Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The current white missionary, Mr Brown, was not over-zealous in his task of conversion to Christianity, he was a peacemaker ‘who came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith. He made friends with some of the great men of the clan and on one of his frequent visits to the neighbouring villages he had been presented with a carved elephant tusk, which was a sign of dignity and rank.’ And the numbers of converts to the church was steadily growing. One of the great men had given a son ‘to be taught the white man’s knowledge in Mr Brown’s school’. Learning to read and write was an achievement, even if not on the same great level as the anklet of the clan’s titles. ‘… it was not long before the people began to say that the white man’s medicine was quick in working.’

  Mr Brown’s school produced results. A few months in it were enough to make a literate court messenger or even a court clerk. Some Umuofians became teachers or pastors as new schools and churches were built by the British. The establishment of colonial occupation provided such opportunities. But – ‘From the very beginning religion and education went hand in hand.’ If you wanted the one it had to be in the grasp of the other. Achebe’s integrity as a writer in search of truth, and his honesty as a man, recognise that progress was real – in the forms of knowledge as it exists essential to the modern world in which Africa was so soon inevitably to become part; for gain or painful loss in terms of its own forms of knowledge and wisdom.

  Achebe has the playwright’s gift of making a conversation between people of opposing faiths and ideas an exciting to-and-fro. In Chapter 21 the missionary, Mr Brown, and the elder, Akunna, have a brilliant exchange on their different religious beliefs. Neither succeeds in converting the other, of course, but they learn more about their different beliefs; so do we, and about the apparently common human need to have a divine explanation and guidance for existence on earth.

  Akunna says,

  ‘You say there is one supreme God who made heaven and earth. We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods.’

  ‘There are no other gods’ said Mr Brown. ‘Chukwu is the only God and all others are false. You carve a piece of wood … and you call it a god. But it is still a piece of wood.’

  ‘The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. It is like you. You are the head of your church.’

  [Mr Brown:] ‘No. The head of my church is God himself.’ [Akunna:] ‘I know, but there must be a head in this world among men.’

  [Brown:] ‘The head of my church in that sense is in England.’

  ‘That is exactly what I am saying. The head of your church is in your country. He has sent you here as his messenger …’

  And now politics enters the verbal contest.

  ‘Or let me take another example, the District Commissioner … Your Queen [Queen Victoria] sends her messenger, the District Commissioner. He finds he cannot do the work alone and so he appoints kotma [assistants] to help him. It is the same with God or Chukwu. He appoints the smaller gods to help him because his work is too great for one person.’

  [Mr Brown:] ‘You should not think of Him as a person. It is because you do that you imagine he must need helpers. And the worst thing about it is that you give all the worship to the false gods you have created.’

  ‘That is not so … when his servants fail to help us we go to the last source of hope. We appear to pay greater attentions to the little gods but that is not so. We worry them because we are afraid to worry their Master.’

  … ‘You said one interesting thing’ said Mr Brown. ‘You are afraid of Chukwu. In my religion Chukwu is a loving Father and need not be feared by those who do His will.’

  ‘But we must fear him when we are not doing his will,’ said Akunna. ‘And who is to tell his will? It is too great to be known.’

  Okonkwo’s homecoming has turned out ‘not as memorable as he had wished … Umuofia did not appear to have taken any special notice of the warrior’s return. The clan had undergone such profound change during his exile that it was barely recognisable.

  The new religion and government and the trading stores were very much in the people’s eyes and minds …’ Now he, too, ‘mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart’.

  The sense of presentiment which Achebe creates as we read takes the form of a new upheaval in the person of Mr Brown’s successor. Reverend Smith ‘saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.’

  There was a saying in Umuofia that ‘as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. Mr Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad. The over-zealous converts … now flourished in full favour.’ This culminates in the disastrous clash between church and clan that has been gathering since Mr Brown left. One of the most heinous crimes against the clan was the sacrilege of unmasking an egwugwu – remember the masquerade of the embodied spirits of the ancestors? Now, during the masquerade ceremonies a Christian convert, Enoch, dares to do just this. An ancestral spirit has been desecrated by the act and the whole of Umuofia is thrown into violent confusion. Reverend Smith and the members of his flock decide to protect their fellow Christian, the violator, hiding him from the wrath of the band of egwugwu and the people. Smith stands before the mob and refuses to give up Enoch; there is terrible tension as it seems Smith is going to be killed. But the head of the ancestors, Ajofia, makes a dramatic intervention.

  ‘The body of the white man, I salute you,’ he said, using the language in which immortals spoke to men …’ Tell the white man that we will not do him any harm,’ he said to the interpreter, ‘Tell him to go back to his house and leave us alone … But this shrine must be destroyed …’

  … He turned to his comrades, ‘Fathers of Umuofia, I salute you’ and they replied with one guttural voice.

