There is the Igbo story of the wood pecker who
proclaimed without doubt that he would honour his
father in death by pecking down the great Iroko tree.
.
But the day came when his father died, and the
woodpecker suddenly grew a boil on its beak. I feel
like the woodpecker. Chinua Achebe's death last
week left me tongue tied.
.
Not because I thought he would not die; I was in fact
at the last Achebe Colloquium at Brown last
November, and I felt in the chill of the New England
winter, a slight premonition. It is just that men like
Achebe transcend death.
.
They seem immortal and timeless. They occupy a
zone of reality that is between myth and legend.
.
So, the announcement of his death felt like a great
pillar had shifted underneath the earth and nothing
feels the same or is likely to stay in the same familiar balance. An era had come truly to a close.
.
Eustace Palmer, the Sierra-Leonean critic of African
Literature said so much, that Achebe's passing is
such an earth-shattering event that years from now it would be asked, "where were you when the great Achebe died?" We were at the Marriot Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, at the annual conference of the African Literature Association (ALA) when the news came. A great pall of silence had descended, then began the celebration of a great and magnificent life.
.
Achebe chose a symbolic moment to pass: the
gathering of the writers and scholars of the literature of the African world in a city which itself has significance in the transatlantic movement of Africans through the middle passage. Chinua Achebe magnified the African story in the 20th century.
The man is a great celebration. He did a lot for himself and his followers while he was alive. May his gentle soul rest in perfect peace.
His death is still a shock to me cos i did not hear any news of him being sick or something.