speaking of themselves. That is to say that most writers use others as characters, but also as tools or mouthpieces for their innermost viewpoints or desires. This is oftentimes done reflexively. In other words, Achebe thought of himself or valued and practiced cleverness, especially the disguised genus. Anyway, most if not all great novelists and artists do. That perhaps explains why their works yield to layers of multiple valid interpretations and uses. And for Achebe, the evidences for his supreme cleverness suffuse almost all his works.

Reading Achebe, specifically Things Fall Apart, attentively, one feels he is under the sway of a master who is guilefully simple. On the surface, Achebe has only one uncomplicated storyline. But that uncomplicated storyline is really a masterpiece of an ambush. Inside the Achebe stories generally, and Things Fall Apart specifically, are labyrinths that run as deep as you can unravel.

Perhaps, it is this Achebe genius for ambush, disguise, and artistic deception that accounts for his readers and scholars missing out on Things Fall Apart as being wholly autobiographical. And Achebe has been so successful that he has misled and/or fooled the best literary detectives for the last sixty odd years. It is thus safe to say that Things Fall Apart is like a clear water pond, and its refracted depths are wont to deceive even the wise and the prudent. In other words, Achebe an ace, is cleverer and deeper than he seems, perhaps even to himself.

So, to go wholly down and drain from the Achebe depths, it makes for reason that we read Achebe with an eye on the Surgeon General’s warning: “All there is, is deeper than all you can see” in Achebe. And this parallax of reality and scene, has in this instance ”defaulted” even Achebe’s hitherto most ardent scholars and spooks. And it may be meet to repeat that it is not impossible that if Achebe were alive and well today, he Achebe, may just like the rest of us be knowing it for the first time, that Achebe is deeper than even Achebe thinks. Why? Genius is never fully self-revelatory.

Now, it is time to let the world know that after a hiatus of sixty odd years, it serves well to say as follows. That self-evidently, Okonkwo, the hero or antihero, depending on your views, of Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart, is Achebe’s fictional double.

The facts are as follows. The least unpacking of Achebe’s life as we know it, runs and correlates just about one-on-one with the life of Okonkwo as Achebe created him. And the fact of this correspondence is – do not believe it­ – faithful from birth to death, even unto suicide. And it runs, both in matters of character and fate.

Please, hold your breath!

In justice, the best way to go about tracking the Achebe analogue in Okonkwo is to match the key and character defining moments and highlights of the lives of the two men; the man as god made him, and the other as created a character.

1a.

Okonkwo was born, Achebe tells, as the son of a lazy but impoverished man. The key point is that Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, was not one of the leading personages or as Achebe may prefer, one of the lords of the clan. Okonkwo was born into the lower strata of society.

1b.

One telling fact is this. Achebe writes in Things Fall Apart, a sociological truth that resonates with historical veracity.

The church had come and led many astray. Not only the low-born and the outcast but sometimes a worthy man had joined it.” Later he writes, [Mr. Brown] went from family to family begging people to send their children to his school. But at first, they sent their slaves or sometimes their lazy children. Mr. Brown begged and argued and prophesied. He said that the leaders of the land in the future would be men and women who had learnt to read and write. (Achebe 2008, 139).

So, it is obvious that the bulk of the Igbo who first went to school or converted to Christianity were not from the dominant strata of the Igbo society. In fact, the fact of ”A worthy man joining,” was much later. And since Achebe’s parents were the first of the converts, it is reasonable to affirm that his fathers did not belong to the elite strata of society or the lords of the clan. In other words, Achebe was like Okonkwo. He was born underprivileged. This is especially so in the eyes of the extant, ”the status quo ante,” not the transitional society he is reporting in Things Fall Apart. That these underprivileged ones later became leaders and lords of the clan was due to the self-fulfilling prophesy of the white man. The white man fixed it. It was ”his century” and consequentially, the century of his local agents in Igbo land. And these local agents were the Achebe fathers and sons who pioneered going to schools and churches.

So, it is not out of place to read an Achebe memoirist excerpt, under a chapter appropriately titled: “Pioneers of a New Frontier”:

My father was born in the last third of the nineteenth century, an era of great cultural, economic, and religious upheaval in Igbo land… and his father, Achebe, a refugee from a bitter civil war, did not long survive his wife. And so, my father was raised by his maternal uncle, Udoh.

