Achebe
laments: We’ve lost our Africanism
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (akuhen@sunnewsonline.com)
Sunday,
April 13, 2008
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•Achebe
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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To mark the Golden Jubilee anniversary (which begins this
weekend) of the publication of the classic - Things Fall Apart
– the quartet of Okey Ndibe, Joyce Ashuntantang, Sowore
Omoyele, and Oyiza Adaba had a session with the author, Professor
Chinua Achebe. It is vintage Achebe, the master story teller
himself.
Congrats, Professor Achebe, on the 50th commemorative year
of Things Fall Apart. Let’s begin with a somewhat predictable
question. When Things Fall Apart was published fifty years
ago, did you ever suspect that it would travel as much as
it has throughout the world?
Of course not. There was nothing like it that I knew about.
I did not know very much about writing or publishing. There
was no plan. It happened, and thinking back now, I can theorize
that the story wanted to be told at all costs, and why it
chose me to tell the story, I don’t know. It could have
been anybody else, the story would have been different, of
course, because every person has his or her story. This is
my story, and it wanted to be told.
It’s remarkable that you should make that point about
the story choosing you. On the way here, I was telling Professor
Abunaw that Things Fall Apart is the kind of novel one would
expect a novelist in his 50s or 60s to write. It’s not
the kind of novel you’d expect a young man at 28 to
have written—and that’s exactly how she explained
it, that the novel must have come to you. It’s intriguing
that you speak about this mystical connection, that the story
made itself a sort of gift to you. Could you talk about what
inspired this novel?
Well, what you just said about my age; this is itself part
of our story. What colonization did to us was to remove power
from the elders and pass it over to children. This is what
European education meant for us. I don’t know what other
place had this experience of having children, because they
went to school, giving them power over the elders to determine
what was going to be what. And so that’s part of the
reason why it was someone very young. My father could not
have written it. There were things, many things that he knew
that I didn’t know, but scribbling a story was not one
of the things he knew. This is one of the major weapons with
which, if you like, we were disorganized, or if you prefer,
one of the weapons that enabled us to pick up the fight. The
generation that should have done the fight had been disabled.
There’s a paradox in the fact that your generation
was one of the first to be inducted, as it were, into Western
education and Western letters. Part of the drama is that the
British who colonized us said that Africans had no story,
no history. It was conceivably possible for the colonialists
to separate people like you from any form of interest in your
history. Instead, what contact with Western ideas did in your
case—and in the case of many other African writers—was
to engender this hunger, this desire to tell your story. Could
you speak to that tension between Europe’s impression
that you had no history and your insistence that you had a
story and you were going to tell it?
Yes, well I’ll tell you another story. James Baldwin
and I were invited to speak at an African literature conference
somewhere in the South, and what Baldwin said in talking about
me to the audience is that “This is a brother I had
not seen for 400 years,” and people laughed. And he
said that it was not intended that he and I should ever meet.
That’s what you asked me. Part of the center of the
plan was that we should not know each other. So that’s
why our task is, in my view, so very important: that in spite
of that intention to keep us apart, there will be some people
who would refuse and insist on knowing their brothers and
sisters who had been sold away and lost. There are some people
who knew that it was important to discover them, and I’m
not talking in the past, because the problem remains. There
are so many of us on both sides of the Atlantic who do not
know the importance of that recognition, that this is my brother,
this is my sister, that their story is the same as my story.
Whatever variations, it is basically the same story.
TFA has become a story in itself, it’s in fact
garnered many stories. Could you speak to some of the ways
in which the novel has surprised you, some of the stories
that it has brought to you since its publication 50 years
ago?
Well, off the cuff, if you like, one of the first comments
I had from children reading it, from students, came from students
from a girls’ school in Korea. The whole class of 30
plus wrote a letter each to me and their teacher sent it all.
