SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO THE LATE PROFESSOR CHINUA ACHEBE:
A storyteller, a voice of his nation, a cultural impresario, and an intellectual combatant and provocateur.

With more than ten million copies sold, “Things Fall Apart” remains the best...-known work of African literature.
The great African novel? The book could as truly be called a great novel, period. Many writers would prefer to carry that badge of universality, but Achebe—who has gone to his grave without ever receiving the Nobel Prize he deserved as much as any novelist of his era—has said that to be called simply a writer, rather than an African writer, is “a statement of defeat.” Why? Because his project has always been to resist emphatically the notion that African identity must be erased as a prerequisite to being called civilized. Growing up as what he called a “British-protected child” in the colonial order, the young writer came to see that the Empire’s claim that Africans had no history was a violent, if at times ignorant or unconscious, counter-factual effort to annihilate the history of his continent’s peoples.

As a kid, I never missed any episode of the TV adaptation of "Things Fall Apart" on Nigerian Television Authority every Sunday. I read and digested his books beyond academic recommendations as a literature student. I'll share one of my unforgettable favourite quotes from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall apart with you.

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

Away from the book, Have thing really not falling apart? What about all kinds of war and violence that has taken the place of unity, peace and progress in Africa as a result of colonized, inferiority-complex-infected greedy minds?

You shared the untold truth about your defining experience; The Nigerian Civil War a.k.a the Biafran War, 1967-1970. with us in your epic book "There was a country". I will close this by using the titles of some of your great books that I've read; "Arrow of God", "Things fall apart"No longer at Ease and "There Was A country" in One sentence.

Adieu Professor Albert Chinualumogu Achebe(1930 - 2013).

Thank you for insightfully revealing to us that' "There was a country where things have fallen apart and The Arrow of God is No Longer at Ease."

Your Legacies will forever live in our hearts. May your Departed soul Find eternal Rest. Meer weergeven