₦airaland Forum

...

Like a fresh dewdrop of a new day...may God's loving hand be upon you today to freshen your soul and body!
Happy birthday Eze nwanyi.

She beautiful, they should seal it ASAP!

Here they go again...Iran will wipe Isreal off the surface of the earth, Iran will destroy tel-aviv and Haifa, Iran will destroy America. Bla Bla Bla... Talk is cheap Ayatollah.

Try it and see the might of Israel come upon you.

Assad was injured in a grenade attack, i learnt it was a failed assassination plot. But not to rejoice yet, it is not Assad( the Syrian President). It is the head of the free Syrian Army, General Riad Al- Assad.

Anybody who clamor amnesty for a terrorist organization like BH should have his or her head examined.

How can anyone think of such? Isn't that tantamount to rewarding evil doers?

And what will happen to hundred if not thousands of people who lost their lives as result of BH?

omonnakoda: yes it the turn of the Ibos the Best humans

Is this necessary?

Why must we see everything through the tribal lens?

Africa in mourning for Chinua Achebe, grandfather of African literature


From Nobel laureates to roadside booksellers, Nigerians expressed their grief and shock at the death at 82 of Chinua Achebe, the literary giant whose works made him a household name and national hero. Many who had worked alongside him wept as they paid tribute, and bookstores in downtown Lagos said his books sold out as news of his death trickled in.

Despite his age and distance from his homeland– he died in Boston, where he had lived for years – Achebe's frequent and often barbed pronouncements against an oil-fed Nigerian elite kept him very much in the national psyche. He further endeared himself to a younger generation of Nigerians weary of corruption, when he twice turned down a national honour in 2004 and 2011.

African literature burst onto the world stage with Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which portrays an Igbo yam farmer's fatal struggle to come to terms with British colonialism in the late 19th century. It remains the best-selling novel ever written by an African author, having sold more than 10-million copies in 50 different languages. Nelson Mandela, who read his books during his 27-year incarceration, once said of him: "He was the writer in whose company the prison walls came down."

Wole Soyinka, a fellow giant of African literature, who was informed by the Achebe family in a dawn phone call, said, "We have lost a brother, a colleague, a trailblazer and a doughty fighter."

Writing for the Guardian's Comment is free section, Soyinka said: "No matter the reality, after the initial shock, and a sense of abandonment, we confidently assert that Chinua lives. His works provide their enduring testimony to the domination of the human spirit over the forces of repression, bigotry, and retrogression."

Speaking from the town of Ogidi where Achebe was born in 1930, village head, Amechi Ekume, said: "There is deep mourning all over the village, both young and old are mourning."

"As we say in Igboland, when an extraordinary person dies, the iroko [African teak] has fallen," said a weeping Dora Akunyili, a former minister who worked with Achebe during his tenure at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Achebe's earlier works focused on the social upheavals wrought by British colonialism. "He was the first of our African writers to tell the story from our own perspective. But even beyond Africa, people who were colonised or oppressed could relate to his stories," said Denja Abdullahi, the vice president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, which was founded by Achebe and other writers in 1981.

Wheelchair-bound since a car accident in 1990, the octogenarian had made time to speak with hundreds of fans during a gruelling national tour to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Things Fall Apart. Abdullahi said, "He was always so welcoming to everybody we met, anytime. He was very humane, very reflective. Even when he wasn't speaking, he just had so much presence."

Speaking of Achebe's impact, Abdullahi said: "He's the father of African literature and children always try to imitate the good qualities of their fathers."

The celebrated Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, last year said she wept when she received a note from Achebe praising her best-selling novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. She was too awed to pluck up the nerve to call him back. Meeting him for the second time, she was again too shy to approach as writers including Toni Morrison and Ha Jin crowded around him backstage during an awards luncheon. "Before I went on stage, he told me, 'Jisie ike [more grease to your elbow]'. I wondered if he fully grasped, if indeed it was possible to, how much his work meant to so many."

Novelists from a younger generation described the freedom to write in their own voices, which Achebe's own writing opened up, and the daunting task of trying to live up to his works.

