Madam Prime Minister,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be here, and to be given a role of this magnitude in today’s events. But I had better explain the source of my happiness a little more clearly, lest I be misunderstood. I am not happy because a cruel and abominable traffic in my people across the Atlantic was abolished 200 years ago; it should never have started. Furthermore we know that the legacies of that crime, direct or disguised, still take their toll on the African continent and on the African Diaspora wherever they are today despite the abolition.
My joy is that Jamaica, which acquitted itself so splendidly in its long struggle for freedom, should choose me as one witness of this commemoration. I like to believe that you and I share a common anxiety about the state of our relationship today. How much do we still remember about each other, living as we do so far apart from each other, and carrying scars and memories of diverse experiences?
It is very important that we should become totally familiar with what happened to each other. I know there are those who think differently, who say we should leave the past behind and move on. But wiser people tell us that those who forget their past run the risk of repeating it. I believe that what we should take away from this bicentennial is not a slogan to move on but the determination: Never Again! To ensure this, we will need to reach out to each other more than we do and to make ourselves comfortable in each other’s presence. The awkwardness which we tend to feel now is the result of centuries of ignorance and guilt. Our “education” has told us that Africans brought down their brothers and sisters to sell to Europeans who stayed in their ships on the coast. What were they doing in their ships on the African coast? The famous British crime writer, P.D. James, told how even as a child she had wondered about Humpty-Dumpty. Did she fall or was she pushed; and what were all those king’s horses and king’s men doing there? I feel like that about all those European ships lying innocently on the African coast while Africans from the interior herded their relatives in droves to exchange for trinkets. Incidentally historians have told us also that in one year, 1765, the city of Birmingham in England exported 150,000 guns to West Africa. What was that for?
The anxiety I have referred to concerning the state of our relationship is not the only emotion available to us in the matter. I find hope just as reasonable, perhaps more so. And the reason is that I have not found at any point in our long, painful history a moment of despair, an absence of the desire to rebuild our broken family some day. Wherever I have looked I have found hope and resilience among learned men and women who have studied our history deeply, and also in ordinary folk who derive their inspiration from commonsense and instinct. This faith has lasted as long as the agony, and survived hundreds of years of deception and falsehood.
I grew up hearing stories about brave men and women who brought the gospel to us often at great inconvenience to themselves and their families. But there was one of them who struck me as quite exceptional. He was a black man from the West Indies. And as if that was not enough he was Director of Education for the Church Missionary Society in Igboland. He impressed the Igbo so much that they gave him a title: The Man Who Knows More Book Than White People. His real name was Blackett; he was a living legend. A time came in the 1920s when the British who had been less than candid with the West Indians decided to repatriate them from West Africa. Mr. W.E. Blackett and his wife who had become a good friend of my mother’s, paid a farewell visit to my parents. It must have been an emotional parting for the two women. Mrs. Blackett told my mother in the words of an Igbo hymn: “Uso uwa na-efe”—“thus passes the sweetness of the world.”
When I began to write novels I put into Arrow of God a living legend called Blackett who knew more book than white people. Or perhaps I should say that Mr. Blackett put himself into my novel, and I thought no more about it until some years later when I received a letter from Mr. Blackett’s son, Principal of a school in Barbados. He thanked me for honoring his late father. He had been born in Nigeria and had been given the name Chukwuemeka—God Has Been Bountiful.
My mother was ecstatic when I told her the story. She remembered the child and told me his name, Chukwuemeka, before I could tell her.
The need for us to reach out to each other is well understood in the Caribbean. I have a sense that statistically the Caribbean Diaspora is ahead of everybody else in this regard. Your decision to honor Haiti at this occasion is a magnificent gesture that speaks volumes about your awareness of the gratitude we owe our ancestors.
But as we know the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade did not usher in a millennium of justice and equality for black people, but a slow-motion decline of an already exhausted continent into a period of European partition and colonization. Still we did not despair. In due course the colonies themselves became centers of resistance to colonial rule. Individuals like Marcus Garvey came on the scene and left their mark everywhere.
