Africa Is Nobody’s Metaphor : HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS <i> by Chinua Achebe (Doubleday: $17.95; 186 pp.; 0-385-24730-3) </i>

This selection of essays by one of Africa’s foremost writers is taken from various lectures, addresses and prefaces, and covers a wide range over a 23-year period.

The topics vary from the significance of art in the life of a people to a moving memorial to James Baldwin, but the theme throughout is the racism inherent in the Eurocentric view of Africa and the damaging effect it has had on the African psyche.

As a writer, Chinua Achebe has taken on the formidable task of dismantling, brick by tedious brick, some of the carefully constructed myths erected by the colonialists during their occupation.

In a Chancellor’s Lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in February, 1975, Achebe offered a biting analysis of “Heart of Darkness” that to this day continues to enrage some scholars of Conrad.

This book, “taught and read and constantly evaluated, . . . projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization. . . .”

Achebe focuses on Conrad’s description of European and African character, setting and dialogue. England’s Thames River is serene and tranquil as measured against the “frenzy” of the Congo River. African characters speak in unintelligible grunts (when they are allowed any voice at all), while Europeans “murmur” their concerns.

The problem with “Heart of Darkness,” Achebe states, is that “Africa is employed as a metaphorical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity. (It is) reduced to the role of a prop for the breakup of one pretty European mind.

“In effect, the African has been eliminated as a human factor. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans that this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art.

“My answer is no, it cannot.”

In “The Novelist as Teacher,” an essay published in The New Statesman in 1965, Achebe speaks of the result of “the disaster brought upon the African psyche in the period of subjection to alien races . . . (and) acceptance--for whatever reason--of racial inferiority. ‘What we need to do is look back and try to find where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us. . . .’ ”

He speaks of the schoolchildren who preferred to write about winter, a climatological circumstance they have never experienced, rather than describe their encounters with the Harmattan, the parching land-wind charged with dust that regularly sweeps over the land, causing untold damage to crops and cattle and villages. They avoid this the way their elders avoided using water pots of clay and other indigenous materials, preferring instead to draw water with discarded kerosene cans.

Of one schoolboy, Achebe states, “(He said) the other boys would call him a bushman if he (wrote about the Harmattan). Now, you wouldn’t have thought, would you, that there was something shameful in your weather? But apparently we do . . . I think it is part of my business as a writer to teach that boy that there is nothing disgraceful about the African weather, that the palm tree is a fit subject for poetry. Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse--to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement.”

Achebe goes on to say that “the writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. . . . I for one would not wish to be excused. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past--with all its imperfections--was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans, acting on God’s behalf, delivered them.”

He examines such impediments as the inability of Europeans to enter into partnership or even a dialogue with Africans as equals, and cites such attitudes as those of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who, having given up a comfortable life in Europe to become a medical missionary in Africa, and who devoted himself to the alleviation of human suffering, still referred to the African as “my brother, but my junior brother.” “And so,” writes Achebe, “he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being.”

The West, Achebe observes, has become a victim of its own success, has sacrificed its soul on the altar of materialism. As a result, there is “a deep anxiety about the precariousness of its civilization and (there is) a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at an Africa trapped in primordial barbarity, it could say with faith and feeling: ‘There go I but for the grace of God.’ ”

Although the majority of African nations have shed foreign domination in the years since these essays were written, colonialist-inspired attitudes are more difficult to excise. Achebe questions the motives of such writers as V. S. Naipaul, who stated in an interview in 1979 that “Africa has no future.”

Achebe also takes to task those apologists who declare that the past should be forgotten, thus absolving Europe of responsibility for Africa’s present state of affairs. But a past that still impinges heavily on the present cannot and should not be forgotten. It must be explored, examined and understood, if only to insure that such circumstances do not occur again.

These lectures are not cries of despair but rather a call for Africans themselves to define their history and tell their own story, “ . . . and for the West . . . to look at Africa, not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystification but quite simply as a continent of people--not angels, but not rudimentary souls either--just people, often highly gifted and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society.”

The final essay is a postscript: a moving tribute to the memory of James Baldwin.

In the educational system of colonial Nigeria, all books relating to the American experience were prohibited, with one notable exception: Booker T. Washington’s autobiography “Up From Slavery.”

Later, when Achebe discovered works of W. E. B. DuBois, and then the novels of James Baldwin, he was gratified to see that “(Baldwin) brought a new sharpness of vision, a new energy of passion, a new perfection of language to battle the incubus of race which DuBois had prophesied would possess our century.”

Achebe met Baldwin in 1980 in Gainesville, Fla., when they were invited to open a conference sponsored by the African Literature Assn. As Baldwin began to speak, an anonymous, hate-filled voice “came over the public address system and began to hurl racial insults at him and me. I will see that moment to the end of my life.

” . . . It is a failure to comprehend, a willful, obdurate refusal. The world, viewed from the high point of the pyramid where its controllers reside, is working perfectly well and sitting firm. So neither history nor legend encourages us to believe that a man who sits on his fellow will some day climb down on the basis of sounds reaching him from below. And yet we must consider how so much more dangerous our already very perilous world would become if the oppressed everywhere should despair altogether of invoking reason and humanity to arbitrate their cause. This is the value, and the relevance, into the foreseeable future, of James Baldwin.”

In 1975, when Achebe criticized the depersonalization and dehumanization of Africans in Conrad’s novel, he might have noted that the heart of darkness, if it exists at all, lies uneasily in the recesses of the Western psyche.