"In the last five decades, just about every post-colonial African author, one way or another, has been engaged in a creative call-and-response with Chinua Achebe," said author Lola Shoneyin. "You are never weaned off his fiction because it renews itself. It gives you something new every time. He was just that kind of storyteller."

Another novelist, Chika Unigwe, recalled reading Things Fall Apart as a young child: "I like to imagine it was on a Sunday afternoon, right after lunch, lying on my bed. I [clearly] recall … the wonder of reading the world he creates in the book so beautifully. Its power did not hit me until years later when I re-read it as a much older reader. I am immensely grateful to him."

His children's books on African folklore remain popular with Nigerian parents. "I just literally handed The Flute and also The Drum to my daughter two weeks ago. She was glued to them, reading and re-reading them. I was too," said Ifeamaka Umeike of her 7-year-old. "I feel like my granddad died."

Released last year, Achebe's final book, There Was A Country, was a deeply personal account of his experience during the 1967-1970 Biafran civil war.

"Even a lot of [white] people buy it," said Success, hawking books amid the choking Lagos traffic yesterday. "We don't have anymore to sell but people are still asking. That means he is a man of the people."

http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/22/chinua-achebe-grandfather-african-literature-dies-aged-82

Chinua Achebe death: 'a mind able to penetrate the mystery of being human

Nadine Gordimer on the fifty year career of the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart, who has died in Boston aged 82



Taking the Irish poet WB Yeats's despairing statement of destruction – things fall apart – for its title, Chinua Achebe's first novel was a presentiment of what was to come in Nigeria during the end of the colonial occupations and their aftermath. It is the founding creation of modern African imaginative literature, the opening act of exploration into African consciousness using traditional modes of expression along with those appropriated from colonial culture, particularly the English language.

That first work was also prescient – not only of Achebe's creative powers to develop as a writer in subsequent works, but of the political upheavals, the embattled end of colonialism, the fight for freedom by which the lives of the people of Africa have been shaped.

Achebe lived through these times – a tragic civil war in his country – as an activist in extreme personal danger, finally exile, fulfilling Albert Camus' statement of what it means to be a writer: "The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer." He kept faith with this commitment. Yet during those years he wrote novels, stories, essays and poems that were a bold revelation to his countrymen and women and the world of what suppression and oppression really meant. And trust Achebe to give a new definition of colonialism. His collection of essays, recently reissued as a modern classic, is The Education of a British-protected Child.

Achebe's works do not fear to challenge those post-colonial, independent regimes in Africa who abuse personal power in every possible way – from banning political opposition, to corruption. His novel A Man of the People, a biting satire on corruption in freed African regimes, uses the blade of humour to alert us to official greed and the cant which legitimises it.

His work Chike and the River was republished in 2011. I read it with the sense of extraordinary entry into a brilliant (I do not use that word fashionably or lightly) mind, a writer's continuing achievement of penetrating the variety, possibilities, mystery of being human in the presence not only of one's own people and country, but of the world.

He did not shirk writing of what "I have chosen to call my Middle Passage, my colonial inheritance. To call my experience colonial heritage may surprise some people. But everything is grist to the mill of the artist. True, one grain may differ from another in its powers of nourishment; still, we must … accord appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way."

What audience, what readers do you have in mind, who is it you are addressing yourself to? The somewhat testy answer is: we write for whoever will read our work.

It surely must mean a great deal to a writer to know that his or her work has reached through prison walls, having been longingly requested and received with difficulty by way of lawyers or rare visitors allowed a political prisoner.

Achebe had that rather special recognition when Nelson Mandela, 27 years behind prison walls, told Achebe what his novels brought to him: "There was a writer named Chinua Achebe in whose company the prison walls fell."


http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/22/chinua-achebe-death-nadine-gordimer

Folks, please ignore the resident bigots , cuz the yorubas that matters have paid their respect to prof. Achebe without resorting to name calling.

Much respect to Coogar, Ajanlekoko, Katsumoto, Desola and the rest of the Yorubasthat came in on the thread drop their piece and leave without name calling.


This other ones jumping from page to page are inconsequential nonentities and they are well known on NL.

The government is looking for a soft-landing after the pouring of out cry from the "Alamsgate" scandal.