Out of this ebullience emerged a radical Pan African Movement which held a series of six conferences between 1900 and 1945. Interestingly the first conference was an entirely Caribbean initiative, and the second was organized by an African American, W.E.B. Dubois. Africans from Africa played hardly any role in these early meetings, the central subject of which was colonial freedom. The organizers of the 1945 meeting included C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Dubois, George Padmore, Richard Wright. This short list of six says a lot. The two Africans were soon to become Presidents of their countries. The two Americans and two Caribbeans obviously had prepared the way. It is interesting that Kwame Nkrumah’s Gold Coast which became Ghana and flagship of modern Africa’s independent states opened her door to receive George Padmore as an honoured citizen, as though it was redeeming a promise of two acres and a mule made in another place and time but not kept. A few years later W.E.B. Dubois would follow Padmore’s example to live and die in Africa. Any one who knows anything about the history of decolonization in Africa after the Second World War and the events preceding it will recognize how appropriate the symbolism was for Padmore and Dubois to seek and be granted alternative homes in Africa. I remember the weekly column published by George Padmore in the 1950s in Nigeria’s leading nationalist paper—The West African Pilot. As for Dubois he was the very father of decolonization. For Nkrumah to have reached out for these men was a great act of vision and wisdom.
Today our situation has been complicated by one sad fact—the failure of many African countries to live up to their peoples’ dreams of freedom and progress. When Nelson Mandela came out of prison where he had been locked up for 28 years and gave himself a one-term tenure as President, he had given Africa as great a moral present as it was possible to imagine. One expected to see that example taken up eagerly by other leaders around the continent. But nothing of the sort happened. Why? Could it be we did not hear the news, or perhaps that we got it all mixed up? Could it be we thought we heard that Mandela was in prison for one year and in power for 28 years? God help us!
So what does this do to my message to reach out to Africa’s children wherever they are? I can only say, sadly, very sadly, that we should add one proviso; we must look out even as we reach out, to be sure that we are not reaching out to a president who does not understand why there are elections or term limits. Which would be a betrayal beyond measure!
This story leaves a bad taste in the mouth and I didn’t want to leave it there. I had such wonderful personal experiences of the sheer beauty of encountering brothers and sisters I didn’t even know I lost that my faith remains strong in the future of our people. I shall touch briefly on two examples I have been blessed with, one from Jamaica and the other from America.
In this gathering today is a friend of mine and your countryman, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell who has come home to join in welcoming my family and me the Jamaica. In 1972 Thelwell was a very, very young man who was chairman of the W.E.B. Dubois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His department and the department of English had jointly invited me to Amherst as a visiting professor. Thelwell was teaching my books with amazing insight, and authority, as he still does to this day. Several years later my home university in Nigeria decided to celebrate my sixtieth anniversary with an international symposium on my work and had the good sense to invite Professor Thelwell to come form USA to Nigeria to present my citation. Following the Igbo habit of giving a praise name to their friends I gave Professor Thelwell the name Ekueme meaning the One who does what he is said to do.
The second example was James Bladwin. In 1962 the Rockefeller Foundation had offered me a travel fellowship as a reward, I believe, for writing two novels. Things were done properly in those days! Rockefeller asked me where I wanted to go and I chose Africa, USA and Brazil. I do not recall the reasons I gave for USA and Brazil but in my heart I was curious to learn how the children of Africa were fairing in their largest concentrations in the New World. And Baldwin whose writing I had just become aware of featured strongly in my mind. But I didn’t know enough about the world, then or now, to plan my journey efficiently. When I met with my US handlers to plan my itinerary I was told that Baldwin no longer lived there, but Ralph Ellison did. So I saw Ellison and many others and moved on to Brazil, my desire to see Baldwin on hold. And more than a decade later in 1980 a wonderful opportunity came, to attend a conference of the African Literature Association in Gainsville Florida, the main feature of which was a public conversation between me and James Baldwin!
The chairman and moderator of the conversation asked me, to my complete surprise, to make my opening remarks first. I told Baldwin that my first instinct on meeting him was to greet him with the words: Mr. Baldwin, I presume which fairly brought down the roof on the huge auditorium filled to capacity. Jimmy Baldwin laughed and laughed, his eyes dancing on his extraordinary face. I will not trouble you with anything else I said at the conversation. I am still around and will probably say them again. But Jimmy said two or three things I must tell you. He turned to look at me and point at me while talking to the audience: This is a brother I have not seen in 400 years, he said. The audience really exploded. Jimmy then added quietly: It was not intended that he and I should ever meet. It was as if iced water was poured on that joyful, rapturous crowd. I had never seen anything quite like that. It shook people out of themselves.
The second thing Baldwin said was in answer to the question: What was your reaction on first reading Things Fall Apart: He replied it was a book about a people and a culture I knew nothing about. But as I read it I recognized everybody there. That man Okonkwo was my father. How he got over I don’t know, but he did.
