Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

The villagers collect two hundred and fifty cowries, just to be sure to appease the white man, unaware that the messengers will pocket the extra fifty — one of Achebe’s ironic asides on the beginnings of corruption. Okonkwo goes home to his obi where Ezinma has come with food prepared for him; but he cannot eat; Ezinma and friends who have gathered see where the warder’s whip has cut into his flesh.

During the night the gong of the village crier announces a meeting to be held next day. ‘Everyone knew that Umuofia was at last going to speak its mind about the things that were happening.’

We find sleepless Okonkwo in a strange state of mind: ‘… he had brought down his war dress, which he had not touched since his return from exile. He had shaken out his smoked raffia skirt and examined his tall feather headgear. The bitterness in his heart was now mixed with a kind of childlike excitement.’

He lies on his bamboo bed and thinks about the treatment he received at the white man’s court. ‘If Umuofia decided on war, all would be well. But if they chose to be cowards he would go out and avenge himself.’

When Okonkwo and his fellow elder Obierika arrive at the meeting-place there are already so many people that — one of Achebe’s uniquely original images — ‘if one threw up a grain of sand it would not find its way to earth again’. Okonkwo distrusts the man Eginwanne who is due to address the crowd. Obierika asks.

‘Are you afraid he would convince us not to fight?’

‘Afraid? I do not care what he does to you . I despise him and those who listen to him. I shall fight alone if I choose.’

‘But how do you know he will speak against war?’

‘Because I know he is a coward.’

But before the man can begin to speak, Okika, ‘a great man and a great orator’, leaps to his feet and salutes his clansmen.

‘Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad day-light, then you know that something is after its life … When I saw you all pouring into this meeting from all quarters of the clan so early in the morning, I knew something was after our life … This is a great gathering. No clan can boast of greater numbers of greater valour. But are we all here? I ask you: Are all the sons of Umuofia with us here? … They are not. They have broken the clan and gone their several ways … our brothers have deserted us and joined a stranger to soil our fatherland. If we fight the stranger we shall hit our brothers. Our fathers never dreamt of such a thing, they never killed their brothers. But a white man never came to them. So we must do what our fathers would never have done. Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: “Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.” We must root out this evil. And if our brothers take the side of evil we must root them out too. And we must do it now .’

The tragic climax of this incomparable creation of a society in a time and place of inescapable, irrevocable upheaval and change closes the circle where it began: with the man whose life embodies it — Okonkwo. But it is not for me, it is for Chinua Achebe himself to tell you, for you to read for yourself the stunningly unexpected last pages of this story, the unforeseen consequences, decided by Okonkwo himself, of violent means he has resorted to under the pressures of that time and place, old Africa and the impact of colonial rule, with his own stormy personality fully revealed by the novelist. And there is a surprise postscript to the dramatic end of his story. Suddenly an about-turn in the viewpoint from which it has been told. Now the tragic events are as seen by the eyes and realised in the words of the District Commissioner, not the individuals of Umuofia with whom we’ve become so familiar. And I shan’t reveal the final twist in the last sentence, with its challenge to the reader to laugh, and grimace with disgust, at the same time, at a white colonial mentality.

Things Fall Apart is a work that delights and shocks, rousing many questions. Does Chinua Achebe glorify the past? In this work of the imagination transforming history as poetry — lyrical imagery — common speech, anecdote, suffering, celebration, humour, the extraordinariness a great writer discovers in ordinary life — he makes no such sweeping judgements. He does not deny the inevitability of change; only looks into its ruthless processes with a steady and deeply human gaze.

In Chinua Achebe’s second novel, Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son converted to Christianity, appears, No Longer At Ease (the book’s title) carrying continuity to the epic of dealing with change begun with Things Fall Apart . And later, with the brilliant satire, A Man Of The People , Achebe takes up the story when change has been established, four years after Nigeria’s independence; his unmatched personal and intellectual nerve exposing, in the words of the narrator, Odili Samalu, ‘with deepening dismay the use to which our hard-won freedom was being put by corrupt, mediocre politicians’. A dismay that comes to its conclusion in one of the most devastating final sentences of a book ever written: the words of Odili, ‘I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest — without asking to be paid.’

2002

What does one expect to find, returning to a writer’s first novel after years of reading his others have overlaid it? Outdistanced it?

The most widely read of Joseph Conrad’s novels is Heart Of Darkness , whose very title has passed idiomatically into a metaphor for the evil of humankind in oppression of one another. As colonialism in its peculiarly historical form — conquest military, religious, commercial — began to near its end from the middle of the twentieth century, Conrad’s narrator’s recollection of what he found in a trading station up the Congo River in the late nineteenth century came to epitomise, for many readers and literary critics, the document of the colonialist phenomenon. For some it is the finest proof of Conrad’s genius, laying bare with passion and irony that the heart of darkness is within the white exploiters of other peoples and not in the jungle Congolese whose hands were amputated by Belgian King Leopold’s philanthropic company if they did not produce the required quota of wild rubber. For others, including the great African writer, Chinua Achebe, the novel is literary colonialism, representing Africans as savages with whom contact brings degradation for whites. Conrad’s view of his novels set in the world outside Europe: ‘The critic … seems to think that in these distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai. And yet it is not so … There is a bond between us and that humanity so far away.’ 108

Conrad’s other major novels are Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), read not alone for the transporting skill of Conrad’s story-telling and evocation of land- and water-scapes, but for the astonishing relevance his themes have to our recent past and our present international preoccupations. The secret agent is not only to be found in Conrad’s London just before the Russian Revolution; the way the agent operates matches for us the known but unseen presence of other secret agents of contemporary causes. Under Western eyes there is today the aftermath of Soviet Communism whose desperately dramatic beginnings and complex individual human psychology between the forces of faith and betrayal are his theme in St Petersburg. Nostromo, Italian immigrant shadily employed by the vast European-owned silver mine company which controls every aspect of life of the indigenous population of a South American country, is put to use between it and the abortive revolutions in which one set of indigenous corrupt politicians is toppled and replaced by another; a theme of the three-cornered act between capitalism, the poverty of underdevelopment and local corruption, seen every day on our millennial television.