Lecture 5

I have mentioned numerous texts in these lectures. They are texts that narrate the stories of fictional characters. They may be texts that you decide to read in order to broaden your understanding of non-western cultures. This lecture is a transitional lecture.  I, therefore, want to focus on Chinua Achebe of Nigeria and his relationship to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  So you will have to read another essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ". Achebe: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"   http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html 

First I must say that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is one of the most perfect pieces of fiction written in English I have ever read. This particular novel resonates with a comment made in an interview with Caryl Reid about Heart of Darkness that the western reader sees the setting/role of Africa as “a prop” in the novel to examine his ambivalence toward [the three c’s] my emphasis. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/feb/22/classics.chinuaachebe) 

The term objectifying finds its way into how Africa is treated even today in the west. Again I am schooled in the western traditions of reading and writing English, so I too have found myself subject to what I understand now as wrong thinking, which was the foundation of the European mission described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. In Achebe’s words,

“Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth. But the victims of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the inhumanity it makes them heir to have always known better than any casual visitor even when he comes loaded with the gifts of a Conrad.”

These “gifts” were a part of my schooling from elementary school. I did not read Conrad until college, but by then I initially felt estranged from Africa.  After all, my fourth grade teacher said Africa had no written literature, or as Achebe’s teachers put it no history.  However, in college, reading Latin I discovered, Livy’s history of Rome, specifically the Punic Wars. Here I read about the battles of Scipio Africanus (a Roman) and Hannibal of Carthage/Libya. My expanded world view included northern Africa and later Plautus, a former slave, introduced me to the art of classical Latin satire. By now I was feeling Africa, so I took Charles Larson’s African Literature course at the University of Indiana and read Things Fall Apart, Grain of Wheat and The River Between by Ngugi Wa Thiongo of Kenya, to name a few. The class was never offered again, while I was there, but I had possession of these texts, which I read again and again. Things Fall Apart was the text I ended up teaching to secondary students for the New York Regents exam. These are the gifts that African writers, in particular, Chinua Achebe, have given me. I read Emergency by South African Richard Rive in this class, which gave my parents, who were informed of the Sharpesville massacre, and me, a topic to discuss. Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti of Cameroon, Radiance of the King by Camara Laye of Guinea and Ambiguous Adventure by Cheik Hamidou Kane, of Senegal are francophone authors, who I read in translation a decade later with Kenneth Harrow at Michigan State University. Senegal’s So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba and God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane tweaked my imagination because of the women who found their voices and acted.

 I found great delight in the irony that these authors applied. I did not need to be in the various countries to embrace the skill of these writers who were in some ways like me struggling with the duality of identity forced on them by colonization. Of course, I was nearly forty when I studied the language Zulu at Cornell University and was told that I could not go study it further because of apartheid. I was unable to capture Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s exhortation to me to speak and read Zulu when I met him at a reading in Boston, MA because that was something, which would come, as I said much later and he had returned to Kenya. Watch Newton Aduaka (Sierra Leone) at Ted.com. http://www.ted.com/talks/newton_aduaka_tells_the_story_of_ezra.html

Study Skills

1.       Find the italicized terms and names. Watch Aduaka, take notes. Can you identify this author and/or the country he lives? These exercises will assist you in a deep reading of Adiche’s book, Purple Hibiscus.