Out of Africa

This summer, I had the immense honor of meeting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who’s article for the Guardian is featured in my last post).  She talked a lot about her journey toward writing and becoming a writer: from writing about people with blonde hair and blue eyes playing in the snow and eating mangos to writing about about Nigerians playing in the sand and eating mangoes. All-in-all, it was a great hour+ spent.

When I first read her book, “Purple Hibiscus,” I fell in love. Here was a story about Nigeria and Nigerians that was cliche, that didn’t proliferate the horrible Western ideals of Africans. It was modern, unlike the books written by Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (both who I also admire) which are rooted more in historical Nigeria. Her other books, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” and the most recent, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” are equally as great.

In the clip below (which is from one of the TED talks), Adichie repeats a lot of the things she mentioned in the talk when I heard her speak. Her point is this: without a variety of stories, with only a single type of story, the world is deprived of the truth. The single story of Africa must be changed — it’s stuck in Africans as poor, backwards; Africa as a place of negatives. Newer African authors, like Chimamanda Adichie, are becoming more prominent in the Western world and are changing this single story.

And I’m thankful for that.

The clip is engaging, funny, and informative. But most especially, for me as an aspiring writing, it’s eye-opening.

It’s about 19 mins long, so if you don’t have time to listen to it all, here’s some “soundbites”:

“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. … Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. … Start the story with the failure of the African states and not with the colonial creation of the African states, and you have an entirely different story. … The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story the only story.  … But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it’s very important, it is justas important to talk about them. I’ve always felt that it’s impossible to engage properly with a place or person without engaging with all the stories of that place or that person. The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity… it emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar. … Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. … When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”  

– Chimamada Ngozi Adichie, quoted from a TED Talk
(filmed July 2009, posted October 2009)

This was written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Guardian recently:

South Africans and Nigerians (and indeed other African immigrant groups) have simply not had the time or the neutral space to grow an organic understanding of each other. The Nigerians arrive with their different, more distant colonial experience, with their mercantile spirit, with none of the conditioning of the South African menial wage-earning experience and – yes – with that swagger. They arrive in a vulnerable country where the legacy of institutional exclusion still thrives. They create spaces for themselves in whatever way they can and, of course, they arouse resentment.

You should read the whole article, which stems from the recent controversy over the sci-fi movie District 9, which portrays Nigerians as the ultimate bad guys. Nigerian officials have asked for Sony to offer an apology for the film and take out all references of Nigeria, saying it promotes negative stereotypes of the country and its people.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” The book is hailed as the beginning of modern African literature. Chinua Achebe, hailed as the father of African literature.

There have been a lot of good interviews, articles, conferences and ceremonies, honoring the legacy both Achebe and his book has created for African writers.

The following is an interview with Evan Mwangi, an English professor at Northwestern University, who teaches African literature (and is from Kenya) about the beginnings of modern African literature, its evolution and how Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” fits into it all.

Audio

Interview Transcription

Bunmi Ishola: We can kind of start out sort of with the history of African literature; where it all started out.

Evan Mwangi: The major books in African literature started in the 1950s. They started writing in the 1950s, and they did not make as much impact as “Things Fall Apart,” which was published in 1958. And so it ["Things Fall Apart"] became like the benchmark of African literature. And mainly, all these novels, were mainly a response to what the writers felt were distortions and misrepresentations of Africa by Western writers. [Achebe has said that he wrote "Things Fall Apart" to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," and to books written by colonial masters like Mr. Johnson].

BI: Do you think, in a sense, that the book deserved to be the benchmark?

EM: Yes, the book is very well written. Achebe also has a very balanced view of both the Europeans and Africa. Those [older novels written by the West] would idealize colonial Africa as a perfect, romantic place. But Achebe views Africa from a much more objective position. So that he’s criticizing the pre-colonial culture, as much as he’s criticizing colonialism for some of the bad things that happened in Africa.

BI: And after this book was published, what was the development of Africa literature?

EM: Almost all the major authors in Africa wrote their versions of “Things Fall Apart.” So that, almost every country had a “Things Fall Apart;” again, talking about the contact between Europeans and African cultures, and the controversies that arose out of that. The writers persisted in talking about the pre-colonial past way into the 1960s. But later, in the late 1960s, they started talking about the disillusionment with post-independence condition. And mainly what I think they are doing by going back to pre-colonial past is trying to let African know that they have beautiful culture, that they need to preserve their culture. They should have confidence in themselves as a society.

BI: More recently there have been a lot of writers of African descent just coming up lately. I’ve noticed many of the ones that are getting the most remarks [Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta, Helon Habila] are from Nigerian. I don’t know if you have any theories as to why?

EM: Most likely it’s because of the exile. [In] Nigeria, military dictatorship has been really bad. So writers have been able to go to exile. It happened in the apartheid era too. There were a lot of writers operating in exile. And that’s why there’s a very strong Nigerian diasporic writing, I guess. I think, the reason that Nigeria is so prominent in African Diasporic writing could be because of the economic and political circumstances. If you remember, people like Chris Abani have been jailed. Yeah, he was jailed by Sani Abacha.

BI: I know, for both, at least, Abani and Adichie, they mentioned that Achebe had a lot of influence on the reasons why they write now, and even they way they choose to write. What do you see some of these influences being, and why do you think he is such a strong influence? 

EM: I think it is mainly the emphasis on the thematic relevance of the texts. Like when you read Adichie, she’s very sensitive to the politics of Nigeria. Even if she’s writing, like in [Half of a Yellow Sun], she’s writing about Nigeria of the 1960s, she’s commenting about the present. Just the way Achebe, still, when he’s talking about pre-colonial past — he’s not so much interested in romanticizing that past, he’s commenting about the present-day Nigeria. So, to say, the level of themes, and making sure they [newer African/Nigerian writers] are relevant to their communities, they have followed in the footsteps of Achebe. But they are also changing, they are not just imitating Achebe slavishly. Like Adichie forgrots gender a lot, in a way you may not find in Achebe. Even Chris Abani; issues of gender and sexuality are very prominent in his writing. So they use Achebe, just the way Achebe used the past — in a critical way.   

BI: Where do you see African literature going in the future?

EM: That’s a tough question. But, I think it’s growing. There are people who seem to see African literature as maybe off. Mainly because the kind of writers they see published in the West, they seem to be addressing Western audience as opposed to the African readers. So that this literature becomes part of the West, and the literature in Africa dies off. But I think there are very strong literary traditions in almost all regions of Africa. I think the literature is very good, and it’s going to be talking about issues to do with the Diaspora, issues to do with gender and sexuality. Literature that maybe the Achebe generation may not have been very much interested in.