Rereading Chike and the River

I recently found the collection of children’s books I acquired on a trip to Benin City four years ago. Frayed bits of mouldy and brittle paper rained on my dress as I heaved the large bundle of dusty books out of the storage bin.

The bad print-job of ‘The Passport of Mallam Ilia’ put me off. ‘Eze Goes to School’ brought back memories of the most boring school mornings ever when the English teacher, droning endlessly, would read aloud page after page of the book. I eventually settled on ‘Chike and The River’.

Nestled in a corner of my office, on the hard wood floor, I reread the book.

Encountering ‘Chike and the River’ through eyes layered with twenty-year’s worth of cultural sensitivity, I am not surprised that I was not charmed by the book. What surprises me is the recollection that even in my first reading, at the age of seven, I did not find the book charming. Twenty years later, I think I know why.

If you ever had the suspicion that ‘Chike and The River’ was not an adventure story, you were probably right. Adventures are the places where play and spontaneity meets childhood dreams and the aching craving for the unknown.

To write an adventure story would be to let Chike go, and Achebe, too eager to teach, just could not do that. As a child, I did not hold my breath when I read the book probably because Achebe did not want me to hold my breath.

There aren’t that many surprises since the book is littered with cultural cues that prepares you for the few twists and turns in the plot. When Chike develops this intense desire to cross the Niger, you get the sense that the curiosity that propels the desire will not result in any discovery worth holding one’s breath for.

This is because Achebe makes Chike out to be curious just so he can show what is wrong about curiosity. Why else do you think that upon his eventual crossing of the Niger and arrival on the shores of Asaba, Chike is disappointed:

“Chike looked around him. He could not believe his eyes. Was this the Asaba about which he had heard so much? There was nothing to see except a few miserable looking houses… From the stories his friends told Chike expected Asaba to be better than any place he had seen.

And he expected the Mid-West to be very different from the East. But now the air felt the same, the soil had the same look and the people went about their business in the same manner.”

Somehow, I am not convinced that children think like this. The mind of a child just seems too imaginative and sharp to make such a bland summation of things. This is one of the moments in the text where you suspect that Achebe has interrupted Chike’s flow of thought to slip in his own authorial agenda.

You get the sense that Chike is lying about his impressions about Asaba so that he can prove right Achebe and a cultural establishment founded on the maxim that there is nothing new under the sun, so why explore, why be curious?

These speculations become even more interesting when we consider the fact that “Chike felt like Mungo Park when he finally reached the Niger.” Partly because of the connections between exploration and colonisation, we are not surprised that Achebe makes sure that Chike’s Mungo-Park airs are undermined by the realisation that, after all, the crossing of the Niger did not bring any discoveries—the Mid-West turned out to be an inferior replica of Onitsha.

Mungo Park is the explorer believed to have discovered the source of the Niger, his exploration being part of a long series of events that culminated in the colonisation of Africa. You do not need to condone the violence and exploitation of colonialism for you to acknowledge that colonialism was an extremely smart program.

At the heart of the construction and management of empire were the obsessive production of knowledge and the use of this knowledge for the proliferation of power. Is it not rather odd, then, that in the face of this reality, Chike is “punished” for his desire to explore and to know by reaching out to worlds beyond his own?

“Hands in pocket, looking this way and that like a European Inspector of Schools,” Chike wanders through streets and market stalls, finds that he might as well have not come on the journey, misses the last Ferry that leaves for Onitsha and is left behind.

Weeping in the darkening solitude of the fast approaching night, Chike must have felt like the sinners in Jesus’ parables who are cast into the out darkness where they weep and gnash their teeth in regret.

Chike’s journey across the Niger, however, is not an all out failure, for he wins a scholarship and gets his picture on the newspaper for ratting out a band of robbers to the police. Having eaten the bitter fruits of curiosity, Chike makes peace with society by presenting himself as a vessel for cleansing society of others that, like him, have strayed far, far away from the beaten path.

Since Achebe could not give Chike any props for crossing the Niger to indulge his curiosity, Chike had to do something in service to society—something that involved the preservation of the status quo—for his efforts in embarking on the journey to be rewarded.

Love for country aside, one has got to admit that Chike and the River is not that captivating and an adventure story. If I were to think aloud, I would even say that it is largely not a very good book mainly because it aspires to teach without first delighting.

In fact, adventure story is a misnomer. ‘Chike and The River’ is a conduct leaflet.

Adventure stories, on the other hand, glorify encounters with the unknown, encounters driven by untamed desires and a wild imagination. Preachy and catechismal, ‘Chike and The River’ leaves very little to the imagination of child and saves the child the trouble of taking interpretative leaps, of filling in the gaps.

Teaching cultural and moral values through stories are not entirely wrong. It’s just best to teach without seeming to do so.

Ainehi Edoro teaches Writing at the Columbia College in Chicago.