‘All because of The Spectator’

Clemency Burton-Hill

27 June 2007

As much as Achebe says he found it ‘particularly satisfying’ to be writing for his people — some of his family had never read a book until Things Fall Apart — the need to address Europe and its prejudices was always uppermost in his mind. Later he would go on to write the essay ‘An Image of Africa’, which begs a re-reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by drawing attention to its latent racism; that ‘evil’, he says, ‘that was buried in so much of the literature written to justify the slave trade’.

Achebe has never relinquished his role as a champion of the voiceless and dispossessed. ‘If someone announces in the morning at the market, when everybody is there, that you are a thief, and then later, when the market is empty, admits that in fact you are not a thief, well, that is not very helpful,’ he explains. On the importance of writing in English, he is clear. ‘Those who raised the issue of our humanity raised it in English,’ he points out. ‘How to address it and answer that question “Are we human beings?”, well, you must do it in the same way that the original denial was made.’

In any case, Achebe was loath to write in his native Igbo. ‘It is still suffering from the intervention of the English missionaries who came to save us,’ he tells me, relishing the irony. ‘One of the things this Archdeacon Dennis (the Christian missionary chief in Nigeria who ‘unified’ the dialect) did, a hundred years ago, was to invent a new dialect from a mixture of all the Igbo tongues. He just fabricated it, which has kept the language from developing into something you can sing with, dance with. I am still wrestling with this. I’m working on an Igbo dictionary.’ He sounds exhausted all of a sudden. ‘Nobody has the right to extinguish any dialect,’ he almost whispers. ‘The excuse that you are doing it to create a union dialect, which is what they said, that is not right. Language is self-determining. There is no reason for any person to intervene, to prevent it from expanding — or expiring — on its own.’