Converting Achebe’s Africa for the New Tanzanian: Things Fall Apart in Swahili Translation

Abstract

Given the centrality of Chinua Achebe’s work in the early debates surrounding language choice in African fiction and Achebe’s own claims about the necessary transformation of English in representing African reality, what happens when his most acclaimed and archetypal novel is translated “back” into an African language? Given the long history of reading Things Fall Apart as an “ethnographic” account of pre-colonial Igbo society addressed to Western audiences, how are the functions of the novel transformed when addressed to an almost exclusively African population, but one for whom traditional Igbo epistemology remains culturally distant? This article considers these questions through an analysis of Shujaa Okonkwo, Tanzanian Clement Ndulute’s 1973 Swahili translation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Drawing on the translation theories of Lawrence Venuti and Itamar Even-Zohar, among others, this paper describes how the function of literary translation within an emerging national literature in Swahili affects Ndulute’s choices. The text of Shujaa Okonkwo ultimately reveals the translator’s struggle to maintain the pan-African symbolism of Things Fall Apart while minimizing its attention to the historicized cultural details of a particular ethnic group and its recuperation of a culturally specific belief system.