by Okey Ndibe
Still giddy, I served notice to my friends. Since the great Achebe had not only acknowledged my greeting but had also returned it—with a smile, to boot—I let my friends know that, for the next two weeks or more, I would not use the same mouth that saluted Achebe to talk to insignificant people like themselves!
It was years before I spoke to Achebe again, in circumstances that were far more amazing.
It was 1983. I had just graduated from college and been hired as a staff correspondent by the Lagos-based African Concord, my first job in journalism. Before taking up the post, I traveled to Amawbia to share the news with my parents and to receive their blessing. I also visited Ogidi, Achebe’s hometown, to see a friend. As we conversed, I raved and raved about Achebe and Things Fall Apart. I confessed to envying her for belonging to the same town as the famous writer. The young woman listened for a while, her cheeks stretched in a smile. Then she asked, “Do you know that Achebe is my uncle?”
“He is?” I said in surprise.
“And his house is a short walk away.”
“Really?”
“And he’s home this weekend. Do you want us to go visit him?”
Did I ever!
The Achebe I met in his country home personified grace. He welcomed us in that quiet, warm manner that was his style. He served us tea biscuits and chilled Coca-Cola. He fixed me with penetrating eyes as I gushed about his novels, his short stories, his essays, even reciting favorite lines memorized from years of devoted reading. He asked a few questions of me, and I felt flattered by his attention as I spoke. Before taking leave of him, I related that I had recently been hired by African Concord. Would he agree to an interview with him for the magazine? Ever gracious, he consented. He gave me his home telephone number at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). I should simply give him a ring whenever I was ready.
A week later I flew to Lagos, reported for work, and told Lewis Obi, the weekly magazine’s editor, that I had Achebe’s telephone number—and a standing commitment to give me an interview. The editor was elated.
“That will be your first major assignment,” the editor said. The interview, he added, would be the magazine’s cover story.
I rang Achebe to set a date for the interview. The magazine made arrangements for my flight from Lagos to Enugu, the nearest city to the writer’s location. On the scheduled date, the author and I met at his spare, book-lined office at the university’s Institute of African Studies. The very air seemed flavored with the scent of books stretching and heaving. An air conditioner droned, ineffectual against the humid heat.
Pleasantries quickly exchanged, I pressed the record button of my tape recorder. A minute or so into the interview I paused and rewound the tape to check that everything was working. Satisfied, I continued the interview. I asked questions about Achebe’s fiction, poetry, and essays, about literary politics, and about Nigeria’s vexed current affairs. He responded in his deliberate, accessible language. He spoke softly, for the most part, as if words were fragile things liable to shatter should he raise his voice. Yet, raise his voice he sometimes did. At moments, his voice rose, accentuated. His words, like ripples, rode the surface of his soft, even voice.
Three hours later, rather reluctantly, I rose to take leave of him.
“This is the most exhaustive interview I have ever done,” Achebe remarked. “Where did you study literature?”
He was surprised to learn that I had read business administration at Yaba College of Technology in Lagos and the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT) in Enugu. He laughed when I described myself as a certified misfit and shirker as a business student.
I had been a sartorial oddity both at Yaba Tech and IMT. Fellow students majoring in business administration sported overpolished black or brown shoes and wore dress shirts and ties. I had drifted about campus in jeans, T-shirts, and mud-caked sneakers. While other students pored over business and accountancy texts, I had indulged my fondness for reading novels, magazines, and newspapers, local as well as foreign. While they crammed accounting principles and filled their heads with labor laws, I had imbibed the works of Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, Achebe, Okigbo, Flora Nwapa, John Steinbeck, Kofi Awoonor, Jane Austen, Armah, Buchi Emecheta, the Brontë sisters, Richard Wright, William Faulkner—and had memorized lines from Time magazine essays by Lance Morrow and Roger Rosenblatt. Forsaking business texts—except for the two or three days before exams—I had fervently followed the controversies and feuds that often erupted between writers in Africa and elsewhere.
A few friends were waiting for me at Hotel Presidential Enugu, where I was lodged, when I arrived from interviewing Achebe. They were eager to listen to Achebe’s voice. Happy to oblige them, I fetched the tape recorder and pressed play. We waited—not a word! I put in two other tapes, the same futile result. Each tape rolled but produced only a steady whir and soft wheeze, not a word Achebe had spoken. How was I going to explain this mishap to my editor—who had scheduled the interview as a forthcoming cover?
Terror seized me. I had not taken a single note throughout the interview. Why, I had had no inkling that technology could turn merciless saboteur. Until then, it had not crossed my mind that a tape recorder could be so fickle, so inept, could sleep on duty. At any rate, I had checked that one time, at the beginning of the interview, and the tape recorder had seemed fine. Now, there was nothing to show for all my effort, all the time I had put in. I asked the hotel’s switchboard to ring the writer’s home for me. When Achebe picked up, I panicked, for a fleeting moment too flustered to find words. Then the words came in a torrent.
