CHINUA ACHEBE: TIME TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EMERITUS NOBEL LAUREATE

CHINUA ACHEBE: TIME TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EMERITUS NOBEL LAUREATE

What is it with the Nobel Prize in literature? Why has not Professor Chinua Achebe won the prize?

Chinua Achebe, renowned writer and author of the 1958 classic novel, Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, Arrow of God, Home and Exile and many more has sold over 20 million copies (Things Fall Apart alone has sold over 10 Million copies) and translated into several languages has won yet another prize; the 300, 000. 00 U.S Dollars Dorothy and Lillian Gish prize thus joining the esteemed list of Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Robert Redford and a select few who have won the prize which is one of the largest and most prestigious awards in the arts. Chinua Achebe is currently Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, R.I, United States of America.

Achebe, whose incisive writings and critical thinking examines the impact of colonialism on African culture and politics in the pre and post colonial world has won several other awards and he won the Man Booker International Prize (2007) which recognizes a life time of work, sponsored by the Man Group and established in 2005 to complement the Man Booker Prize, the Man Booker International Prize rewards one writer's overall achievement in literature and their significant influence on writers and readers worldwide. The award is therefore a recognition of the writer's body of work, rather than any one title.

Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, the clash of values during and after the colonial era and he has also written about the missed opportunities and squandering of the continent’s high hopes at independence. He has variously been described and held in high esteem by the literary world. When in 1987, he released his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, about a military coup in the fictional West African nation of Kagan, the Financial Times hailed him thus, “in a powerful fusion of myth, legend and modern styles, Achebe has written a book which is wise, exciting and essential, a powerful antidote to the cynical commentators from 'overseas' who see nothing ever new out of Africa”. The magazine, West African, also wrote that the book which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize of that year deserved to win the prize, and that Achebe was “a writer who has long deserved the recognition that has already been accorded him by his sales figures”.

In June 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. The judging panel included U.S critic Elaine Showalter who said he "illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies"; and South African writer and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer who said Achebe has achieved "what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer’s purpose: 'a new-found utterance' for the capture of life’s complexity". Now in 2010, Achebe has been awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize “awarded to a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life” in the words of one of the creators of the trust, Lillian Gish.

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and I copiously quote “Achebe has been called "the father of modern African writing", and many books and essays have been written about his work over the past fifty years. In 1992 he became the first living author to be represented in the Everyman’s Library collection published by Alfred A. Knopf. His 60th birthday was celebrated at the University of Nigeria by "an international Who's Who in African Literature". One observer noted: "Nothing like it had ever happened before in African literature anywhere on the continent".

Many writers of succeeding generations view his work as having paved the way for their efforts. In 1982 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Kent. At the ceremony, Professor Robert Gibson said that the Nigerian author "is now revered as Master by the younger generation of African writers and it is to him they regularly turn for counsel and inspiration." Even outside of Africa, his impact resonates strongly in literary circles. Novelist Margaret Atwood called him "a magical writer – one of the greatest of the twentieth century". Poet Maya Angelou lauded Things Fall Apart as a book wherein "all readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents and friends and themselves along Nigerian roads". Nelson Mandela, recalling his time as a political prisoner, once referred to Achebe as a writer "in whose company the prison walls fell down."

Of his extra-ordinary classic – Things Fall Apart, Time magazine wrote, “a novel of great power that turns the world upside down”. Time magazine also acknowledged the book as one of the best 100 English language novels written between 1923 and date. Things Fall Apart, is thus in good company, and ranks with other seminal works of our time, like Gone with the Wind, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath, The Blind Assassin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, An American Tragedy and Blood Meridian.

Achebe is the recipient of over 30 honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States, including Dartmouth College, Harvard, and Brown University. He has been awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Nigerian National Order of Merit (Nigeria's highest honour for academic work), and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Professor Chinua Achebe, received The Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club in New York City in 2007. The Medal of Honor for Literature, one of America’s most prestigious and distinctive literature honors is given for a body of work of literary excellence. Achebe will become the 39th recipient of the medal since it was instituted in 1968. It is noteworthy, that Achebe is also the first black African and second black writer to receive this honor.