I learned that my story was also the story of Korea, at least
as these children saw it. Some of them were very angry that
I killed Okonkwo and they thought Okonkwo should have been
spared to succeed. They didn’t want him to fail. So
that’s one sort of way out…I had never been to
Korea, I didn’t know their history, it was these children
who told me, “Oh, we were colonized by the Japanese.”
And so that similar but different incident of colonization
was the thing that held us together. And I’ve discovered
that the whole life of the world is full of that kind of similarities
and that people can use if they want to make themselves brothers
and sisters of other people.
I do know that TFA has been translated into more than
50 different languages, so it’s clearly a novel that
has resonated around the world. Have you been keeping count,
do you know how many languages TFA has been set in now? I
also understand that there is an Igbo translation that is
in the works; could you speak to that as well?
Oh yeah, unfortunately I have not been very well treated by
my original British publishers, especially after the first
generation—the people I met—after they passed
on or left or retired. The new generation came and took over.
I remember my publisher, my old publisher, telling me that
we had been taken over by accountants, and so relations have
not been very good. This has to do with suspicion about how
what I was being told, under-accounting, which they have admitted
and made efforts to correct. But then you say well, if there
was an error in this one that I saw, what about what I have
not seen? Can I send an auditor to your place to go through
and find out? Oh no, they will not allow this. So I don’t
know [how many translations]. I can only say “They told
me.” Or “This is what I heard.” The relationship
has not been as good as it should be. In spite of the great
success of the novel, which you’ve referred to—you,
would think that the relation between the writer of that story
and those who published it would be very close. Unfortunately,
we live in a world of accountants.
Could you speak about the Igbo translation?
Well, the Igbo translation which you are talking about is
probably the one I promised to do (laughter). Well, I understand
that there have been translations and so on. So I expect that
in the end there will be many translations. But the one I
promised to do would be my own version, which I expect would
justify itself when it comes out. The book is almost like
a mysterious presence, and to be able to take back from English
to the original language in which the events happened –
the events happened in a language – to do that journey
back—because I had sort of taken the story from its
roots and created a language, a dialect of English. This was
my own invention. This I can now see, because I kept worrying
about what word would suit what, I kept worrying about how
you translate a proverb so that its dignity would be maintained.
I have worried about all those things and now I know why.
It’s because I wanted English and Igbo to hold a conversation,
and see how you can tell a story that happened in Igbo in
this dialect of English. Now I want to go back and do it the
other way and see what happens. Again like before I have no
idea whether it would work or not.
Are you embarked on it, or is it, as it were, on your
table of things to do?
I’ve started.
How long did it take you to actually write TFA?
Well, something like two years. Yeah, about two years.
And I take it you wrote everything by hand?
Yes.
Did you consider any other titles other than TFA?
Oh, I may have, but once I encountered the Yeats’ poem—“Things
fall apart, the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world,”—once I encountered that I knew
that was it, I had to take it for the title of Things Fall
Apart. It presented itself.
How many copies of the original written manuscript
did you make, since it took you two years? Did you do two
copies, or just one?
I did one copy. I made corrections and if I felt a page was
too heavily changed, then I would change the page altogether.
How much editing did your manuscript receive from
you? Do you remember any significant incident that you wrote
in and edited out?
No, this is 50 years ago. I write very carefully. I wrote
very, very carefully, particularly at that beginning of my
career. I knew that the language was extremely, extraordinarily
important. And if I wrote anything that didn’t quite
fit, it told me so immediately. “This wouldn’t
work.” You read it and if it’s not so suitable,
you keep worrying it until it works. So it’s difficult
to answer, you know, the specifics of what exactly did I edit
out. But each time I included a word or a sentence or an idea
that was contrary to the spirit of the story or to the meaning
of the story, [the story] told me itself. I didn’t need
an editor. I didn’t really learn anything about form
from my teachers. And in a way, that was as it should be,
because there was nobody who could have told me how to write
Things Fall Apart. It was so peculiar to me.