“Professor, this is Okey. Okey Ndibe. I don’t know how to explain this. I owe you a big apology. I’m so sorry I wasted a lot of your time today. I don’t know what happened, but my tape recorder did not work. You remember I checked once and it was working. But everything seemed to have stopped after that. I should have checked periodically. The recorder didn’t catch even one word you spoke.”
I paused, to let him absorb the astonishing information. When I was growing up, my parents often caned me when I broke chinaware or screwed up in some other way. Caning was a painful but neat way to put a closure on things. The dose of pain marked each errant moment and then released me to move on with my life—until I broke something else, screwed up another time. Cane-inflicted pain was its own form of vocabulary. It gave the body a language with which to inscribe failure, to etch the memory of a lapse—and then to file it away. On the phone with Achebe, a part of me wished he would voice fuming, flagellant words. I wished he’d berate me for my lack of fastidiousness, my lack of diligence. Let him scold me as much as he wanted, but let him not foreclose a second chance. Let him not hang up, leaving me to stew in my distress.
“Oh, so sorry to hear that,” he said calmly, nary a note of exasperation or impatience in his tone.
It was a wonderful surprise, his tone. Yet, it would take more than a patient, sympathetic tone to dispel my discomfiture. There was no question: should I return to Lagos without accomplishing my task—without the interview—my career as a journalist would be as good as over. It would be stillborn, dead on arrival. And there was no other way I had ever wanted to make a living.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
“No, not at all,” Achebe said. “These things happen.”
“I’ll be fired if I go back with nothing. Could I come back tomorrow for a short interview? Thirty minutes—even twenty—would do,” I pleaded.
“Not tomorrow,” he said. “I have a full day. But if you can come the day after, I’ll give you all the time.”
Two days later, I arrived in Nsukka for the salvage interview. This time, I went with three tape recorders. I also took copious notes, prepared for technology’s capriciousness, mischief, and malice. Achebe was as indulgent as the first time. He was genial as he answered all the questions I threw at him. I paused every few minutes to check that the three rec
orders were working. I had stretched the interview to an hour and a half before guilt—mixed with gratitude—compelled me to stop.
But I made sure to ask a question that went to the heart of Achebe’s trademark style. He was famous for a spare narrative style that shunned any form of linguistic contortion, adornment, or flashiness. I asked him about it. He explained that he was not fond of writers who use language to confound readers. Invoking the example of the philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell, he explained that true mastery of any discipline did not lie in using jargon to keep the uninitiated at bay. A true expert, instead, was one who understood a subject well enough to make its most intricate concepts accessible to a novice.
The second interview was not as exhaustive as the first one, nor did it have the spontaneity of the first outing, but it gave me—and the readers of the magazine—a prized harvest. My friends got a chance to savor Achebe’s voice, with its mix of faint lisps and accentuated locutions.
Few writers of his stature would have sacrificed so much of their precious time in an interview with a rookie journalist. He had saved my career.
That early encounter fixed my impression of him as a man of uncommon generosity and deep humanity. The memory of it would come to shape my reaction, years later and in America, when bumps developed in my relationship with him.
The day after Achebe had left a message with the secretary at the Guardian, I rang the author’s American number. I expected to hear that he was on his way to Nigeria.
“There’s an important conversation I’d like us to have,” Achebe said. “Some of my friends and I are talking about setting up an international magazine in America. I have recommended you as the founding editor. I want you to think about whether you’d be interested in doing it, and then let’s talk again in three days.”
The invitation was an incredible honor, absolutely unexpected. I was flattered that Achebe offered me an opportunity for such a significant turn in my personal life and professional career. I didn’t need three days to think about it. I didn’t need hours or even minutes. The answer was a firm and irrevocable yes.
For years, beginning from childhood, I had nursed a fantastical dream about living in the United Kingdom, the United States, or the Soviet Union. In 1988, it was as if, in one audacious move—and thanks to Achebe—America had outmaneuvered its rivals and emerged winner of a fierce three-way race for my affection.
Never Look an American in the Eye
Giving my word to Achebe was rather easy. Yet, my initial exultation about relocating to America quickly wore off, leaving a mixed residue of tense anticipation and anxiety.
I handed in notice of my intention to resign from my post at African Guardian and proceeded on a monthlong terminal leave. There was a lot to do to wind up my affairs in Lagos and prepare for the next chapter of my life in the United States. I set about the tasks in earnest. The sheer energy demanded by it all, the running hither and thither, helped reduce—but not stave off—my fretting and agitation.
One of the first things I did was to obtain a Nigerian passport for the first time in my life. I had been warned that the US embassy would deny me a visa if I told the bald truth—that I was going to take up an editor’s job in America. I couldn’t countenance being turned away, my dream nullified. So when I applied for a visa, I had to fib. I told the young American consular chap who interviewed me that I was going for a conference and then a short visit. I don’t remember his follow-up questions or my answers, but I recall the brevity of the encounter. Before I knew it, the young man had stamped a rejection on my passport and pushed it to me.
