I mourn this great son of Africa but remain unshaken

Last April, I was privileged to have been invited to the “Annual Chinua Achebe Lectures” and co-receive a life time’s African Leadership Award, along with an Igbo chieftaincy title, by Achebe’s own alma mater – the University of Nigeria at Nsukka.

Regrettably, due to some of Africa’s endemic problems that Achebe has spent a life time writing about, we never made it for this occasion.

This aside, Achebe’s death must be a truly sad moment to all who knew him and even to us in Kenya just when we are raring to celebrate 50 years since the end of colonialism.

As I join the family, his countrymen and the continent in grieving, I urge us all to remember to ask ourselves: what would Achebe have preferred we do in these circumstances?

Would he have wished that we mourn for days or would he have wanted us to continue dialoguing with him now that he has simply transited to the land of the living-dead?

I seem to believe that Achebe would have preferred that we sit down and seriously ponder some of the questions that he has recently posed as urgent for the African continent. In his most recent book There Was a Country, he sought to deal with the ghost of nation-state formation that haunted African countries in the period immediately after the colonisers left.

Indeed There Was a Country demonstrates how ethnic jingoism and the big man syndrome can drag a whole community and the country into a perpetual strife.

The failure of the Biafra must surely be a painful historical experience, not just for Nigerians but also for the rest of the continent. For in that civil strife, Africans should find invaluable lessons about the need to jealously guard the nation-state and whatever it is that joins the different peoples who make up African countries.

Achebe’s writing – whether fiction or non-fiction – can be read as probably the most sustained defence of Africa’s collective identity. From Things Fall Apart which celebrates the culture of his Igbo people to There was a Country, Achebe has relentlessly written about what is good and bad about Africans, but most significantly he sought to show that Africa is a continent capable of remaking itself and joining the rest of the world in development.

I mourn this great son of Africa but remain unshaken in the firm belief that he hasn’t really left us for good: he has merely transited to the world of the ancestors; the living-dead, eternally watching over us for now. May his soul be well reposited.

Raila Odinga is the outgoing Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya