Today, we celebrate Professor Chinua Achebe’s 87 Posthumous birthday. Here are 75 Notable quotes from the widely considered Africa’s greatest storyteller.

1. One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

2. Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.

3. When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.

4. I tell my students, it’s not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What’s more difficult is to identify with someone you don’t see, who’s very far away, who’s a different colour, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

5. We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’

6. Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

7. When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

8. The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.

9. When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

10. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

11. People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that’s the time to do something about it, not when it’s around your neck.

12. 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.

13. We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation as – we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth.

14. Become familiar with your home, but know also about your neighbours. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.

15. People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that’s the time to do something about it, not when it’s around your neck.

16. The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

17. Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do – it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

18. The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity – that it’s this or maybe that – you have just one large statement; it is this.

19. The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

20. A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

21. I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

Read 75 Notable Chinua Achebe Quotes

Mynd44
Seun
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I prefer achebe to wole soyinka anyday any time.
Even though wole soyinka is from my tribe but I remember him more for bringing cultism into the campus than any literally work.
If you love the biafran ss. And se including benue man click like.
If. You are a cultist and you love wole soyinka click share