Do you have any remnants at all of the process of
writing TFA, any one paper that has survived 50 years, lying
somewhere from that period?
Oh, there may be. There may be. One thing you must remember
is that my history has been quite chaotic, for different reasons.
The first chaos was the Biafran War, the civil war—and
the coup before it actually. And there is the fact that we
abandoned our homes. My ancestral home was destroyed, and
now I am not at home, I operate from America. So I don’t
know what is there, that’s what I am telling you. I
don’t know what is available. It’s possible that
someday, somewhere I’ll run into this manuscript that
we are looking for.
Q: Why did Professor Thomas Melone [a late Cameroonian
academic who borrowed the only existing complete manuscript
of TFA and never returned it] request the manuscript, and
did you know him personally?
A: Well he made himself very friendly. He came to see me because
he was writing a book, which was about Yeats. And he was a
very pleasant man, I must say. He asked me to loan this manuscript
to him, and I must say I did not have very much respect for
manuscripts then. I really had no sense of it…Once you
finish writing something, it’s over. And I also do not
like a lot of paper all over me, but now I know the value
more than I did then. So anyway I did give this manuscript
to Melone and then he just vanished. We were actually in [United]
States at the same time, but he wouldn’t reply letters,
and so it became clear to me that he wanted to hold on to
it for whatever it was worth.
Q: If the manuscript were recovered today, where would
you want it preserved?
A: You know, many of my manuscripts are held at Harvard now,
but that’s probably part of my disenchantment with what
happened to this manuscript. I think I would say, if it happens
let’s look at it at that point—and not to say
“Take it here or take it there.” But if I had
my way, the manuscript should be in Nigeria. But to do that
would be to burn it because people don’t know the value,
the facilities would not be provided. So we’ve got a
lot of work to do before we can put our house in order.
Q: If you had a chance at revising Things Fall Apart,
where you would your ax fall?
A: I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t bother with revising.
Q: Not even the incident with Chielo that some of
us think that maybe…
A: Well many of you may think whatever you like (general laughter).
Yeah, I mean have been told that I was a chauvinist. So people
have different readings, but I trust the book, that it has
enough spiritual power that it took care of many things that
people may not yet understand. So I would leave it exactly
as it is.
Q: If you were to be a character in TFA, which one
would you be?
A: There isn’t one that is fully me, because I want
everyone to be different there. And so there are parts of
me in different people. Perhaps the most moderate one, because
moderation is important here. Okonkwo is a man of excess.
I respect him as a hero, but a flawed hero. But very interesting,
nevertheless; that’s why he is famous. Now, his friend,
Obierika, is more moderate, the kind of person who would keep
the house in order. And so if I had to be one person, if it’s
not Ezinma it probably would be Obierika.
Q: One of the most important questions is about the
influence of this book in terms of maintaining our culture
and our language. Do you find that, as Africans, we are losing
our touch with our language and culture?
A: Yes, obviously this is one of the major—maybe the
top—problems that colonial rule has left for us. So,
you have to learn somebody else’s language, and if you
wanted to be educated then that was the language you were
educated in. That story we know very well. There is no point
in going over it now, or in fact weeping over it. I think
we should just go to work, find a way to curtail some of the
harm that has been done to us, and move on, as Americans would
say.
Q: What are your views about the African diaspora,
the Africans living abroad? Are we living up to our full potential,
are we doing what we’re supposed to be doing?
A: Well, I referred to this issue earlier on. What we lack
is a full understanding of who we are. And until that is absolutely
right, until we understand that we are one person, that when
we don’t talk about the diaspora, that wherever you
find this diaspora, whether it is in America, in Brazil, in
Africa itself, wherever—it is the same story that they
have. It is the story of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. So
wherever you see an African diaspora person, you know this
is a victim, like myself, of that event. Until we realize
how thorough and complete it was planned to be—Baldwin
said it was never intended that he and I should ever meet,
not to talk about discussing anything. So we have a long way
to go in the diaspora getting our story straight. If the story
is not straight, then we will not be straight.
