The Everlasting Humour of Chinua Achebe

During the lecture, Achebe would recite several of his poems as a way of playing his own part, he confessed, in “destroying that conspiracy”. By this time in his career, Achebe no longer lived in Nigeria—for health reasons, having survived a car accident in 1990 with severe injuries. He had, nevertheless, published five acclaimed novels, essays and, at least, one poetry collection to a global audience of readers.

In Nigeria, today’s readers of Achebe are people accustomed to reading him from a distance. For some of us, the only experience of Achebe that we will ever know, having never shared a venue or a classroom with him, will be derived through his essays, his fiction, random quotes from the Internet that are, otherwise, placeless. My knowledge, thus, of his lecture in Portland is, unsurprisingly, by way of a recording. And each time I listen to that particular recording of him, I join the audience in laughing when he mentions the word conspiracy. I’m amused, not that there’s anything inherently amusing about conspiracies (successful ones, at least) but because it is Achebe—already a literary giant by 1998, an African literary giant if the former doesn’t register—being self-deprecating.

The recording is only one of several avenues, never quite like the original, through which generations of readers will continue to recognise the importance of Achebe. The significance of his work to the post-colonial imagination of Africa and the African self, to a more representative globalization of humanity, cannot be overstated. But this giant—who, when we think of him, is imagined behind signature blocky glasses, pensive, wearing a beret—was funny as well. In a rare, conscious way; through a unique understanding of the Nigerian psyche and an effortless command of language that lent to there being no mutual exclusivity between his humour and seriousness.