Achebe's National Psychology

 I found this to be the most profound statements in Achebe's essay:

Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity.

Achebe is playing with the idea that a nation, like a person, has a psychology.  In 1975, however, psychology was still relatively psychoanalytic; as I understand, concepts like repression and the tripartite mind were still in use. (This is in comparison with today, where these ideas are largely relegated to folk psychology and are widely considered pseudoscientific.) Freudian psychology considers the mind to be determined by subconscious and irrational urges and desires.  These desires are formed as a result of early experiences and are almost always sexual in nature.  The thing to take away from this is: if Achebe believes that a nation can be analyzed as though it were an individual, then that nation is subject to the same irrational urges as an individual.  More importantly, its processes should be considered as the manifestations of repressed sexual desires.

Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

The idea of a nation being an individual leads to numerous psychological implications, some of them amusing (e.g. we seemed to have manifested our Oedipus complex somewhere around the American Revolution), some of them less so (e.g. repression of unwanted "behaviors," i.e. people, typically women or minorities).  However, it also says something about responsibility: if nations are like individuals, then they behave like individuals.  And if they behave like individuals, then they, like individuals, are accountable for their actions.  So, nations are morally responsible for their behavior, and when their behavior violates certain moral norms, they deserve to be punished as a whole, to follow Achebe's analysis.

At the same time, this seems a little much.  After all, surely not everyone is responsible for the actions that their nation, as a whole, committed.  And yet, Achebe isn't really implying anything new; we do this sort of thing all the time.  For a great deal of Americans, Germans after WWII were Nazis, Asians after 1950 were communists, and Muslims after 9/11 were terrorists, to name a few.

I worry that I'm taking Achebe's metaphor too far, but at the same time, I can't shake the sense that he's oversimplifying.  Simplifying is useful insofar as it can help to make sense of something, but in this case, I think that Achebe is just making the problem worse: in considering nations as people, you eliminate its actual individuals as moral agents.  It's a helpful metaphor, but taken further, it's just misleading, not unlike psychoanalysis as a whole.