₦airaland Forum

The funny aspect about this thread is that there is no difference between the two groups that are battling each other on this thread.

You all are using the laurels of others as a measuring stick for your own success. Create your own achievements and stop living through other people's success.

If you would like more information on this topic, Kishore Mahbubani's book, "March to Modernity" explains these pillars in more detail. He coined the term March To Modernity, in which he stated that Asia's march to material and social well-being which ultimately leads to a more stable and peaceful world. Asia’s modernity was first achieved by Japan, and sequentially the Four Tigers, China and India followed its path of achieving fast economic growth, all of which completely and partially embraced the West’s free market economic system.

ezeagu: Yoruba indentured servants were still arriving in places like Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil way after most European nations had abandoned buying slaves from Africa.

By the way, Efik and aspects of their culture still exists in the Cuban abacua society. Many aspects of Brazilians culture like Candomble and music comes from Angola.

You also forget that in Trinidad & Tobago, some people still practice Obeah. I think that is a derivative of traditional Igbo spirituality.

CAMEROONPRIDE: ^^ shut up , black american spend $3biillion every year in beauty products

Did I say they didn't? I simply said that skin bleaching is not one of their problems. Perms and weaves are the problems.

But I see skin bleaching as more insidious.

This thread is for anyone who is tired of the usual back & forth want to have a dialogue about how to move Nigeria forward.

I know some people may not want to hear this, but in order for Nigeria to reach it's full potential, Nigeria will have to emulate countries that led the way. That means following the path of the West, Japan and now China. It will not be easy, but all of those countries mentioned followed the same path to get where they are to.

That path is called the 7 Pillars according to Mr. Mahbubani, which was the reason for the countries mentioned success.

1. Free Market Economy (Ex: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations

2. Science (Leads to more economic opportunities)

3. Meritocracy/Equal Opportunity

4. Pragmatism (Just another euphemism for copying lol)

5. A Culture of Peace

6. The Rule of Law

7. Education (The most important in my opinion)

This is not only an African phenomenon. I hear this is also quite prevalent in countries in the Caribbean like in Jamaica. Thankfully, this trend is not practiced by African Americans. The only African American I ever heard of bleaching their skin was Michael Jackson. We as black folk need to be proud of our natural beauty. No need to poison your skin or hair.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTWEgiOrSb8

Gal me honour you!
A you nuh bleach out yuh skin
You nuh use no chemical fi look like a brownin.

I consider skin bleaching as self hate.

Just listen to Mr. Vegas's Black and Proud.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTNuwV7NFHM

As someone of African American descent, I can help explain this conundrum.

Slavery in the British colonies was far different than slavery in the Portuguese colonies. The planters (plantation owners) made a concerted effort to make sure that they mixed up the tribes on their various plantations. They did not want members of the same group to be on one plantation, because they feared a slave rebellion which was an ever present fear. Read about Nat Turner's rebellion. Igbos were mixed up with Akan, Woloof, Fulani etc. Plus, drumming, speaking their indigenous language, and any other cultural aspects were forbidden.

The enslaved Africans found in Brazil did not have to be subject to this, because the Portuguese planters did not care if members of one group could be found on one plantation. That is why many aspects of Yoruba culture can be found in Brazil as well as in the Spanish colonies.

If you look at the former British colonies, you can still see the African presence, but it is nothing compared to what is seen in Brazil. There is a reason for that. I hope that helps.

This discussion is simply shameful.

Requiescat in pace Chinua Achebe

If you wish to read spirtualism, just read W.E.B. Du bois book, "Souls of Black Folk."

Sorry I went on a tangent.

Deleted

Appreciation: Chinua Achebe influenced writers around the world

Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

The famous Nigerian author leaves behind his novel, 'Things Fall Apart,' which influenced a generation of writers from Africa and from around the world by giving voice to the oppressed.

One of the towering figures of world literature is gone. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has died at 82.

Now the father of modern African literature will never receive the Nobel Prize that so readers and critics around the world believed he deserved.

