Nigeria Content Online

Someone once told
me that the depiction of women in Chinua Achebe’s, Things Fall Apart
understates the role of women in Igbo communities. I am at a loss as to
what that means. Is it any narrower than the stereotypical fiction of
swashbuckling women in the West bossing snivelling male weaklings?
Indeed in that sense, is it not a less stereotypical portrayal? Have
you read Buchi Emecheta’s novels? Does she invite you to draw
conclusions based on her lived life and the testimony in her novels?
And why would any researcher worth his or her salt draw conclusions
about a people’s way of life based on just one novel? And what are we
talking about anyway?

Political
correctness threatens to distort the lived life. What we would like to
see is different from what happened. As for the bit about women being
empowered and getting chieftaincy titles etc, some of that is true and
Achebe has addressed this in some of his books (with mixed success
because rather than focus on his work, he was trying to be sensitive to
accusations of misogyny). What is true is that the fate of the vast
majority of women and children in today’s Nigeria makes their fate in
‘Things Fall Apart’ heavenly. We invest in mimicry and say all the
right things about women empowerment, blah, blah, blah. But the truth
stares us in the face. Today in Nigeria, many of our women and children
are mostly second-class citizens in a country dominated by powerful
patriarchs, men that have bastardised a cultural past and turned it
into the patriarchy from hell. Just like their “institutions of higher
learning,” “democracy,” and other perversions of mimicry, they clothe
aberrations in the power of empty words.

The notion that
Achebe has to travel the length and breadth of Igboland in order to
write the definitive epic on women empowerment is, to be honest with
you, silly. He has written a story based on a rich slice of Igbo life;
he has not drawn any conclusions. It is up to the reader to draw his or
her own conclusions. Why should that now translate into an acceptable
criticism of his work? It is one thing to say that Achebe’s worldview
is narrow; it is another thing to suggest that his depictions are
false. We can’t have it both ways: Should fiction document the lived
history or is fiction free to distort life?

We must be wary of
being ambushed by the fiction that denies our humanity, or that
italicises us into “the other.” I shake my head when I read thinkers
describing ‘Things Fall Apart’ as an Igbo novel, whatever that means.
It would never occur to them to describe a John Updike tome in such a
limiting fashion. Because Updike is human and Chinua Achebe is, well,
‘the other’. Things Fall Apart is of course more than an “Igbo” or
“African” novel. It is a novel about our humanity and how we adapt (or
don’t) to change. The compartmentalisation of our humanity is
relentless, despite loud protestations. Jerry Guo of Newsweek recently
did a semi-illiterate interview of Chinua Achebe (Chinua Achebe on
Nigeria’s Future, Newsweek, July 5, 2010). Sample blurb: “Although best
known for his 1958 masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, about a simple yam
farmer in tribal Nigeria, novelist Chinua Achebe is still writing about
Africa a full half century later. The 79-year-old author and social
critic spoke with Newsweek’s Jerry Guo about recent developments in his
home country and politics on the continent.” It is news to me that
Things Fall Apart is “about a simple yam farmer in tribal Nigeria.” We
are in the year 2010 and Things Fall Apart is being described in such a
hideous fashion. It gets worse: Here are sample questions asked of
Achebe: “Why do you think Nigeria has such a bad reputation?” “So how
did notoriously corrupt African states like Nigeria become that way
while others such as Botswana and Ghana went down a different path?”
“There’s been an uptick in ethnic violence between the Christians and
Muslims in Nigeria. Are you afraid of radical Islam taking root there
and spreading?”

Newsweek’s interrogation masks the usual clarity of Chinua Achebe’s
thinking. The questions force the responses to be pedestrian and that
is too bad. Once more Newsweek misses a grand opportunity to encourage
new thinking, shed new light on persistent challenges. There is nothing
new here from Achebe that many of us have not previously engaged and I
do not blame him. There are too many things to worry about. Again,
think of your favourite great white author, anyone of Achebe’s stature
and imagine him/her being taken through the indignity of this absurd
interview. For one thing, the questions would have been researched and
fielded by a senior ranking editor, not just a wretched stringer who
does not know how to read books. And can you imagine the author
responding to questions so parochial, they belong in medieval times? It
is not just disrespectful, it is an outrage.