Blog Post #20: Achebe Interview

From our in class discussion on the Achebe interview, I believe one of the most important takeaways was the writer's intentions. The interview goes into great detail about his mindsets and opinions of certain subjects which express the context of composition learned about. The context of the composition is heavily influenced the book and his realisations and hatred held for the single story drove him to shed light on African tribes and the Igbo people.

"The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. The cruelties of this trade gradually began to trouble many people in Europe. Some people began to question it. But it was a profitable business, and so those who were engaged in it began to defend it -- a lobby of people supporting it, justifying it, and excusing it. It was difficult to excuse and justify, and so the steps that were taken to justify it were rather extreme. You had people saying, for instance, that these people weren't really human, they're not like us. Or, that the slave trade was in fact a good thing for them, because the alternative to it was more brutal by far." 

With these meaningful takeaways in mind, I think that Achebe explaining why European literature exposed them in a vulgar light is possibly the most enlightening part. His reasoning of their work is eye opening as he assesses this behaviour and exposes the inhuman intention of brutish depictions of the African people. At that time they had to justify slavery and did not want it to die out as it provided economic benefit. With more people questioning the labour they separated the races and divided people, this division was through the barbaric descriptions which created the illusion that trade would improve their life. This illusion relinquished guilt left in Europeans who were a part of slave labour, as the one story spread civilisation did not question it as it was the only depiction provided. It put Africans below western society giving them a sense of power and justification, these actions preyed on the different nature of their race exhibiting them as oddities in which need help or are barbaric. In many ways, this literature could have exaggerated racism at that time, furthering stereotypes and beginning the trend of single or one sided stories. The mention of this in the interview further establishes Achebe's intention as his story was a chance to expose the injustices of single stories while providing another light to his people coming from a more "culturally authentic" perspective.