It was this maternal uncle, as fate would have it, who received in his compound the first party of English clergy in his town. The new arrivals, missionaries of a new religion, Christianity, had already ”conquered” the Yoruba heartland and were expanding their footprint in Igbo land…. My father was an early Christian convert and a good student. (Achebe 2012, 7).

2a.

Achebe writes:

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight, which the old man agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.(Achebe 2008, 1)

This too is the story of Achebe, if especially we read Things Fall Apart, philologically. The point is that we miss doing so. The details are as follows.

Today, we see wrestling as street brawls and not the haute couture cultural fiesta it was for the Igbo of Umuofia. That is, an Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart is the equivalent of a George Weah or an Arnold Schwarzenegger of today, if you liked. Weah and Schwarzenegger are all popular sportsmen who rode on their entertainment value to become a President of Liberia and an American State Governor [California], respectively. And by the way, they are not exactly fools, all torsos and no brains.

Thus, the rite of Okonkwo’s winning, not to speak of the millennial upset he staged set him out as one of the – all-American, sorry, all-Liberian, sorry – all-Umuofian boys of all ages. In today’s world, Okonkwo would be one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.

One of the world’s most eligible bachelors? Yes. The point is the nine villages and beyond constitute the equivalent of the whole known world for the Umuofians and there is nothing odd or exotic in this. The sages of the Greek city states wrote and performed as if they constituted the world. The only ”Prisoners they took” was that the unknown world was made up of barbarians, men who were outside history, and thus of no consequence. In justice, it is thus obvious that Okonkwo’s fame was worldwide, in philological or new-reality adjusted terms. Even today, when Americans say, ”It is a worldwide hit,” they really mean that it is a hit in America, the larger West, and Japan. Africa and other provincials are not members of their known cultural universe or kit.

2b.

If one thing can be said of Things Fall Apart, it is that it is an upset, a worldwide upset. Achebe was an outlier, a provincial lad. In this, he was just like Okonkwo. While Okonkwo’s handicap was cast from the perspective of sociological lowliness, Achebe’s, was of his being a colonial. Colonials like Achebe were not proper citizens of any part of the known world. They were more chattels than citizens, at least to the British who colonised them.

And just at the tender age of 28 [adjusted for the years of his education, it would probably come to 18 or so],as against Okonkwo’s 18, Achebe pole-vaulted to the top of the known world just like Okonkwo. Of course, Achebe must be writing of himself principally, when he ostensibly writes of Okonkwo that: ” His fame rested on solid personal achievements.” The point is if ever there was such an achiever it is Achebe. Things Fall Apart, a dazzling accomplishment, is Achebe’s singular, solid, personal achievement, as there ever was. And that ensured that Achebe like Okonkwo became a pan-world icon.

In other words, Achebe’s first great and crowning achievement, Things Fall Apart, is the moral or urban equivalent of Okonkwo’s unbundling of Amalinze the Cat, and it was just as monumental. So monumental, that it was compared in the case of Okonkwo with the epic fight of the founding fathers. And in the case of Achebe it was so monumental that it is compared with the epic fathers of world literatures. Today, alongside immortals, the greatest of the greats, like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, etc., Achebe is ranked as their equal. (“The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction; “The 100 Best Books of All Time From the Norwegian Book Club. A list of 100 books compiled by the Norwegian Book Club based on surveys of international authors” https://www.listchallenges.com/the-100-best-books-of-all-time-from-the)

It is thus safe to state, that if Umuofians made such urban lists as the “100 greatest men, etc. of all time,” Okonkwo would have made it alongside their founding fathers and ”urban” names like Einstein, Nietzsche, Napoleon etc. Okonkwo would have ”philologically” topped the lists just as Achebe does today.

3a.

Okonkwo’s undoing was a largely innocuous event. A “Friendly or such fire” killed a maiden, and a lad, etc. was substituted for her. The lad, Ikemefuna, stayed in the Okonkwo household as was befitting one of the lords of the clan. And it so happened that in the wisdom of the day, Ikemefuna – Okonkwo’s adopted son – had to be killed or sacrificed. Okonkwo heeded the call to swing the machete and did. And a little later, unrelated to the death of Ikemefuna, things took a bad turn; and Okonkwo never quite recovered

3b.