What other excuse are we to expect again? Thinking aloud..,

Per Chinua Achebe refused to b coopted and celebrated wit d Political thieves in d midst of sufferin Nigerians. He turned down several awards from corrupt leaders, he never minced words wen he criticised d polity, he refrain frm d big circles of celebrities and continued to uphold his moral virtues and dictate of an ideal society,devoid of d stench and rotteness of corruption. He wil forever b remembered.

Adiu Papa..

Tunjman: Our nationalists tried to build an enviable nation, one that would have a flourishing economy and a perfect political landscape. Of course, their efforts yielded good result, they laid down a platform for true federalism until self-centered and political jobbers started making THINGS FALL APART…When state creation started, regional development gave way to state development and states with less resources were NO LONGER AT EASE…Our common wealth was used to build a state- of –the- art presidential villa at Abuja where they thought would be free from external aggression and attack from hungry Nigerians forgetting that ARROW OF GOD is stronger than all nuclear weapons put together…They detached themselves totally from the people they govern, none of them cared to be A MAN OF THE PEOPLE…Good leadership became scarce like ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH...I’m afraid, if today’s youths don’t question the status quo, the only tale they would tell generation unborn is THERE WAS A COUNTRY.

R.I.P Prof. Chinua Achebe

Brilliant !!!

An icon, a litrary giant, a trailblazer has finally passed away. We 'll never forget you, the sage.

Rip the great one

Br3nd4: we go kill persin na

Chelsea will be unstoppable if they can add the attacking duo of Ramadel Falcao and The other Uruguay guy that plays for Napoli. I forgot his name.

Can you imagine how dangerous Chelsea would be with a couple of class strikers to go with that class midfield?

What is it with wussies jumping at opportunities to exhibit vacuos cyber power! Bad belle!

Les jalous vont megrir.

Stay off the sryup weazie.....and the alcohol and the bolivian marching powder and the pills at the same time. It's going to KILL YOU man.

Speechless!

palugy colina: he shud pray dt GOD gives him another chance..becus if him die..na hellllll...first class

See how you don begin judge him...are you God?

Alhaji Dan kedede ina wuni?
Lafiya kalow? Yaya dey?

This ràpe cases of adult molesting teens are becoming too many, what is it with all this pedophile? What is that a 42yrs old father is looking for in the anüs of a 12yr old teen?

Is it that Nigeria has a ràpe culture or are these are sings of end time? Just thinking aloud...

Less I forget, I thought I read on nairaland the last time that the legistlatures have enacted a law, that henceforth ràpist are to be shot or is it life imprisonment?

Somebody enlighten me here.

Real-Mccoy:
.

I'm loving what you dishing out to the dunderhead obnoxious tribalist, who knows nothing about Nigeria politics.

Where is the thumps up when you need them?

There is something GEJ knows that we the rest of Nigerians don't know... If not, i can't fathom why he should grant a pardon to a certify criminal/embezzler. He has just lost the little credibility left in his administration. What a shamless lot.

BreakIng news!!!


After his Gaffe on National TV, the Lagos State NSCDC Commandant, Mr Obafaiye Shem, who was interviewed on Channels Television and couldn’t tell his organisation’s website, has immediately issued a statement in his defense, saying his “reluctance to put ‘ dot.com ‘at the end of the website was totally intentional and not regretted”

In his statement, he says he “intentionally shied away from using the dot com”, as it sounded sexual, in fact, too sexual to be
uttered on “Live TV”.

He also said the presence of a Woman on the panel made him “too uncomfortable to say the word 'com’, a Homonym of ‘cum’ as it would have been embarrassing for her”

In an exclusive Telephone chat with GossipHA magazine, he further said:
“Look, i did not want to embarrass myself by saying such dirty word. There was a woman there, how would i have sounded? I am a man of high moral standing. If you think i’m telling lie, ask MY OGA AT THE TOP. That Is All”

Meanwhile, GEJ has just watched a recording of the interview, and has set up a committee to find out the real Website of the NSCDC.

Every #OgaAtTheTop workin against my destiny, may God silence u like the "dotcom" in NSCDC WEBSITE.