Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe

Electrifying essays on the history, complexity and appropriation of a continent, from the father of modern African literature.

Achebe is well-known as the first African author to write from the perspective of the colonised rather than the coloniser. Things Fall Apart was and is a seminal piece of literature.

In the collection of essays in Africa’s Tarnished Name, Achebe explores various aspects of Africa: what Nigeria means to him, what it was like to travel around Africa as an African amongst white tourists, the treatment by world leaders of African countries as a theoretical experiment and, in the eponymous essay, the fact that there is a lot of literature about Africa but hardly any of it is written from an African perspective.

Achebe saw Africa through great change. He was almost 30 when Nigeria became independent from the British Empire in 1960. He experienced its bitter civil war which resulted from the instability of the transition. Similar instability erupted around the continent throughout the 1960s which saw a domino effect of decolonisation. Every single nation in Africa has its own turbulent story.

In the last essay, Africa is People, Achebe describes being inexplicably invited to a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. As an African novelist surrounded by western economists and bankers, Achebe did not understand why he was there. However, when he heard the attendees discussing solutions to African economics in a way that might look workable on paper but Achebe thought was impossible in practice, he felt compelled to speak up to explain that Africans were real people, not an afterthought, and Africa was not a fiction to be experimented with.

The main point running through Achebe’s four essays, most obviously in Africa’s Tarnished Name, is that Africa is constantly spoken for by non-Africans. He is particularly critical of Joseph Conrad whose book about explorers of the Belgian Congo, Heart of Darkness, not only gives the impression that the character was the first visitor to that area of Africa but also then portrays the Congolese people as savages or aliens, highlighting how different he perceives them to be from the civilised west. Achebe notes in passing how common it is for writers to describe parts of Africa being “discovered” (meaning discovered by Europeans as people had already lived there for thousands of years) and that even when something positive is said about Africa it would often come across as patronising at best and racist at worst. Africa is not given a chance to be spoken about by Africans, as western perspectives are too dominant.

I will stop here to acknowledge that I am doing exactly what Achebe criticises: giving my own perspective on African literature as a non-African. I do not pretend to be a special exception to those he criticises. I can only give my own western perspective on this blog about books written by Africans about Africa – and thankfully there are considerably more of those now than there were when Achebe was first writing – but I will never understand what it is like to have lived that history.

Achebe has a way of describing and explaining his experience of being African which is calm yet firm and articulate. These essays clearly outline the problems which live on since colonisation and decolonisation as a result of the colonising nations shirking almost entirely any duty to ensure a stable transition. These are important essays and Achebe’s words are, as ever, carefully thought out and hard-hitting.

“He needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others.”