Like Achebe’s Ikemefuna, an inauspicious event also befell him because of his solid personal achievement, because of his genius. Achebe authored a novel, A Man of the People. It was a prescient and prophetic novel. The novel predicted the coup that quickly followed its publication. That alone made Achebe guilty in the eyes of the genocidal Yakubu Gowon and or his agents, and they sought out Achebe to murder him. To these genocidaires, Achebe was a part of the Igbo conspiracy to dominate the known world. Luckily, Achebe escaped, but things tipped in the manner it did for Okonkwo. Just, as the white man came and brought his pestilence, the Biafra war erupted, no thanks to Gowonism, and the Gowon-exacted genocide against the Igbo.

And just like it happened to Okonkwo with the coming of the white man, Achebe never quite recovered from the Biafra war. It is not only that it cut short his writing career – organically at least -– he now saw the country he once loved slip into darkness with the direst of consequences; and this was not just for him but for his people also. This too was similar to Okonkwo’s understanding of the consequences of the white man and his new ways, that devastated not just Okonkwo but Umuofia. Again, and insistently, Achebe and Okonkwo live out parallel lives.

4a.

Okonkwo never quite listened to advice or alternative opinions, especially after he became a successful man. We may recall:

Looking at a king’s mouth… one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast. He was talking about Okonkwo, who had risen so suddenly from great power and misfortune to be one of the lords of the clan…. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo’s brusqueness in dealing with less successful men…. Without looking at the man Okonkwo said: “This meeting is for men.” The man who contradicted him had no titles. That was why Okonkwo called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit. (Achebe 2008, 21).

4b.

But was Achebe in real life any different? Historical data suggest that Achebe lived up to be an analogue of his character, Okonkwo, in these matters. A pivotal and character defining event in Achebe’s literary life and career must be the critical revelation by Professor Charles Nnolim. Nnolim ”unearthed” the source of one of Achebe’s great novels, Arrow of God. Quite some din was raised over the matter and Achebe faltered, Okonkwo-like – it is apparent –in his responses. For instance, Nnolim reports on Achebe’s written response. Achebe writes:

A certain fellow was claiming that Arrow of God was written by his uncle, which led to a rather curious situation in which the fellow was dismissed as irresponsible by a white critic. It really should have been expected that some Igbo critics would have shown as much concern as the white critic about matters of critical responsibility in our literature.(Charles Nnolim, “A Source for Arrow of God,” University of Port Harcourt. Okike, No 52, 01 November 2014. https://www.unn.edu.ng/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Charles-E.-Nnolim-%e2%80%98A-Source-for-Arrow-of-God%e2%80%99-Matters-Ari1.pdf)

“A certain fellow,” Achebe’s epithet for Nnolim, whom he knows personally, and who was at the time a well-known and distinguished critic, is the urban equivalent, of Okonkwo calling another, a man, a woman; and Achebe did and in print!

Even more interesting is that Okonkwo rationalized his killing of his adopted son by recourse to the higher authority of the clan, though he needed not, at least according to his equally brave and well-achieved friend, Obierika. In other words, that act of murder by Okonkwo was superfluous as far as Okonkwo, a foster father, was the actor-subject. This is despite conceding that the act may be done. But not done by Okonkwo, was Obierika’s very reasonable position. In the telling words of Obierika:

“If I were you, I would have stayed at home. [And not participated in the killing of Ikemefuna.] What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families.”

“The Earth cannot punish me for obeying her messenger,” Okonkwo said.

“That’s true,” Obierika agreed. “But if the Oracle said that my son should be killed, I would neither dispute it nor be the one to do it.”(Achebe 2008, 53).