Q: What do you think of today’s writers, the
young African writers coming up today?
A: Well, they are great, they’re good. There was a time
when it seemed as if the thing was drying up. But anybody
who knows about art would have known that it was waiting for
something to happen. I don’t know what it is, but we
seem to be back at work.
Q: Do you have any personal favorites?
A: Well I wouldn’t mention any, because I would forget
my best friends…but since one of them is here, Okey
Ndibe is here, that’s a member of this generation. In
fact, there are now more than two or three generations since
my time. I think this is something that will go on.
Q: What does Nigeria mean to you?
A: Nigeria is home. First of all, that’s what it means
to me: it’s home. It’s a very frustrating home,
a very annoying home, but it is my home. And if I had my way,
that’s where this interview would be happening. But
since it’s not gone that way, you know, I don’t
believe in weeping over something. I think it’s more
effective, more useful, to find what you can do rather than
what you can’t do. So, Nigeria has such a wonderful
possibility built into it, but it’s something it never
uses. Talent. It would rather use a half-baked person rather
than someone who is highly qualified. But that’s the
country I’ve got.
Q: Any regrets about not receiving the national honors?
A: The reason I didn’t receive national honors is that
I didn’t want to receive national honors from Nigeria
as it was, and perhaps maybe still is today. I was tired of
hoping that someone would come up who would understand the
value of the position that we’ve earned because of our
education, or leadership, or whatever, and to apply it to
make our people happier and more prosperous.
Q: What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind?
How would you like to be remembered?
A: Oh, just a nice guy. (Everyone laughs)
Q: Back to TFA, whose 50th anniversary we are celebrating
in 2008. It seems to me that Okonkwo’s problem is also
the predicament of his father, Unoka. We’re looking
at a lack of balance, a lack of moderation—even though
a man like Unoka has great wisdom. Could you speak about the
place of balance in Igbo metaphysics, in Igbo understanding
of the world?
A: Well, it is very, very important. It’s central to
our thinking, and I think the Igbo convey it in many different
ways. But the one that springs to my mind immediately is the
statement that wherever one thing stands, another thing will
stand beside it. That’s one thing and another thing,
you see. Nothing stands alone. If you see something that stands
alone, the Igbo people say “Run away,” because
that’s the worst possible danger—this thing that
doesn’t have anything near it, not even a necklace to
keep it company. By itself: that’s the Igbo idea of
evil. Alone, you see. So, it’s from there that the idea
of balance comes. One thing is good but something else is
also good. It says: become familiar with your home, but know
also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere
thinks his mother is the greatest cook. That’s one thing
they tell us. So balance is at the center of our idea of the
good life; the good world is a world in which there are many
kinds.
Q: The other thing is: you’ve been accused by
some critics of harboring an unflattering view of women in
your novels. But to go back to again the concept of balance,
reading through TFA one sees the concept of spaces. We have
male crop and female crop, male functions and female functions,
ceremonies that are exclusive to women as well as ceremonies
that are exclusive to men. And so it seems to me that there
is a very intricate sense of balance in those arrangements.
How do you see the place of women within the society you depict?
A: There is a misreading of my fiction in that complaint.
I think many people think that what I’m doing is praising
the position of women. It’s not; in fact, it’s
very opposite. What I was doing was pointing out how unjust
the Igbo society is to women. And how better to explore it
than to make the hero of this story, Okonkwo…all his
problems are problems to do with the feminine. There’s
nothing else wrong with Okonkwo except his failure to understand
that the gentleness, the compassion that we associate with
women is even more important than strength. Now, people don’t
understand why I am showing these women who are not in charge.
I’m showing them that way because that’s how it
is in this society I want to change. And that’s what
Okonkwo was not able to learn, and I want others after him
to learn it: that women, compassion, music…these things
are as valuable—more valuable—than war and violence.
