Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture

Abstract

Ihave never met Chinua Achebe in person, but every time I read his fic? tion, his essays, or critical works, I feel as if I have known him for most ofmy life. For if the act of reading and re-reading establishes networks of connections between readers, writers, and context, and if texts are indeed crucial to the modes of knowledge we come to develop about sub? jects and objects and the images we associate with certain localities and institutions, then I can say without equivocation that I have known Achebe since I was thirteen years old. I can still vividly recall the day when, in my first or second year of secondary school, I encountered Things Fall Apart. It was in the early 1970s. We had a young English teacher who, although a recent graduate of Makerere University College, which was still the bastion of Englishness in East Africa, decided to carry out a literary experiment that was to change the lives of many of us: instead of offering the normal literary fare for junior secondary school English, which in those days consisted of a good dose of abridged Robert Louis Stevenson novels, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, and Barbara Kimenye's popular readers, we were going to read Things Fall Apart over a period of two weeks. We would read a chapter of the novel every day, aloud in class, until we got to the end. Once I had started reading Things Fall Apart, however, I could not cope with the chapter a day policy. I read the whole novel over one afternoon and it is not an exaggeration to say that my life was never to be the same again. For reading Things Fall Apart brought me to the sudden realization that fiction was not merely about a set of texts which one studied for the Cambridge Overseas exam which, for my generation, had been renamed the East African Certificate of Education; on the contrary, literature was about real and familiar worlds, of culture and human experience, of politics and economies, now re-routed through a language and structure that seemed at odds with the history or geography books we were reading at the time.