Chinua Achebe
Kingston, Jamaica
January 2, 2007
Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be here, and to be given a role of this magnitude in today’s events. But I had better explain the source of my happiness a little more clearly, lest I be misunderstood. I am not happy because a cruel and abominable traffic in my people across the Atlantic was abolished 200 years ago; it should never have started. Furthermore we know that the legacies of that crime, direct or disguised, still take their toll on the African continent and on the African Diaspora wherever they are today despite the abolition.
My joy is that Jamaica, which acquitted itself so splendidly in its long struggle for freedom, should choose me as one witness of this commemoration. I like to believe that you and I share a common anxiety about the state of our relationship today. How much do we still remember about each other, living as we do so far apart from each other, and carrying scars and memories of diverse experiences?
It is very important that we should become totally familiar with what happened to each other. I know there are those who think differently, who say we should leave the past behind and move on. But wiser people tell us that those who forget their past run the risk of repeating it. I believe that what we should take away from this bicentennial is not a slogan to move on but the determination: Never Again! To ensure this, we will need to reach out to each other more than we do and to make ourselves comfortable in each other’s presence. The awkwardness which we tend to feel now is the result of centuries of ignorance and guilt. Our “education” has told us that Africans brought down their brothers and sisters to sell to Europeans who stayed in their ships on the coast. What were they doing in their ships on the African coast? The famous British crime writer, P.D. James, told how even as a child she had wondered about Humpty-Dumpty. Did she fall or was she pushed; and what were all those king’s horses and king’s men doing there? I feel like that about all those European ships lying innocently on the African coast while Africans from the interior herded their relatives in droves to exchange for trinkets. Incidentally historians have told us also that in one year, 1765, the city of Birmingham in England exported 150,000 guns to West Africa. What was that for?
The anxiety I have referred to concerning the state of our relationship is not the only emotion available to us in the matter. I find hope just as reasonable, perhaps more so. And the reason is that I have not found at any point in our long, painful history a moment of despair, an absence of the desire to rebuild our broken family some day. Wherever I have looked I have found hope and resilience among learned men and women who have studied our history deeply, and also in ordinary folk who derive their inspiration from commonsense and instinct. This faith has lasted as long as the agony, and survived hundreds of years of deception and falsehood.
I grew up hearing stories about brave men and women who brought the gospel to us often at great inconvenience to themselves and their families. But there was one of them who struck me as quite exceptional. He was a black man from the West Indies. And as if that was not enough he was Director of Education for the Church Missionary Society in Igboland. He impressed the Igbo so much that they gave him a title: The Man Who Knows More Book Than White People. His real name was Blackett; he was a living legend. A time came in the 1920s when the British who had been less than candid with the West Indians decided to repatriate them from West Africa. Mr. W.E. Blackett and his wife who had become a good friend of my mother’s, paid a farewell visit to my parents. It must have been an emotional parting for the two women. Mrs. Blackett told my mother in the words of an Igbo hymn: “Uso uwa na-efe”—“thus passes the sweetness of the world.”
When I began to write novels I put into Arrow of God a living legend called Blackett who knew more book than white people. Or perhaps I should say that Mr. Blackett put himself into my novel, and I thought no more about it until some years later when I received a letter from Mr. Blackett’s son, Principal of a school in Barbados. He thanked me for honoring his late father. He had been born in Nigeria and had been given the name Chukwuemeka—God Has Been Bountiful.
My mother was ecstatic when I told her the story. She remembered the child and told me his name, Chukwuemeka, before I could tell her.
The need for us to reach out to each other is well understood in the Caribbean. I have a sense that statistically the Caribbean Diaspora is ahead of everybody else in this regard. Your decision to honor Haiti at this occasion is a magnificent gesture that speaks volumes about your awareness of the gratitude we owe our ancestors.
But as we know the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade did not usher in a millennium of justice and equality for black people, but a slow-motion decline of an already exhausted continent into a period of European partition and colonization. Still we did not despair. In due course the colonies themselves became centers of resistance to colonial rule. Individuals like Marcus Garvey came on the scene and left their mark everywhere.
