REMEMBERING CHINUA ACHEBE BY BENEDICTO WOKOMAATANI MALUNGA

GUEST WRITER-BENEDICTO WOKOMAATANI MALUNGA (Malawian author, Poet and Lecturer) 

A gentle Igbo giant

Bedecked with impeccable

Literary credentials and accolades

When you humbly walked this earth

You rest quietly 

In the belly of Africa

You loved and defended

When Joseph Conrad

And Joyce Cary

Dismembered its personality

With intellectual jaundice

Born of racial bias

Stinking with distortions

Springing from cultural

And historical ignorance

Only bigots weave into

Their stories of denigration

Tales calculated at putting down

People whose past was no nightmare

Whose history was no night of  darkness

To be dreaded by its modern children

To be despised by the present generation

Chinua Achebe the father of African literature

You are to be saluted in death

Just as you were praised in life

For retrieving our lost glory

Through Things Fall Apart

The reservoir of culture and history

We can happily cherish as our own

Enriched by recreation provided

By a memorable wrestling match

Pairing Amalinze the Cat

The wily craftsman

And Okonkwo the slippery fish

In a highly contested encounter

Watched with bated breath

As tom toms generated euphoria

Amidst appreciative villagers

United by a  well regulated sport

Our embodiment of mesmerising craftsmanship 

Capturing our grateful imagination 

You moved us beyond measure 

With the candid portrayal 

Of the harshness

Of throwing innocent twins

Into the evil forest

Where they perished as their mothers

Quietly mourned in solitude

You made us lament

About the violent departure of Ikemefuna

The lad we grew to love in your novel

When Mbaino offered him as a ransom

To avert war with Umoufia

Whose daughter it had butchered

You created Akunna the crafty

Village theologian

Whose agility of mind

And philosophical tenor

Confounded Pastor Brown

Beaten at his own game

Of indoctrinating others

You gave us empathetic Uchendu

Made humane to inconsolable Okonkwo

Refusing to accept exile exacted on him

By Umuofia when he committed a female Ochu

Our literary gem extraordinaire

You punched above your weight

At the age of twenty-eight

When your gifted pen

Exposed us to your intellectual rigour

Cultivated with the Whiteman’s scholarship

To which you became an antithesis

As Obierika assumed the status

Of Okonkwo’s conscience

To clear the cataracts with which

He viewed his meteoric rise

Taking away humility from him

You delighted us with the musical beauty

That was the spirit of Unoka

To whom blood was anathema

The wise one of Nigeria

You created literary space

For our continent humbly and yet assertively

As we marvelled at how

The nine masked spirits of Umuofia

Justly presided over cases by

Rehabilitating those that were wayward

Within normal society and not

Incarcerating them in prisons

In the punitive style

Of the Whiteman

Via your sublime art Achebe

Like fire in the harmattan our story

Has travelled to faraway places

Through over 56 translations of

Things Fall Apart giving us back

Our true philosophy of life and values

Replacing imagined barbarism and 

Primitivism championed by Conrad

Bringing us back self-respect and dignity

Maliciously eroded by Joyce Cary

We can now walk tall

Without romanticising our past evils

While bringing our strengths to the fore

Recaptured by an immortal novel

Crafted by the colossus of African literature

We can all celebrate with verve

As our eloquent spokesperson