₦airaland Forum

drugBaronTINUBU:
no wahala
till den

DMerciful:
We gonna do the needful.

drugBaronTINUBU:
ogun kee ur papa

i just dey pray make obi contest 2027

if na war, we will be ready. the druggie will learn

DMerciful:
Obi won in 2023 but it was stolen. It will not be stolen in 2027 because we ain't going to court

ariesbull:
Chinua Achebe, the father of African literature?

“For many people all around the world, Chinua Achebe was their first African writer”
-Kwame Anthony Appiah

There is a report that Prof. Soyinka just repeated his stance about Achebe not being “the father of Africa literature.”

Well, we all could remember that just few weeks after Achebe’s demise, Soyinka had this to say; “Chinua himself repudiated such a tag—he did study literature after all, bagged a degree in the subject…Those who seriously believe or promote this must be asked: have you the sheerest acquaintance with the literatures of other African nations, in both indigenous and adopted colonial languages? What must the francophone, lusophone, Zulu, Xhosa, Ewe literary scholars and consumers think of those who persist in such a historic absurdity?”

He maybe right there. That’s his opinion. Just like everyone else has their own.
Of course, I have my own opinion on this issue but will mostly be sighting the opinions of great minds and institutions on the place of Achebe in African literature.

I think it was Noble Laureate Nadine Gordimer, the South African author that first called Achebe “the father of African literature when in 2007 he won the Man Booker International Price.

Writing on this issue, Kwame Appiah would say; “It would be impossible to say how “Things Fall Apart” influenced African writting. It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or how Pushkin influenced Russians.”

Ainehi Edoro, a Nigerian from Akure and a professor of Global Black Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison, writing in the Brittle Paper, an online literary magazine for readers of African Literature, had this to say on the topic; “The first mistake that Soyinka makes.. is taking the idea of “the father” or “the inventor” way too literally. Achebe is the father of African literature only in a metaphorical sense. No one is saying that Achebe was physically present when African literature came into being—like he was some kind of god who stood before the expanse of Africa’s literary nothingness and said “let there be African literature, and then there was African literature.” She continued; “Before Achebe, if you were black and you were African, the world most likely did not see your work as literary. They would evaluate your work as folklore, myth, or things that should interest an anthropologist, but not literature. This affected the way African writing was circulated globally. Instead of African fiction to be reviewed by the New York Times or shelved alongside Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, it was published by religious presses and reviewed in anthropological journals.

Things began to change in a big way after the global success of Things Fall Apart. It took a novel like Things Fall Apart for the global literary market, readership, and literary institution to see African writers the same way they saw Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or William Shakespeare—people writing things called literature and not myth, or folklore or historical documents or anthropological texts.”
Simon Gokandi, a Kenyan, Chair, Department of English, Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University has this to say; “Achebe is the man who invented African literature because he was able to show… that the future of African writing did not lie in the simple imitation of European forms but in the fusion of such forms with the oral tradition.”

As the founding editor of Heinemann's African Writers Series from 1958, Achebe was managing editorial operations and the refinement of books published under this label. Under Achebe’s editorship, many of the great literary works of great African minds and leaders went through him and this includes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Keneth Kaunda, Leopold Senghor, Kwame Nkuruma, Flora Nwakpa, Aluko T. M, Ekwensi Cyprian, Ferdinand Léopold Oyono, La Guma Alex, John Munonye and many more. After Achebe left Heinemann’s in 1972 works of people like Mandela, Soyink and Obasanjo also came to Heinemann’s.

It’s not just for his great books that Achebe is called by many all over the world “The father of African Literature” but also for his person and his overall contribution to the development of African Literature.

Perhaps that was why while writing in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch, an American author and journalist and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker has this to say; “the fact that [Achebe] must be remembered as not only the father but the godfather of modern African literature owed at least as much to the decades he spent as the editor of Heinemann's African Writers Series.”

Ngugi wa Thiongo would say; “There’s hardly any African writer of my generation who has not been mistaken for Chinua Achebe. Every African novel became Things Fall Apart, and every writer some sort of Chinua Achebe. He never bragged about it, even refusing the unofficial title of father of African literature.” Writing in his tribute to Chinua Achebe, Ngugi also said that Soyinka agreed that he had been mistaken for Achebe in many occasions by so many in many country.