Q: One of the ironies is that Okonkwo the warrior
misses out on two points. One is that the most important deity
in this society, the earth goddess, is a female goddess. The
other is that Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves which
has supervisory powers over wars again has a female principle
at its core. Okonkwo, who is an extraordinary warrior, doesn’t
get that particular point and so continues to live under the
illusion that the only thing that is important is the male
and masculinity. Could you then talk about Unoka’s importance
in TFA?
A: Well Unoka, if you like, you like you can place him with
the women in the society. This is how Okonkwo saw him. But
he’s a very decent and nice person. Not successful in
the sense of wealth and resources, or ability to look after
his family and live big. All these things didn’t work
for him. One thing that worked for him was his flute, so in
the view of the Igbo people he was a failure. And this is
in fact where Okonkwo makes his biggest mistake, and Igbo
culture is partly responsible because Igbo culture makes a
lot of strength and power and success—and Okonkwo heard
this from his society.
He heard it all the time, you know, this importance of strength
and being manly and so on. Now Igbo society does not talk
so loudly about the other side, but it talks gently. It’s
there, but you’ve got to make an effort to listen to
hear it. If you are wearing all these heavy things people
wear in their ears nowadays, you probably won’t hear
it. But in a gentle voice the society is saying, “But
also remember your children, but also remember the women,
but also remember compassion.” Why does it say, “Well
if the gods have decided that this boy (Ikemefuna] should
die, we can’t stop them but I won’t be there”?
So cowardice is even a value. The Igbo society is saying that
to Okonkwo. It is not only in the machete that there is virtue.
There is virtue in sitting down quietly and contemplating.
Q: Unoka is something of a poet in a sense, certainly
in his use of language. He is also a dramatist in the way
he dismisses Okoye, his creditor. And there is something of
a philosopher in him as well. In a sense, you’ve created
an artist figure in him, a man who in a different time and
society would sit down and write witty and interesting books—and
be successful. But he lived in a society that required that,
in addition to being a good artist, being good at your flute
and music, you must also be a good farmer and brave warrior.
Did you deliberately want Unoka to be that artist figure within
this society, maybe a wise man, but wise in his own wretched
way?
A: Obviously, yes. I mean that’s why he’s there,
I guess. The way I write is not to say, “Okay, where
is an artist figure to put in here?” The story dictates
all that. Even what we call it, which is a way of defining
in a precise way what is perhaps loose and vague and so on,
about a character—all that is part of your story, your
story-making. And I think one learns how to include them without
even talking about them as if they were abstractions. This
is what you find in a complete life, the life of a society
that is truly alive.
Q: TFA has become the most widely read, most widely
translated novel in African literature. Have you reflected
at all on the impact that TFA specifically but also your total
oeuvre have had on other African writers?
A: Yes. I haven’t given much thought in the sense of
writing anything about it. For one thing, it’s a little
risky, you know. Some people started talking about the Achebe
generation. It’s not everybody who wants to be in the
school of Achebe.
Some of my best friends became writers. I’m thinking
particularly, for instance, now of John Munonye, who was my
classmate. Now there’s a joke that was told me by another
friend, Francis Ellah—about himself and John Munonye.
Francis said they thought, after the publication of TFA, “Why
can’t we be writing a novel, be novelists?” So
they decided they were going to begin. So they bought lots
of pencils and paper and they were to begin this weekend.
And so John went into one room, Francis to the other, and
they started writing. The way Francis put it, probably not
exactly, was that by the end of the day he gave up and John
continued.
Q: Interesting anecdote...
A: So it wasn’t even the younger generation. These were
people of my own age. And many of them, quite a number, did
take up writing, but of course they would write differently.
