THE FABRIC OF MEMORY: NIGERIAN STORYTELLER CHINUA ACHEBE Chinua Achebe is president of the town council in his village o f Nigeria, a role that brings him more headaches than honors. He's also a storyteller who hears the music of history weaves the fabric of memory, and sometimes offends the Emperor as well His first novel, Things Fall Apart, sold over three million copies and has been translated into over thirty languages. His lates novel is Anthills of the Savannah. As told to Bill Moyers Moyers: There’s a proverb in your tradition that says, “Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.” How do you interpret that? Achebe: It means that there is no one way to anything. The Ibo people who made that proverb are very insistent on this—there is no absolute anything. They are against excess— their world is a world of dualities. It is good to be brave, they say, but also remember that the coward survives. Moyers: So if you have your God, that’s all right because there must be another God, too. Achebe: Yes, if there is one God, fine. There will be others as well. If there is one point of view, fine. There will be a second point of view. Moyers: Has this had any particular meaning for you, living as you do between two worlds? Achebe: Yes, I think it is one of the central themes of my life and work. This is where the first conflict with the missionaries who came to improve us developed. The missionaries came with the idea of one way, one truth, one life. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” My people would consider this so extreme, so fanatical, that they would recoil from it. Moyers: And yet your father became a Christian, and you were raised by a-Christian family. Achebe: Yes, completely—but there were other ways in which the traditional society failed to satisfy everybody in it. Those people who found themselves out of things embraced the new way, because it promised them an easy escape from whatever constraints they were suffering under. Moyers: So one of the reasons missionaries, colonial administrators, and other Westerners seldom penetrated the reality of the African society was that the African could embrace the Christian God while still holding on to the traditional gods. . Achebe: Yes. But it was not necessary to throw overboard so much that was thrown overboard in the name of Christianity and civilization. It was not necessary. I think of the damage, not only to the material culture, but to the mind of the people. We were taught our thoughts were evil and our religions were not really religions. Moyers: How did you come to grips with this when you arrived in the United States for the first time in 1972? Achebe: Well, I suddenly felt strange in very many ways. America was not unknown to us. While I was growing up, during the period of the nationalist agitation for independence from colonial rule, America stood for something. It stood in our ipind for change, for revolution. That image lasted right through the Second World War. When, for instance, Churchill and Roosevelt were talking about the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt said, “What about the colonial peoples? Would this apply to them?” Of course you would expect Churchill to say, “No,” it wouldn’t apply to these people. And he did. ' Up to that point, America was seen as a friend of struggling peoples, and that was part of the background I brought with me when I came. That kind of image, of course, no longer exists. It is, in my view, one of the tragedies. Moyers: What’s happened to it? Achebe: Well, I don’t want to be overly critical, because as a guest, I should be careful. But it seems to me that something happened in that period between Roosevelt and perhaps the period of McCarthy that made it possible for the South African regime, for example, to say they have a friend in the White House. I think what happened is that America became a power in the world and, after the Second World War, forgot its revolutionary origins. Moyers: The dominant ambition became power politics instead of revolutionary fervor. Achebe: Yes, yes. Moyers: I remember when I first came to your country, Nigeria, in the sixties, I found three students out at the University of Ibadan who were reading Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. That was their great revolutionary pamphlet. Achebe: That’s right. In addition, two key people in the liberation from colonial rule in West Africa were trained in this country. So, in fact, a lot was expected of America. Moyers: What did it mean for African leaders to be trained in this country? What happened to them when they went back? You write about leadership a great deal and about the conflict in leaders between their training in colonial or Western ways of thought and their old traditions. Achebe: Well, Ithink that the first generation of liberation leaders came back bearing a message of America as a place that would befriend struggling nationalists. That image was possible because America was not in charge of West Africa. America was far away. Moyers: Unlike the British. Achebe: Yes, unlike the British. There was a kind of romantic air about America. The newspapers spoke of a land of freedom. Uncle Sam was very popular at that point, Moyers: And today in Nigeria? Achebe: Somehow America has found itself mostly on the wrong side of the popular feeling, the popular will. For instance, take Angola. There I think a very, very serious mistake was made from the very beginning. For America to support a government that the whole of Africa—with the ex- ception of South Africa —was against seems to me very, very strange and very, very unfortunate. Moyers: Does it seem to you that the United States has allowed the Cold War to determine what it does in Africa—that we embrace the government of South Africa because it’s alleged to be a bulwark against communism and the Soviet Union? Illustration by John Kleber Design by Kim Klein Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989 9
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz