Seminar 2 Summary  
Leader:  Bill Kinney
15 April 2002

"In the face of the greatest adversities, there is always a significance of greater importance."  Bill quoted a man he had once worked with, to express a key idea he gained from reading Chinua Achebe's essay "The Novelist as Teacher" (from Hopes and Impediments) and from viewing Bill Moyers' videotaped interview Chinua Achebe: A World of Ideas.  That is, Bill is impressed that Achebe is an idealist who can find the good even in the great evil of colonization.  Bill cited several Achebe quotations from both works to develop his view that Achebe is a man who can see all sides, whose ideas and judgments are wise and balanced.  "If one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it," Achebe states in his interview.  The Igbo proverb illustrates the wisdom of avoiding single-mindedness:  the world can best be explained by looking not just at one side, but looking for the other sides as well.  Achebe calls for people to be open-minded, for we lack imagination if we cannot see the many sides, and recognize the validity of diversity of today's world.

Response:  
As Bill pointed out, Achebe takes his vocation as novelist and teacher very seriously, and listens to his readers carefully. Achebe's essays and literary criticism contests the Western idea of "art for art's sake"--the African writer and storytellers advocate an "art for life's sake" and combine aesthetic goals with social responsibility.  In "The Novelist as Teacher,"  Achebe tries to "teach my readers that their past--with all its imperfections--was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf had delivered them."  

Marjorie prepared a careful and thorough summary of the main points Achebe makes in two essays:  “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (from Hopes and Impediments) and "Africa's Tarnished Name" (from Another Africa). Achebe contests the status of Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a literary masterpiece because of the novel's racist depiction of Africa and Africans.  Achebe examines the Western need for "constant comparison" to its "other"--Africa--and that resulted in the devastating equation: white = good vs. black = bad.  He rebuts the justification that Conrad was simply a man of his time reflecting its racist attitudes; in fact, Conrad ignored the "facts"--for example, of Africans' long history of resistance--when he wrote Heart of Darkness as he does not do in the rest of his fiction.  Achebe is deeply offended by Western "literature of devaluation" that developed out the the slave trade and colonization.  The images of Africa that this literature produced, acted to silence and dehumanize Africans, and created demeaning stereotypes that are still prevalent today--e.g. in contemporary media portrayals of Africa.  

Marjorie observed that the two essays overlapped in their themes and ideas, but that "Africa's Tarnished Image" seemed more balanced and less emotional that "An Image of Africa" written decades earlier. 

Response:  I could never read Conrad's Heart of Darkness in quite the same way after reading Achebe's influential and controversial "An Image of Africa."  I can certainly understand Achebe's reaction--which is carefully argued and persuasively supported--and I am grateful that he was impelled to start writing because he decided another story, his story, African stories needed to be told--by Africans!  "Where one thing stands..." another thing should be brought forward to stand beside it.