Hopes and Impediments Read online

  Books by Chinua Achebe

  THE SACRIFICIAL EGG AND OTHER STORIES

  THINGS FALL APART

  NO LONGER AT EASE

  CHIKE AND THE RIVER

  A MAN OF THE PEOPLE

  ARROW OF GOD

  GIRLS AT WAR AND OTHER STORIES

  BEWARE SOUL BROTHER

  MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY

  THE TROUBLE WITH NIGERIA

  THE FLUTE

  THE DRUM

  ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH

  HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS: SELECTED ESSAYS

  HOW THE LEOPARD GOT HIS CLAWS (with John Iroaganachi)

  WINDS OF CHANGE: MODERN SHORT STORIES FROM BLACK AFRICA (with Others)

  AFRICAN SHORT STORIES (with C. L. Innes, Eds.)

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1990

  Copyright © 1988 by Chinua Achebe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britian by Heinemann in 1988 and subsequently in the United States by Doubleday in 1989. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Excerpts from “East Coker” and “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Achebe, Chinua.

  Hopes and impediments : selected essays / Chinua Achebe.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9387.9A3H6 1989

  809—dc19 89–31281

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81646-7

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  FOR MIKE THELWELL AND CHINWEIZU

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Preface

  1 An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

  2 Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South

  3 Named for Victoria, Queen of England

  4 The Novelist as Teacher

  5 The Writer and His Community

  6 The Igbo World and Its Art

  7 Colonialist Criticism

  8 Thoughts on the African Novel

  9 Work and Play in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard

  10 Don’t Let Him Die: A Tribute to Christopher Okigbo

  11 Kofi Awoonor as a Novelist

  12 Language and the Destiny of Man

  13 The Truth of Fiction

  14 What Has Literature Got to Do with It?

  Postscript: James Baldwin (1924–1987)

  Notes

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use material in this book.

  University of Massachusetts, Amherst, The Chancellor’s Lecture Series, 1974–75, Amherst 1976, and Massachusetts Review, vol. 18, no. 4, winter 1977, Amherst, for “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

  The Times Literary Supplement, 1 February 1980, for “Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South.”

  New Letters, vol. 40, Kansas City, October 1973, for “Named for Victoria, Queen of England.”

  New Statesman, London, 29 January 1965, for “The Novelist as Teacher.”

  University of California at Los Angeles, Regents’ Lecture, 1984 for “The Writer and His Community.”

  Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, authors, and Museum of Cultural History, University of California at Los Angeles, publishers of Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos, 1984, for “The Igbo World and Its Art.”

  Dalhousie Review, vol. 53, no. 4, Halifax, Canada, December 1973, for “Thoughts on the African Novel.”

  University of Ibadan, The Equiano Memorial Lecture, 1977, and Okike, no. 14, September 1978, Nsukka, for “Work and Play in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.”

  Fourth Dimension Publishers, publishers of Don’t Let Him Die, Enugu, 1978, for “Don’t Let Him Die: A Tribute to Christopher Okigbo.”

  Kofi Awoonor, author, and Doubleday/Anchor, New York, publishers of This Earth, My Brother …, 1971, for “Kofi Awoonor as a Novelist.”

  Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, U.S.A., for “Language and the Destiny of Man.”

  University of Ife, Convocation Lecture, 1978, for “The Truth of Fiction.”

  Authors Preface

  THIS SELECTION from essays I wrote for diverse occasions over a period of twenty-three years represents my abiding concerns in literature and the arts as well as my interest in wider social issues. In bringing the work together into one volume, I might simply have arranged the items in chronological order. Instead, and following a certain whim, I took my standard-bearer from the middle ranks and then picked my way back and forth to position the rest. James Baldwin’s death in November 1987, while the manuscript was in active production with my publishers, determined the final stop-press entry.

  But stepping back and looking at this somewhat haphazard organization I now perceive a certain unpremeditated roundedness to the final result. To open the collection with a 1974 public lecture on Conrad’s racism given at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also close it at the same institution thirteen years later with a tribute to one of the most intrepid fighters against racism, was, at the very least, a curious coincidence.

  Conrad and Baldwin; two very different writers separated by almost every barrier we cherish—time (Baldwin was born the very year Conrad died); space (a Polish exile in England and an American exile in France); and, greatest of all perhaps, race (one white and the other black).

  This last turns out to be the most crucial in its consequences, for while Conrad casually wrote words that continue to give morale to the barricades of racism, Baldwin spent his talents subverting them. Impediments and Hopes!

  At the reception that followed my 1974 lecture an elderly English professor had walked up to me and said: “How dare you!” and stalked away. A few days later another English professor said to me: “After hearing you the other night I now realize that I had never really read Heart of Darkness although I have taught it for years,” or words to that effect. Revisiting Amherst thirteen years later in 1987, yet another colleague tells me he did not agree with me before but now does! More hopes?

  I am not so naïve as to think that I have slain the monster of racist habit with one stroke of the essay. The twentieth century was ushered in with a prophecy by one of its greatest thinkers, W. E. B. Du Bois (another exile, by the way, who at the very end of a long life of struggle against the monster finally gave America up as a bad job and settled for Nkrumah’s Ghana). In the preface of his famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, he wrote: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line” (New American Library Edition, New York, 1969, p. xi). The verb he used is interesting: is instead of will be. And he wrote his words not during the 1960s Civil Rights marches in America as the tone might suggest to some, but actually in 1903—“at the dawning of the Twentieth Century” as he himself put it, and only one year later than Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This chronology is of the utmost importance. Therefore the defence sometimes proffered: that Conrad should not be judged by the standards of later times; that racism had not become an issue in the world when he wrote his famous African no
vel, will have to clarify whose world it is talking about.

  CHINUA ACHEBE

  University of Massachusetts

  Amherst

  IN THE FALL of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.”

  A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who—bless their teacher—had just read Things Fall Apart. One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe.

  I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather heavy conclusions which at first sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them. But only, I hope, at first sight.

  The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of his age, but I believe also for much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware that the life of his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and superstitions and, like everybody else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Africa to encounter those things.

  The other person being fully my own age could not be excused on the grounds of his years. Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again I believe that something more wilful than a mere lack of information was at work. For did not that erudite British historian and Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper, also pronounce that African history did not exist?

  If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.

  This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but do so more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good story-teller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class—permanent literature—read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it “among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language.”1 I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise.

  Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting peacefully “at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks.”2 But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that “going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world.”

  Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.

  These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad’s famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness. In the final consideration, his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on page 103 and page 105 of the New American Library edition: (a) “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” and (b) “The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.” Of course, there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of “inscrutable,” for example, you might have “unspeakable,” even plain “mysterious,” etc., etc.

  The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis3 drew attention long ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.” That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents, and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery, much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally, normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such underhand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well—one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.

  The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of Darkness are, however, about people. I must crave the indulgence of my reader to quote almost a whole page from about the middle of the story when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa:

  We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of the black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.

  The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of
it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.4

  Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: “What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours … Ugly.”

  Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page later, on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes:

  And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam gauge and at the water gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed his teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.5

  As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad, things being in their place is of the utmost importance.