Achebe's writing triggered a revolution in fiction which continues to this day. By presenting the world and history as seen through different eyes, he gave voice to the previously unheard. Achebe inspired writers in both Africa and elsewhere to tell their stories, most notably African-American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.

Achebe's most famous novel Things Fall Apart was published in 1958. An exploration of the tragic effect of British colonialism on a traditional African man, it has been published in almost 50 languages.

Among the most famous novels in world literature, it has appeared on countless high school and college reading lists. Admired by critics, it was also popular, spending four weeks on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books List in 2006, where it reached No. 33.

Oprah Winfrey declared it one of the "Five Books Everyone Must Read At Least Once."

Taking its title from a W.B. Yeats poem, it It tells the story of Okonkwo, a "strong man" in an Ibo village in Nigeria. His world is destroyed by the introduction of British colonialism and Christian missionaries.

In an essay, Achebe once wrote that he wanted "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement."

For many years, Achebe -- who was paralyzed in a car accident in 1990 -- lived in the United States where he taught at Bard College and Brown University.

After Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer noted, "Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-author-of-things-fall-apart-dies-at-82/2009751/

Chinua Achebe, Famed Nigerian Writer, Dies At 82

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-WU459_achebe_EV_20130322093934.jpg

The first book of Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was nearly lost to history when a London typing service dismissed the handwritten manuscript—sent from Africa—as a joke.

The joke was on them. Finally published in 1958, “Things Fall Apart” became an improbable success, announcing the Nigerian author, and Africa, on the world’s literary stage. It went on to sell more than 10 million copies in 50 languages.

“It literally invented African literature,” said Simon Gikandi, Kenyan author of “Reading Chinua Achebe.”

Mr. Achebe has died, his publisher confirmed Friday, according to the Associated Press. He was 82 years old.

Born in 1930 in a roadside town in British Nigeria’s rural southeast, Mr. Achebe sought work as a young man in Lagos, the colonial capital, where he wrote his first novel: the tragic story of a champion wrestler reduced to suicide by the arrival of Christian missionaries.

Mr. Achebe wrote his early fiction at a hopeful hour in African history, in the 1950s and 1960s, when waves of independence inspired young writers to celebrate—and perhaps romanticize—the sunnier aspects of life in the so-called dark continent. Many sought to capture the grandeur of Africa’s landscapes, its rivers and gardens.

Mr. Achebe was more wry—and more skeptical of Africa’s winds of change. In the novels he wrote, African society could be both beautiful but brutal, and always in danger of falling apart.

“He started writing at a moment of great expectations, but his works contained this important cautionary note, that things could go wrong,” Mr. Gikandi said.

Soon, they did. Mr. Achebe’s 1966 novel “Man of the People” ends with a military coup. Weeks after its publication, Nigerians awoke to learn their military had seized power for the first of six times. Civilians and soldiers alike accused the novelist of enjoying foreknowledge of the coup.

Within months, Nigeria was engulfed in independent Africa’s first humanitarian catastrophe: a war for the independence of Mr. Achebe’s Igbo homeland that left one million people dead, most of them children who starved.

The novelist delved into this painful period in his last book, “There Was A Country.”

After the conflict ended, in 1970, he drifted from fiction toward criticism and talent-scouting. As editor of a British publishing house Heinemann’s African Writer Series, he edited, published, and promoted early entrants into Africa’s pantheon of writers: Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah, Cameroon’s Mongo Beti.

A brief foray into politics, campaigning for a political party, prompted him to write 1982’s “The Trouble With Nigeria,” a 68-page rant against everything from taxi drivers to corruption that op-ed writers still quote from liberally. His country—Africa’s most populous—looked to him for guidance. At literary seminars in the U.S., Nigerians would pack the seats and exhaust him with questions about their country’s politics—to the dismay of non-Nigerians who had come to discuss literature.

