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Achebe: quotable quotes

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In Africa, Chinua Achebe is one of the most quoted writers even beyond literature. We all have our Chinua Achebe moments when we are asked to say a few words at a party or a funeral. In Africa, if anyone says, “This is what Achebe himself said,” the debate is over! You only check where and when the words were said by Achebe.
The great African author from Nigeria died on 21 March 2013 in Boston, United States. His oeuvre is well known throughout the world.

I know people who can recite chunks and chunks of his pioneering novel, Things Fall Apart. The novel that is estimated to have sold millions of copies.
It is also not possible to agree or disagree with everything Achebe uttered or wrote. However, we all remember certain key passages from the Achebe literature and thought; passages that are worth underlining with a pen in order to be re-read on a better day.

In this article I present some of my favourite passages from what I call “the Achebe thought.” It may not be possible to evaluate in one breath all that was written by Chinua Achebe but you can go piece by piece.
Achebe on if he is surprised by the huge success of his Things Fall Apart:
“Was I surprised? Yes, at the beginning. There was no African literature as we know it today. But, of course, something doesn’t continue to surprise you every day. After a while I began to understand why the book had resonance. I began to understand my history even better. It wasn’t as if when I wrote it I was an expert in the history of the world. I was a very young man. I knew I had a story, but how it fits into the story of the world — I really had no sense of that. Its meaning for my Igbo people was clear to me, but I didn’t know how other people elsewhere would respond to it.” From Achebe’s interview with Katie Bacon, New York, 2000

This means that an artist may not immediately know if his work of art is going to be very successful or not until the world accepts or rejects it. He may even think that his story is only a very local story until it begins to appeal to a large audience.
In the preface to his novel, Arrow of God, Achebe himself says: “Whenever people have asked me which among my novels is my favourite, I have always evaded a direct answer, being strongly of the mind that in sheer invidiousness that question is fully comparable to asking a man to list his children in the order in which he loves them. A parent worth his salt will, if he must, speak about the peculiar attractiveness of each child.”

That statement is useful to students of Creative Writing. An author can be attached emotionally to his work, new and old. An author is may also be unable to rank his own work. Some authors are only able to tell how they felt when they wrote each of their works.
Achebe on the role of the African writer:

“The (African) writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front . . . I for one would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones set in the past: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure art. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind. And I don’t see that the two need be mutually exclusive…” Source: “The Novelist as Teacher,” 1965)

This means that Achebe considered himself a teacher and a lawgiver. He was aware that he was not just an artist but a cultural activist too. He felt deeply about the way Africans were looked down upon. He always hoped that maybe his books could straighten that up.
Achebe went on to say: “The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost.

There is a saying in Igbo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. After all, the novelist’s duty is not to beat this morning’s headline in topicality but to explore in depth the human condition. In Africa he cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history.” Source: “The Novelist as Teacher,” 1965)
Achebe considered a good writer to be a man “on the side of history.” Meaning that, for Achebe, a writer ought to support the whims of the ordinary people. A writer has to take sides with the ordinary people.

Achebe on defining African literature and its appropriate language:
In June 1962, there was a writers’ gathering at Makerere, impressively styled: “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” Despite this sonorous and rather solemn title, it turned out to be a very lively affair and a very exciting and useful experience for many of us. But there was something which we tried to do and failed—that was to define “African literature” satisfactorily. Was it literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent or south of the Sahara, or just black Africa?

And then the question of language. Should it be in indigenous African languages or should it include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and so on? In the end, we gave up trying to find an answer, partly — I should admit — on my own instigation. Perhaps we should not have given up so easily… What all this suggests to me is that you cannot cram African literature into a small, neat definition. I do not see African literature as one unit but as a group of associated units — in fact the sum total of all the national and ethnic literatures of Africa… Any attempt to define African literature in terms which over¬look the complexities of the African scene at the material time is doomed to failure. On writing in English:

Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the pos-itive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice, which may yet set the world on fire. But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it.

