The National Question

Abstract

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, writing in the 1960s, explains as follows why so many African writers made the past the theme of their work:

The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost …. It would be futile to try and take off before we have repaired our foundations …. This, I think, is what Aimé Césaire meant when he said that the short cut to the future is via the past.¹⁵⁵

The various factions within the nationalist movement studied in the Irish past what they needed for their work in the present and what seemed to provide a basis for their hopes of the future. Where AE and Connolly underlined the communal nature of Gaelic society, to Canon Sheehan it was essentially religious. This is emphasized in a sermon on St Patrick published in 1902, in which the Irish are said to be ‘the chosen people of Heaven’, and their history a puzzle and a miracle to all disbelievers:

They see a. nation in the past, that clung to its faith and its traditions through seven centuries of bitterest persecution, that steadily and steadfastly rejected every bribe to sacrifice its beliefs, and patiently endured every kind of suffering to preserve them; a nation that never murmured, never complained, but suffered in silence, like the Divine Master whom it worshipped; a nation that passed through the fire with the calmness and fortitude of the martyrs …¹⁵⁶