Duru1:


Do you not think your silly question should encompass sentiments of human intellect in order to attract a humanly response?

Negro_Ntns:

please enumerate his contributions to Africa beginning with Nigeria.

Achebe was an ingrate! Twice conferred with national awards and he turned it down each time citing corruption. You should share with us how, sitting in US, he contributed at home to remove the very ill he vehemently opposed. The truth is Achebe remained bitter to his death and he never brought himself around to accept and reconcile the biafran defeat in his own spirit. By accepting a Nigerian honorary award would be an acceptance that his biafran identity is defeated and lost forever. He ended up personifying the Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart.

TheBookWorm: This discussion is simply shameful.

Requiescat in pace Chinua Achebe

ROSSIKE: ^^I actually sympathize a bit with your sentiments. I think Achebe was a bit too much of a pessimist where it concerned modern Nigeria. He failed to understand that developing nations, especially complex ones like Nigeria, need time to develop the institutions and even the culture required to create and sustain advanced societies. He had this naive idea that straight off from independence, we should have been on a one way trajectory to being the new Japan or USA, forgetting that those nations had several centuries of independence before getting where there are. Africans are not superhumans. The colonialists left us without a single proper university on the entire black continent right up till 1960 when they left (apart from in SA). How does such a continent develop into a world class place in a decade or two as Achebe was expecting? It was never going to happen. The coups, the corruption, the ineptitude etc were all very predictable growing pains of newly liberated nations that had been bastardized for centuries by rapacious, unscrupulous foreigners. We've actually come a long way if you look at it objectively. We've brought mass education to our people, which was denied us by the colonialists. We've built some notable infrastructure, and our economies are growing from strength to strength. So we're not standing still. Shame Achebe never found it in him to acknowledge that progress.. But we still honour him for his great works of literary genius which brought glory, international respect and honour to his fatherland and to the continent. His place is assured in the annals of great African heroes.

Hourglass4real: R u for real? Wld u rathr he sugarcoat or lie outrightly abt his ordeal? This ws a real life experince, a writer witnessd first hand nd narrated frm his own angle. There ws a civil war that ws fought nt a nollywood movie and ppl went thru a lot! He didn't wnt al that undr d rug. Hav u asked yourself y our civil war is not being taught@schools? Whil developd countries lik US evn France stil learn abt theirs up till date?y? So that the youth wl learn from the past mistaks made.
If we cld hardly 4get an armed robbery incident that affected us directly, how much more a war?
The prblm we hav in this country is mostly that of ignorance. If u wr ther whn it hapend,wht stopd u frm writing ur own memoir?

Pangea:
So, any one advocating the case for tribal supremacy is inherently wicked, evil, satanic and mad!