When Things Fall Apart – Fare Thee Well Chinua Achebe

Many times, we wonder how the death of someone famous will affect us. What role in our lives does a celebrity or personality hold? We admire them and keep track of professional and personal life achievements, but do they really mean anything to us? After all, we don’t know them.

The other week, I read the news of Chinua Achebe’s death and was shocked when genuine tears began to flow down my face. I was driving and had to slow down as they continued to flow freely. I wondered why I was so affected and began to think back to ask myself what Chinua Achebe, perhaps the greatest of African authors had meant to me, that I should be weeping over the loss of a man I had never met.

Source

The story begins and ends with his seminal work, Things Fall Apart. I always planned to, but never got around to reading any of his other works (I still do). I read articles and essays that he wrote, as well as followed interviews he gave to various publications and outlets.

I was a latecomer to the Things Fall Apart party.

Growing up in the UK, I never had the privilege of reading any African writers at school. I was introduced to reading at home, where I developed a lifelong respect for the written word. At a mission primary boarding school in Zambia, we had story time in the afternoon as well as a weekly book reading for the whole school of a more serious literary work. I first ‘read’ The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien during these read-aloud sessions at school. By Grade 3 we were required to submit a weekly book report based on what we read. I was hooked and have never looked back. It is for this reason that I still have a love for children’s books and young adult fiction.

I spent my High School years living in South Wales with my family, where English Literature was one of my favourite subjects. For our GCSEs, we read Jane Eyre and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (both in my top 5 favourite books), while the plays were Macbeth and Hobson's Choice. During my weekly trips to the council library, I came across Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and immediately fell in love. She remains my favourite author and her most famous book occupies the top (No. 1) spot on my Best Books Ever list.

The books I read as a young child and adolescent contributed to moulding me into the woman that I am today. Titles and authors that come to mind are:

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; Watership Down; The Silver Sword by Ian Serralier; The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis; The Magic Faraway Tree, Mallory Towers, Amelia Jane and St Clare books by Enid Blyton; The Animals of Farthing Wood; numerous books by seasoned YA fiction writers Robert Leeson, Lynne Reid Banks and Jan Mark; Liz Berry and the forbidden world of Easy Connections; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Superfudge and of course, Forever by Judy Blume; The Shoe books by Noel Streatfield; almost all of Roald Dahl’s works; so many books by Christian children’s author Patricia St John; Charlotte’s Web; The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett; Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairytales; The Chalet School series; My naughty Little Sister Ramona and other classics by Beverly Clearly and last but not least, an honourable mention to the Sweet Valley High books by Francine Pascal. All these make up a part of who I am.

Why have I taken so much time to give this background to my literary past? In order to give you an indication of how much of a revolution reading Things Fall Apart was at the ripe old age of 27. My family returned to Zambia in the autumn (fall) of 1995. I enrolled in Evelyn Hone College to study Journalism before switching to the University of Zambia to study Mass Communication. I was drawn to my social science studies to the extent that I almost changed majors to Development Studies. I was passionate about what I was learning about poverty, economics, political history, and development. I came to understand some of the reasons why Africa had some of the difficulties I saw around me. At the same time, I was also being inducted into appreciating my black identity. It may appear strange to some people, but I was unfamiliar with RnB music and most African American music artists. I was comfortable with my Brit Pop and soft rock because I had no idea other genres of music existed. However, even though I got interested in African music, food, dress and hair, I never got around to reading any of the African writers my friends mentioned reading in high school.

When I came up with the idea of starting a book club in 2005, it was initially a Jane Austen Book Club, but since she only wrote six books, it soon morphed into a regular book club. Despite having run the Lusaka Book Club for a number of years, no one had ever picked a title by an African writer. So when someone finally did in 2007, it was something that I looked forward to immensely. Unlike others in the group, I wasn’t revisiting a beloved (or hated) high school classic as was the case when we read Jane Eyre; I was being baptised into African literature for the first time. And oh what a baptismal it was!

From the very first page, I was transfixed. As a social science student who had studied development and politics and for someone who worked in a development context, I was so often fed a single and skewed narrative of Africa, such that one scarcely recalls that there is more to our people than poverty, corruption and disease. Having had a western education throughout my life, it was at that moment I realised just how biased it was.

