Twenty years later Nigerians are still at the cross-roads of culture.

Chinua Achebe
Modern Africa as the Crossroads of Culture 1980

I have always been fond of stories and intrigued by language.—first Igbo, spoken with such eloquence by the old men of the village, and later English, which I began to learn at about the age of eight.

 I don't know for certain, but I have probably spoken more words in Igbo than English but I have definitely 

written more words in English than Igbo. Which I think makes me perfectly 

bilingual. 

Some people have suggested that I should be better off writing in 

Igbo. Sometimes they seek to drive the point home by asking me in which lan­  guage I dream. When I reply that I dream in both languages they seem not to 

believe it. 

More recently I have heard an even more potent and metaphysical

version of the question: In what language do you have an orgasm? That should 

settle the matter if I knew. 

We lived at the crossroads of cultures. We still do today; but when I was a

boy one could see and sense the peculiar quality and atmosphere of it more

clearly. 

I am not talking about all that rubbish we hear of the spiritual void 

and mental stresses that Africans are supposed to have, or the evil forces and 

irrational passions prowling through Africa's heart of darkness. We know the

racist mystique behind a lot of that stuff and should merely point out that

those who prefer  to see Africa in  those lurid terms have not themselves

demonstrated any clear superiority in sanity or more competence in coping 

with life. But still the crossroads does have a certain dangerous potency; dangerous

because a man might perish there wrestling with multiple­headed spirits, but

also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic

vision. On one arm of the cross we sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. On the other my father's brother and his family, blinded by heathenism, of­fered food to idols. That was how it was supposed to be anyhow. But I knew

without knowing why that it was too simple a way to describe what was going 

on. Those idols and that food had a strange pull on me in spite of my being 

such a thorough little Christian that often at Sunday services at the height of 

the grandeur of "Te Deum Laudamus" I would have dreams of a mantle of 

gold falling on me as the choir of angels drowned our mortal song and the

voice of God Himself thundering: This is my beloved son in whom I am well

pleased. Yet, despite those delusions of divine destiny I was not past taking my 

little sister to our neighbor's house when our parents were not looking and 

partaking of heathen festival meals. I never found their rice and stew to have

the flavor of idolatry. I was about ten then. If anyone likes to believe that I was

torn by spiritual agonies or stretched on the rack of my ambivalence, he cer­ 

tainly may suit himself. I do not remember any undue distress. What I do re­  member is a fascination for the ritual and the life on the other arm of the crossroads. And I believe two things were in my favor—that curiosity, and th

little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth.

 The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary 

backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas

steadily and fully.

Afterword.

It would have been thought that twenty eight years later, the issue raised here by Achebe would have been addressed. But still , in 2018 the average Igbo man is still much mired in the cultural confusion of post-colonialism. 

 We are still confused in the direction to go in religion, language even culture. 

Can we ever transcend the African question?