Out of this ebullience emerged a radical Pan African Movement which held a series of six conferences between 1900 and 1945. Interestingly the first conference was an entirely Caribbean initiative, and the second was organized by an African American, W.E.B. Dubois. Africans from Africa played hardly any role in these early meetings, the central subject of which was colonial freedom. The organizers of the 1945 meeting included C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Dubois, George Padmore, Richard Wright. This short list of six says a lot. The two Africans were soon to become Presidents of their countries. The two Americans and two Caribbeans obviously had prepared the way. It is interesting that Kwame Nkrumah’s Gold Coast which became Ghana and flagship of modern Africa’s independent states opened her door to receive George Padmore as an honoured citizen, as though it was redeeming a promise of two acres and a mule made in another place and time but not kept. A few years later W.E.B. Dubois would follow Padmore’s example to live and die in Africa. Any one who knows anything about the history of decolonization in Africa after the Second World War and the events preceding it will recognize how appropriate the symbolism was for Padmore and Dubois to seek and be granted alternative homes in Africa. I remember the weekly column published by George Padmore in the 1950s in Nigeria’s leading nationalist paper—The West African Pilot. As for Dubois he was the very father of decolonization. For Nkrumah to have reached out for these men was a great act of vision and wisdom.
Today our situation has been complicated by one sad fact—the failure of many African countries to live up to their peoples’ dreams of freedom and progress. When Nelson Mandela came out of prison where he had been locked up for 28 years and gave himself a one-term tenure as President, he had given Africa as great a moral present as it was possible to imagine. One expected to see that example taken up eagerly by other leaders around the continent. But nothing of the sort happened. Why? Could it be we did not hear the news, or perhaps that we got it all mixed up? Could it be we thought we heard that Mandela was in prison for one year and in power for 28 years? God help us!
So what does this do to my message to reach out to Africa’s children wherever they are? I can only say, sadly, very sadly, that we should add one proviso; we must look out even as we reach out, to be sure that we are not reaching out to a president who does not understand why there are elections or term limits. Which would be a betrayal beyond measure!
This story leaves a bad taste in the mouth and I didn’t want to leave it there. I had such wonderful personal experiences of the sheer beauty of encountering brothers and sisters I didn’t even know I lost that my faith remains strong in the future of our people. I shall touch briefly on two examples I have been blessed with, one from Jamaica and the other from America.
In this gathering today is a friend of mine and your countryman, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell who has come home to join in welcoming my family and me the Jamaica. In 1972 Thelwell was a very, very young man who was chairman of the W.E.B. Dubois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His department and the department of English had jointly invited me to Amherst as a visiting professor. Thelwell was teaching my books with amazing insight, and authority, as he still does to this day. Several years later my home university in Nigeria decided to celebrate my sixtieth anniversary with an international symposium on my work and had the good sense to invite Professor Thelwell to come form USA to Nigeria to present my citation. Following the Igbo habit of giving a praise name to their friends I gave Professor Thelwell the name Ekueme meaning the One who does what he is said to do.
The second example was James Bladwin. In 1962 the Rockefeller Foundation had offered me a travel fellowship as a reward, I believe, for writing two novels. Things were done properly in those days! Rockefeller asked me where I wanted to go and I chose Africa, USA and Brazil. I do not recall the reasons I gave for USA and Brazil but in my heart I was curious to learn how the children of Africa were fairing in their largest concentrations in the New World. And Baldwin whose writing I had just become aware of featured strongly in my mind. But I didn’t know enough about the world, then or now, to plan my journey efficiently. When I met with my US handlers to plan my itinerary I was told that Baldwin no longer lived there, but Ralph Ellison did. So I saw Ellison and many others and moved on to Brazil, my desire to see Baldwin on hold. And more than a decade later in 1980 a wonderful opportunity came, to attend a conference of the African Literature Association in Gainsville Florida, the main feature of which was a public conversation between me and James Baldwin!
The chairman and moderator of the conversation asked me, to my complete surprise, to make my opening remarks first. I told Baldwin that my first instinct on meeting him was to greet him with the words: Mr. Baldwin, I presume which fairly brought down the roof on the huge auditorium filled to capacity. Jimmy Baldwin laughed and laughed, his eyes dancing on his extraordinary face. I will not trouble you with anything else I said at the conversation. I am still around and will probably say them again. But Jimmy said two or three things I must tell you. He turned to look at me and point at me while talking to the audience: This is a brother I have not seen in 400 years, he said. The audience really exploded. Jimmy then added quietly: It was not intended that he and I should ever meet. It was as if iced water was poured on that joyful, rapturous crowd. I had never seen anything quite like that. It shook people out of themselves.
The second thing Baldwin said was in answer to the question: What was your reaction on first reading Things Fall Apart: He replied it was a book about a people and a culture I knew nothing about. But as I read it I recognized everybody there. That man Okonkwo was my father. How he got over I don’t know, but he did.
Chinua Achebe
Kingston, Jamaica
January 2, 2007
Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013)
The late Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe being greeted by The Honorable Portia Simpson-Miller at Emancipation Park, Jamaica
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