And when Achebe had a similar issue what did he do? Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones plays Obierika to headstrong Achebe:

”What I find curious is that Achebe did not acknowledge the source which he obviously studied and whose use does him no injury.” Quoting [Professor] Eldred Durosimi Jones. Founding editor of Africa Literature Today. (Charles Nnolim, “A Source for Arrow of God,” University of Port Harcourt. Okike, No 52, 01 November 2014. https://www.unn.edu.ng/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Charles-E.-Nnolim-%e2%80%98A-Source-for-Arrow-of-God%e2%80%99-Matters-Ari1.pdf)

Thus, just like Okonkwo, the rationalization by Achebe of a self-evident even if ”harmless failure” of his, is superfluous. It would have served him and the rest of us best if he admitted to being forgetful or in plain error. But like Okonkwo, Achebe hinged his personal choices on higher powers. For Okonkwo, it was the Earth goddess: for Achebe it was the white critic he called on his fellow Igbo to queue behind.

5a.

In characterizing the ”doubleness” of Achebe and Okonkwo, we may not yet be done. Achebe again writes:

[Okonkwo] walked back to his obi to wait Ojiugo’s return. And when she returned, he beat her very heavily. In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace. His first two wives ran out in great alarm pleading with him that it was the sacred week. But Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way, not even for fear of a goddess.

Before it was dusk Ezeani, who was the priest of the earth goddess, Ani, called on Okonkwo in his obi. Okonkwo brought out kola nut and placed it before the priest.

Take away your kola nut. I shall not eat in the house of a man who has no respect for our gods and ancestors. (Achebe 2008, 23)

5b.

Was Achebe not such as one? Would Achebe ever have changed his mind even in the face of contradictory evidence? Our records show Okonkwo-like tendency of the great man. For instance, Achebe was into a political dalliance with Alhaji Aminu Kano, a prominent Northern Nigeria politician. It is not impossible Achebe did not in the morning of his political romance with the said Aminu Kano, know that Aminu Kano was a ”notorious” – even if then closeted – genocidaire. But when the fact of it was in the open (Iloegbunam 1999), Achebe neither retracted nor spoke on the fact of his friend, a genocidaire, against his own people. The point is that Achebe as the successful Okonkwo took himself as beyond good and evil, as the new measure of all things. That is, for Achebe as for Okonkwo, there was to be no community Week of Peace or rites, or even truths, that their personal whims could not override. The matter is so much that Achebe in pursuit of personal sentiments above community good, dedicated his famous The Trouble with Nigeria to Aminu Kano, a notorious genocidaire ­– we repeat. And worse, he had the temerity to later write: “… there were a few upright political figures like Mallam Aminu Kano….”(Achebe 2012)

Get the drift? A genocidaire as an upright political figure? Only in Achebe/Okonkwo-style delusion!

6a.

Achebe writes:

In a flash, Okonkwo drew his matchet. The messenger crouched to avoid the blow. It was useless. Okonkwo’s matchet descended twice and the man’s head lay beside his uniformed body…

Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew that Umuofia would not go to war. He knew because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult. He heard voices asking: ”Why did he do it?”

He wiped his matchet on the sand and went away.

And next it was reported of Okonkwo: It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offense against the Earth….

Okonkwo had committed suicide. (Achebe 2008, 163)

Our conjecture is this. If Achebe had recorded Okonkwo’s last soliloquy, it would have been recorded Okonkwo said something like: “There was a people, oh alas, there was a brave Umuofia-Country” And that was likely to be Okonkwo’s last rite before he took to the gallows.

6b.

For Okonkwo, it all came to a bad bend. It was so bitter that he committed suicide. Achebe did not exactly do so. But it is clear from his ”last testament and confessions,” There was a Country, that Achebe felt Okonkwo-like embitterment by events as they turned out, just as Okonkwo did. Truthfully, Achebe as a single being has done so much that few if any African or other persons can rank with him, but society is team-play not a solo run. This is one thing Okonkwo understood and Achebe too, even if they both did too late in their days. It was the failure of their teammates, as it were, that pushed them beyond the pale, beyond consolation and each to a bitter self-bemoaned death.