How come such a man has not received the Nobel? In 2006, when the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Turkey’s novelist Mr. Orhan Pamuk, it was widely believed that the other four (though unconfirmed) nominees were a Nigerian, an American, a Syrian and a Peruvian and if this would-have-been Nigerian laureate was Achebe as many have since then speculated we will never know until fifty years hence when in keeping with tradition, the 2006 runner-up status is made public. For me personally and I take umbrage (not without good cause though) with the academy in Stockholm, why no Nigerian has won the Nobel prize in any field of human endeavour in the intervening 24 years since Professor Wole Soyinka in 1986 beats me silly. There is nothing left for Chinua Achebe to do to deserve the recognition. Some have argued that the literary prize is too Eurocentric and they may not be far from the truth, the 2009 Nobel prize for literature as an example was awarded to Roman born German poet and novelist, Herta Muller with the Swedish academy describing Muller as a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. Though she is relatively unknown, she has been celebrated as one of Germany’s best writers in a long while. American’s it was reported were shocked at the choice of Muller. If American’s were shocked at the choice of Muller because no American has won the prize in a couple of years then Africans ought to be enraged. In its 110 years old history, only five Africans have won the Nobel prize for literature despite the obvious glut of iconic literary talents on the continent – Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt in 1988, Nadine Gordimer of South Africa in 1991, J.M Coetzee of South Africa in 2003 and Iranian/Zimbabwean/British Doris Lessing in 2007 and more outrageous is that Chinua Achebe is much more distinguished than these writers. Achebe even bested Doris Lessing to win the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.

It is a testimony to the impeccable character of the man who has also been described with such superlatives as “the most translated writer of African heritage”; “one of the great intellectuals and ethical figures of our time”; “one of the 1, 000 makers of the 21st Century responsible for defining a modern African literature that was truly African” that when Wole Soyinka won in 1986, he joined the rest of the world in celebrating the first African Nobel laureate in literature. He lauded Wole Soyinka’s works and remarked that he was “most eminently deserving of any prize”. On this vexatious issue he told Quality Weekly in 1988; “My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize. Literature is not a heavyweight championship. Nigerians may think, you know, this man has been knocked out. It's nothing to do with that”. See how this man has bore and still bear it all with equanimity and good grace uncommon in these times and age.

Achebe’s biographer Ezenwa-Ohaeto suggests a possible reason why the Stockholm academy continues to shun Achebe: Achebe once refused to attend a Conference on African literature in Stockholm, Sweden. With his characteristic humility he explained that he “consider(ed) it (in) appropriate for African writers to assemble in Europe in 1986 to discuss the future of their literature. Ezenwa-Ohaeto implies that in all likelihood the act was perceived as a snub by the Nobel committee, who assumed that this refusal was an indicator that Achebe would refuse the Prize itself if awarded.

Again, Achebe had in 1975, at the Chancellor lecture at Amherst, Massachusetts criticized Joseph Conrad, the tradition of racism in the west and pointed out that racism was the core of Conrad’s critical book “The Heart of Darkness”, asserting that the book more than any other work displays that “Western desire – one might indeed say the need – in Western psychology to set up Africa 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”. To Achebe, “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”.

Now Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is considered in the West as one of the great works of art produced by any man and is about the best read book in the English Departments of European and American Universities. Apart from emphatically denying that this book is a great work of art, Achebe even had the “temerity” to criticize another one considered great in the West, Albert Schweitzer, a 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner who Achebe described as an “extraordinary missionary who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to African’s” but who could not ultimately accept the equality of the African as he gleefully quotes “the African is indeed my brother but my junior brother” and he went on to build substandard hospitals appropriate to the need of junior brothers. Westerners were scandalized and many appalled that Achebe could criticize a man honoured in the West for his service to mankind and advocacy of Western liberalism. The West never forgave him and Stockholm took note.

Perceptibly, it does seem that literary reasons are no longer the sole consideration for awarding the Nobel in literature any more. Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk won in 2006 because “in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native land has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing cultures”. Austria’s Elfriede Jelenik in 2004 for revealing “the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”. In 2010, Peruvian, Mario Vargas Llosa has won for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat”. This all smacks of Political correctness. No longer will anyone win the approval of Stockholm again if he simply “in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence” without more.

