Chinua’s hat is strategically placed on a thick mass of short white hair. He seemed calm and ready to educate, almost like it wasn’t an interview, but one of his many lectures. He didn’t rush his words or stumble on them. One word at a time, he talked about everything that defined him, with conviction.

But when he was asked about the Nigerian Civil War, fear filled his eyes as he put his intertwined hands over his mouth–to stop more fear from falling out. He goes on to recount an experience he had when soldiers came to his office to look for him during the civil war. With all the glory and gore crested on their chest as stars, they were still intimidated by a pen.

“We hear his pen was very strong and we want to compare it with our guns.” As he said this, the fear that clouded his eyes disappeared like the thick morning harmattan fog would when the afternoon sun found its way out. Maybe it was because, just like us, he knew that bullets could only kill. But a pen? A pen could take life and write it back into existence.

Chinua’s ambition was to distinguish between good novels and bad novels, to show all human beings as human beings and not the way they were portrayed in the western novels he read while he was younger, which he especially enjoyed at that time. He found himself siding with the white men and damning his own people to the status of savagery. Not because he wanted to, but these books were demagogues of a western ideology, made to convert everyone who read them, which was an essential portrayal of the power of story-telling.

“I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine. They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not. They were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realised that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.”

Chinua went on to tell the story of “ogbuagu” (lion slayer) and the warrior dance of a lion, in his books, and essays. He brought western and African cultures together to break kola. His writing was exemplary. It didn’t look rehearsed or calculated, but yet had a kind of calculation to it. He was a born writer. He even believed so himself. But never relied on anyone to tell him how a story or his story should be written. Because according to him, it was his art, and he was a “master of what left his house.”

“Many writers can’t make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don’t really know about its value to the student. I don’t mean it’s useless. But I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. That’s my own taste. I prefer to stumble on it. I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, this is the way it is done.”

Chinua made it sound easy. But writing wasn’t easy and he knew it! It was like asking the soil to vomit stories of men that has stridden its path for inspiration. It’s frustrating, and exhilarating. Writing is “difficult. But the word difficult doesn’t really express what I mean. It is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.”

When Chinua crossed this hurdle of imprisonment from his art, which damned him into a fight against ideas and stories, he produced magnificent books. They had the tenacity to hold a system by its throat and force it to vomit the guile that it had ignorantly and deliberately swallowed. His writings were highly politicised. He interwove history, reality and politics almost as effortlessly and dramatically as he interwove languages to upset a system.

“Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”

While Chinua upset systems, he made us fall in love with characters like Okonkwo, Ikemefuna, Chris, Obi, Ikem, Odilli, Ezelu. We identified with them in ways we never really understood. And that was his literature performing wonders. He upset the system but stood fervently on the side of the people. He was never on the side of oppression as he committed his art to people and drew his ink from the well of societal decadence. He was an artist who painted disillusioned reality in ways that made us find pain and solace in his own principles that he silently drummed through his characters. But in all these, he managed to survive the chaos of fights he waged with ideas and a system that didn’t completely answer to his pen.

“If you look at the world in terms of storytelling, you have, first of all, the man who agitates, the man who drums up the people—I call him the drummer. Then you have the warrior, who goes forward and fights. But you also have the storyteller who recounts the event—and this is one who survives, who outlives all the others. It is the storyteller, in fact, who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that survivors must have — otherwise surviving would have no meaning.”

Chinua recounted the events and he outlived all the others while doing so.

Dike, happy birthday.

This article is the fourth in our ‘Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People’ series. Ventures Africa is celebrating and honouring Chinua Achebe, one of Nigeria’s most influential and celebrated writers.

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