Reflections on Chinua Achebe
Chike Momah
Saturday, November 3, 2007
About
two decades have now passed since I first experienced the full extent of
Chinua’s stratospheric ranking in the world of literature. I can no longer
recall the exact date, but it might have been in the mid-nineteen eighties. The
venue was one of the campuses of the City University of New York, in Manhattan.
Chinua was the keynote speaker at some university function or the other.
I sat at a respectful distance and watched as several university professors argued strenuously among themselves. Each strove mightily to claim the credit for Chinua’s presence among them that night. And as I watched, the famous biblical question reverberated in my mind: IS THIS NOT THE CARPENTER’S SON?
Between January 1944 and August 1953, Chinua and I moved in the same orbit, from high school through university. As thirteen-year-olds, in January 1944, we gained admission to arguably the best high school in Nigeria, the Government College, Umuahia. Ten years later (August 1953) in the University College, Ibadan, we got our Bachelor of Arts Degrees in the same subjects: History, English and Religious Studies. Between those two years (1944 and 1953) we were, first, classmates; then we were not; and finally we were again.
For those interested in the details, Chinua was promoted from our class, in the middle of our very first year, to class 2. Fine other boys went up with him. I was not one of them. Which explains why, for five years we ceased to be classmates. I finally caught up with him, in 1949, in the University College, when he switched courses from Medicine to the Liberal Arts, and began all over again.
It is a matter of public knowledge that Chinua was the best student in every class I shared with him. In the five years of our separation, he was also the best student of his other class. I knew about his extraordinary brilliance, before I ever met him, because his reputation went ahead of him. My headmaster in primary school, as sagacious a teacher as you could find then, foretold it. He had taught Chinua years earlier, in the lower primary classes, before he came to my school for my three final primary classes before the entrance examination to Umuahia Government College. As I labored over my preparations for the examination, he blithely prophesied Chinua’s success in the same examination. He had not seen Chinua in all of three years. And he could not have known for sure if the bright young kid he had taught three years earlier, in another town, had any plans to sit the same examination. All he knew, and said, was that Umuahia was the best high school around, and Chinua naturally belonged there.
“Christian,” he said to me, using my baptismal name, “if you pass in this exam, I’m sure you will meet a boy called Albert Achebe there. And when you do, Albert will make the rain that will drench you.”
Albert, that is Chinua, did exactly that, even if my headmaster’s imagery was a trifle fanciful. I have watched him, from close quarters, and from some distance, as he has unleashed his literary masterpieces on an astonished and admiring world. I was around him when he started to write THINGS FALL APART soon after we went down from college. When he finally got it published in England, I rejoiced with him. The whole of Nigeria rejoiced with him.
Other novels followed. And success followed hard on success. Then the inevitable began to happen. Chinua, force majeure, began to shift out of my orbit. He did not think it would happen that way. But he could do nothing, even did he so wish, to stem the tide. He discovered, as his friends did too, that he had been drawn onto a world stage. Henceforth, he belonged, not just to a narrow circle of friends and admirers, but to all of humanity. The simple, quiet, almost self-effacing lad I had known from our common childhood, had been transformed, before my very eyes, into one of the great human beings of this, or any other age.
It is really quite impossible for the rest of the world to understand, or even to appreciate, the magnitude of the Chinua Achebe phenomenon. How do you describe what it feels like to see your friend and classmate, nurtured in the colonial quagmire to which our people were condemned for a century or more, rise above it all to write the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens and the rest, with a masterliness that takes the breath away? When we read Dickens, Stevenson, and yes, even Conrad, in high school and in college, we did not think we would produce an Achebe. We dared not think it!
THE CARPENTER’S SON? I only ever met Chinua’s father three or four times during the years Chinua and I were in high school and university, and a little after. But though my contact with the senior Achebe was not frequent, I always came away with the impression that the Chinua apple did not fall far from the tree. So, though his old man was no carpenter, it is my conviction that the father was largely responsible for chiseling the son, in the latter’s formative years, into the marvelously fine product the world knows today, and has admired for just about five decades.