  He turned again to the missionary. ‘You can stay with us if you like our ways. You can worship your own god. It is good that a man should worship the gods and spirits of his fathers.’

  The church is burned down.

  For a few days the people’s anger is pacified, although all go about armed with a matchet or gun in case of attack by Christian zealots. Then the District Commissioner sends for the leaders of Umuofia to come to his headquarters for what he calls a ‘palaver’. Okonkwo is one of the six, warning the others to be fully armed. ‘“An Umuofia man does not refuse a call” he said. [However:] “He may refuse to do what he is asked …”’

  The District Commissioner wants to hear the elders’ account of what happened at the masquerade. His manner, and the atmosphere, is calmly official, conveyed in the terse, cool style Achebe uses here. The leader of the six is about to speak, when the District Commissioner says, ‘Wait a minute, I want to bring in my men so that they too can hear your grievances and take warning.’ Like Okonkwo and his companions the reader is unprepared: ‘It happened so quickly that the six men did not see it coming. There was only a brief scuffle, too brief even to allow the drawing of sheathed matchet. The six men were handcuffed and led into the guardroom.’

  The District Commissioner:

  ‘We shall not do you any harm if you agree to co-operate with us. We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy. If any man ill-treats you we shall come to your rescue. But we will not allow you to ill-treat others. We have a court of law where we judge cases and administer justice just as it is done in my own country under a great queen. I have brought you here because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their places of worship … I have decided that you will pay a fine of two hundred cowries.’

  Imprisoned, after three days of hunger and bullying by the warders the six begin to talk about accepting the fine in exchange for their release.

  ‘We should have killed the
white man if you had listened to me’ Okonkwo snarled.

  ‘We could have been in Umuru now waiting to be hanged’ [someone says to him.]

  ‘Who wants to kill the white man?’ asked a messenger who had just rushed in. ‘You are not satisfied with your crime, but you must kill the white man on top of it.’ He carried a strong stick and he hit each man a few blows on the head and back. Okonkwo was choked with hate.

  The villagers collect two hundred and fifty cowries, just to be sure to appease the white man, unaware that the messengers will pocket the extra fifty – one of Achebe’s ironic asides on the beginnings of corruption. Okonkwo goes home to his obi where Ezinma has come with food prepared for him; but he cannot eat; Ezinma and friends who have gathered see where the warder’s whip has cut into his flesh.

  During the night the gong of the village crier announces a meeting to be held next day. ‘Everyone knew that Umuofia was at last going to speak its mind about the things that were happening.’

  We find sleepless Okonkwo in a strange state of mind: ‘… he had brought down his war dress, which he had not touched since his return from exile. He had shaken out his smoked raffia skirt and examined his tall feather headgear. The bitterness in his heart was now mixed with a kind of childlike excitement.’

  He lies on his bamboo bed and thinks about the treatment he received at the white man’s court. ‘If Umuofia decided on war, all would be well. But if they chose to be cowards he would go out and avenge himself.’

  When Okonkwo and his fellow elder Obierika arrive at the meeting-place there are already so many people that – one of Achebe’s uniquely original images – ‘if one threw up a grain of sand it would not find its way to earth again’. Okonkwo distrusts the man Eginwanne who is due to address the crowd. Obierika asks.

  ‘Are you afraid he would convince us not to fight?’

  ‘Afraid? I do not care what he does to you. I despise him and those who listen to him. I shall fight alone if I choose.’

  ‘But how do you know he will speak against war?’

  ‘Because I know he is a coward.’

  But before the man can begin to speak, Okika, ‘a great man and a great orator’, leaps to his feet and salutes his clansmen.

  ‘Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad day-light, then you know that something is after its life … When I saw you all pouring into this meeting from all quarters of the clan so early in the morning, I knew something was after our life … This is a great gathering. No clan can boast of greater numbers of greater valour. But are we all here? I ask you: Are all the sons of Umuofia with us here? … They are not. They have broken the clan and gone their several ways … our brothers have deserted us and joined a stranger to soil our fatherland. If we fight the stranger we shall hit our brothers. Our fathers never dreamt of such a thing, they never killed their brothers. But a white man never came to them. So we must do what our fathers would never have done. Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: “Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.” We must root out this evil. And if our brothers take the side of evil we must root them out too. And we must do it now.’

  The tragic climax of this incomparable creation of a society in a time and place of inescapable, irrevocable upheaval and change closes the circle where it began: with the man whose life embodies it – Okonkwo. But it is not for me, it is for Chinua Achebe himself to tell you, for you to read for yourself the stunningly unexpected last pages of this story, the unforeseen consequences, decided by Okonkwo himself, of violent means he has resorted to under the pressures of that time and place, old Africa and the impact of colonial rule, with his own stormy personality fully revealed by the novelist. And there is a surprise postscript to the dramatic end of his story. Suddenly an about-turn in the viewpoint from which it has been told. Now the tragic events are as seen by the eyes and realised in the words of the District Commissioner, not the individuals of Umuofia with whom we’ve become so familiar. And I shan’t reveal the final twist in the last sentence, with its challenge to the reader to laugh, and grimace with disgust, at the same time, at a white colonial mentality.

