Failure™ Magazine

Chinua Achebe

The Failure Interview.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, History

Why do you think Westerners continue to present Africans to the world the way they do?
Well, that’s what I should be asking you [laughs]. I can only guess. One of the most charitable possibilities is that people get used to something. In physics they call it “the inertia of rest” [laughs]. But you can, I’m sure, suggest more sinister reasons. Whatever the reasons, the important thing is to recognize this and deal with it, because we really cannot afford the problem it has created.

Recently The New Yorker [in its March 26, 2001 issue] published the journal of a European traveling in Africa, and the events and places the writer described weren’t particularly positive.
My quarrel with this fiction is not that it’s not positive. Africa is full of problems. I don’t deny that. But if you are African or if you go to Africa and go with an open mind you’ll still see that these are people. They are not less than human as suggested by much of this literature. You are not surprised to find, as Marlow is surprised to find in “Heart of Darkness,” that these are people like himself. But I’m not saying, “Don’t criticize us,” or “Don’t find fault with us or what we do.” David Livingston was asked, “What do you think about Africa?”—I think I mentioned this in “Home and Exile”—and he said, “Oh, they are capable of terrible deeds, but they are also capable of extraordinary and good actions.” In other words, like people anywhere else [laughs].

What is the effect of this media coverage?
That’s really the issue. It makes it impossible for us to understand one another. People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. It’s not viewed as a serious continent. It’s a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people don’t do what common sense demands.

And it has just gone on so long that you can almost call it a vested interest in propagating this. After I delivered my lecture at Harvard, a professor emeritus from the University of Massachusetts said, “How dare you? How dare you upset everything we have taught, everything we teach? ‘Heart of Darkness’ is the most widely taught text in the university in this country. So how dare you say it’s different?”

You have said that people should be able to contribute to the definition of themselves and not be the victim of other people’s judgements. Is the situation changing for the better?
One must say that it is getting better for the simple reason that the people who didn’t used to say anything are now saying something about themselves. So you have to add that to whatever the equation is. And that’s very important. It’s not just black people or Africans that I am talking about. It applies to all segments of human society—segments that did not speak very much at all, including women, for instance.

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