I was stunned by the appalling finality of the decision. Everything seemed to stand still for an instant and yet to move at a ferocious velocity. I couldn’t utter another word to the man; I was tongue-tied. What was there to say? There were too many people in the cavernous waiting room, other Nigerians waiting for their turn to play the lottery of the American visa. Their eyes stabbed me, or so I felt. In their presence, I could not wheedle, beg, and plead. Even if I did, what good would it do? Nor could I form the words to demand an explanation. Had my interviewer seen through my lie, decided that my dream die? Would it help matters if, contrite, I offered to right the story I had told, to revisit and rewrite the lie about going for a conference?
I realized that, cajole or scold, I could not change a thing, much less the mind of the withholder of a visa. Of the stereotypes I had formed then of every white man, there was this: that once he made a decision, he stuck by it. Let the victim of the decision demonstrate its unjustness; let him importune or flail or weep up a lake of tears; let the decision maker’s parents entreat a review; in fact, let his long-deceased ancestors arise from the dead and make an eloquent case for reconsideration—the white man’s mind was steely, inflexible, and impermeable.
I have never been able to recall how I made it out of that hall of disenchantment. The memory of my exit has remained a blur. Perhaps I had hurried out, desperate to flee from the dream-aborting encounter. Perhaps I had tarried there, too stubborn or too wounded to move. Perhaps I had left slowly, one leisurely footstep placed in front of the other, in no haste lest the other visa dreamers smell my failure and their eyes peel away my despair layer after layer until the bleeding core of me was laid bare.
For sure, my trip and new life had been upended. How was I to gather and mend the broken shards of this dream? What would I tell friends with whom I had shared farewell drinks? How about my colleagues at the Guardian: How was I to explain to them that my dream job in America had slipped from my grasp into oblivion? How was I to recount the dizzying, devastating punch I had been dealt by a capricious consular officer, a puny man-god with the prerogative to bestow or deny a visa, the power to smother dreams or fertilize them?
My memory of that terrible day returns to vividness only after I had made it out of the hall. Once outside of the embassy, I realized I had broken out in a torrent of sweat. Denied a visa, I knew real agony. Was I going to watch my dream falter and stumble? How was I to countenance this woeful nullification of my trip?
I took my case to Nick Robertson, a likable, gregarious acquaintance who worked for the then United States Information Service (USIS). Nick and I got to know each other rather well because he frequently invited me to the agency’s events—talks, receptions for visiting American artists, film screenings, parties. My physical anguish must have made quite an impression on him. As I stuttered and fumbled for words to tell my story, he interrupted me in that zestful, ebullient manner of his. He said, point-blank, he didn’t see why I should be denied a visa to the United States. And he offered to write a letter to the consular folks pleading a review of my case.
His intervention worked magic. I was reinvited to the embassy, asked to present my documents, and then instructed to take a seat. A little while later, somebody called my name. I approached a kiosk and was handed back my passport—duly stamped with a visa.
“Have a great time in the United States,” the consular official who handled the transaction said. I must have made some grunting sounds, for I was too emotionally edgy to speak.
The day I came out of the embassy, visa finally in hand, it was as if a dead dream had jerked back to life. I could exhale again, with ease, for things were righted, the promise of a new life salvaged.
I set about completing a few tasks in Lagos—shopping, making farewell rounds to friends, informing my landlord of my relocation. Then I traveled to my southeast hometown of Amawbia to spend a week with my parents.
The first time we sat down to talk, my parents remarked on the jumbo salary I was going to earn in America. I was not to become a spendthrift, they cautioned. Instead, I was to cultivate a frugality dictated by an established practice within our extended family. That practice imposed an obligation on members of the family with the financial means to help pay the school fees of those coming behind. It was a formula for lifting up everybody in the wider
extended family. In that spirit, my parents said I was to take up responsibility for paying the school fees of my youngest brother, Oguejiofo, and two male cousins, Emeka and Ndubuisi. Once pronounced, the matter was settled; I proudly accepted the responsibility.
My parents must have expected that I would regularly send money to support them. Parents made sacrifices to put their children through schools or into some profession. In return, once established in a job, trade, or profession, children were expected to cater to some of their parents’ needs in old age or after retirement. I recognized the sacredness of that obligation. My parents didn’t raise it explicitly because they knew that I knew my duty by them; it went without saying.
I could sense that my parents were even tenser than I was about my departure to America. They expressed their foreboding in separate ways, consistent with their respective personalities.
Father tried to mask his nervousness. We’d pass each other and he would tighten his jaws or turn his face slightly away, as if to keep me from reading his emotion, or he would whistle in a way that suggested nonchalant cheeriness. Sometimes, he would look me in the face and attempt to beam, but merely manage a grin. A few times, I surprised him staring at me, wearing a worried look he’d quickly unscramble. Was he wondering if I was up to the challenge Achebe had placed on my shoulder? Or was he seized by a deeper fear, the possibility he’d lose a son—whatever that loss might mean—to America? It was not in his nature to verbalize his fears.
He had fought in World War II in Burma, reaching that turf of war chiefly on a ship. That was the extent of his travels outside of Nigeria. In some profound way, that war defined him. There was something of the stoic soldier in his carriage. His face was ever imperturbable, as if conditioned to mask fear and allied emotions.
