Those who remember the Dublin Writers' Festival of 1988 will have an image of the kingly whiterobed presence of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author, declaiming against Joseph Conrad's portrayal of Africans in Heart of Darkness. "Their black hands, their black faces," he repeated contemptuously, "as if blackness were an abnormality that had to be pointed out, against a white norm." Mind you, I remember as a young teacher in the Nigeria of the 1970s being described, along with my white colleagues, as baturai, or "man-with-no-skin", so the question of norms is a delicate one. Anyway, it is the essence of these three Harvard lectures which attempt to trace a power-shift, not unlike pre- and post-independence Ireland, from British caricature of the colonised to the onset of a narrative repossession of present and past, a telling of their own story.
Ireland, it should be said, has a small part in all this, through the novel Mister Johnson by the Donegal-born Joyce Cary, who spent his working life as a British civil servant in pre-independence Nigeria. That novel, compulsory reading for young students of literature at Ibadan University in the mid-1950s, was the dry tinder of an intellectual revolt Achebe himself witnessed, against British misrepresentation of indigenous culture.
His indignation, though, is tempered by magnanimity towards Cary himself, and later on towards Elspeth Huxley, despite her writings in justification of the white settler ethos in Kenya. Both are "decent people" who see things defectively, from a power-base they have failed to acknowledge in themselves. This gets us beyond mere political correctness, the blackand-white demonology of post-colonial studies, to a larger perspective where the flow of people, power and information is examined, more detachedly, from both ends.
The one exception to the magnanimity is V.S. Naipaul ("I don't count the African readership," he is quoted as saying, "and I don't think one should. Africa is a land of bush again, not a very literary land") whose novel, A Bend in the River, Achebe cannot forgive for its contempt of what it calls "men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing".
London, of course, is the other side of the two-way mirror Nigerian writers, and African writers in general, have been seen through and have seen their diminished selves reflected in. It is where Amos Tutuola's ground-breaking The Palm- Wine Drinkard was dismissed for its "grotesque imagery of the African mind", but also where the famous Heinemann African Writers Series was inaugurated, with Achebe's own Things Fall Apart one of its first and greatest successes. In general, it is a city of fond recollection for him, from the first shock of being driven by a white taxi-driver to the positive encouragement he got there as a trainee radio producer in the 1950s. Which is not to say he doesn't have hard words for those who forget their origins and "de-Africanise" their writing, to assimilate it to the middle-class British publishing industry.
Achebe, the child of Igbo missionaries from a village in the south-east of Nigeria, now lives and teaches in America. A thread of autobiography runs through these lectures - but only a thread. He may feel, perhaps, he has said the rest in his novels, which chart the gradual estrangement of a young man from his African roots to the "larger" world. Asked if he would ever write an "American" novel, he replies "No, I don't think so." That omission is an interesting one, given the American-financed evangelism within Nigeria, and links him once again with the writers of post-independence Ireland who also live and teach in America, but choose, like Achebe, to remain silent about their lives in the bosom of that superpower.
Harry Clifton is a critic and author. His most recent book Berkeley's Telephone and Other Fictions, was published last year by Lilliput