Research in African Literatures 42.2 honors Chinua Achebe and features a cluster of essays on Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God, his early novels. With African literature marking its 50th institutional year, it is appropriate that RAL commemorates the outstanding creative interventions—also starting a half-century ago—of the man rightly characterized by Nadine Gordimer as Africa’s modern literary “father.” Thanks to Achebe, RAL is able continuously to draw its sustenance as a journal from, and contribute to the reproduction of, the institutional life of African literature.
African literature’s institutional life emerged in and out of the fortuitous historical conjuncture in the late 1950s and early 1960s of determined literary creators on the African continent; the promotional work of local and international publishing houses; the birth and growth of Africanist traditions of literary criticism and exegesis; and the pedagogical legitimizations of African studies in schools and universities both inside and outside Africa. The late 1950s was also a time when decolonization in Africa was at its most intense. It was a time when pan-Africanist ideology and affect were widespread on the continent and made fertile ground for the cultivation of pan-African institutions of literary and scholarly culture.
If the coming together of these circumstances made room for the birthing of a literature that is African, it would take Achebe’s special genius to write Things Fall Apart, immediately acknowledged both far and near as the seminal text qualified to stand at the defining head of a new tradition emergent in world literature. It would be Achebe’s good fortune also to have been chosen by the publishing house Heinemann to inaugurate its influential African Writers Series, a position he occupied from 1962 to 1972. The Series influenced the course of African literary canon formation, a development owed in significant part to Achebe’s authoritative and able editorial direction. Achebe’s influence would not only be decisive as a seminal writer and canonizing editor; as a self-described “novelist as a teacher,” he would insinuate his authority as a writer also into a determination of the literary-critical commonplaces, the exegetical unfolding, and the pedagogical framing of what was emergent in African institution as a new branch of (world) literature.
These are some of the outstanding reasons RAL has considered it proper to honor an influential pioneer with the essays gathered in 42.2. The issue is edited and introduced by the RAL editor Kwaku Larbi Korang, who, in his Introduction, sees Achebe’s achievement in terms of his ability to answer successfully the demand made on him to invent a literary Africanism, on the other one hand, and to reconcile it with a literary humanism, on the other. As well, Korang, in “Making a Post-Eurocentric Humanity: Tragedy, Realism and Things Fall Apart,” emphasizes that Achebe’s humanism is profitably read off the tragic-realist aesthetic the author utilizes in his first novel. Ato Quayson, in “Self-Writing and Existential Alienation in African Literature,” contributes a reading of Arrow of God that unusually places Achebe’s second “village novel” in a venerable global tradition of existential literature. Tejumola Olaniyan, in “A Paddle that Speaks English: Africa, NGOs and the Deep Archaeology of an Unease,” proposes that we read in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease an allegory of an Africa for which the heritage of European social-cum-cultural engineering has been the colonial institution and postcolonial perpetuation of “elite” social factions that live at a troubling structural and psychic remove from their “subaltern” counterparts. If Achebe’s vision is tragic, Sofia Samatar, for her part, suggests in “Charting the Constellation: Past and Present in Things Fall Apart” that this tragic vision can be interpreted in terms of, and in humanistic fraternity with, Walter Benjamin’s optimistic historical materialism. Adeleke Adeeko, in “Okonkwo, Textual Closure and Conquest,” raises critical questions about how satisfactory Achebe’s tragic vision is as expressed in the resolution of his first novel by comparing Things Fall Apart, on the one hand, with Achebe’s Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, on the other. In Nicholas Brown’s assessment, Achebe is self-consciously political in the way he formally positions the reader of Arrow of God. As the novel is cast, it refuses to grant the reader the position of pure outsider gazing at a distant exotic. Instead, to the extent that Arrow of God’s action and contradictions unfold under the aegis of a capitalist world history—which is a universal history—Achebe’s politics of form forces the reader to acknowledge his/her sharing a commonality of world-historical setting, situation, and condition with those he/she encounters in the novel.