Certainly, it made not little sense when Mandela told Achebe what his novels brought to him among all the African literature he had while in prison: “There was a writer named Chinua Achebe in whose company the prison walls fell.”

Notfogotten:
Soyinka is an envious man, period.

MySolace:
Theres nothing reasonable about soyinka, dont mistake d honour he got as being reasonable, literature? Sth da small Chimamanda Adichie also got. Its just a personal stuff. Has any of his ficticious literature help our country in anyway?

onuman:
Internet emerged and fewer people read books. Wole Soyinka's income from his books dwindled. He had to turn to a rich politician to sustain his life status of a Noble laureate. Soyinka turned to rich Bola Ahmed Tinubu for sustenance.
The first notable political errand by Wole Soyinka for Tinubu was lure Rotimi Amaechi to abandon then President Goodluck Jonathan to join the nascent APC alliance spearheaded by Tinubu.
Amaechi saw a whole PROF AND NOBLE LAUREATE approaching him. Amaechi quickly yielded to Soyinka's entreaties and joined Tinubu in political alliance. Amaechi got used and dumped. The rest is history.

DMerciful:
Labour should collect 60k if the lawmakers and executives will follow the same salary structure

DMerciful:
Borno was paying 8k to teachers

DMerciful:
Arent some states paying 18k and some 8k when minimum is 30k?

DMerciful:
If the minimum wage ia 100k, the employer of the driver would be forced to go up to like 50k. If minimum wage is 60k, the driver might be given 30k.

In essence, the higher the minimum, the better for everybody

mightyhaze:
Them don ban jagabatB?

Ofunaofu:
Is your state amongst the 10 state paying the wage award?

Ofunaofu:
I'm not arguing with you. I am only asking you to show evidence that your state governor paid a wage award for six months. 

Is that a difficult thing for you to do, or were you just making a wild false claim?

Ofunaofu:
Simply show evidence you are running around like a headless chicken

Ofunaofu:
Show evidence that your state governor paid wage award for the period of six months

Ofunaofu:
Which one is wage award again

You are just so confused

Ofunaofu:
You are just being mischievous and irredeemable. 

Why are you not dragging the former governor, Ikpeazu, who was in office at the time the 30k minimum wage was signed into law but refused to implement it? You are calling on Alex Otti, who just took over about a year ago. 

Well, in case you are not aware, Otti has already promised to pay the new minimum wage currently being negotiated when it's signed into law. 

Tell Tinubu to pay Nigerian workers a living wage and stop haggling the amount like market women haggling over the price of crayfish.

Ofunaofu:
Infact, No going back until Tinubu resigns since he cannot pay the minimum wage demanded by the NLC

Its not by force to remain president. He should Step aside for someone else

MajorOvakporaye:
NLC should not listen to this demonic government. They should continue with the strike, shut down everywhere until their demands are met. At least, 200k as minimum wage should not be a bad one. When it comes to executing projects and paying workers, the useless government tells you that there is no money but when it comes to paying themselves, money becomes surplus. Just imagine a Nigerian senator receiving millions as furniture allowance every month.

Anything that makes NLC to listen to this incompetent demonic government, sorry will be their name.

vanbonattel:
Forget those numbers, pay the workers so they don't manage 30k.

Emergency lovers of Poor Nigerians.

alanto:
First how much do you think it will cost federal and state governments to pay their respective workers? What do you think is the size of the government workers both federal and state (considering federal will pay for both)?

Will Dangote, TFC and Access Bank also pay from these 25 trillion? What about a POS business owner that employed an operator? How much does such person have to make to pay 470k a month, how about the local mama put that pays 1k a day which would be the minimum wage if multiply by 30. Will this mama put be able to pay 400k Salary?

And what about the laundry guy that needs extra hands?

Make una dey think small small.

raskymonojendor:
Thanks for helping with the conversion

raskymonojendor:
Why are Labour Party people so wicked? Ordinary 30k, Alex Otti doesn't want to pay.