When I first started my blog about natural African hair care, www.ZedHair.com, I shared about some of the events that motivated me to cut off my chemically straightened hair. In my inaugural post, I wrote:

“In September 2004, I had just spent three months in Holland doing a course in development and was full of righteous activist fire. From Holland, I spent a month in Bermuda where my visit coincided with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery... I was an angry black woman of 25 years and I felt the need to do something radical… I felt a need to reject what I termed 'western concepts of beauty'. A friend later pointed out the flawed nature of the second point, seeing as I still wore western clothes and ate western food. Still, at the time, I didn't want to quibble about such details since I was bent on making a political statement.”

That was me and my oh-so-young self (almost a decade ago). But, it was the beginning of my exploring my African identity and I went about it in the most obvious (if not superficial way). My work in the development sector led me to question why as Africans we couldn’t seem to get our act together. I don’t have the answer to that question yet and it is not really the focus of my discussion here.

Being invited into Okonkwo’s world was a major revelation. Finally, I felt that my identity as an African was validated. I existed before the white man came and I had a history and a culture that was rich and diverse. It was not primitive, backward or unsophisticated; in fact, it was intricate and complex and it worked. Okonkwo’s genuine struggles with reconciling the old way with that of the newly arrived white man is something many Africans still face today. Especially given the influence of Christianity on our cultural traditions and way of life and how many of the early missionaries took the ‘everything you are and represent is evil’ strategy.  I think this doctrine was transferred to so much more than just religion. With missionaries as agents of colonialism brought with it the plunder of resources and a political and administrative system that was unfamiliar. Add in to that trade, commerce and globalisation and Okonkwo’s world was gone forever.

On this foundation, the African independence struggle was formed and in the midst of this wind of change across the continent, Things Fall Apart was published. In it, Chinua Achebe for me, represented why it is so important for us to tell our own stories and our own history in our own voices, from our own perspective as Africans and on our own terms. Yes the victors write history, but Africa’s story is not over yet.

Fare thee well Mr Achebe...

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The Guardian’s obituary brought on fresh tears. Read it here.

There is a wonderful interview with Mr Achebe also published in The Guardian in 2010, that they have re-released. Read it here.

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Butterflies On My Mind

Today, the 25th of November is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. As a development worker, I have commemorated this day for almost fifteen years as it is the first day in the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, which culminates in Human Rights Day on 10th December. You can follows the 16 Days of Activism Facebook page here.

What I did not know until July this year is that the 25th of November marks the day the Mirabal sisters were savagely murdered for their part in trying to overthrow a brutal dictator and liberate their husbands, their people and their country.


Who were the Mirabal sisters?

The Mirabal Sisters - source

The Mirabals were four Dominican political dissidents who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Three of the sisters were assassinated by persons unknown on November 25th, 1960. The Mirabal women grew up in an upper class, well-cultured environment. Their father was a successful businessman. All became married family women. Minerva became particularly passionate about ending the dictatorship of Trujillo after talking extensively with an uncle of hers. Influenced by her uncle, Minerva became more involved in the anti-Trujillo movement. She studied law and became a lawyer, but because she declined Trujillo's romantic advances, he ordered that while she would be issued a degree she was not to receive her practitioner's license. 

Her sisters followed suit, and they eventually formed a group of opponents to the Trujillo regime, known as the Movement of the Fourteenth of June. Within that group, they were known as "The Butterflies" (Las Mariposas in Spanish) because that was the underground name that Minerva was given. Two of the sisters, María Argentina Minerva Mirabal and Antonia María Teresa Mirabal, were incarcerated and tortured on several occasions. Three of the sisters' husbands were incarcerated at La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo [from Wikipedia]. 

The Mirabals died in a ruse where their husbands were deliberately moved from Santo Domingo to a prison on the outskirts of Puerto Plata, so that when their wives went to visit them, the sisters were lured into a trap, specifically so they could be brutally murdered without witnesses. The sisters, with their driver (Rufino de la Cruz), were strangled and clubbed to death. To hide the murder, the bodies were placed in the jeep they had travelled in and rolled off a cliff.