Ike Okonta writing in the Thisday of October, 29, 2006 came as close to the truth as anyone who has written on the subject before when he wrote “the reading world, including the Nobel Committee, know this fact: Chinualumogu Achebe is not only the greatest writer to come out of Africa, he is also, perhaps, the one writer in the world today who, through his work, single-handedly changed the way in which one people, their history and culture are perceived by another. After the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, the myth of a dark Africa, peopled by savages, without history and so without a story, a myth assiduously cultivated and peddled by European explorers and mercenary soldiers of the Frederick Lugard variety, was smashed forever. The guardians of the Western literary cannon in Oxford and Stockholm and Harvard have not forgiven Chinua Achebe for this ‘heresy’. He is widely seen as an ‘uppity nigger’ who does not know his place, who does not accord white ‘Massa’ sufficient respect. Above all Achebe is considered the cultural equivalent of Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba, great African’s who made it clear from the outset that their life’s mission was to rid the continent of the armed robbers and rapists that had held her down for five centuries. It is significant that all three were removed from power by the West, and in the case of Cabral and Lumumba, murdered in cold blood by agents of Western imperialism. Had Achebe’s terrain been politics, there is no doubt in my mind that he too would have gone the way of the others, felled by a bullet fired from London or Washington. ‘Heretics’, those that challenge the status quo, are meant to burn at the stakes, after all. Is it likely that the Nobel Committee, which in truth is merely the cultural arm of a rapine project intent on gobbling up all that is non-Western, will reward Chinua Achebe for insisting so powerfully and so brilliantly in his novels, essays, and poems that Africa was not one long night of savagery before Europe came calling in the fifteenth century?”

But does Chinua Achebe really need the Nobel Prize to validate his pre eminence in African literature? As the ‘Eagle on the tallest Iroko?’ Many think not and Obi Wakama captured it in good sense when he wrote in 2002, “frankly, I think that Achebe does not need the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize will merely dignify itself if it is awarded to Chinua Achebe. Everyone recognizes that he is among the greatest writers living on earth today. The real significance of Achebe was captured by that announcement in London two years ago in 2000, when he, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott were invited to a special program. The announcement read: ‘Two Nobel Laureates and a Legend’. There is no greater honour”.

The continued disregard for Achebe by Stockolm has truly not diminished him a bit. Achebe would win the Nobel either in life or in death but unfortunately the prize is not awarded posthumously and Achebe will be 80 years in November 2010. Simply, if Achebe does not win the Nobel price anytime soon, then he will never win it. This will not diminish him in our eyes but it will sure diminish him in the eyes of the next generation of literary connoisseurs who may never have the good fortune to know and understand what we know now. But then Achebe will loom large even in death and his place in African literature will never be discountenanced. More than any other African writer I know, see how Africa remains the focus of this great man’s thoughts? In 2007 when he won the Man Booker International Prize, Achebe reacted thus: “It was 50 years ago this year that I began writing my first novel, Things Fall Apart. It is wonderful to hear that my peers have looked at the body of work I have put together in the last 50 years and judged it deserving of this important recognition. I am grateful.” In essence African literature has flourished for 50 years, critically galvanized by Achebe’s monumental work, Things Fall Apart. Three years on in 2010, he said about the Gish Prize "When I was a boy, growing up in Nigeria, becoming a novelist was a far-away dream, now it is a reality for many African writers, not just myself. The Gish Prize recognizes the long journey my fellow colleagues and I have taken, and I am proud and grateful for that." Quintessential Achebe on the difficult road less travelled he took in 1957 and the thousand African writers who will be joint heirs to the throne. Ngugi wa Thiong’o for example, another one who should be a Nobel laureate one day if Stockholm does the right thing.

So in the innermost recesses of the minds and in the heart of African’s and 20 million readers across the globe, Achebe is the unacknowledged Nobel laureate and to the Nobel Committee they have assigned the task of carrying the burden of their snub of a literary giant, more eminent than scores of men in their honours list and who in their hearts they acknowledge a legend and a Nobel laureate several times over.

All therefore hail Africa’s emeritus Nobel laureate, Professor Chinua Achebe!!!

STEPHEN O. OBAJAJA is a Partner at the Lagos Law Firm of Fountain Court Partners.


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