‘To be a writer, stay around old people’
(By Mike Awoyinfa, first published in Sunday Concord Magazine of November 6, 1983)
As he narrated the story of his life, Chinua Achebe called to mind the wise old man in T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi—incidentally the narrative poem from which Achebe chose the title No Longer At Ease for his second novel. Chinua said he was born in 1930, not in his hometown of Ogidi as on record, but a place called Nnobi.
•Mike Awoyinfa talking to Chinua Achebe
His father was a missionary teacher who moved from one station to another. He retired and settled at Ogidi when Achebe was five. Achebe’s childhood reminiscences are mostly about Ogidi where he grew up at the crossroads of two cultures—the traditional and the missionary. “The fact that my father was almost a very strict Christian in a traditional society was one source of inspiration because inspiration tends to be sharpened by conflict between forces,” he said. “When you have confrontation between ideas, something sparks; plus the fact that I was growing up at a very crucial time of African history, Nigerian history when we were just beginning to become aware of our African identity. Everybody was becoming aware all around us, so this was rubbing on us. The environment was full of contending forces.”
Achebe attended primary school at Ogidi till the final year when he left for Owerri to stay with a senior brother, a teacher who prepared him for the Standard Six examination. It was a fruitful exercise as Achebe won a scholarship to study at Government College in Umuahia, from 1944 to 1947. Achebe said that in his primary and secondary school days, he was usually fascinated by all kinds of stories—both fictional and real. He sought for the history of his village and other local villages from his parents and the old people of the village.
“The community was very vital,” Achebe said. “You just have to listen. And this is still true today. The problem is many people don’t listen. They don’t want to listen. If you go to my village and you have the time, you can still learn a lot.” Such stories, according to Achebe are usually not sought in a hurry. It required staying around the village with the old people. It is not when one is seeking knowledge deliberately when the information comes. “It is when you are not seeking information that something very important drops from the mouth of the old people. So you have to be around them. You have to have the kind of mind that is not hurrying to get away,” he explained.
Just like Amos Tutuola, the novelist of The Palm Wine Drinkards fame, Achebe didn’t listen to his childhood stories hoping to write a novel one day: “At that time, I didn’t know a thing like writing a novel was possible. I had no idea there were such people called novelists. I didn’t know how some of the books I read came about. I didn’t know of anybody really until much later.”
From Government College, Umuahia, Achebe won another scholarship to read medicine at the University College, Ibadan. He was equally good in science, just as he was in the arts. But Achebe didn’t want to study medicine. He wanted to read English. So he lost his scholarship. He sees the loss of that scholarship as one of the most painful experiences of his life. In the absence of a scholarship, some relations of his came up with the money to see him through the university where he studied with such contemporaries like Wole Soyinka (three years his junior), novelist Vincent Ike, J.P. Clark, the poet, the late Christopher Okigbo, the other major Nigerian poet who was then reading classics, Bola Ige, the former governor of Oyo State, and a host of other luminaries.
Achebe remembers his undergraduate days with nostalgia: “We were full of enthusiasm, full of hope for Nigeria. This was on the eve of independence and there was revolution in the air, there was change in the air. We were meeting as young people, very talented people from different parts of the country—the selection processes in those days were very strict and rigorous.” He graduated from Ibadan in 1953 with a Bachelor of Arts Second Class degree and was the best student in his class for that year. From the university, he went into broadcasting and took up writing in his spare time. He began setting the ideas of Things Fall Apart to paper around 1955, finished the first draft and took it along with him to London in 1957 when he was going for training at the British Broadcasting Corporation Staff Training School. In London, Achebe shared a flat with his friend Bisi Onabanjo, the Governor of Ogun State, and he was “instrumental in urging me to show it to somebody.”
Achebe was at first diffident, but Onabanjo urged him to show the manuscript to one of their lecturers who happened to be a novelist himself. It was shown to the novelist who came out with words of encouragement. Achebe returned to Lagos at the end of the training to put finishing touches to the manuscript and sent it for typing to the typing agency in London where it was nearly stolen. In all, Achebe thinks it took him between 18 to 24 months to write Things Fall Apart. He sent it through an agent to Heinemann Publishing Company who were very enthusiastic about the manuscript and got it published in 1958 in London. It received rave reviews in the British press. It was originally published in hardcover and sold in Nigeria for 10s:6d. The book wasn’t all that popular then in Nigeria because only very few people could afford to buy a book at that price. It was not until the African Writers Series came into being with a paperback version sold at a cheaper rate that the book became popular in Nigeria, coupled with the fact that it became a recommended textbook for the West African School Certificate. Generations of Nigerians and West Africans read Things Fall Apart. In 1982 for example, Heinemann had a substantial order for 250,000 copies of Things Fall Apart.
Despite the massive sales and the fact that his books have been translated into different languages of the world, Achebe would not agree that writing has made him rich. He spoke of book piracy, adding that he is “neither rich nor poor.”
Chinua Achebe left broadcasting in 1966, having become the Director of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, External Service. He co-founded a publishing company in Enugu with Christopher Okigbo called Citadel Book Ltd. He became a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1967. Then came the Nigerian Civil War during which he travelled to the United States with Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi to seek help for Biafra—something like roving ambassadors. But Achebe said “it is not really true” that he played the role of a roving ambassador. He said he was not actually offered an official role in that capacity. He stated his stand: “I did go out, maybe three times, to U.S. and Europe. I gave lectures in the United States. I was sent at one point (by the Biafran government) to carry a letter to Senghor—this was before the war itself started—to intervene to ensure that there was no war. I did that, so that’s what the white people called roving ambassador. I did it as an individual, not as a member of a foreign service. They thought a writer would be received by Senghor and they were right. Senghor was very keen to talk with me about literature. In the end, he wrote a letter. He didn’t do anything about what the letter said. Ambassador? No, I was not an ambassador. I went out a few times, the rest of the time, I was in the country.”
(To be continued)