One final point remains for me to make. The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether they ought to. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.

“But, for me, there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it… I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Source: ‘The African writer and the English Language,’ Achebe speech: 1975.

Achebe’s views on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.

Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr Kurtz, which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.

Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad’s great talents. Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments…. Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts….

As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it…. Source: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts, 1977
Achebe on association:
“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.” Source: Things Fall Apart

Memory Chirere

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Insight

Shining Like Stars: Part One

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Last week, in a piece titled “Hope Springs Eternal”, I wrote about the relative values of (leftist) political commitment and Christian faith in a world that is beset with violence, poverty and oppression. Now I’m offering a review of a book by Lindsay Brown titled Shining Like Stars: The power of the gospel in the world’s universities, which explores the work of evangelical students in propagating the Christian faith in some of the world’s most dangerous countries, such as Columbia, China, Russia, Sudan and the DRC. Countries where despair seems to be a pretty rational response to the lives that huge numbers of people are forced to lead. I shall concentrate on cases where that effort to spread the Christian faith is allied to a commitment to agitate for better political and social conditions.

As an aside, I begin by quoting Will Shoki, editor of the invaluable online opinion journal Africa is a Country. I know I’ve mentioned him at least once in previous weeks, but that is because they are so good. In a piece Shoki wrote for the edition of March 4th this year, he records the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s reference to “the courage of hopelessness”, whereby “it is only when we despair and don’t know anymore what to do that change can be enacted.” Shoki adds: “I have never been quite sure what this means — in fact, I have never been quite sure what Zizek means about anything.” Which is to say, Zizek is a pretty difficult read, but his work is a nut it’s well worth cracking.

Be that as it may. Let us turn again to the question how, in a harsh world largely run by greedy, selfish, murderous brutes, a dedication to the message of the gospels and a commitment to political and social transformation can be a joint life-saver.

Lindsay Brown, the author of the book I’m reviewing, was for many years General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). Towards the end of his book there is an Appendix in which he lists around 150 student organisations worldwide that are affiliated to IFES. Many countries where IFES-allied groups have a strong presence are only nominally Christian, many others (for example, China and the Gulf States) are hostile to the gospel. In Lesotho — where neither of these impediments holds — the relevant body is called the Scripture Union of Lesotho, Tertiary Ministry (SULTM); as Brown’s book doesn’t touch on Lesotho, I’d be very interested to hear from my readers about the activities of SULTM.

The first chapter of Shining Like Stars is titled “Never Underestimate What Students Can Do.” This begins by recounting the story of Daniel and his three fellow captives in Babylon under the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, the story that ends with three of the young Jews being saved by their faith when they are cast into the burning fiery furnace. Then there are reminders of the long history of evangelism in western Europe, followed by the observation: “world mission is less and less about westerners going elsewhere to serve Christ, but about believers from everywhere going everywhere . . . for example, during the twenty years of civil war in Chad its displaced students, sent by the government to study in other countries, founded IFES movements in Niger, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Burkina Faso.”

One of the first of many testimonies the book contains is, however, from a female British student of Russian, identified simply as Elizabeth, who travelled as an evangelist to one of the -stan countries, former Soviet republics of Central Asia (which of the former -stans this was isn’t specified). It was a perilous but highly successful mission. Elizabeth records: “My birthday was fun. I had five cakes and three parties. They really know how to make cakes here!” Not much peril involved in that, you might say. But then Lindsay Brown notes that many sensitive words in Elizabeth’s testimony have the letter “x” inserted in them and explains that this was to escape electronic surveillance.

And so it seems being an IFES evangelist can be a bit like being James Bond, except more graceful. The second chapter in Brown’s book is titled “Our Sovereign God and Human Courage” and that’s where I’ll pick up the story next week, as well as detailing the activities IFES evangelists organize to attract students to the gospel. And then — after all, the chief focus of this piece — how they strategise evangelical work in relation to the advocacy of political and social transformation.

