PBC reader and Townhall contributor Mary Grabar reminds me that Achebe’s novels are not taught in today’s PC universities and high schools in a way that encourages honesty about the harshness of some tribal customs and the relatively improved ethos introduced by Christianity. Actually, the reverse. She is right. I expected students to see that the tribal customs were brutal and that their disappearance was not to be lamented, but the students’ response was: That’s their culture! (I wish they had the same regard for our culture.) Here is Ms. Grabar’s note to me:

In your Phi Beta Cons posting, you make a good point about what comes through in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I came away with the same conclusions you did. I have not read Achebe’s later novels, but I thought that at least in this novel the author’s attitude appears neutral to Western culture at best. The problem lies with the way the novel is taught. Most college anthologies put a spin on the novel’s message: Western culture corrupts the authentic native culture. In an honors freshman class I taught a few years ago, most of the students had read Things Fall Apart in their AP English classes. Not only did they hold the same anti-West interpretation of the anthologies (and their high school teachers), but had all the critical buzz words (hegemony, colonialism, gender, etc.) to apply to it. Perhaps, Travis Kavulla’s memories of this kind of interpretation imposed in class are still fresh. Sadly, when I’ve taught Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and asked the class what they thought about the tribe’s ritual of suicide, the class responded with the usual relativist comeback: Well, those are their values and the British should not have interfered. Soyinka, of course, makes his British characters buffoons, a point I was able to allude to as ”flat character.”