This three-part diagram traces the literary feud between Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah, as well as Armah’s conflictual relationship with the Heinemann African Writers’ Series, for which Achebe served as editorial advisor until 1972.
The conflict was sparked by negative comments Achebe made about Armah’s debut novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, published in 1968. In the 1980s, after Armah had founded the African publishing cooperative, PER ANKH, it turned into a legal struggle over unpaid royalties and exploitative contractual agreements, which led Armah to refer to Heinemann as “a neo-colonial writers’ coffle owned by Europeans but slyly misnamed ‘African’” (in “Larsony: or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction”) or “The Colonial Publisher as Pirate” (in The Eloquence of the Scribes).
The diagram can be read chronologically from left to right. The first part shows Achebe’s literary success following his famous debut novel, Things Fall Apart, and Armah’s entrance into the African literary scene. The second part focusses on Achebe’s attack and Armah’s counter-attack around the question of who can claim to call themselves an African writer. The third part follows the later stages of their respective publishing careers until Achebe’s passing in 2013.
Instead of claiming to convey a neutral overview of the back-and-forth between two of Africa’s most influential writers, the diagram is mainly based on Armah’s rendition of their relation. Armah’s decision to stop working with US-American and European publishing houses signalled his effective exit from the African Anglophone literary industry, as it was shaped by Achebe and the African Writers’ Series.
Working against the prevailing view that African literature is by and large a postcolonial phenomenon, Armah sought a reconnection with Africa’s oldest scribal tradition, the hieroglyphic archive of pre-dynastic Egypt dating back to more than 5,000 years.
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References (chronologically ordered)
Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975.
Ayi Kwei Armah, “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction”, in Asemka 4, 1976, 1-14.
Ayi Kwei Armah, Remembering the Dismembered Continent: Seedtime Essays. Per Ankh, 2010 (includes two letters to Chinua Achebe from 1976).
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir on the Sources and Resources of African Literature. Per Ankh, 2006.
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Per Ankh, 2008 (includes new preface).
James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature. Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2008.
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Resolutionaries. Per Ankh, 2013.