The Prophetic Vision of Chinua Achebe

‘Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society . . . The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same reality.’

In other words, because the Igbo experience and the Igbo sensibility are particular to the experience of the Igbo people as it is lived and told from one generation to another, the language of this telling must precede any true apprehension of its speakers. This is a useful perspective from which to understand linguistic imperialism as a tenet of the colonial project as well as the denigration of indigenous languages as objects of knowledge. But it also brings into question Achebe’s use of the English language over his native Igbo. The excerpt, and all of Achebe’s writings, show that he was aware of the costs of choosing to write in English, and for a significant part of his career, it was a hotly contested choice.

The onset of African independence posed difficult questions to the generation of writers rising in colonialism’s shadow. Chief among these questions was one of language. The debate over the appropriate language choice between indigenous African languages and the languages of the former colonial masters came to a head at the Conference of African Writers of English Expression held in Makerere College, Kampala in June I962. The attendants were mostly split into two positions. The first, who like Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Nigeria’s Obi Wali, believed that ‘…until these writers and their western midwives accept the fact that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they should be merely pursuing a dead end, which can only lead to sterility, uncertainty, and frustration’, as Wali wrote in the essay ‘The Dead End of African Literature’. The second were like South Africa’s Ezekiel Maphalele, who wrote in the essay ‘Polemics’ that ‘the creative instinct always runs ahead of social, political, and economic developments; and the creative impulse cannot wait for such developments before it expresses itself. So, we use English, French, and Portuguese, which we know and have mastered.’

Between these two extremes stood Achebe and others like Gabriel Okara who made the case in in ‘African Speech…English Words’:

As a writer who believes in the utilization of African ideas, African philosophy and African folk-lore and imagery to the fullest extent possible, I am of the opinion the only way to use them efficiently is to translate them almost literally from the African language native to the writer into whatever European language he is using as his medium of expression. I have endeavoured in my words to keep as close as possible to vernacular expressions. For, from a word, a group of words, a sentence and even a name in any African language, one can glean the social life of a people…. [A] writer can use the idioms of his own language in a way that is understandable in English. If he uses their English equivalents, he would not be expressing African ideas and thoughts, but English ones. Some may regard this way of writing in English as a desecration of the language. This is of course not true. Living languages grow like living things, and English is far from a dead language.

For Achebe’s part, such reverence for the English language was of no use to him. He had every intention of desecrating it for it was the language of desecration, the language which deformed and mutilated, in which the ‘Dark Continent’ was created and bordered, and its savages endlessly explicated. As the colonial masters retreated, the back door had been left open, and he was determined to tear down the house and rebuild it. He intended to become a threat. Like his South African counterpart, J. M Coetzee, Achebe keenly understood the fragility of the post-imperial world, how deeply Africans bore ‘their past within them – as scars of humiliating wounds’ and were now hurriedly expected to move, in the euphoria of independence, ‘towards a post-colonial future […] in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory reclaimed’.

But Achebe was a man who wrote always with an awareness of the time in which he wrote, and he could see that it was a fragmented time; a time in which past and future collided in an uneasy pairing, in continuous mistrust of each other. In such a beleaguered situation, it was necessary to assume one’s ‘impurity and to recognize the necessity of speaking from a hybrid place’, as Vietnamese professor and filmmaker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, once said. Achebe intended to write from his woundedness, believing that much of what had been dislocated by colonialism had been dislocated permanently and that hoping for wholeness was a waste of time. If he could not prevent or undo the knife’s intrusion on what held things together, then, Achebe believed, he could articulate the ‘peculiar experience’ of being cut and split, of this hybrid place, a third space, an in-betweenness. Though he was the first—as in his 1973 essay, ‘Named for Victoria, Queen of England’—to admit, the ‘dangerous potency’ of navigating such a space, an endeavour made ‘dangerous because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic vision’. And so, Achebe wrote English that was not English, Igbo that was not Igbo, but both, combining the syntactic structure of the former with the rhythms and iconography of the latter.