Contextualizing Chinua Achebe’s Revolutionary Impulses

Summary

Enterprising research areas about Chinua Achebe's writings are inexhaustible. The reason for the inexhaustibility can partly be deduced from Chris Searle's assertion that Achebe's ‘whole life of writing is really one novel that includes [many] perspectives’ (‘Achebe and the Bruised Heart of Africa’: 156). In other words, many critics see him as a prolific writer and this has necessitated different perspectives to his works. C.L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors have noted examples of these perspectives, stating that some writers have focused on Achebe's ‘narrative technique (Iyasere, Carroll), some on particular images and symbols (Jabbi, Ramadan and Weinstock), some on the historical and cultural context (Brown, Obiechina, Wren, Lindfors), some on the comparisons with English poets suggested by the titles (Stock, Wilson)’ (Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe, 7). To say the least, these are but few perspectives that have not included the two seminal volumes of Ernest Emenyonu's sixty-eight critical essays that produced Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe; Vol I, OMENKA: The Master Artist, and Vol. II, ISINKA, The Artistic Purpose: Chinua Achebe and the Theory of African Literature. These perspectives, to borrow Umelo Ojinmah's assertion, are presented ‘with the intention of eliciting certain fundamental messages embedded in Achebe's works’ (‘Introduction’: viii). It is equally interesting to observe that those same subjects Achebe once raised in his lifetime are still actively conversed to date.

However, none of these perspectives comprehensively understudied his general revolutionary temperament, which kept gaining momentum in both the fictional works and critical commentaries of his later years. Elements of his revolutionary temperament manifested in protest forms in some of his earlier fictional works. In fact, even his oldest novel Things Fall Apart, as a foundational text for postcolonial studies, according to Chima Anyadike and Kehinde Ayoola, has the potential to attract ‘Marxist and feminist readings’ (‘Preface’: xi). In other words, Achebe's career as a writer can be adjudged as one very long protest and emancipatory task of educating, sensitizing and revolutionizing his people's mind about the notion that ‘there was no African history before colonialism, no African literature until of course Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in African literature’ (Nwodo Philosophical Perspective on Chinua Achebe: ix).