In 1975, he accomplished a feat rare even for authors: He knocked a classic, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” from the literary canon. The 1903 novel had been Europe’s most commonly read account of Africa, and bristled with depictions of Africans as half-human cannibals. In an influential series of lectures and essays, Mr. Achebe called the author “a thoroughgoing racist.” The charge stuck. Steadily, Mr. Conrad’s share of university reading lists fell as Mr. Achebe’s rose.

In 1990, a car accident in Lagos left Mr. Achebe paralyzed from the waist down, and sent him to Bard College in New York, an easier setting than Nigeria for a wheelchair-constrained author. In 2009, he joined Brown University in Rhode Island. He would live and lecture in the U.S. for the final decades of his life.

By then, “Things Fall Apart” ranked as one of America’s most frequently taught high-school books.

Yet its author played down praise. Twice, he rejected Nigeria’s second-highest honor, accusing the leaders who award the prize of trying “to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom.”

When critics credited him with transforming American and European views of Africa, he abstained—he thought they hadn’t changed all that much.

But he believed they could. In a 1994 interview, he summarized the driving thought behind his art: “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-famed-nigerian-writer-dies-at-82/?mod=google_news_blog

Chinua Achebe and the ‘Bravery of Lions’
By JOHN WILLIAMS

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer who died on Thursday at 82, spent his life thinking deeply about his home country, Nigeria. After moving to the United States in 1990, he still kept a close eye on Nigeria and offered strong opinions about its leadership and politics.

In 2010, he told the Guardian: “If we took just one of our political or military leaders, put them on trial in Nigeria, showed how much money they had taken and sentenced them to an adequate punishment, from that point corruption would begin to end.”

Some readers believed Mr. Achebe’s views became muddled by nostalgia in later years. Writing about Mr. Achebe’s memoir “There Was a Country” for The New York Times Book Review last year, Adam Nossiter said the book sounded a familiar theme: Mr. Achebe’s “bitterness over what Nigeria became after independence from Britain in 1960.” Mr. Nossiter called the writer’s outlook a “partially rose-tinted view of the colonial past.”

But Mr. Achebe’s work, especially the novel “Things Fall Apart,” a mainstay of high school and college reading lists, has opened many eyes to Africa’s history by telling stories removed from the frame of the colonial perspective.

During a 2008 tribute to Mr. Achebe organized by PEN, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who like Mr. Achebe grew up in southeastern Nigeria, recalled the books she first read as a child: “Mostly British children’s books,” she said, “in which all the characters were white and ate apples and played in the snow and had dogs called Socks.” When she first started writing her own stories, the people in them had similar characteristics. “I didn’t know that people like me could exist in books,” she said. “I had assumed that books, by their very nature, had to have English people in them. And then I read ‘Things Fall Apart.’ ”

In a 1994 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Achebe spoke of “the danger of not having your own stories”:

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-and-the-bravery-of-lions/

Feed me more: Is this necessary?

Why must we see everything through the tribal lens?

It is getting quite tiresome.

Yet, some of these people will be the same people complaining about racism in the United States or the United Kingdom. If they cannot show their fellow countryman with respect, how do they expect the respect of others?

One_Naira: he was in his 80's though so i don't understand why people are shock. Eventually old life would take him. he'll greatly be missed

Even though he was in his 80s, it was a sudden death. It was not because of some long and protracted illness.

I really like Ben Okri's work, but I think Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie may be the next Nigerian to win the Nobel Laureate in Literature.

All she has to do follow up on the success of her first novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun."

OgidiBoy: I just got off the phone with family members in Ogidi my home town and home town of Prof Acheba, the whole Town is in shock and people are just in a daze over the news of our belove Professor.

The whole world is in shock of his passing. He has solidified himself among the world's literary greats.

Chinua Achebe and Nairobi Half Life

By Hayden Bixby
International Program Coordinator, Cura Orphanage

It was 1988 at the University of Nairobi, and Chinua Achebe was only three feet away from me when my cheeks prickled and blushed a deep red. I had read his work already, but his presence and his voice seemed to admonish me, personally, to "cultivate the habit of humility" -- and I felt practically commanded to examine what the hell I was up to there in Africa.

