By Hugo Odiogor

IT is said that “if you don’t want to be forgotten as soon as you die, you either write something worth reading or do something worth writhing about.” That is the number one law of immortality.

So, even before his demise on March 22nd 2013, far away in the United States of America, Professor Chinualumogu Albert Achebe, the Ogbuefi of narrative prose in Africa, had engraved his name on the marble of the immortal,  by  sheer dint of his hard work and by the affirmation of his chi, which said yes and even when he was on the path of committing career suicide.

Only Achebe would understand how fortunate he was to have escaped the fate of his main protagonist  in No Longer At Ease, Obi Okonkwo.

Greater honour

There is no doubt that encomiums will endlessly pour in for Achebe, whose works cut across all ages and surely one of the few Nigerians who uplifted the image of their fatherland.

Beyond the hypocritical gambit of wanting to be identified among those who eulogised Achebe in death, there can be no greater honour to the man than to uphold those ideals that he espoused in his life, his literary works, and political activism.

Born in Ogidi, Anambra State on November 16, 1930, Prof. Achebe impacted positively on humanity, during the 82 years that he spent on earth, leaving behind, indelible foot prints that cannot be  quantified in fat bank accounts or huge investments.

Late Prof Chinua Achebe

As a young man, Achebe was a voracious reader and was nicknamed the“Dictionary.”At Government College, Umuahia, he came in contact with the works of  Shakespeare, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jonathan Swift among others.

While at the University College Ibadan,  he met his future wife Christine Okoli who gave him four children, his friend, Christopher Okigbo, who was killed during the Biafra war and other writers like  Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, J.P. Clarke,etc.

On his graduation  from the University College  Ibadan in 1953, Achebe worked as a radio producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation before he went  to London where he worked at the British Broadcasting Corp.

His path to immortality was paved with such classical works like Things Fall Apart,(1958),  which he took its title  from William Butler Yeats’ poem: “The Second Coming.”  The book is reputed to have sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

No Longer At Ease (1960)

and Arrow of God. (1964), A Man of the People” (1966), Girls At War,(1972), Beware Soul Brothers, (1971), a collection of Poems, “The Anthills of Savannah,” (1987) and his memoir, There Was A Country, (2012). Other works include; Chike and The River, a novelette, Morning Yet On Creation Day, a critical work on African literature and The Trouble With Nigeria (1983), a pamphlet on Nigeria’s political and leadership failures which has remained a reference material for all those seeking answers to the problem of governance in Nigeria. All these were vintage literary and critical works from Achebe’s creative mind.

In No Longer At Ease, the main character Obi Okonkwo, the grand son of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, was used to deal with the theme of corruption in public service.

A man of the people was classic portrayal of the political behaviour and culture in Nigeria as an evolving independent country. The endemic corruption in the polity, heralded the collapse of the first republic and the subsequent out break of the Nigerian civil war from1967-1970.

The country has seen series of military rules and the mismanagement that have followed this political aberration, which formed the theme for  The Anthills of Savannah, issued in 1987.

This was Achebe’s contribution to the problems of military rule in Nigeria and its devastation on the psyche of the nation.  Achebe  was a known critic of Western literature about Africa, especially the Darwinist mindset of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and Joyce Cary in “Mister Johnson”. The conflict of cultures and worldviews were no more eloquent than Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisation.

At the time most eminent Nigerians lobbied to  be nominated and bestowed with national honours, Prof. Achebe, twice, rejected such recognitions from the Federal Government in protest over acts of political brigandage and unbridled corruption in his fatherland.

Achebe was more than a

literary person and that is an aspect of his life that he shared with Professor Wole Soyinka, Political activism, Achebe was a progressive minded politician and he became involved in partisan politics in 1983 when he became a running mate of late Malam Aminu Kano of the Peoples Redemption Party. It was a party that had ultra radical philosophy which Nigerians do not understand.

The PRP performed poorly as it took a fourth position in the 1983 presidential election. A disillusioned Achebe chronicled his experience in the political terrain and encounter with the ruling political elites in his highly polemic book entitled: The Trouble with Nigeria. As a political actor, Chinua Achebe identified with  progressive minded people like late Malam Aminu Kano of the Peoples Redemption Party, whom he ran with as vice presidential candidate in 1983.

Peoples Redemption Party was a party that had ultra radical philosophy to empower the poor, but  Nigerians did not  understand what the party stood for, consequently,  it performed poorly in the presidential elections to the frustrations of Prof. Achebe.

His memoir “There Was a Country,” became controversial for the comments he made about the role of Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the Nigerian civil war. The book earned enemies especially among Yoruba intellectuals who saw the book as an anti-climax of Achebe’ literary odyssey. His demise just 161 days after the release of that book has been seen in some circles as a justification of the anti-climax theory.

But beyond that aspect of the civil war, the book essentially captured  Achebe’s personal history, especially early upbringing, the conflict between the Christian religion of his parents and the retreating, older religion, his artistic career, the events that took place in defunct Biafra, the role played by some key actors and himself as peace envoy, seeking food and relief support for starving women and children.

But by  a strange twist of fate, an auto accident in 1990, paralyzed him from the waist down and forced him to live his final years in  New York City before he joined Brown University in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature. This gave the whiteman, acting on God’s behalf,  the opportunity to keep Achebe in his land and tap his brain to the maximum.

Achebe was critical of the whiteman’s world view of Africa and its people, but he was not a racist. Achebe refused to follow the stereotypes that the whiteman expects from African writers, tales of failures, under achievements, inferior creatures for which the white man came to redeem the black man from.

Perhaps, that disqualified him from the Nobel Prize award, but  Achebe received other numerous awards in literature, including the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.  Chief Ebenezar Babatope  was among the fierce critics of Achebe  for his denunciation of the actions of Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the civil war, that provoked the Yoruba national group, but as Chief Babatope observed in his tribute, Prof Achebe was a forthright and patriotic Nigeria and his criticisms of late Chief Obafemi Awolowo would not diminish his credential as a literary giant and a worthy patriotic Nigerian who meant well for his fatherland.

Ardent loyalist

Chief Ebenezer Babatope, a chieftain of Peoples Democratic Party and an ardent loyalist of Chief Obafemi Awolowo  who was among the first to attack Prof. Achebe for his comments on late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, said the death of Prof Chinua Achebe is a great loss to Nigeria, “because he was not only a profound intellectual, but also a progressive intellectual and a political actor.

While he was  at University of Nigeria Nsukka, Achebe was among the intellectuals that published the Nsukka Scope which took up progressive social issues and even outside the academia, the late Prof Achebe aligned with progressive forces. He provoked healthy controversies because he was a forthright and patriotic Nigerian.   Going by all these testimonies, one can only add that for the Ogbuefi of African literature, it is morning yet on creation day. Ko’ emesie.