The Literariness of the Personal Essays of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Abstract

This study examines the literariness of the personal essays of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. It is the kind of literariness that is imbued with the respective artistic vision of each of essayist. By literariness, I am referring to the strategies of writing that deviate from the standard language, that rearrange the normal usage of language and that impart a degree of freshness in the text. The study is justified on account of the paucity of critical engagement with the literary aspects of this genre and it a response to claims in some quarters of Western literary scholarship that the personal essay in Anglophone Africa lacks personal intensity, is inauthentic, didactic and polemical. The objectives of this inquiry are: to analyse the stylistic choices made by Ngugi and Achebe and how they contribute to the literariness of the essays; to interrogate the similarities and differences in both their ideological positions and artistic visions in relation to the postcolonial condition; and to evaluate the similarities and differences in the literariness of their personal essays. The methodology for conducting this study included the literature review to select the relevant essays; intensive reading and analysis to examine how the essayists respond to key postcolonial thematic issues; intensive reading and analysis to identify the literariness and aesthetic value of the essays; a comparative interrogation of the literariness of their essays; and a comparative evaluation of their artistic visions. I have combined stylistics and selected postcolonial theories to establish not only how essayists orchestrate their stylistic choices to realise aesthetic effects but also how they articulate pertinent issues affecting the postcolonial condition. The study has revealed the divergent standpoints and contrastive tonality of Ngugi and Achebe on the use of imperial languages. While Ngugi advocates for indigenous languages, Achebe calls for the domestication of the foreign languages. The study demonstrates that Ngugi and Achebe

have appropriated the genre from the West and refashioned it with traditional African forms, resulting in a marked and deliberate stylistic deviation from the genre’s European antecedent. This deviation imbues the essays with various shades of literariness. The essayists have achieved unique literariness by appropriating the African archive from which they have adapted proverbs, fables, songs, anecdotes, allusions, metaphors, politeness, rhetorical cataloguing and the persuasive rhetorical style. The adaptation of these stylistic devices into a European genre echoes the postcolonial realities of hybridity and cosmopolitanism, pointing towards the artistic vision of the two writers. From the comparative study of the two essayists, this analysis has brought out both the contrast and similarity in the organising principles underpinning their essays, their artistic visions, and some noticeable gaps in their artistic visions. Achebe enacts accommodative resistance against the West, while Ngugi’s resistance is more militant, strident and socialist. Finally, the study suggests that there is need to undertake research on African women essayists, emerging strands of this genre and its expression in new media such as the cyberspace.