The Dominican public did not believe the government's story of the "accident". Historians consider their murder a turning point in the downfall of Trujillo's dictatorship. Following the Mirabal murder, support for the dictator waned as the resistance gained momentum. The Catholic Church became openly critical of the regime. On May 30, 1961, six months after the Mirabal's death, Trujillo was ambushed and assassinated [Source, Source].

The Mirabals on the 200 note Dominican peso - source

While 25th November had been commemorated by women's activists in the Americas since 1981, on 19 October 1999, at the 54th session of the General Assembly, the representative of the Dominican Republic on behalf of itself and 74 Member States introduced a draft resolution calling for the designation of 25th November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The purpose of commemorating this day (the anniversary of the Mirabal sisters' death), was to invite the world to raise public awareness of the problem of violence against women. The draft resolution expressed alarm that endemic violence against women was impeding women’s opportunities to achieve legal, social, political and economic equality in society. The Assembly reiterated that the term "violence against women" would refer to acts capable of causing physical, sexual or psychological harm, whether in public or private life [UN].

A commemorative stamp from 1985 - source

So, by now you may be wondering how on earth I ever even came to learn about these amazing women. 

Earlier this year (2011), in The Lusaka Book Club, we read a book entitled, 'In The Time Of The Butterflies' by Julia Alvarez. I had never heard of the author, but I had come across some of the issues covered in the book while reading another book club title in 2010 called 'The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao' by Junot Diaz. Both of these books concern the Dominican Republic and the tyrannical reign of dictator Rafael Trujillo. As someone who prides herself on being pretty well informed, I was rather disturbed to find that prior to reading Oscar Wao, I had never even heard of Trujillo and the many evil and wicked things that he did. I never gave much thought to the Dominican Republic, aside from that it shared the island of Dominica with Haiti, it's much poorer and oft-maligned neighbour.

In this excerpt from a New York Times review of Oscar Wao, the protagonist, a lovable, overweight, self-confessed Tolkien geek and second generation Dominican-American living in New Jersey describes life under Trujillo in his home country from 1930 to 1961 as follows:

“Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.”

His 30 years in power, to Dominicans known as the Trujillo Era (Spanish: La Era de Trujillo), is considered one of the bloodiest ever in the Americas, as well as a time of a classic personality cult, when monuments to Trujillo were in abundance. It has been estimated that Trujillo's rule was responsible for the death of more than 50,000 people, including 20,000 to 30,000 in the infamous Parsley Massacre. The brutal murder on November 25, 1960, of the three Mirabal sisters, Patria, María Teresa and Minerva, who opposed Trujillo's dictatorship, further increased discontent against his repressive rule. [from Wikipedia].

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez's book that inspired my decision to learn more about the Mirabals is part fact, part fiction. In order to tell their story, she has had to fictionalise many scenes. Amazon.com's review states that: 

"Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures--as she imagines their teenage years, their gradual involvement with the revolution, and their terror as their dissentience is uncovered.Alvarez's controlled writing perfectly captures the mounting tension as "the butterflies" near their horrific end. The novel begins with the recollections of Dede, the fourth and surviving sister, who fears abandoning her routines and her husband to join the movement. Alvarez also offers the perspectives of the other sisters: brave and outspoken Minerva, the family's political ringleader; pious Patria, who forsakes her faith to join her sisters after witnessing the atrocities of the tyranny; and the baby sister, sensitive Maria Teresa, who, in a series of diaries, chronicles her allegiance to Minerva and the physical and spiritual anguish of prison life".

In the Time of the Butterflies is inspiring, heartbreaking and educative. It is definitely the highlight of my book club year and well worth reading.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is probably one of the most original books I have read in years. It is witty, funny, entertaining and educative. I highly recommend it. Did I mention it won the 2008 Pulitzer prize for fiction?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

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"Look Under Your Seat"

"Look Under Your Seat". I had dreamed to one day hear these words when, by some stroke of luck, I won an all expenses paid trip to Chicago to attend a screening of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Naturally, I would take my mother with me. This is the ultimate Mother-Daughter dream trip, followed by shopping and a make over, of course.

