The TV Series on ‘Things Fall Apart’ and the work of the ancestors
By Dokubo Melford Goodhead
MUST an Igbo actor play the role of Okonkwo for the role to be fully realized? Mr. Daniel Nsa thinks so. In “Ikimefuna [sic] in Hollywood: Film, Theatre & Outrage,” his contribution to the debate on whether an Igbo actor must play the role of Okonkwo for a full representation and realization of the role, he writes, “The fear is that casting someone who doesn’t have the cultural roots might dilute the essence of this iconic role.”
Mr. Nsa goes on to say:
It’s about the loss of cultural specificity and authenticity. How do you tell a story so deeply tied to Igbo tradition, language, and folklore without involving someone who is inherently familiar with that world? Think about it—Okonkwo’s speech, mannerisms, and interactions are steeped in a very particular context. His conversations, his proverbs, the rituals he partakes in—they’re woven into the fabric of Igbo life.”
Mr. Nsa is standing the debate on its head with the kind of argument he is making for cultural authenticity. The actor of the role of Okonkwo must not be Igbo for their full and thorough representation and realization of the role of Okonkwo. That is the very essence or definition of great acting.
Mr. Nsa is mistaking one essence for another: he is mistaking the “essence” of ethnicity for the essence of acting. Black actors have made a valid argument for a better seat at the table in Hollywood but that is not what Mr. Nsa is referring to here. He is talking of an ethnic essence, which has the potential to create unnecessary strife and factionalization in the community of African and African Diaspora actors if its logic is followed to the end. Meanwhile, who is to say that going down that path will not lead us to future insistence on the specificity of clan and geographical area even within the ethnic group?
Mr. Nsa goes on to make a very troubling statement that is probably making Achebe and the late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the man who was popularly known as “Zik of Africa,” who famously inspired the late Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah on his pan-African journey, roll in their graves. He writes, “This might open up a whole tribal can of worms. A Yoruba executive producer and an Englishman working on a project that’s so deeply rooted in Igbo culture? Yeah, that’s going to be interesting to watch.” Here, Mr. Nsa turns the very noble and praiseworthy gesture of Mr. David Oyewole upside down. It is worth mentioning that before stepping forward to produce the Things Fall Apart TV series, Mr. Oyewole had masterfully played the role of Sir Seretse Khama, the Oxford-educated and deposed king of the Bamangwato, who led the anticolonial struggle of the people of Botswana and became the first president of the country. In a surprise visit to the set of the movie, A United Kingdom, President Ian Khama, the son of the late president, said, “I never thought I’d see my parents again.”
Commenting on the words of President Ian Khama, Mr. Oyewole said, “It was a really profound moment for us all.” That is the essence of great acting. Mr. Oyewole is not a Bamangwato. In short, he is not from Botswana but his and Ms. Rosamond Pike’s portrayal of Sir Seretse Khama and Ruth Willliams, the parents of the president, made the president to make an emotive and powerful statement, that in their portrayal of his parents he was seeing his parents again. It is noteworthy that Mr. Oyewole was a co-producer of the movie. We should not forget, too, Mr. Oyewole’s powerful portrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. As such, if anyone has the professional experience and competence to produce the TV series on Things Fall Apart, it is Mr. Oyewole.
Meanwhile, is it not also worth mentioning that Mr. Nsa is loudly silent on the fact that the family of Achebe, ably represented by Dr. Nwando Achebe, the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Social Science at Michigan State University, is also working on the project as executive producer?
Yes, Achebe wrote from a place of ethnic specificity but that location was always put in the service of the wider struggle by people of African descent everywhere for their rights as human beings qua human beings, in short for equality. By his own admission, he wrote Things Fall Apart in response to the images of Africans that he saw even in the works of supposedly well-meaning white authors, such as Mr. Johnson by Joyce Cary and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In fact, some believe that his scathing attack of Conrad for his representation of black people through his narrator Marlow in Heart of Darkness probably cost him the Nobel Prize for literature. Can a writer be called racist for his fictive racist narrator?
I delve into Achebe’s scathing attack on Heart of Darkness, a novel set in the Congo, and its author to make it very clear that he was always acutely aware of his location as a black author writing against colonialism and anti-black racism on a planet where black people everywhere in the Western and colonial world were suffering racist humiliation and colonial subjugation and pressed his writing into the fight against both. In a lecture titled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that he delivered as the Second Chancellor lecture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in February 1975, he talks of whole libraries of books that, like Heart of Darkness, were devoted to the denigration of black people, most of them “so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today.” He then goes to the heart of the problem with Heart of Darkness.
Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.
He goes on to call Conrad a bloody racist, which some believe doomed his otherwise surefire path to the Nobel Prize in literature. If we regard the Nobel Prize as the biggest prize on the planet for one’s work in one of the fields for which the prize is awarded, Achebe paid an enormous price for his fight against colonialism and the equality of black people everywhere.
There has been a ton of debate about whether Achebe’s attack on Conrad was not misplaced since it could be said in defense of Conrad that in Marlow he is only laying bare the psychology of the European colonizer, who, in the words of Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized, once he accepts the colonial mandate to conquer, proceeds to paint the most uncharitable portrait of the colonized. Here, it is worth quoting Memmi at length. Memmi writes:
As was stated before, accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a non-legitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns… In other words, to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained. This explains his strenuous insistence, strange for a victor, on apparently futile matters. He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories—anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.
