Unit 3: Vocabulary from Readings 2

Chinua Achebe’s emergence as “the founding father of African literature...in the English language,” in the words of the Harvard University philosopher K. Anthony Appiah, could very well be traced to his encounter in the early fifties with Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson, set in Achebe’s native Nigeria.

In 1958, Achebe responded with his own novel about Nigeria, Things Fall Apart, which was one of the first books to tell the story of European colonization from an African perspective.

(It has since become a classic, published in fifty languages around the world.)

Achebe depicts his gradual realization that Mister Johnson was just one in a long line of books written by Westerners that presented Africans to the world in a way that Africans didn’t agree with or recognize, and he examines the “process of 're-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by all kinds of dispossession.”

Achebe depicts his gradual realization that Mister Johnson was just one in a long line of books written by Westerners that presented Africans to the world in a way that Africans didn’t agree with or recognize, and he examines the “process of 're-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by all kinds of dispossession.”

You have been called the progenitor of the modern African novel, and Things Fall Apart has maintained its resonance in the decades since it was written.

You have been called the progenitor of the modern African novel, and Things Fall Apart has maintained its resonance in the decades since it was written.

A character in Things Fall Apart remarks that the white man “has put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart.” Are those things still severed, or have the wounds begun to heal?

With the coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was incorporated into a totally different polity, to be called Nigeria, with a whole lot of other people with whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact before.

With the coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was incorporated into a totally different polity, to be called Nigeria, with a whole lot of other people with whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact before.

The problems that Nigeria is having today could be seen as resulting from this effort that was initiated by colonial rule to create a new nation.

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms.

The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

But it was a profitable business, and so those who were engaged in it began to defend it—a lobby of people supporting it, justifying it, and excusing it.

Or, that the slave trade was in fact a good thing for them, because the alternative to it was more brutal by far.

And therefore, describing this fate that the Africans would have had back home became the motive for the literature that was created about Africa.

We realize and recognize that it’s not just colonized people whose stories have been suppressed, but a whole range of people across the globe who have not spoken.

Do you see this balance of stories as likely to emerge in this era of globalization and the exporting of American culture?

The mindless absorption of American ideas, culture, and behavior around the world is not going to help this balance of stories, and it’s not going to help the world, either.

In an Atlantic Unbound interview this past winter Nadine Gordimer said, “English is used by my fellow writers, blacks, who have been the most extreme victims of colonialism..."

I think that once you’ve mastered a language it’s your own. It can be used against you, but you can free yourself and use it as black writers do—you can claim it and use it.

There are those who say that media coverage of Africa is one-sided—that it focuses on the famines, social unrest, and political violence, and leaves out coverage of the organizations and countries that are working. Do you agree? If so, what effect does this skewed coverage have?

The reason for this concentration on the failings of Africans is the same as what we've been talking about—this tradition of bad news, or portraying Africa as a place that is different from the rest of the world, a place where humanity is really not recognizable.

It is that ability to see the complexity of a place that the world doesn’t seem to be able to take to Africa, because of this baggage of centuries of reporting about Africa.

The people who consume the news that comes back from the rest of the world are probably not really interested in hearing about something that is working.

So America sends out wonderful images of its success, power, energy, and politics, and the world is bombarded in a very partial way by good news about the powerful and bad news about the less powerful.

I’ve been struck, for instance, by the impressive way that political transition is managed in America. Nobody living here can miss that if you come from a place like Nigeria which is unable so far to manage political transitions in peace.

There are other things, of course, where you wish Americans would learn from Nigerians: the value of people as people, the almost complete absence of race as a factor in thought, in government. That’s something that I really wish for America, because no day passes here without some racial factor coming up somewhere, which is a major burden on this country.

A universal civilization is something that we will create. If we accept the thesis that it is desirable to do, then we will go and work on it and talk about it.

All those who are saying it’s there are really suggesting that it’s there by default—they are saying to us, let’s stop at this point and call what we have a universal civilization.