but we’re not really going to listen to them, and they are not ultimately going to determine what happens in Africa. Moyers: You mentioned Africa before the colonial powers came. There is the opening line of your children’s story The Drum, which begins: “In the beginning, when the world was young.” Does the artist in you ever wish you could start the whole story all over again? Achebe. Yes, that is the strength of stories, and especially of children’s stories. I'm happy you raised that, because all of us need to learn to become like children again once in a while. We become so stiff. We are weighed down by so much knowledge, so much possession, so much special interest, that we lose the flexibility of children. Children can fly. You know, everything is possible to a child. This is something that children’s stories can do for us and that we ought to learn again. We ought to keep ourselves young in that particular way. Moyers: You took a period of your life away from writing novels and wrote for children. Why? Achebe: Because I felt it was very important. I had some very interesting and very strange experiences bringing up my own children. That really confirmed my fears about the danger of not telling our children stories. You see, our fathers did, and our grandfathers did. But once writing came, we more or less forgot that responsibility to tell children’s stories. Moyers: So what happened? Achebe: What happened was that all kinds of bad stories, all kinds of junk were being dumped—again, like toxic waste. We were very young parents, so we really had no experience. We used to go into the supermarket in Lagos and pick up a glossy, nice, big-looking, colorful story. We never read children’s stories ourselves, so we didn’t know what was in them. But then we discovered that our daughter was beginning to have very strange ideas. At that point we began to look carefully into what she was reading. And really, there was a lot of poison there—stories full of racism, full of ideas of Africa as the other place, as the back of the world. I knew then the importance of children’s stories. And I knew that we were failing as parents in not bringing down the children after dinner, as our forefathers did, to tell them stories. Then a friend of mine, who was a poet and working for Cambridge University Press, came to me and said, “Look, we want a children’s story from you.” I had not written any before, and I didn’t know how it was going to work. But I was ready to try. Moyers: Did your children read your stories? Achebe: Yes, I read the stories to them before they were published. Moyers: Were they pretty good critics? Achebe: Very good. Children are young, but they’re not naive. And they’re honest. They’re not going to keep awake if the story is boring. When they get excited, you see it in their eyes. That was quite an education for me. Moyers: When you were living in the States in the early seventies, were your children with you? Achebe: Yes. The youngest was in nursery school when we were here in 72. She waSJust two and a half, and it was quite a problem, because I was teaching, and my wife was anxious to do her doctorate in education, so we found her a little nursery school — and she hated it. I don’t know why. I had the job of driving her to this school, and it was always such a terrible scene, leaving her there. So, in the end, I promised to tell her a story every morning as we went to school and another story as we came back. She would look forward to this—and this was the way she overcame the trauma of this first alien experience. Moyers: Are your children comfortable in this crossroads between Africa and the United States? Achebe: I guess so. There are problems, though. They have to know more than either tradition, you see. This is the problem of being on the crossroads. You have a bit of both, and you really have to know a lot more than either. So their situation is not very easy. But it’s very exciting. Those who have the energy and the will to survive at the crossroads become really very exceptional people. Moyers: You went home in 76 and came back last year to spend the year at the University of Massachusetts. Has America changed very much in those eleven years? Achebe: Yes. I think there was a loss of the feeling of euphoria. When I was here in 1972, it was pretty close to the sixties, to the era of the Civil Rights movement. There was the feelEverything is possible to a child. This is something that children’s stories can do for us and that we ought to learn again. ing that America was on the move. There was a lot of optimism and all kinds of new programs to bring the disadvantaged into the society, for example. Coming back now, it was quite shocking that within a month or two of my arrival, there were incidents of racism on a level that reminded me of the pre-Civil Rights period. There’s a new spirit in the land. Perhaps it is an inevitable part of the dynamics of society that a period of optimism should be followed by some kind of reaction. Perhaps that’s what’s happening. But suddenly I have found too many young people saying, “I’m a conservative.” Now, I can’t imagine a sixteen-year-old conservative. What will he be when he becomes sixty and the president of a bank? Young people at that age are not really conservatives and shouldn’t aim to become conservatives. They should be open and free, and they should be flexible. They should be ready to try new things. They should be open to the world. Moyers: The title of your novel No Longer at Ease is taken, if I remember correctly, from T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where