Chinua Achebe and our own ‘Digong’

Posted by watchmen
March 30, 2017
Posted in OPINION

“Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism, and war also originate in the human brain.” –Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

“You crazies and sons of a whore leave us alone. Don’t impose your culture on us.” That was President Rodrigo ‘Digong’ Duterte’s curt message to the European Union and the United Nations, which is also an attack on lingering colonialism, following their criticism of the administration’s bloody assault on narcotics.

Duterte wanted to emphasize that his method of eviscerating drug peddlers and, to a certain extent, drug users was not the business of outsiders.

Filipinos make their own laws, Filipinos implement their own laws.

The bodies piling up in the streets are the direct byproduct of Duterte’s all-out war against illegal drugs – a campaign promise that earned him 16 million votes in the 2016 presidential election.

This has made Duterte into the Philippines’ own Chinua Achebe. What Achebe is in literature, Duterte is in politics.

Critic
Well-known Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe produced numerous novels, short stories, and critical essays over the past decades.

His essay “Colonialist Criticism” is an attack on lingering colonialism in the criticism of African literature by non-Africans. The African writer writes the text, or “produce literature,” their literature then goes to Europeans for analysis – all African literature has to go through agrid of European writers.

Born on November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Anambra and died on March 21, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, Achebe’s best known critical essay is a discussion of racism in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which he originally gave as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts in 1975 and reprinted in “Hopes and Impediments.”

It evoked both high praise and strong antipathy and has given rise to further discussion and response as questions of racism and colonialism have been more vigorously debated.

Criticism
The fault of this criticism stems from the implied assumption that the African writer is a “somewhat unfinished European” and, somehow, outsider know Africa better than native writers.

These assumptions lead to, among other things, the specious man-of-the-world theory of the African intellectual and imply a continued European arrogance.

Achebe’s principal theoretical point involves his rejection of universalism, represented by critical statements that generalize the particularity of African literature.

The two problems of universalism, according to Achebe, are, first, the presumed universality that critics find is merely a synonym for the “narrow self-serving parochialism of Europe” and, second, that every literature must “speak of a particular place, evolve out of the necessities of its history, past and current, and the aspirations and destiny of its people.”

Universal
It would seem, then, if there is to be a concrete universal in African literature, it must stem from a much deeper human source than any parochial view can uncover. But Achebe doesn’t say this. Rather, his concentration in on the particular alone, for he puts literature, at least his writings, in service of the need to alter specific things in specific places, especially attitudes.

It is in this context that Achebe defends the “high moral and social earnestness” of Christopher Okigbo against the charge of outspokenness.

Achebe’s point is that earnestness is appropriate to Okigbo’s and his situation and that a certain levity would be inappropriate./WDJ

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