Chinua Achebe’s passing is a loss for me personally, but I’m not sure he was as important to Africans as he was to me, an outsider interested in Africa.
I taught “Things Fall Apart” to my Form D class at Ngoana Jesu Secondary School in 2006, and of all the books I taught there — from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” — that novel was my favorite.
First, the context. The classroom felt charged as I taught this book about colonialism in Africa in a classroom in Africa — I being a European-looking guy. But what buoyed the book through every English period for a couple months was the extent of Achebe’s talent as a storyteller and his honesty as a thinker. His sentences were economic, powerful, each like a command. The ideas behind them were plain to see. This let the tension pour through as Okonkwo struggled for his identity, for his people, for his pride. This was the first book I taught that was written by an African where I felt it stood up to any other book I’d read, ever, written by anyone, from anywhere. My students, on the other hand, would have left Achebe’s Nigerian Okonkwo to be with the American Hardy Boys.
Before we read “Things Fall Apart” that year, we went through some bookless weeks. The literature books selected by Lesotho’s Ministry of Education were not yet stocked and available for purchase in any bookstore. (And there was no such thing as buying online and shipping to the village.) But my friends and family from the U.S. had collected and shipped a variety of books to our school over the previous two years, and we now had quite a collection of Hardy Boys thrillers. So I chose one to read aloud in class each day, just to pass the time until the Ministry of Education’s required literature books became available.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the students paying close attention to the motorcycle chases and the shady characters that Joe and Frank Hardy encountered. Soon my other Hardy Boys books were being borrowed and read by students in their free time, and not only the Form D’s. Lemeko, as in Lemeko the Climber, that voracious little reader, began burning candles through the night to get to the end of another Hardy Boys mystery. Sepheche would be sure to have a copy on hand to read out in the pastures as he looked after his father’s cattle. Over the next few months, a group of boys emerged who were reading, exchanging and discussing Hardy Boys books more than their textbooks. “Could you ask your friends in America to send more Hardy Boys, sir?” They were running out. I started calling them the Hardy Boys.
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