Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013

It's worth nothing at this moment, as we prepare to finish our discussions of Heart of Darkness, that Chinua Achebe died about two and a half years ago at the age of 82. It's hard to overstate his importance to the fields and endeavors of African and postcolonial literatures; his ideas, his critiques, and his own literary characters both haunt and challenge the parameters and ideologies of Englishness that you carry around in all those pages of the literary anthology. We read and we understand differently today because of individuals like Chinua Achebe.

You now probably understand why Achebe's critique (which is available to you on our Moodle site) became as controversial as Heart of Darkness itself. Many feel that Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, in which he tries, through fictional narrative, to tell the African side of the story of colonization, was far more effective in countering the problems of Heart of Darkness than his more polemical, scholarly approach in the essay you read. Still, Achebe has many valuable and compelling issues to raise in the essay once you move away from the more baldly accusatory (and thus more problematic) moments ("thoroughgoing racist" etc.). We learn, if nothing else, to think about how "the Other" is represented and to ask who has the power to do that representing. The great literary critic Edward Said argues that HoD is "a work that has functioned ever since to reassure Westerners that they had the right to rule the Third World"; he admires Conrad for dating imperialism and showing its "illusions and tremendous violence and waste," but at the same time he notes that "Conrad's tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that 'natives' could lead lives free from European domination." He believes Conrad was still beholden to that "redeeming idea."

Appropriately, a good many articles about (and tributes to) Achebe appeared in the days and weeks after his death. The Nation republished a 2009 article on Things Fall Apart, which includes these lines: "Among the greatest qualities of Things Fall Apart is the vigor of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland. Indeed, without ever stooping to polemic, Achebe sustains this quiet rebellion on nearly every page.... Achebe's defiance of Western contempt is married to a subtle but unmistakable appeal to Africans not to submit to feelings of inferiority, and this achievement is all the more remarkable for the book's utter lack of mawkishness." There's also this tribute from The Guardian ...