While Okonkwo dashed for the gallows, embittered and feeling betrayed, There was a Country, may be seen as a stylish repetition of the same act; or its memorial as a swan song or perhaps as a stylized suicide. But please, let no ”judicial references” be made of this, ala, the 1979 transition elections judgment: ”Chief Justice Atanda Fatai Williams’ Supreme Court, legitimized President Shehu Shagari’s election… [but] ruled that the majority judgment should not be cited as a precedent in future cases!” https://thenationonlineng.net/justice-path-not-taken/

7a

Finally, Achebe writes beguilingly of Okonkwo:

Looking at a kings’ mouth, said an old man, one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast. He was talking about Okonkwo, who had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of the clan.(Achebe 2008, 21)

Continuing, Achebe writes:

The old man bore no ill-will towards Okonkwo. Indeed, he respected him for his industry and success. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo’s brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. (Achebe 2008, 21)

 

7b

The point remains that the Achebes [plural] were like the Okonkwos. The Achebes, even more than the Okonkwos, arose most suddenly from great material poverty to be lords of the new and emergent dawn, post-colonialism and all. Many would roll their eyes on this. But first let us remind ourselves of the following:

They [post-colonial administrators and heirs like Achebe] take over the colonial state in an unaltered from. They even take great care not to alter anything, because such a state offers fantastic privileges, which its new administrators [the Achebes] naturally do not wish to renounce. The colonial origins of the African state – a state wherein the civil servant received remuneration beyond all measure and reason…. All at once, in the blink of an eye, a new ruling class arises – a bureaucratic bourgeoisie that creates nothing, produces nothing, but merely governs society and reaps the benefits. (Kapuscinski 2002)

The only difference is that while Achebe was Okonkwo-specific in his reportage, it is Achebe’s composite class of ex-colonials that were granted unimaginable wealth, position, and power. And this was typified by their moving into Government Reserved Areas, GRAs, after the white man left. The plain fact is that the Achebe composite class had no hand in building such a civilization or country. They merely inherited the rump of a British Empire and civilization. And as it turned out, they just could not run it. Achebe confesses to this even if obliquely. In his There was a Country, he writes: “Here is a piece of heresy: The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care… British colonies, more or less, were expertly run.” (43). Of course, they ran it and handed it over to the Achebe composite class of ex-colonials.

Today alas, Nigeria is run like chaos. The Nigeria – the Achebe composite class of ex-colonials, inherited – that was once expertly run by the colonial power is today alas run as disorderly as the gates of hell. Perhaps it is that this Achebe composite class of ex-colonials, came suddenly into a fortune they could scarcely imagine, not to speak of manage or organize or run, and it all collapsed on their heads – and ours too.

One is forced to conjecture that it was the downside of a sudden meteoric rise in fortune that laid Okonkwo low and out. Okonkwo could not handle the new and unbelievable wealth and power he ran into by his industry. Both the Achebe composite class of ex-colonials and Okonkwo were like modern Mike Tyson. A famed American boxer, Tyson’s unimaginable good fortunes was beyond and blighted him, fatally, unto ruins. Perhaps, all too perhaps, these types make up one class.

And it is not out of place that the Achebe composite class, an heir of the rump of a perishing British civilization never came to knowledge that they were merely a band of adopted heirs. They were not truly of the bloodlines. Yet, alas, they deluded themselves that they were. The fact of this delusion is their mother sin. That explains in part, perhaps, why Achebe, one of the best of the rot that is their class, wrote his prose, even if apocryphal masterpiece, The Trouble with Nigeria. His tract above all was aimed at rationalizing the shameful failures of his class, the merely adopted, not true heirs of British or any civilization. In other words, the Achebe ex-colonial composite clan lacked a dialectical knowledge of even who they are. So, how could they generate the leaders to lead the unknowns, themselves?

And that was similar of course to Okonkwo, one can extrapolate. If Okonkwo were to author his own The Trouble with Umuofia, it would have been as un-dialectical as Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria. But the truth of the fall of Umuofia is closer to this dialectical short-circuit than to whatever Okonkwo, would as Achebe, have conjectured. For Okonkwo as much as for Achebe, they are never to be complicit of errors.

Umuofia’s fall is in their cosmological not leadership failures. They did not fully comprehend what the world was made of. Thus, they could not defend themselves on the “ecologically” indicated, even if to them, mutant manifestations. Therefore, if one editorialized, substituting Umuofia for Aztec, etc., the truth of Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican Achebe if you liked, rings perfectly true:

But the Umuofians didn’t know the world existed outside the boundaries of the Igbo universe. When the white man arrived, they died of fright. There was another world they never thought of, and they were paralyzed to death. (Moyers 1989, 507).