To be concluded

Chris Dunton

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Hope springs eternal

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Given the abysmal state of the world today, what is it that keeps one going? I mean, just look at the mess we’re in. The cowardice of world leaders faced with the challenge of climate change —world leaders most of whom are, of course, in thrall to capitalism (for when it comes to our mismanagement, that’s what really rules the roost). The appalling violence in Ukraine and the Middle East. The apparently endless misgovernance of countries as diverse as Lesotho and Nigeria. How does one not give into despair?

Me, I have an interim resource and a vastly more profound one. The former is my commitment to left-wing socialism, a conviction that life on earth can be vastly improved by following the principles of Marxist-Leninism (not — an important qualification — the corrupt form of those principles that moulded dictatorships such as the Soviet Union). The second resource is faith in the message of the Gospels, the embracing of our Lord Jesus Christ. For with this, the ills of the world pale into insignificance. Which is not — I absolutely insist — to refuse the responsibility of political commitment to ease the suffering of millions on earth, a duty we have while we’re still stuck on the bloody place.

Of those two resources, one allows a limited, constrained kind of hope, the other a hope that is boundless.

To expand on the notion of hope, recently in these pages Bishop David Ramela quoted the great Czech author and political leader Vaclav Havel, who became President of his country after resisting Soviet oppression in acts of dissidence for which he was imprisoned. Havel, as quoted by Bishop Ramela, wrote: “I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart . . . I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big as life itself.”

Hope as distinct from optimism? Well, a couple of references here. First, the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (like Havel, imprisoned for his beliefs, in his case by Mussolini’s Fascists) wrote of the need to maintain “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In other words, any reasonably intelligent person knows that things are going to screw up, but must act as if this were not the case. And another Marxist, the British critical theorist Terry Eagleton (the mentor of your columnist, incidentally, when he was an undergraduate — and ever since) has written a fine book, Hope Without Optimism. I shan’t go into that here, but shall review it in this column in a few weeks’ time.

Turning to the relationship between political commitment and the Christian faith, the evangelist preacher Robert Sheehan once commented: “Many Christians put more weight on political programmes and economic packages than on the power of the gospel in the nation. Do you?” The answer, I would hope, is “no”, but “quite a lot of weight all the same.” And I’m going to sign off this week with a lengthy quotation from the New Testament—namely, Ephesians 2: 14-22—which has to do with the relationship, in the time of Paul’s evangelism, between Jews and Gentiles. It is a passage — to refer to my piece some weeks ago on the Gaza crisis — that one would like to read to the Hamas leaders in Palestine and to Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu before banging their heads together.

“For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordnances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace. And that he might reconcile them both to God in one body, through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also being built together for a dwelling place in God in the Spirit.”

Joining, harmony, hope.

Chris Dunton

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Reading and emotion

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What does a good piece of writing do? How does a piece of writing evoke emotions in you? Well, reading is a good art that can stimulate and sharpen our sensibilities. In this instalment we focus on the emotional journey triggered and enabled by good literature. While other books may educate us and sharpen our cognitive abilities, that is the abilities to think and solve problems, reading literature of fiction does more; it stirs our emotions and sharpens our affective capacities.

By affective capabilities, we refer to the abilities to feel and tune in to our emotions and sensibilities. Life, after all, is not only about heart facts and reason. Life is about feeling and experiencing and the ability to put ourselves into other people’s shoes. Reading literature is so liberating and humanistic! Reading art in all its many genres grounds us in the varieties of human experiences and engenders in us tolerance, understanding and empathy.


Stories have a way of taking us on journeys real and imagined which stories transform us from the inside. These stories allow us to visit far-flung places and meet new people and feel their environment. Art has a way of mending bridges because through stories we come to understand people who may seem different from us. And at times we may have felt hatred and dislike for them and their way of doing things. But through reading about them, we hear their stories. We experience that which they are experiencing. We begin to see them from the inside out, and we get to know what lies underneath their skin, so to speak. That’s why they say that we can only begin to make sense of the world once we have reduced the whole world to stories. Let’s write a small story together and ascertain how it would move us. Let’s go.