And by the way, the generation of Cyprian Ekwensi was then
the background, the older generation than ourselves. He had
followed a different path in writing, but he was there. So
it wasn’t altogether an accident. Amos Tutuola was there;
again a different path. Some pundits said, “Oh that’s
how African literature will be,” but no single person
has ever copied Tutuola because there is just no way you can
get it. That is his own. So we are lucky. There is really
talent in our culture, a lot of talent, and it’s not
an accident that Nigeria, in the past, has all these traditions
– the Nok culture, the Igbo-Ukwu culture, the Ife culture,
the Benin culture and all of them very rich. And all we need
is to sit down quietly and make something of it.
Q: TFA and Okonkwo have been with us for 50 years.
Has Okonkwo been living with you these 50 years, has he been
with you, and how is he doing?
A: Yeah, it’s interesting how you put it. He has, and
what I feel towards him is a sense of wonder and pity. Pity
is probably not a good word because Okonkwo is a very dignified
and proud person and would not like anyone to pity him. But
I am sort of concerned that a major aspect of our human experience
has to be suffering and failing to reach where you set out
to go because of all kinds of things on the way. One day somebody
came to me in the hospital after I had this accident, and
the question he asked me was, “Why you? Why would this
happen to you?” So I said—I didn’t think
twice—I said to him, “Do you have an idea of somebody
else to whom it should have happened?” What I was saying
is that the world is tragic by nature. And that’s why
tragic stories appeal to me, far more than happy and comic
stories. Both the tragic and the comic are there in our lives,
but somehow the tragic one, the Okonkwo kind of story, is
the one that speaks most to us.
Q: You’ve made a personal effort to make sure
we don’t forget the late poet, Christopher Okigbo, who
was your close friend. Does Okigbo live on because of your
efforts or because he left behind works that still speak to
us?
A: My son was two years or three years old when Okigbo died,
and when I came back – this is during the Biafran war
– I just traveled from Enugu to my home to announce
to my family that I heard on the radio that Okigbo had been
killed. My son, Ike, said, “Daddy, don’t let him
die!” The reason was that Okigbo had made friends with
him. Okigbo had friends everywhere, children, old people.
I remember that whenever he came to visit us, this little
boy would hold his hand and try to break it and Okigbo would
be pretending to be in pain crying. They would be struggling
this way and Okigbo would say over his head, “Children
are so wicked.” And so that’s the boy who said,
“Don’t let him die.” I then decided to publish
something called Don’t Let Him Die, an anthology of
poetry by friends of Okigbo—or anyone who wanted to
contribute. There was no plan which would work unless the
subject, in this case Okigbo, had something of interest to
say. His life was so romantic in a way, his life and death
was so extraordinary. It just seemed so unlike anybody else
you knew. So that’s the material for the kind of history
that we have of him. But there is also the profound nature
of his poetry. So it is both his life and his works.
Q: There’s the moment in TFA when the District
Commissioner says the story of Okonkwo is interesting, but
he wants to give it perhaps a paragraph in his own book. Did
you consciously write that as irony…?
A: Yeah, I think so. I mean it’s clearly…it’s
not very fine irony, it’s so crude.
Q: You think it’s crude?
A: Yeah, for the man who said it. But that’s how they
figured out the colonial subject.
Q: I read your bio and you were a very savvy young man, the
way they described you in those days in the 70s, the way you
dressed, and all that. When I heard of this accident, it’s
been worrying me, and I’m sure it’s worried a
lot of your fans: What exactly has this accident meant to
you as a writer and person? Do you think you could have produced
more than you’ve done…?
A: Well, it’s done those things you’ve just indicated.
I was telling you the story of the fellow who said, Why should
it happen to me? And my answer is “Why not?” And
that’s really what I believe. Look at my fiction. Okonkwo
is strong-headed, and wouldn’t listen to advice, and
it’s a trap. And what happens? He comes to a sticky
end. Then I say, okay, let me try a different kind of African,
an intellectual kind of person. So I go to Ezeulu in Arrow
of God. He is a priest, a philosopher, and what happens to
him? He comes to a sticky end. So there’s no way out.
