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"But even Herodotus called the Negroes sorcerers [...] it is they who command the elements, and this they call 'magic'."1
HEGEL'S LABELLING OF "NEGROES" AS "SORCERERS," drawing, as he puts it, on "the copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries," is a forceful reminder of how the practice of magic was identified by colonizing nations as a principal sign of Africa's "self-incurred immaturity," from which it needed enlightened deliverance. Things Fall Apart was, of course, conceived as a counter-narrative to such misrepresentation, but the potentially irresolvable problem facing Achebe, on the eve of Nigerian independence, was how to celebrate traditional African beliefs in a more positive light without reinforcing such embedded Western prejudice. The argument developed here is that it was only by resolving this problem that Achebe was able to write Things Fall Apart. The artistic solution involved crafting a narrative perspective to effectively reconcile the traditional with the modern, while the political solution lay in placing the Igbo people, and by extension Nigeria and Africa, within the continuum of history, equipped to embrace the future without abandoning the past. Much was at stake, then, in Achebe's decisions on how to represent magic in his ground-breaking first novel.2
What is meant by "magic" is, of course, highly contentious and its deployment problematical in a postcolonial context. Abdul JanMohamed faced a similar dilemma when coining the awkwardly oxymoronic phrase "sophisticated primitivism"3 to describe Achebe's handling of Igbo beliefs. David Whittaker and Mpalive-Hangson Msiska express surprise at JanMohamed' s
blindness to the fact that within the cultural politics of decolonization in which he locates Achebe, the term 'primitivism', however subtly deployed, is unambiguously seen as signifying negativity, as the quintessential expression of the colonialist economy of representation of the African Other.
They add: "The difficulty is that JanMohamed lacks a positive vocabulary in which to articulate Achebe's aesthetic."4 By problematizing the negative association of magic with the primitive and relating the term to supernatural beliefs held by both colonizer and colonized, this contribution seeks to avoid Hie pitfall identified here. It is clearly the case, however, that to refer to practices and beliefs which are dependent on supernatural forces as "magic"5 is inherently offensive for any faith-based culture, as the embattled distinction between magic and religion has...