Memmi is not finished. He goes on to further excavate the bad faith of the colonizer, laying bare a psychology that thrives on Manichaeism. He writes:
“How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time. In effect, these two attempts at legitimacy are actually inseparable.”
Achebe was historically astute and alert enough to know that despite some flashes of cosmopolitan sentiments in Heart of Darkness, Conrad is, through Marlow, engaged in a Western literary economy that preceded him and that thrived on damning and dehumanizing portraits of the colonized in the service of the colonial project, both as justification of the project to the officers who perpetrated it and as propaganda for the audience of readers at home, whose support the politicians and the various ruling houses of Europe needed to perpetrate the colonial project.
As a great writer, he was also aware that had Conrad not chosen to participate in the Western literary economy that mobilized literature in service of the colonial project, he would have created a voice or voices other than Marlow’s to represent the colonizer who refuses, one who refuses to participate in the literary economy that employs damning, demeaning, and bestial language to portray his African characters in order to justify the colonial project. Take, by contrast, Doris Lessing’s reading of colonialism as bad faith in her short story “The Old Chief Mshlanga.” Lessing invests the old chief with human dignity and pride throughout his ordeal as a once powerful chief who loses everything to colonial settlers. At the same time, she gradually teases out colonialism as bad faith, as the settlers embark on a systematic project of setting up a Manichean world that strips the colonized Africans of their human dignity. The children are indoctrinated from childhood to think of even their African servants as raw black savages and niggers.
That this is a project of bad faith is exposed in the way that Lessing deftly shows the psychological transformation of the settlers as they assiduously embrace the ideology of settler colonialism and in contrast shows the growth of the protagonist from a subjectivity based on an uncritical acceptance of the status quo to an emergent critical maturity and subjectivity that thinks through to see with clarity the falsehoods and injustices on which settler colonialism is built. It is in this context that Achebe calls Conrad a bloody racist, for “he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters.” He rightly concludes that it “would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make provision if he had thought it necessary.” Lessing thought it necessary to do so. Achebe’s own response was Things Fall Apart.
Things Fall Apart is therefore never about a parochial ethnic project. Beyond the specificity of location, that is, the story of the failed project of Okonkwo, Achebe’s tragic hero, to mobilize his people against colonization, is a far larger project: the struggle by black people everywhere against colonization and dehumanization. Achebe was speaking from the location of his common blackness with black people all over the world when he called Conrad a bloody racist and the figure of Mr. Johnson in Mr. Cary’s Mr. Johnson a buffoonish caricature of black people. In fact, his powerful collection of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day, is in large part a meditation on colonialism, postcolonial literature, and black subjectivity at the crossroads. He writes: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than 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 delivered them.”
No, he was not saying that the African past was perfect. He believed in looking at history straight in the eye. Approvingly quoting the Canadian novelist and critic Margaret Laurence, he writes, in Morning Yet on Creation Day, “African writers are interpreting their world, making it ‘neither idyllic, as the views of some nationalists would have it, nor barbaric as the missionaries and the European administrators wished and needed to believe.’”
Blackness as a common and unifying identity was forged in the flames of slavery in the Americas following the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, when irrespective of where they came from in sub-Saharan Africa, slave masters treated them as one people coming from the same place – Africa. Out of this cauldron of enslavement, pain, and despair came the rallying cry of pan-Africanism or pan-Blackness that transcended region and national border.
The work of people such as Marcus Garvey, with his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W.E.B. Du Bois, who attended the first pan-African Conference in 1900 in London and subsequently played a prominent leadership role in the pan-African Congresses that the sentiments arising from the 1900 conference birthed, with the first taking place in 1919 in Paris, France, built on the work of earlier pan-Africanists such as the leaders of various slave revolts throughout the Americas and the intellectual work of intellectuals and Christian clergymen such as Henry Highland Garnett, Alexander Crummell, and Henry McNeil Turner, and the writer Martin R. Delany of the United States; Edward W. Blyden (originally of the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and later an educator in Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as a foundational figure in thinking of blacks outside of Africa as the African Diaspora); the London-based Egyptian and Sudanese actor, playwright, journalist, and orator, Dusé Mohamed Ali; the Trinidadian attorney, Henry Sylvester Williams; and Dr. Robert Love of Jamaica.
This is the history that gave birth to the soul-lifting development where Mr. Oyewole, a Yoruba and Briton, himself a formidable actor, has stepped forward to executive produce a TV series on Things Fall Apart, with the Achebe family joining him as executive producers, and Mr. Idris Elba, an Afro-Briton of Sierra Leonian and Ghanaian descent, playing the role of Okonkwo. Our black ancestors, throughout the Americas, Africa, and Europe, who fought under the rallying cry and banner of their common blackness as an oppressed people from Africa, would be dancing for joy if they were here with us today.
We have already had a TV series on Things Fall Apart, where an Igbo actor, Pete Edochie, played the role of Okonkwo. If Mr. Nsa wants another production of the path-breaking novel with another Igbo in the role of Okonkwo, he can step forward as an executive producer and raise the money for the production. It is estimated that more than four hundred productions of the plays of Shakespeare have taken place each year since 1959. Achebe’s novels have earned their place in the pantheon of great literary works to deserve such a treatment.
* Dr. Goodhead is a scholar on African and African Diaspora literatures, film, and culture