Nigeria: A Land in Need of Heroes

analysis

In There Was a Country, his memoir published last year, Chinua Achebe counted himself part of a lucky generation, and so they were. Pampered by the departing British as the sun began to set on the Empire, they were in their late twenties and early thirties at independence in 1960, fresh graduates from the country's only university, where they were taught in small classes by professors from Oxford University.

Achebe himself walked from there into a job with the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and quickly rose to Director of External Broadcasting by the time of the civil war seven years later. By then, he had a house in Ikoyi, a 'Jagua' car and four well-received novels to his name, one of which, Things Fall Apart, is widely considered a twentieth-century classic. It was to his great credit that he recognised the privilege for what it was, which perhaps accounted for his famous humility, a much-praised quality in Nigeria - hardly an obituary fails to attribute such to the dearly departed - precisely because it is so rare, at any rate amongst those whose chi cracked their nuts for them.

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