At 19 years old, I had come to Kenya essentially on a whim, and I was making the most of the cosmopolitan and chaotic city that had become my temporary home. Nairobi offered itself up to this newcomer: a great exchange rate made it possible for me to live (frugally) for $2000 a year; my smiling white face endeared me to well-heeled ex-pats who had their drivers pick me up for dinners at their guarded compounds; and a little bravado could get me a free day by the Norfolk pool

He never knew me, of course, but I've carried his books and his words through these intervening decades... and his death this week has reminded me to re-examine what the hell I'm still up to: still traveling to Nairobi after all these years, not exactly a tourist but certainly not a Kenyan, either.

My musings have been helped along by the serendipitous timing of the U.S. screenings of Nairobi Half Life. Blissfully, this is no Out of Africa (blech). It tells a Kenyan story on Kenyan terms, and it is rough and tender and dark and funny.... Its main character, Mwas, arrives in Nairobi in search of opportunities, and is quickly offered several: the opportunity to shovel shit off a slick cell block floor; the opportunity to separate fellow citizens from their belongings; and the opportunity to hustle and be hustled, to name a few. But Mwas is not only a con-artist, he's also an artist in a more conventional sense: he's an aspiring actor who gets his break in a local theater production.

His talent for performance helps him live by his wits in a city that is both unforgiving and invigorating -- he's entrepreneurial and sharp, and he embodies Nairobi's allure. He - and it - is charming and vibrant, but also unflinching and unromantic when that's what the moment calls for.

His life, and the Nairobi of this film, is untouched by NGOs providing fresh water or AIDS cocktails or educational programs. There are no sundowners at the Muthaiga Club or lectures at the National Museum or khaki-clad wazungu headed out to ogle lions. These are realities of modern Nairobi, too, but we've seen these images before -- in documentaries that feature do-gooders and their projects to lift people out of poverty, and in feature films that romanticize pre-colonial African life and/or demonize the bored memsaabs who order the help to refresh their gin and tonics. I see bits of myself reflected in each of these other visions of Africa... not as an oppressor exactly, but certainly as a beneficiary of historical oppression. In this vision of Nairobi, however, people like me are inconsequential.

Nairobi Half Life has no interest in revisiting Africa's historical or international relationships. Instead, it beautifully illustrates another of Achebe's observations about the progression into modern urban Africa:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hayden-bixby/chinua-achebe-dead_b_2932794.html

I met Achebe a few times in his wheelchair-bound American years. When he gave you his hand it was at once firm and soft and notably warm. He had a gentle presence—a man fully capable of wit and mischief and open laughter, but whose default expression, at ease, was one of sympathetic melancholy. His voice was another matter: low-pitched and rich and adamant. When he spoke, it was with great command and unmistakable music. In Boston, in 1999, at a celebration of the centennial of Ernest Hemingway’s birth, I had the honor of sitting on a panel with Achebe, on the subject of writing about Africa. He was as cogently withering about Hemingway’s Africa—a place he could not recognize because there were no speaking Africans there—as he was, in one of his most famous essays, about Joseph Conrad’s. At the end of the session, the floor was opened to questions. An evidently confused woman in the audience took the opportunity to ask “In what sense are you writers about Africa?” The other panelists—Nadine Gordimer and Kwame Anthony Appiah—were too baffled to respond. Not Achebe. He leaned into his microphone, and very slowly and melodically, with rolling “R”s and drawn out “O”s, roared: “Read. Our. Books.” The woman said, “But I’m asking you.” And Achebe said, “I’m telling you: Read. Our. Books.”

