Nigeria: Chinua Achebe - Eagle On the Iroko

23 November 2008

FROM early in the year, scholars of African and world literature rolled out the drums to celebrate the life of Chinua Achebe and his famous novel, Things Fall Apart; the book which the critic Simon Gikandi has described as constituting "the inaugural moment of African literature."

I have on my own occasion noted that Things Fall Apart is the biography of a continent. It accomplished its narrative status and served notice to those who were wont to maintain the lie of Africa as a historic and cultural tabula rasa that Africa indeed, as he would put it, was people.

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