Sadly, we have just begun the final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show and I will have to strike this one off of my life's To-Do List, as I did last year with 'Seeing Michael Jackson Live'. However, I feel that the occasion behoves me to share what The Oprah Winfrey Show has meant to me over the last 18 or 19 years.

Oprah Herself
The highlight is Oprah. Whatever people say about her, I think Ms Oprah Winfrey is an inspiration to me and millions of people all over the world. I truly believe that she is genuine and has dedicated her life to doing some good with the position of influence that she has and with the wealth that God has blessed her with.

Key Moments For Me
1. The fat in the wagon was probably something I saw on the news first, before seeing the show. But it is an iconic television moment.
2. I have NEVER understood what all the fuss was about regarding the Tom Cruise jumping on a couch episode. I have watched it many times (not just the clip, but the whole interview) and I still cannot for the life of me understand what the big deal was. I think it was just Tom Cruise haters, who resent that the guy was happy about his new love. What is so wrong with that? And because Tom and Oprah are friends, he was able to let go of his emotions more with her.

Celebrity Interviews
That's another thing I have loved about Oprah. Being a mega celebrity herself and way richer than any of the most famous super star, it made interviews very different from all other shows. I think that we often saw a candidness and an insight that you don't get from many other talk shows. I remember the Michael Jackson interview. From watching her show, you can tell that John Travolta really is one of her best friends. I loved when Hillary Swank went on with her mum and they both cried. You see, I'm not the only one for whom being on the show is a dream come true.

Texas Beef
The Texas Amarillo episodes when they sued her for saying she wasn't gonna eat a hamburger again. Whatever! I'm glad she won. I will always remember the white middle aged dude who recited her lines from The Colour Purple. Hilarious!

The Feel Good Factor
I remember reading an interview with Carmen Electra in Glamour magainzine, where she talked about a rough patch in her life and how we all have those moments when we need to get ourselves together and we end up watching lots of Oprah. I loved that. It is so true. Even though i don't follow the show that much these days (since I no longer watch TV), when I stumble upon a show, the feel good factor is always there.

The People
Celebrity or not, Oprah does ordinary people really well too. In  fact, that is why she is successful as she is. There are so many people that have appeared on her show who inspired and motivated me, who touched me and from whom I learned something. The indomitable human spirit has been celebrated time and again.


The Causes (good and bad)
1. Child Abuse. Oprah has done SO MUCH to tackle child abuse (especially sexual abuse). From the Oprah Bill that was signed by Bill Clinton; to the campaign to catch child molesters which I really disagreed with. I thought it created potential witch hunts. Being accused of being a child abuser is something you can never shake off if people get it wrong
2. The Gratitude Journal. The discerning reader of my Big Three Oh 30 things I'm Grateful for birthday email picked up that this was a gratitude journal. This is one of the most effective things I have ever learned. It always pays to count your blessings
3. Leadership Academy. If I am ever blessed with a huge amount of money, I will establish a Leadership Academy to teach and inspire young, gifted people. If not, I will do my best to influence the people who can to ensure it is run properly.
4. Books. Oprah's Book Club has done so much to get people reading proper books from which we can learn something about ourselves, other people and the world. My own book club that I started owes a lot to this great lady who has championed the writtten word and brought reading back into fashion for people ALL OVER THE WORLD.

The Give Aways
This entire post is centred around the stuff Oprah gives away. The fact that most of it is donated by corporations is completely besides the point. She gets these companies to do it for deserving people. The Car episode is still the most awesome as was the whole dream thing. I remember families given new homes, women given new looks. The list is endless. "Look Under Your Seat!"


The Weight
Oprah's weight loss (and gaining) journey is probably one that has resonated the most with people (especially women) everywhere. It is what makes her normal, just like you or me. About three years ago, I learned from Oprah about truly accepting myself for who I am and believing I was beautiful and sexy, just the way I am. This doesn't mean I have never tried to lose weight (it is healthier for you after all), but it is about self-image, worth and esteem. I will never be the same again.

I love you Oprah!