And this concludes and summaries the counterfactual history of Umuofia and the current and resistant reality that is Nigeria. This is a Nigeria procured and bequeathed by the Achebe ex-colonial class to present and succeeding Nigerians. However, it is on record that Nobel Prize winner, Professor Wole Soyinka, member of the Achebe class of ex-colonials, was more forthright, more honest, in admitting to, not rationalising, his own and his group’s complicity in the shameful Nigerian tragedy:

BBC: “Has your generation of older Nigerians failed the people?”

WS: “Yes, I believe so.”

(https://www.independent.ng/soyinkas-confession-my-generation-has-failed-nigeria/).

 

Other observations:

1.

The following question may be indicated. How did Achebe write accurately of his future unto his death, when he was only 28? The answer is simple. It is in the nature of the artist to be both analytic and a seer. Most great artists– Achebe is indisputably one – have Delphic insights and hints of who they are and the likely unfolding of those seed personalities.

One of the most immediate in our national memories, must be of the poet Christopher Okigbo. His last book Labyrinths was declared as ”prophetic” by his publishers in their blurb. And the facts of Okigbo’s future actually matched his fears as he prerecorded them. So, the rite of the writer as prophetic is nothing strange or exotic. And this is also known in other climes. For instance, in his essay on Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, a German Achebe if you liked, writes:

It has seemed to people that Tolstoy, in his old age, fell into a kind of religious madness. They do not see that the Tolstoy of the last period lay implicit in characters like Pierre Besuchov in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina. (Mann 1958, 200.)

So, an Achebe foreseeing his future is neither odd not outlandish. These things happen. And the Latin American author ties it all up in his half dream world of characters: ”Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave the room…” (Marquez 1971, 383).

Look, we are all doomed. Our greatest men are those who foresee these ends and try to counsel us on ways about or out of our fated tragedies. Achebe and Okonkwo were two of such, each after his own way.

2.

Perhaps, why the self-evidence of Okonkwo as Achebe’s autobiographical double has eluded us is because of the elephant in our brains. We just could not think of comparing Okonkwo, a common ”wrester”, with Achebe, one of the world’s greatest minds.

The error comes as follows. First, we are wrongly seduced by forms and categories. We gave up too easily, too suddenly, on content, on development; and content and development ironically are the defining assets.

First, it serves well if we came to knowledge that being an artist is not due to form. The conventional category of denoting artists by form may only be self-serving at best. The point is that not all novelists [that is users of the novelistic forms] are artists. Some novelists are in it, legitimately, for the money. Writers – or if you liked fabricators – of Mills and Boon titles are such types. Sometimes, other users of the novelistic forms are no artists too. But that is because they have no talents whatsoever. They remain journeymen, not artists, not masters. The German example of the so-called, The Good and the Bad Mann brothers are telling.

The analogue to the above is this. The so-called non-traditional categories or forms that are considered non-art, like wrestling, business etc. abound with visionary artists. Perhaps, they are rare, but history records they have been there.

Fact is, if any man or maker advances the form, whatever form, or uses the current forms, for the search for perfection in whatever area, such as one is an artist, is a poet. Thus, it is not the form that creates the artists, the poets, the geniuses. It is the content, the innovation, the genius a given practitioner brings to the form.

For example, Donald Trump who is America’s current president once gave an insight in his autobiographical work, The Art of the Deal. It is now said that it was ghosted. However, the point is that he said it right: ”Deals are my art form.” (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/180675/trump-the-art-of-the-deal-by-donald-j-trump-with-tony-schwartz/9780399594496/excerpt).

Even if it is not true for him, the fact of it has been and still remains. Long before Trump for instance, one of the greatest banker-businessmen of all time have had his biography written. And an excerpt goes:

When I remarked that on how unusual it was to find a banker who was also a genuine man of letters, [Raffaele] Mattioli’s face took on an expression of sardonic merriment, and his voice took on a histrionic resonance as he replied. ”I see no difference whatsoever between a poem and a balance sheet…. At best, each is a work of art, and I approach both in the same way. When I look at either a poem or a balance sheet, I try to see the center of gravity, the focal point. (Wechsberg 1966).

