Essay Help and Achebe, Chinua Nigerian

admin @ January 15, 2008

Chinua Achebe is the first major African novelist to be widely read and recognized both inside and outside Africa, and is also renowned for his role as the founding editor of the African Writers series published by Heinemann. His career as an essayist is limited to two collections of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) and Hopes and Impediments ( 1988), as well as The Trouble with Nigeria ( 1983), a long essay (essay help) which diagnoses the reasons for the political stagnation of post-colonial Nigeria. However, the influence and importance of his essays have far exceeded their actual number. They have been instrumental in establishing the critical and theoretical issues with which other African writers such as Ngugi was Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, and the bolekaja critics (Chinweizu and Madubuike) have had to grapple, and along with the work of the Frantz Fanon are among the earliest examples of the type of critical writing that has come to be known as "postcolonial" criticism.
Achebe’s essays (essay help) are mainly conversational in nature, written for lectures that he has been invited to give in response to specific questions and situations. In the essays in Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and ImpedimentsZ (which reproduces five essays from the earlier collection), he articulates three characteristic concerns in his self-appointed role as spokesperson for the African novel. In essays such as "Colonialist Criticism" ( 1974), he is critical of the failure of European critics to understand African literature on its own terms. In their demand that African fiction be concerned with issues and themes that are "universal," Achebe sees European critics as perpetuating a colonialist attitude which views " the African writer as a somewhat unfinished European who with patient guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European" (essay help).  For Achebe, evidence of the autonomy and uniqueness of African literature from its European counterpart can be seen, for example, in the very different role that the African writer must have toward his or her society. In “The  Novelist as Teacher" (1965), he attacks the notion that the African writer should adopt the Western Modernist pose of the angst-ridden writer living on the fringes of society (essay help). The African novelist has an obligation to educate, to "help society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement." Achebe is aware this might mean that ". . . perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important, but so is education of the kind I have in mind." The Igbo ceremony of mbari, a festival of images in which every member of the society participates, provides him with an example of artistic production in which "there is no rigid tension between makers of culture and its consumers. Art belongs to all and is a ‘function’ of society" (Morning).

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