What better epitaph for the man, and what better way to remember him: read his books.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/postscript-chinua-achebe-1930-2013.html#ixzz2OJElJZDB

Achebe made his case in many forms—essays and lectures, interviews and acts of protest, and as an ideologue and propagandist for the failed Igbo-nationalist secessionist state of Biafra—but he made it most cogently on the final page of “Things Fall Apart.” With the reader in the full emotional grip of the many dimensions of Okonkwo’s epic fate, the author boldly and deftly adds another, shifting to the perspective of a colonial governor who considers Okonkwo’s story good material—“perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph”—for the book he is planning to write: “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”

Having, with his first effort, created a permanent place for the African novel in the world literary canon, Achebe continued to be a prolific imaginative writer, producing novels and stories that evoked, in a range of voices, the trials of Nigeria’s pre-colonial and colonial history, and the traumas of its post-independence ordeals: from “No Longer at Ease” and “A Man of the People” in the sixties to “Girls at War” and “Anthills of the Savannah” in the aftermath of the Biafran war. But the fact that he must be remembered as not only the father but the godfather of modern African literature owes at least as much to the decades he spent as the editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. In that capacity, Achebe served as the discoverer, mentor, patron, and presenter-to-the-world of so many of the now-classic African authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. The series’s orange-spined, generously inexpensive paperbacks carried a stamp of excellence that drew readers everywhere to essential works by writers as varied as Kenneth Kaunda, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dennis Brutus, Tayeb Salih, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer, to name but a few: it is an extraordinary legacy.

As a storyteller, as a voice of his nation, as a cultural impresario, an intellectual combatant and provocateur, Achebe gained with age the status in Nigeria of a bard and a sage that the modern world rarely affords to writers. After suffering terrible injuries in a car crash, he spent much of his time in the last decades of his life in America, where he settled into long-term professorships at Bard College and Brown University. But when he returned to Nigeria he was received as a national hero. Crowds of thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—gathered to pay tribute to him. The adoration hardly softened him, though. He was, in his old age, as much a scold to his compatriots as he had ever been in his youth.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/postscript-chinua-achebe-1930-2013.html#ixzz2OJDTsAJG

POSTSCRIPT: CHINUA ACHEBE, 1930-2013
Posted by Philip Gourevitch

https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/chinua-achebe-290.jpg

Chinua Achebe, who died in Boston today at the age of eighty-two, was a few weeks shy of thirty years old when Nigeria was granted independence from the British Empire, on October 1, 1960, and he was already acclaimed, worldwide, as the preëminent novelist of “black Africa.” The British publisher Heinemann had brought out Achebe’s first novel, “Things Fall Apart,” only two years earlier, and it had to have been the first African novel that many of his admirers—on the continent and off—had read. The sure tragedian’s authority with which Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo elder of immense strength and pride, a figure of heroic qualities within the traditions of his culture, who is ill-served, brought low, and undone by those same qualities in his first violent encounters with colonial power, has ensured that still today, with more than ten million copies sold, “Things Fall Apart” remains the best-known work of African literature.

The great African novel? The book could as truly be called a great novel, period. Many writers would prefer to carry that badge of universality, but Achebe—who has gone to his grave without ever receiving the Nobel Prize he deserved as much as any novelist of his era—has said that to be called simply a writer, rather than an African writer, is “a statement of defeat.” Why? Because his project has always been to resist emphatically the notion that African identity must be erased as a prerequisite to being called civilized. Growing up as what he called a “British-protected child” in the colonial order, the young writer came to see that the Empire’s claim that Africans had no history was a violent, if at times ignorant or unconscious, counter-factual effort to annihilate the history of his continent’s peoples.'

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/postscript-chinua-achebe-1930-2013.html#ixzz2OJCDs2q1

The Essential Nonfictions

The Biafran War waged from 1967 to 1970, and is the subject of Achebe’s final book, the memoir There Was a Country. The accuracy of A Man of the People’s events was such that the Nigerian government that took over after the counter-coup thought that Achebe must have been a conspirator, and he was forced to flee to Britain. He fully supported the Biafran secession, and took a break from fiction, thinking that politics was more important. (He would not write another novel until his final one, 1987’s Anthills of the Savannah.) When the civil war ended in 1970 with the Nigerian government crushing the Biafra republic, Achebe increasingly took refuge in Britain and the United States. He moved to the U.S. for good when he was forced to undergo overseas medical treatment after a car accident in Nigeria that left him paralyzed from the waist down in 1990.

