In an interview with Caryll Phillips during 2003, Chinua Achebe quoted a well-known passage from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness in which the attitude of the European towards the Africans whom they encountered in their colonising ventures on the “dark continent” is revealed in a frighteningly penumbral light:

Conrad says here that the European fears more than the fact that the African is different - and even diametrically different - from him, but rather the likelihood that the African is his own human brother after all. It does not follow, of course, that the daemonical stereotype of the African as daemonical - howling and leaping with ‘horrid faces’ - is therefore wrong. Instead, it signifies that the revelation of the irrational and even the pre-rational in the conduct of the African is actually a revelation of the human.

It would seem that Achebe always intended his first novel, Things that Fall, as a rebuttal of the colonial stereotype - in all its self-contradictory complexity - incorporated in these overheated sentences. In bearing witness to this, he gave a lecture entitled ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ at the University of Massachusetts in February 1975, calling Conrad ‘a thoroughgoing racist’ - one who presents Africa as ‘the other world [and] the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilisation, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality’. [2]

Altogether, then, Africa has featured in European consciousness as the dark counter-image of the European self, its alter ego: a frightening (mis)representation in which the “white man” sees his own values and his own virtues mocked and turned to ashes - and this is, indeed, the story of Kurtz, the corrupted European missionary in Conrad’s famous story.

The African whom Europe regards in this psychologically damaging way cannot, of course, remain eternally silent. Sooner or later, the victims of colonialism will accuse their accusers, and when they do, the dynamic radically alters - but not before the European makes a last-ditch attempt to justify its role as the bearer of civilisation and hence saviour of the African “native”. As Achebe has said, in 1990:

Here, again, he harps upon the passage quoted from Conrad’s novella.

It is one thing for the European to disown this malignant stereotype of the in-human (or even sub-human) African. In fact, we have no choice but to disown it today considering that a significant part of popular culture is expressly derived from the tradition of Black American Music, assimilated to the Western mainstream in the form of Rhythm & Blues, Rock & Roll, &c. In so doing, we appear to acknowledge a fundamental similitude between so-called “primitive” culture of African societies and our own, and even to regard that newly-recognised similitude as an escape from our formerly repressed sexuality and thus an enlargement of our psychic stature.

So much the better for us; it is a very different thing, however, for the subject of Conrad’s malignant portrait to take possession of their own self-image: that is, to represent themselves to themselves, and also to us (in which ever order of priority), as fully human in a sense that does not diminish them by placing them at the bottom of an evolutionary scale of the kind implied in Conrad’s novella and also in the form of popular culture which sees access to Black African traditions as a licence to set free the essentially unethical energies of pre-civilised nature in ourselves, as Europeans.

Conservatives who loathe rock music are not, after all, inconsistent: they fully appreciate that sexual liberalism and even sexual immorality are crucially connected with the explicit physicality of the popular culture. It may well be that Africans and Black Americans deserve the credit for liberating the European from his own repressions, but the African also needs to find a language and an imagery in which to express his dignity on terms equal to, if not superior, to the European practice of self-adultation as a rational animal (or, as Jonathan Swift called him, with satirical restraint, an ‘animal capable of rationality’.)

The honour of righting the balance between the African and European and (more, specifically still) the English view of native Africans rests with Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian teaching and writer whose epoch-making novel Things Fall Apart Out appeared 1958. In an essay of 1974 Achebe described his purpose in writing it as an attempt ‘to help [his] society regain its belief in itself and put away the complex of years of denigration and self-denigration’ by demonstrating that African society before the arrival of the colonists had not been merely ‘mindless’ but actually posssessed a philosophy, a poetry and a sense of dignity arising from their feeling of self-worth. [4]

Yet African postcolonial literature in English did not, in fact, begin with Achebe - though here we speak of modern literature in particular. The older claimant to that title is Olaudah Equiano, author of a famous autobiography published in 1789 whom Achebe specifically mentions in a paper on ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ [5]. The reference is topical since there recently appeared a new biography of Equiano by Vincent Carretta in which the account given of his African childhood, enslavement and shipment to America in the first few chapters of the novel are shown to be fictitious since Equiano can be shown to have been born in Westminster, South Carolina, where a baptismal record exists.

Remarking on the inevitable shock occasioned by this discovery in the Black-American literary academy, a Guardian reviewer has written that his replotting of his own life is not really a diminution of the interest or importance of the famous autobiography (which went through nine editions between 1789 and 1794 and is regarded as the foundation-text of African literature in English). Instead, he sees it as an imaginative achievement of a high order, ‘a monumental 18th-century text, a unique mixture of travel-writing, sea lore, sermon, economic tract and fiction.’ [6] In fact, this unexpected convergence of history and fiction supplies us with a further reason to regard Chinua Achebe’s narrative of his racial and familial experience in Africa as a true history no less than a confessedly fictional novel.

In a certain sense, Things that Fall is autobiography too: for Achebe is writing about his family, as in several others of his novels. Okonkwo’s son Nwoye for instance, becomes Isaac, the father of Obi in No Longer at Ease (1960) - Nwoye having converted to Christianity by the end of the former novel. Chinua Achebe himself was baptised Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, son of a Evangelical mission-school teacher who (along with his mother) instilled their son with a great respect for traditional Ibo culture along with their Protestant convictions. Ss a student at Ibidan University, Achebe adopted his Ibo fore-name and conceived the ambition of writing about the society from which he sprang in order to correct the misconceptions about it which circulate in Western literature of Africa and its inhabitants.

With Things Fall Apart modern African literature in English was born; yet events surrounding the publication of that novel suggest how narrowly the postcolonial literature of Africa escaped miscarriage. In 1957 Achebe sent the manuscript upon which he had been working for two years to a typist in England whose advertisement had recently appeared in The Spectator. Nothing more was heard of it, and it was only when a colleague of Achebe’s at the Nigeria Broadcasting Service sought out the typist in London while on holiday that it was finally delivered to the publisher Heinemann, who soon brought out the novel, to very wide acclaim.

[In progress 23 02 06]

[1] Quoted by Achebe in Caryl Phillips, ‘Out of Africa’ [interview with Chinua Achebe], in The Guardian, Sat., 22 Feb. 2003 [infra]; print out this quotation [link]).
[2] Quoted by Phillips, in ibid.
[3] ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, rep. in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, London 1977, p.44; quoted in Michael Parker & Roger Starkey, Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, London: Palgrave 1995, . p.97, n.1.)
[4] ‘African Literature as Restoration of Celebration’, in African Journal of New Writing, 30, Nov. 1990; quoted in Parker & Starkey, op. cit., p.83.)
[5] ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, in Morning Yet on Creation Day (NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday 1975), pp.91-103; rep. in Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman, eds., & intro., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993), pp.428-34 [see full text, infra]
[6] David Dabydeen, review of Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man, in Guardian Weekly (20 Jan. 2006). Today Equiano’s autobiography of 1789 is constantly reprinted and features as ‘required reading’ on virtually every course in Black Studies in American, British or African universities today.