Introduction
Edward Said: on the ‘culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalisations’: ‘Reality is divided in various collectives: languages, races, types, colors, mentalities, each cateogry being not so much a neutral designation as an evaluative interpretation.’ (Orientalism, 1978; rep. Penguin 1991, p.227; here p.2.)

Matthew Arnold: ‘The men of culture are the true apostles of quality … those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail … the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time.’ (Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. John Dover Wilson, Cambridge 1969, p.70; here p.2.)

Ngugi wa Thiongo: ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures. Africa needs back its economy, its politics, its cuture, its langauges and all it patriotic writers.’ (Decolonising the Mind, Harare 1987, p.xii.)

Cheikh Anta Diop: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1959); The African Origin of Civilisation (1974).

‘Flight from one’s own language is the quickest shortcut to cultural alienation.’ (Carlos Moore, Conversations with Cheikh Anta Diop, in Présence Africaine, 1 & 2, 1989, p.407.)

Frantz Fanon: ‘The emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which fliinches from the caustic agent; and the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations which have caused certain wise men to say that the native is a hysterical type.’ (The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Edn. 1990, p.44; here p.5.)

Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘The status of “native” is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among the colonised people with their consent’ (Sartre, Introd., Wretched of the Earth, 1990, p.17.)

Wole Soyinka: ‘The African writer needs an urgent release from the fascination of the past. Of course, the past exists, the real African consciousness establishes this [...] it is co-existent in present awareness. It clarifies the present and explains the future, but it is not a fleshpot for escapist indulgence [...] A historic vision is of necessity universal.’ (Art, Dialogue & Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, Ibadan 1988, p.19.)

‘The African world […] is governed by a […] holistic habit of perception and representation. A blacksmith’s poker, an egungun dance, an Ifa prognistic verse, or a royal stool may simultaneously express the history of its makers, their concept of beauty, their propitiation of unseen focus, a statement of cosmic relativity, and a mode of experiencing all of them, of harmonising them with the challenge of existence.’ (Ibid., p.108.)

Authors quote Derrida on the ‘political decentralisation’ which ‘calls, paradoxically, for the existence of a capital, a centre of usurpation and of substitution’ since ‘the modern capital is always the monopoly of writing. [… &c.]’ (Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, 1976). [8]

Ngugi wa Thiong’o: ‘[The] great tradition of European literature [which] had invented and even defined the world view of the Calibans, the Fridays and the reclaimed Africans of their imaginations. Now the Calibans and the Fridays of the new literature were telling their story which was also my story (‘Moving towards the Centre: Towards a Pluralism of Cultures, in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 26, 1, 1991, p.200.)

Chinua Achebe: ‘The European critic of African literature must cultivate the habit of humility appropriate to his limited experience of the African world.’ (‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, in Nigeria Magazine, 75, Lagos 1962’ rep. in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-67, London 1988, p.49; here p.11.)

Nei Ten Kortenaar, ‘How the Centre is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart’, in Parker and Sharkey, Postcolonial Literature (1995); prev. in English Studies in Canada, 17, 3(Setp. 1991), pp.319-36
Abdul JanMohamed explains the ambivalence of the egwugwu (judgement) scene by invoking a “double consciousness”. Achebe’s characters … like all people in an oral society, make no didstinction between the worlds of the secular and the sacred. However, this lack of discrimination would make the Umuofians appear “foolish” to moder n readers, so Achebe makes his characters aware of the border between secular and scared, but quick to repress it. [37] Ftn. JanMohamed, ‘Sophisticated primitivisim: The Syncretism of Oral and Literary Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’, in Ariel, 15, 4 (1984).

Edward Said argues that if non-Europeans are to be written about with justice it must be in a narrative in which they themselves are agents. (Orientalism, NY 1978, p.240; here 41.)

Oral society - homeostatic.

Bibl., Achebe, ‘Chi in Igbo Cosmology’, in Morning Yet on Creation Day (NY 1975, pp.93-105.)

Claude Levi-Strauss: past and present joined in myth ‘because nothing has been going on since the appearance of the ancestors except events whose recurrence periodcially effaces their particularity.’ (The Savage Mind, London 1986, p.236.)

Remarks on Things Fall Apart: ‘Okonkwo wants the narrative of his life to correspond to the truth of traditional wisdom and at the same time to guarantee that truth. But what his narrative shows is that the search for absolute and fixed truth is itself the product of Okonkwo’s upbringing, and must be understood in its context. Okonkwo, who sets himself up as defender of community values, totalizes those values and in so doing betrays them. When Okonkwo’s adopted son Ikemufuna is sentenced to death by the oracle, Okonkwo accompanies the executioners. He does this to prove his fidelity to the oracle. He sets divine authority above personal sentiment. But this is the loyalty of the doubter who must prove to himself his uncompromising faith. In participating in the execution Okonkwo flouts the advice of the elder Ezeudu. The law is not universal and absolute, but made by men operating in historical circumstances. This Ezeudu understands. The law will be obeyed, but it need not be carried out by Okonkwo personally. Okonkwo, however, misunderstands the law. He wants it to be universal and to govern all situations. It does not.

The oral world of Umuofia is not wholly based on repetition and stability: there is an instability implicit, the instability of narrative. The succession of generations marks change, and this is most evident in the rel’ection of Okonkwo’s law by his son Nwoye, who converts to Christianity. Christianity is brought by the Europeans, as history itself appears to be. But Christianity is portrayed as a fulfilment of historic trends among the Igbos; Nwoye has sought something other and thinks he has found it in Christianity. He has had doubts about the religion of his fathers; the songs of the Christians fill his soul with sweetness and peace; they answer to a need in his soul. Similar doubts are expressed by Obierika, who comes to destroy Okonkwo’s compound after his friend has been exiled for an offence that was purely accidental. Achebe is anxious [47] to show that Igbos make their own choices, are not victims of history, but makers of history. There is continuity and development, not just repetition and rupture. The Igbos chose Christianity, as Nwoye did, or rejected it, as Okonkwo did, because they were aware of themselves making their own world in time. (pp.48-49.)

Philip Rogers, ‘No Longer at Ease: Achebe’s “Heart of Whiteness”, in Parker & Sharkey, op. cit., pp.53-64
Kurtz [in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness] had theorised that the African’s awe of the white man (Kurtz, that is) would enable him to exert a powerful moral influence over the “savages”: ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ wrote Kurtz in his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz, of course, discoverds that the will he chooses to exercise manifests itself rather differently in deeds from its epxression in words and becomes himself the object of fetischism, leading presumably to the further degradation (in Conrad’s terms) of the Africans he had come to civilise. (p.55.)

Chidi Okonkwo, ‘Chinua Achebe: The Wrestler and the Challenge of Chaos’, in ”, in Parker & Sharkey, op. cit., pp.83-100
Achebe: ‘You do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honour. You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. … Finally, if the worst comes to the worst, you will be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human.’ (‘African Literature as Restoration or Celebration’, in Okiki: An African Journal of New Writing, 30, Nov. 1990, pp.11-13.)

Bibl.: cites C. L. innes & Bernth Lindfors, eds., Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (London 1978).

The figure of the Champion or Wrestler who carries the taint of anarchy within himself, seen in Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart and Ezeulu in Arrow of God, becomes fully developed in the leader as villain, the Messiah as Beast boldly striding into the promised land of the new-born state in the person of Chief Nanga in A Man of the People and His Excellency Sam, life President of Kangan in Anthills of Savannah. (pp.90-91.)

[&c.]