Let me put this as simply and honestly as I can, or dare. Chinua is the best writer of English that I think I have ever read. He is, for me, its most mellifluous exponent. If this claim causes anyone to raise an eyebrow, I plead that beauty is in the beholder’s eye. I speak for myself and, I suspect, for an entire continent. There is no writer, living or dead, that has demonstrated, in greater measure than Chinua, the ability to weave a tapestry of words taken from the Queen’s English and from the proverbs and sayings of his own mother tongue, Igbo.
Chinua’s mastery of the English language was predictable, and predicted. Our teachers in high school told us Chinua was the best writer of English in the school. Our professors and lecturers in the University College, Ibadan – most of them native speakers of the language, said exactly the same thing. Indeed one or two of them, looking at the rest of the class with pity in their blue or green eyes, declared that Chinua was arguably the only one in our class who actually wrote English. We might have been hurt, but we did our best to appear nonchalant.
The carpenter’s son? Many of his classmates recognized Chinua’s genius early, because we witnessed it unfold before our very eyes. There was some kind of a poetry competition in our second or third year in the university college. From this distance in time, more than a half-century now, I forget the details of this competition. But I have not forgotten the day a white gentleman, a total stranger to all of us and, I believe, even to the faculty, came to the college. The student body assembled in a hall to hear from him the results of the competition. I did not hold my breath, because I had not entered even a line of poetry myself. And then this gentleman, instead of announcing the winners without fuss, first called out, loud and clear: “Will the student named Albert Achebe please stand up!”
Chinua, somewhat hesitantly, got up. The gentleman then read Chinua’s poem: something about a young student in his hall, who thought that because he was small, he should pay less, because he ate less than everybody else (or words to that effect). I believe Chinua won the first prize. He had to have won it, after all that fanfare!
The carpenter’s son? Chinua himself must have had an inkling of his own extraordinary gifts. How else could he have, albeit innocently, prophesied his coming glory? A mutual friend, now a well-known writer in his own rights, wrote a letter to Chinua two years after Chinua and I had graduated from the University College, Ibadan. This friend had just graduated Bachelor of Arts, and in the same subjects as Chinua and I. Somewhat elated that he had achieved the same level of success as Chinua, in the equivalent examination, he glowingly declared, in his letter, that we were all at par with one another. Three years before his first novel was published, and almost certainly before he had even begun to write it, Chinua replied to our friend’s letter. Quoting a passage from one of the Epistles of St. Paul, Chinua gently reminded our friend that though there are many stars in heaven, “ONE STAR DIFFERETH FROM ANOTHER IN GLORY.” Did Chinua know – could he improbably have known – what he was talking about?
I think I can, for fairly credible reasons, be forgiven for thinking of my friend as the carpenter’s son. Actually, I do not, and never did! But what reasons justify his non-selection for the highest literary prize in the world – the NOBEL PRIZE? I dare to assert that there is no writer alive today whose influence on a whole generation of writers compares with Chinua’s. And he has influenced, not only writers from the so-called backwaters of the African continent – Conrad’s heart of darkness – but also in the Americas. I was present at another function, again in Manhattan, where Chinua was one of the guests of honor of the African-American Institute. The celebrated writer, Tony Morrison, was also there. In probably the highest accolade from a Nobel laureate to a non-laureate that I ever heard, TonI Morrison acknowledged Chinua as one of her main literary inspirations in writing about her own people.
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Chike MOMAH is an author and retired International Civil Servant. He resides in Arlington Texas. This unpublished piece was written in October 2000, and amended in October 2007
Email: nnanne@bcglobal.net
SEE ALSO: Oseloka Obaze and Chike Momah: Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart – Fifty years later
Oseloka Obaze-- In lieu of Book Review
Chinua Achebe: The unacknowledged Nobel laureate