A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Terri Ochiagha

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       Encounters with the Colonial Library

      In December 1943, after the memorable literary and aesthetic encounters of his childhood, a thirteen-year-old Achebe went to Government College, Umuahia, to further his education. This elite boys’ boarding school, a colonial version of the distinguished public schools of England—which were anything but “public” in the popular sense—was widely regarded as the “Eton of the East,” and, like its British counterparts, was thus expected to instill the mores and attitudes of intellectual and political leaders. There was a caveat, however. The school’s idealization of Englishness and the ensuing attempts to shield its students from indigenous religions, cultures, languages, and anticolonial nationalist influences—which were finding fervid expression at the time—implicitly reinforced the colonial status quo, while leaving students to grapple with the arduous task of integrating their indigenous sense of self with the English gentleman ideal promoted at Umuahia.

      This type of upper-class British education may seem less than conducive to the kind of mental emancipation we have come to associate with Achebe, but the Umuahia Government College of the time was nothing short of special. Achebe was clearly in the right place at the right time. And the time was never as right as during the principalship of William Simpson, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, which began in December 1944 and lasted through Achebe’s school years. Simpson, as Achebe himself would affirm in 1993, would eventually prepare “the ground for the beginnings of modern African literature.”¹ I have examined this chapter of Achebe’s life in detail elsewhere,² but for the purposes of this book it will be pertinent to recall a few relevant facts. First, despite overarching colonial policies, the vocational motivations, pedagogical backgrounds, and political inclinations of European teachers varied widely, and so did the texts they used, the approaches they favored, and the ideological and historiographical ideas they disseminated in the classroom. This had the result of engendering a literary ambience at Umuahia that was largely absent from other schools of the same status in British Africa: Government College had a very complete library, a rule that encouraged literary pursuits, a magazine culture in which Achebe participated as student writer and editor, and an inclusive historical education that included the study of precolonial African kingdoms and oral history research in neighboring villages. The study of logic focused, to a large extent, on questions relating to discursive manipulation. However, despite these potentially liberating educational factors, Achebe’s reading of imperial adventures, such as John Buchan’s Prester John (1910) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), remained uncritical during his Umuahia school days: “I did not see myself as an African to begin with. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, or at the most, cunning. I hated their guts.”³

      But, as we will see, this education would eventually yield fruits that were of crucial importance to Achebe’s literary vision. It is significant that all the lifelong friends Achebe made at Umuahia Government College eventually became creative writers: Chike Momah, Chukwuemeka Ike, and, until his untimely death in the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, the modernist poet Christopher Okigbo. Few writers have been privileged to have such an immersion in the world of literature at such a young age. And literature was to reign supreme on the next stage of his journey.

      In 1948—exactly ten years before the publication of Things Fall Apart—Achebe’s outstanding success in the Cambridge School Certificate examination secured him a major government scholarship to study medicine at University College, Ibadan. University College had opened its doors in January of that year and operated as a constituent college of the University of London under the principalship of Professor Kenneth Mellanby, with an academic staff consisting mostly of early-career British academics. Mellanby was emphatic that the college was to maintain the same academic standards as its metropolitan counterpart, but certain allowances—which would have been unimaginable at government colleges like Umuahia—were made to reflect the changing times. Anticolonial nationalists, for instance, found a ready platform at University College. And as we will see, African religions were not excluded, but held up to academic scrutiny.

      In his first year, Achebe set out to enjoy the university’s vast intellectual possibilities. But things went slightly amiss. The problem did not lie in his intellectual capabilities but in the fact that, as he eloquently put it years later, he “was abandoning the realm of stories and they would not let [him] go.”⁴ Despite the risks and difficulties—he lost his scholarship and the attendant privileges—Achebe decided to start afresh in the arts faculty, enrolling to study English, history, and theology.⁵

      In his English courses, Achebe was reunited with many of the writers he had read during his Umuahia school years. He also discovered many others. Four of these “new” writers would significantly shape his creative vision. Two were striking exemplars of the tradition of imperial narratives that Achebe had encountered at Umuahia: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939). The first is an aesthetically outstanding novel, part of the high modernist canon. The latter is not as highly regarded today, but received a degree of acclaim in its time.

      The English faculty at University College thought that the inclusion of Irish writers in the literature syllabus was, in light of the colonial situation, interesting, and it was under that rubric that Achebe read Mister Johnson for Eric Robinson’s class. As the novel was set in northern Nigeria, Robinson thought that the geographical proximity might pique the students’ interest. Cary’s novel revolves around the rise and fall of Johnson, a Nigerian clerk so caught up in his Anglophilic reveries that he fails to see the stark realities that bring about his tragic end. According to Ben Obumselu, then in Achebe’s class (and who eventually became a renowned literary critic), Robinson “was trying to recall old Africa, but Cary had no knowledge of old Africa except what he read.”⁶ What he ended up recalling was something else altogether. It appears the students had already read Heart of Darkness, and the discursive continuities with Conrad’s image of Africa were glaringly obvious. The students, unanimous in their distaste for the debased representation of Nigeria that emerged in Cary’s novel, lost their colonial blinkers. Achebe, as we have seen, had savored, with great relish, a number of imperial novels and adventures at the Umuahia Government College, and now he had an epiphany: “In the end I began to understand there is such a thing as absolute power over a narrative. Those who can secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much as they like.” He decided that “that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else no matter how gifted or well intentioned.”⁷