  Things Fall Apart is a work that delights and shocks, rousing many questions. Does Chinua Achebe glorify the past? In this work of the imagination transforming history as poetry – lyrical imagery – common speech, anecdote, suffering, celebration, humour, the extraordinariness a great writer discovers in ordinary life – he makes no such sweeping judgements. He does not deny the inevitability of change; only looks into its ruthless processes with a steady and deeply human gaze.

  In Chinua Achebe’s second novel, Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son converted to Christianity, appears, No Longer At Ease (the book’s title) carrying continuity to the epic of dealing with change begun with Things Fall Apart. And later, with the brilliant satire, A Man Of The People, Achebe takes up the story when change has been established, four years after Nigeria’s independence; his unmatched personal and intellectual nerve exposing, in the words of the narrator, Odili Samalu, ‘with deepening dismay the use to which our hard-won freedom was being put by corrupt, mediocre politicians’. A dismay that comes to its conclusion in one of the most devastating final sentences of a book ever written: the words of Odili, ‘I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest – without asking to be paid.’

  2002

  Joseph Conrad and Almayer’s Folly

  What does one expect to find, returning to a writer’s first novel after years of reading his others have overlaid it? Outdistanced it?

  The most widely read of Joseph Conrad’s novels is Heart Of Darkness, whose very title has passed idiomatically into a metaphor for the evil of humankind in oppression of one another. As colonialism in its peculiarly historical form – conquest military, religious, commercial – began to near its end from the middle of the twentieth century, Conrad’s narrator’s recollection of what he found in a trading station up the Congo River in the late nineteenth century came to epitomise, for many readers and literary critics, the document of the colonialist phenomenon. For some it is the finest proof of Conrad’s genius, laying bare with passion and irony that the heart of darkness is within the white exploiters of other peoples and not in the jungle Congolese whose hands were amputated by Belgian King Leopold’s philanthropic company if they did not produce the required quota of wild rubber. For others, including the great African writer, Chinua Achebe, the novel is literary colonialism, representing Africans as savages with whom contact brings degradation for whites. Conrad’s view of his novels set in the world outside Europe: ‘The critic … seems to think that in these distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai. And yet it is not so … There is a bond between us and that humanity so far away.’108

  Conrad’s other major novels are Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), read not alone for the transporting skill of Conrad’s story-telling and evocation of land- and water-scapes, but for the astonishing relevance his themes have to our recent past and our present international preoccupations. The secret agent is not only to be found in Conrad’s London just before the Russian Revolution; the way the agent operates matches for us the known but unseen presence of other secret agents of contemporary causes. Under Western eyes there is today the aftermath of Soviet Communism whose desperately dramatic beginnings and complex individual human psychology between the forces of faith and betrayal are his theme in St Petersburg. Nostromo, Italian immigrant shadily employed by the vast European-owned silver mine company which controls every aspect of life of the indigenous population of a South American country, is put to use between it and the abortive revolutions in which one set of indigenous corrupt politicians is toppled and replaced by another; a theme of the three-
cornered act between capitalism, the poverty of underdevelopment and local corruption, seen every day on our millennial television.

  So much prescience, so much genius of understanding the concept of progress and its perilous gains, the moral market of human action and feeling that we now posit as globalisation.

  Are the themes that Conrad was to spend his life exploring for what ultimate meaning a single writer can hope to reach, already present in his first use of the imagination on what has been observed and/or experienced? His three great themes were the sea and its contributing rivers, colonialism and revolution. In some of his works all three are combined. A sailor from the age of seventeen, Conrad knew well the coast and rivers of the Malay Archipelago, and his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, is created there as Sambir, on the Pantai River. Colonialism and the sea are indissolubly linked, here, as the superbly, cosmically indifferent sea is the means by which the trader-colonialist venture, Nietzsche’s ‘world as the will to power’ comes about.109 Revolutionary action as such is not the subject, but in the rivalry of the indigenous rajas co-opted on this side or that of the Dutch, English and Arabs seeking control of the region, it is – for the post-colonial reader – foreshadowed.

  Almayer’s Folly is also a story of racism (which Conrad was to plumb further with Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and other works) in the ultimate, intimate expression of colonialism affecting individual relationships – an ‘also’ that grows with a complex narrative of other concerns with such insidious skill that its explicit dominance climaxes as a shock. There! says Conrad.