Nigeria: If Chinua Achebe Were Alive Today

18 November 2016

Today (November 16, 2016), on the day that would have been Chinua Achebe's 86th birthday, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if he hadn't died three years ago. So much has happened since Nna anyi left us that in my private moments, I have often looked at things that would have made him break his oracular silence and wondered what he would have said to them; things like the very idea of Donald Trump as the president of the United States; a country that hosted him in his winter years. Things like the beheading of an Igbo woman in Kano in the 21st Century. Things like killing people for wanting to be different, like the IPOB youngsters and the Shiites? Would the Chinua Achebe that we all know have blessed all these with his silence?

Achebe's landmark lecture on racism as seen in his essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness reminds us of the ancestry we have in him - a proud heritage that does not flinch from standing firm against prejudice, against injustice and against the world if need be. When Achebe gave that lecture at the University of Massachusetts in 1975, America was still struggling with the horrors of segregation. And while the city of Jackson in Mississippi was celebrating the opening of an integrated public swimming pool for the first time, riots were erupting in Louisville, Kentucky over forced bussing. In fact, the humanity of African Americans was still being negotiated while many Caucasians still saw black Africans as living in trees. That was the social landscape in which Chinua Achebe declaimed Joseph Conrad; a highly revered writer who earned a name by writing pathetic pieces that justified the Slave Trade, colonialism and other prejudices by making a strong argument to establish the inferiority of the black man.

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