Last week Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian novelist, celebrated his 80th birthday. Three days later he was in Cambridge delivering a masterly lecture at the invitation of the African Studies Centre there. He had arrived from the United States, where he has lived for the past twenty years in order to have the medical care he requires since an appalling road accident shortly after his sixtieth birthday left him partially paralysed. Achebe is not only a great writer, historically the most important that Africa has produced, he is also a man of instinctive grace and magnanimity. His lecture, however, was essentially bleak and pessimistic. He took as his subject the future of Nigeria, about which in novels, essays and poems he has been writing all his life. In a book called The Trouble with Nigeria, which he wrote in 1983, Achebe had pointed his finger at the leadership of his country, taking a Shakespearian view thatnations take their moral tone from the people who govern them. In anything, he felt that the Nigeria of today was worse off now than it was then.
If there was anything to alleviate this sad summation, all the more poignant coming from an octogenarian, it lay in Achebe’s wonderful command of irony. In an essentially tragic depiction of what has befallen Nigeria, there were a good many laughs, derived from his quietly effective timing and his sense of the absurdity of self-important politicians and business men striding corporately and corruptly across the mass of the people they rule. It made me reflect on the same issues in Britain. We preach democratic values around the world and often boast of our relative freedom from corruption, but how true is either claim? Is it democratic or incorrupt to have so many aspects of our media controlled by wealthy individuals or to non-elect a government which on a daily basis introduces policies that were not mentioned in their election manifestoes? ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ very often comes to mind when our politicians, from every party, lay claim to the moral high ground. I was interested that Nick Clegg recently chose Lampedusa’s The Leopard as his Desert Island book; Cameron before him had selected The River Cottage Cookbook.One is a masterpiece about ancestral wealth in decline and the other self-gratifying ephemera: both apt metaphors for their parties, perhaps. The politician who chooses Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or even more appropriately A Man of the People, with its depiction of political decline giving way to the start of dictatorship, is the one who will get my vote at the next election.
Alastair Niven
Principal
To comment on what you read, email: comments@cumberlandlodge.ac.uk