What came to us—in Igbo they say that what came to Nte—Nte
is a small insect—the Igbo say that what came to it
is bigger than it. What was caught in his trap – Nte
went and set a trap – and something bigger than himself
was caught in that trap. So what does Nte do? So there is
no way, there is no short answer to the problem posed to us
from the moment the initiative was taken from us and we lost
our freedom and independence.
Q: How can literature illuminate the African—even
human—crisis?
A: Oh, there were people who had a very, very rough treatment
in the world. They are known as black people. And they were
fighting or struggling to make sense of what happened to them.
Someone said to them, “Why should this happen to you,
why you?” And they said, “Well, that’s the
way the world is.” We must find a way out, we must face
this problem, face our history. When a people have a history
that is embittered—Anthills of the Savannah—an
embittered history, we’ve got a task on our hands. We’ve
got a big task. And even Nigeria, impossible as it seems,
we’ll someday get under control. We won’t keep
having retired generals and so on much longer. The thing is
not to lose hope. Despair is the worst possible suggestion.
I think we must struggle and keep fighting.
Q: Over the next fifty years, will TFA continue to
speak to us about this struggle?
A: Well if it does—I mean if you find it useful, but
it’s not because I said so—it is simply that people
found that it was speaking to them. If it stops speaking to
people then people will stop reading it.
Q: When you were writing TFA, which was the day you
felt, yes, this was a book and I trust it?
A: Well, I think it was the day I finished. But you see, the
thing with writing, my kind of writing, is that you never
really finish. When I thought I had finished, Bisi Onabanjo,
with whom I was sharing accommodation in London—we both
went to the BBC—and a friend—he knew I had this
manuscript, and he said to me, “Why don’t you
show it to this?” The man was a BBC producer who was
a novelist, Gilbert Phelps. I was very shy, but Bisi kept
saying, “Show him.” So after a while I took this
manuscript and I told him I was writing. And he looked as
writers look if you bring them a manuscript. He wasn’t
hostile, but he wasn’t exactly impressive. But he accepted—very
polite. Then Bisi and I, we went on some British Council tour
of three or four days.
One day I came back from an outing and there was a message
for me that said one Gilbert Phelps called and left his number.
So I said, well, if he doesn’t like the book, would
he make a phone call? Wouldn’t he wait for me to return?
So maybe he likes it. So I would call him. That was the first
response I had—and to cut a long story short, he liked
the book. He recommended his publishers to see it. Meanwhile,
his publishers saw it and they were ready to start. I said,
“No, the book is not ready.” I had made a mistake
in thinking that I could have three generations in one book.
And yet it’s not a big book. So it is too thin to carry
this weight. That version of TFA had Okonkwo, Okonkwo’s
children’s generation, and a third generation—so
bringing it to today. And now I realized just so suddenly
that there are three books. The first part is Okonkwo. So
that’s what I’m going to do. And then after that
I’ll see what happens. And so I rewrote the book with
this emphasis on Okonkwo’s generation, not his son.
Eventually I wrote No Longer At Ease, the story of Okonkwo’s
son. But what about my father’s generation? That one
is still waiting to be done. So, see, there is no quick answer
to your question. If it’s working, go on. If it’s
not, then try something else.
Q: Of all your books, which one got you into the most
struggle?
A: I think it’s A Man of the People. One day I came
home – I think it was a Sunday actually, I went out
and came back – I was then director of broadcasting.
My staff, two young fellows from the North who were in charge
of the Hausa Programs—they called me and they said,
“Soldiers are looking for you. They said they want to
see which is stronger, your pen or their gun.” So I
picked up the phone and dialed Victor Badejo who was the director
general. I said “Victor, what is this story?”
He said, “Where are you?” I said, “I’m
at home.” He said, “Take Christie and children
and leave.” So I took my family, Christie
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