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Chinua Achebe: A Biography, by Ezenwa-Ohaeto; Chinua Achebe and joyce Cary. Ein postkoloniales Rewriting englischer Afrika-Fiktionen, by Tobias Döring.
The two books under review here differ widely in perspective and approach, to a large extent conditioned by the different cultural and biographical backgrounds of the two authors. The two critical texts thematize and exemplify the continued debate about "discourse on or about Africa."
Ezenwa-Ohaeto writes as Achebe's countryman and fellow Igbo, but also as one of Achebe's former students, as a fellow poet, critic, and academic. Ezenwa-Ohaeto's aim is not another book of criticism on Achebe's work, but a record of the writer's life. In this respect, his writing perspective is involved, sympathetic, but definitely not hagiographic. In writing this biography, Ezenwa-Ohaeto achieves for African literary criticism something that he attests Achebe has achieved through his writing: an equal valorization of an author from the South by the same means and methods usually applied to renowned authors of the North or West. Ezenwa-Ohaeto celebrates Chinua Achebe as the ingenious mediator between two worlds and two cultural traditions -- the oral and the literate -- and the same dichotomy -- or symbiosis -- informs Ezenwa-Ohaeto's methodology and insight as a biographer. He has accumulated an enormous amount of written documents, newspaper articles, reviews, and the like from which he can easily reconstruct Achebe's life history, as would be the case with any other literary personality throughout the world. Because Achebe is not only at home in a literate universe, Ezenwa-Ohaeto has to supplement the information about (external) events and biodata with information gleaned from oral sources of personal history. This information that rounds the picture of Achebe's personality with views, insights, opinions that put flesh onto the skeleton of pure written data was gathered mostly by interviews with Achebe himself, but also with many friends, colleagues, "age-group fellows." The interview seems to be a particularly appropriate methodology for the investigation of this delicate topic, "Achebe's life," because it is a form that occupies an intermediate space between the oral and the written, a form that translates the less formal oral statement into the codified literate form.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto follows Achebe's life chronologically in chapters that are mostly determined by external, historical, and political events. The first chapters...