Maybe A Eulogy

This might be a eulogy. I've never written one before, so I'm not entirely sure. But I would like to say a little bit about what Chinua Achebe meant to me. I first heard of Achebe in high school. For my African History class sophomore year,  I had to read Achebe's best known novel, Things Fall Apart. I don't remember much about how I felt about it then. I liked it, I think. But I definitely didn't understand the full implications of the novel. I did not understand the subtle message of the novel as a whole: Africa is not a place of darkness, it is a place of humanity. Sometime in the eighties Achebe wrote a wonderful critical essay analyzing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Achebe drew on many of the techniques and philosophies of the emerging post-colonial academic understanding of the West's relationship with and view of the rest of the world to produce a reading of Heart of Darkness with connotations that make my blood run cold. I did not particularly enjoy Heart of Darkness. I found it stuffy and terribly Victorian. For such a short book, it seemed remarkably dense. Last year, I took a class on post-colonial literary theory. We read Achebe's last book, Anthills of the Savannah. It is a masterfully written novel and quite difficult because Achebe uses Nigerian pigeon liberally throughout the text. I have since read even more of his work. I have come to the conclusion that, while Achebe is not the most brilliant writer I have read, his writing served an important and necessary purpose--and will continue to serve that purpose for a long time to come. Achebe gave a face to Africa. He gave a face to pre-contact, pre-Christian Africa. He gave a face to corruption and instability in Africa. Achebe reminds us--his audience in the West--that there is more to Africa than what we hear in the news. People in Africa go about their everyday lives--always have, always will.That is what Achebe means to me. He is a reminder that, no matter how much I might like to buy into the easy image of Africa with which I am routinely presented, people are people everywhere. Especially in Africa.