“He trudged on thinking how he would approach Mwandionesa. Her warm and coy smile flashed before his eye.


Slowly mustering up a morsel of self-belief, Themba trudged along the battered, winding road in the heart of a thicket of musasa trees in the Musirizwi enclaves in Chipinge, south-eastern Zimbabwe. Like a heavy burden, a gnawing sense of failure nibbled at his conscience and a sense of uselessness clung on the air with unrelenting defiance. The stain of failure, the feeling that his people and he were inconsequential had taken lodging in his entire being. That is why he found a sense of solace only from isolating himself in his flimsy cocoon of loneliness like the proverbial ostrich which buried its head in the sand. He would have an occasional home-brewed beer called chikeke and thereafter lock himself within the labyrinth and sordid visceral being.


A gaunt bird flew overhead and he heard its flapping feathers amidst the thickening doom and darkness. “Bird”, he retorted to its presence, “what would you do if you were ever crushed by the label of failure.” A soft, warm tear tricked down the rugged terrain of his face. “Makauyo went to Egoli and returned without a name to himself, Khuyumani, too, lies buried in the bowels of the soil with nothing to show” he said as if he were speaking to the bird.


As he touched the cold handle of the door to his heart clutching a small, whimpering puppy in a cardboard box, he could hear the breathing of Mwandionesa and her stabbing, moist eyes asking him without a word where he has been for the last three days. He stood for a moment which seemed like an eternity. With false bravado, he mustered a not-so-convincing, frail knock. Mwandionesa, heavy with child, slowly made for the door and slid it open. Themba did not know what to do. He loved her but he did not know how to express it, like a person bereft of a language. Mwandionesa rummaged her pots on the dying embers of a hearth and gave him respectfully a plate with sadza and a small portion of chicken. A tear escaped-one, two, and another! She broke down, a downpour of tears streaming down her lips. “Themba, ngendaa yei weidaro mwamuna wangu? Indaa yei ndiripe Dube? Indaa yei weiita mukuba wekunzerereka kungaitei imbudzi irikumakaba isina unousha?” (Themba, why do you treat me in a manner? Why do you behave as if you are a stray goat without a shepherd? If I have wronged you I am prepared to appease you”).


“Look at me, Themba,” she demanded as a visibly pregnant and swollen stomach bulged through her threadbare blouse. The puppy whimpered plaintively. With hesitation Themba went to where Mwandionesa stood. With his furrowed labour-weary hands he touched her waist and led her to their mat of reeds made of “umhlanga” as she was fond of referring to reeds. She did not protest. A glow, a faint glow burnt in her eyes as she eased comfortably on his lanky chest. She fumbled for his hand and shepherded it to the lower regions of her belly and said, “He was kicking all these days you were away.” Themba was engulfed in a flurry of emotions; guilt as well as pride. With deliberateness, Mwandionesa said, “this boy will be called Thando. Yes Thando. He will build this homestead and more should you feel that you don’t have a home.” Themba nodded in agreement.
Themba began to feel the warmth of her presence as her succulent breasts pressed against his lanky chest and slowly closed his eyes…”

What a gripping tapestry which evokes a lot of emotions! It’s a story that stirs a lot of emotions; from empathy, sadness and an inner glow in the heart at the end. As the story begins, we feel Temba’s struggles, fear and hopelessness. He seems to be carrying a huge emotional burden and a crushing sense of defeat. I hope you have also seen Temba’s bid to reassert his sense of being and purpose through his desire of caring for a puppy – we could actually feel it whimpering. And the new hope ignited at the end of the story and affirmations of hope and new beginnings! The birth of a child always brings with it new beginnings – hope springs eternal!
So here we are! Stories are so humanising. Learning to read art in all its genres evokes emotions in us. It sharpens our affective side and warms our hearts.

Vuso Mhlanga teaches at the University of Zimbabwe. For almost a decade and half he taught English language and Literature in English at high school. Send your comments and questions to: mhlangavuso85@gmail.com

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