And it is not a matter exclusive to professors as Mattioli was. A signalling report on boxing reads:

Once, in answer to the Irish fighter Roger Donoghue, who asked how [Archie] Moore could throw punches out of a position that kept his arms crossed in front of his face, Archie replied, ”You’re talking about technique, Roger, and what I do is philosophy.” Editorializing Miller writes: ”Moore was to boxing what Nimzovitch had been to chess. [Ali, needless to say, could offer his considerable parallel to Bobby Fischer when it came to heckling an opponent out of his skin.] (Mailer 2000).

And we can recall that Plato, rated as one of the finest minds ever, started out as a boxer. In fact, his name, Plato, originally a nickname which he finally assumed, is said to be derived from the fact that he had a broad chest, was a boxer. That Plato was so proud of his boxing endowment that he signed it as his proper name, should make us circumspect in dissing physical or martial grace. Let us suppose that Plato deployed to boxing, his strength and genius. Imagine what innovations he would have purchased for the world by that form, the form of boxing. That he finally chose the philosophical form against the martial kind, does not make him thus a greater genius or innovator. It was his content that was at work and play, and that same content would have been played out in whatever fields he has a knack for – and boxing, a martial-arts, like wrestling, was one of those.

In other words, that Okonkwo was a wrestler and farmer should not automatically degrade our assessment of him in contrast to other parties, say novelists and mathematicians. Rather, what should count is what innovations he brought to his trade, and the data is in his favour. Okonkwo achieved a deed, an upset, an innovation, that ranks him with the founders of the clan. In summary, Okonkwo was a supreme martial artist; and, by this fact merits comparisons with even the gods, literary or otherwise. So, we have to quickly slaughter the elephant in our brains and make meat of it, rather than allow it to decimate our minds as a scarecrow.

3.

In conclusion it is apparent we can see that Achebe’s and Okonkwo’s lives run nearly as one in character and in fate, essentially. The only differences are in matters of Achebe’s management of his family for which we have no firm data. That Okonkwo ran his with a strong hand as Achebe says, may be due to the culture of polygamy which Okonkwo practiced and Achebe did not. In that instance, the dynamics and contexts are entirely different. Anyway, that rather closet, even petty detail, does not detract from the dominant broad strokes in the essential lives of these two characters. And a novel need not conform to the least commas and periods to be autobiographical. Just the essential details, and “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”

In all it may now be safe to say and in justice that the author of Things Fall Apart is [Professor] Chinua ”Okonkwo” Achebe, not Chinua Achebe. Ahiazuwa.

***

© 2019 Ego-Alowes, author and radical conservative thinker is the publisher of africanomics.org.

Biblography

1. Achebe Chinua There was a Country(Penguin Press 2012)
2. Nnolim E. Charles, “A source for Arrow of God,” Okike, No 52, 01 November 2014. https://www.unn.edu.ng/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Charles-E.-Nnolim-%e2%80%98A-Source-for-Arrow-of-God%e2%80%99-Matters-Ari1.pdf
3. Iloegbunam Chuks, Ironside (Press Alliance Network, 1999)
4. https://thenationonlineng.net/justice-path-not-taken/
5. Kapuscinski Ryszard, The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life (Penguin Books2002)
6. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/180675/trump-the-art-of-the-deal-by-donald-j-trump-with-tony-schwartz/9780399594496/excerpt
7. Wechsberg Joseph The Merchant Bankers(Pocket Books 1966)
8. https://thenationonlineng.net/justice-path-not-taken/)
9. MoyersBill, A World of Ideas (Doubleday 1989)
10. Mann Thomas, Essays (Vintage Books 1958)
11. Marquez Gabriel Garcia, One Hundred Years of Solitude(Avon Books 1971)
12. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/180675/trump-the-art-of-the-deal-by-donald-j-trump-with-tony-schwartz/9780399594496/excerpt)
13. Wechsberg Joseph, The Merchant Bankers (Pocket Books 1966)
14. Mailer Norman, The Fight Penguin (Modern Classics 2000)

– Oct 22, 2019 @ 19:53 GMT |

Tags: Chinua Achebe is Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart

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