the Wise Men leave their own warm and comfortable country to travel through a strange and inhospitable land. On their way back, they’re thinking about this journey and whether they have journeyed toward life or death—the question all of us face. What about Africa? In ^he last thirty years Africa has been on a journey toward independence, experiencing chaos, anarchy, violence, failure, hope—has it been a journey toward life or death? Achebe: It is difficult to say— and it is too soon, tdo. If you look at this very small segment of history, then you can talk about it in those terms. If you are frozen in time, you can say yes, it’s awful. And it is really awful. But I think if you take the wide view of things, then you begin to see it as history, as human history over a long period of time, and that we are passing through a bad patch. It’s not death. We are passing through a bad patch, and if we succeed, then even the experience of the bad patch will turn out to be an enrichment. That’s how I prefer to see it. There is no way of saying this is the way it’s going to be, because we are not given to know how it’s going to be. But I think if we are to keep working, if we are to keep writing books, then for me that's the only way I can look at what’s happening. We are going through a very bad patch. We’ve been through bad patches in the past, and we Survived. Moyers: And every survivor has an obligation to remember. Achebe: Yes, yes, yes. Moyers: What’s that old Jewish saying—that in remembrance is the secret of redemption? Is that why you write? Achebe: Well, I didn’t put it that way. I write partly because I enjoy it. But also I knew that somebody had to tell my story. We are in a period so different from anything else that has happened that everything that is presented to us has to be looked at twice. I went to the first university that was built in Nigeria, and I took a course in English. We were taught the same kind of literature that British people were taught in their own university. But then I began to look at these books in a different light. When I had been younger, I had read these adventure books about the good white man, you know, wandering into the jungle or into danger, and the savages were after him. And I would instinctively be on the side of the white man. You see what fiction can do, it can put you on the wrong side if you are not developed enough. In the university I suddenly saw that these books had to be read in a different light. Reading Heart of Darkness, for instance, which was a very, very highly praised book and which is still very highly praised, I realized that I was one of those savages jumping up and down on the beach. Once that kind of enlightenment comes to you, you realize that someone has to write a different story. And since I was in any case inclined that way, why not me? What I am saying is there is a certain measure of seriousness in addition to the pleasure of telling stories. There is serious intention. So when somebody gets up and says, “Oh, but the teacher of poetry should have /nothing to do with society or with heavy things like politics,” I just can’t understand. Moyers: Earlier, you said that Africans hope the West and America, in particular, will listen. If we listen, what will we hear? What does Africa have to say to the rest of the world? Achebe: First of all, we are people. We are not funny beings. If you took up any newspaper here, you probably won’t see Africa mentioned at all for months. Then perhaps one day a year you’ll see some strange story. It has to be the kind of story we’ve come to associate with Africa. I would simply say: Look at Africa as a continent of people. They are not devils, they are not angels, they’re just people. And listen to them. We have done a lot of listening ourselves. This is a situation where you have a strong person and a weak person. The weak person does all the listening, and up to a point the strong person even forgets that the weak person may have something to say. Because he is there, a kind of fixture, you simply talk at him. A British governor of Southern Rhodesia once said the partnership between the whites and the blacks is the partnership of the horse and its rider. He wasn’t trying to be funny, he seriously thought so. Now, that’s what we want the West to get rid of—thinking of Africa as the horse rather than as the man. Moyers: You make me think of that summary passage in Anthills of the Savannah—“Whatever you are is never enough. You must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism.” So there is something that the strong can take from the weak. Achebe: Yes, they need to take it. Seeing the world from the position of the weak person is a great education. We lack imagination. If we had enough imagination to put ourselves in the shoes of the person we oppress, things would begin to happen. So it is important that we develop the ability to listen to the weak. Not only in Africa, but even in your own society, the strong must listen to the weak. Chinua Achebe and Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah will read and discuss their work Sunday, April 16th at Wiley Hall Auditorium, West Bank Campus, University of Minnesota. It is free to students and $3 to the general public. This interview is part of Bill Moyers World of Ideas which will be published this May by Doubleday. John Kleber is a Twin Cities painter and illustrator. Kim Klein is a Twin Cities Art Director. 12 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989
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