At the center of Achebe’s legacy is his clear analysis of Africa, which the world sees as a homogenous continent of malfunction and despair. Achebe attacks the use of Africa as an empty metaphor, which he voiced in a now-legendary Chancellor’s Lecture he gave at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on Joseph Conrad’s racism. The classic essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” is included in Hopes and Impediments, a collection that commemorates one of the most brilliant minds of our time.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-dies-beyond-things-fall-apart-and-his-best-books.html

The Overlooked Novels

https://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-dies-beyond-things-fall-apart-and-his-best-books/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage_0.img.503.jpg/1363987972539.cached.jpg

Things Fall Apart lives on in Achebe’s second novel, 1960’s No Longer at Ease, which follows the story of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi. Whereas Okonkwo’s downward spiral was Sophoclean, Obi’s path was supposed to be up, up, and up. He leaves his village, receives a British education, and takes a job as a civil servant in Lagos. But, in the end, he is “no longer at ease,” and things fall apart just as tragically.

Achebe was not only a chronicler—he’s even been considered an oracle. A Man of the People, his 1966 fourth novel, is about the conflicts of a young and educated school teacher, Odili, and his former teacher, Chief Nanga, now a corrupt Minister of Culture. The story ends with a coup, which anticipated a bloody one on January 15, 1966, the day the book was published. After a counter-coup and genocide, the Ibo people, of which Achebe is a member, seceded from Nigeria and formed the Republic of Biafra, leading to the civil conflict known as the Biafran War—which led to even more genocide. An estimated one million to three million people, mostly Ibo, were killed or starved when the Nigerian government blockaded the Biafran border.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-dies-beyond-things-fall-apart-and-his-best-books.html

Chinua Achebe Dies: Beyond ‘Things Fall Apart,’ And His Best Books

The titan of African literature has died at the age of 82. We know him as the writer of Things Fall Apart, but here’s a primer on his other great novels and nonfiction—and his life.

https://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/03/22/chinua-achebe-dies-beyond-things-fall-apart-and-his-best-books/_jcr_content/body/inlineimage.img.503.jpg/1363986650692.cached.jpg

The Classic

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer and statesman who changed African literature forever, has died at the age of 82. You know him as the writer of Things Fall Apart, his debut novel of 1958, about the decline and fall of the proud Okonkwo, leader of a collection of villages among the Ibo people of Nigeria who are besieged by changes wrought by British colonization. As Ruth Franklin wrote in The New Yorker, Achebe practically invented the Great African Novel. There were famous Nigerian writers before Achebe, like Amos Tutuola, who based his novels on folk tales, and Cyprian Ekwensi, who wrote memorable children’s stories. But, as Howard French wrote on the 50th anniversary of the publication, “among the greatest qualities of Things Fall Apart is the vigor of its revolt against the everyday amalgamations and condescension that treat Africa as an undifferentiated wasteland.” Things Fall Apart stood up and stood strong, as Achebe did throughout his career.

His novel was nearly lost before ever seen by the public. When Achebe finished his manuscript, he sent it to a London typing service, which misplaced the package and left it lying in an office for months. The proposed book was received coolly by London publishers, who doubted the appeal of fiction from Africa. Finally, an educational adviser at Heinemann who had recently traveled to west Africa had a look and declared: “This is the best novel I have read since the war.”

In mockery of all the Western books about Africa, Achebe ended “Things Fall Apart” with a colonial official observing Okonkwo’s fate and imagining the book he will write: “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.” Achebe’s novel was the opening of a long argument on his country’s behalf.

“Literature is always badly served when an author’s artistic insight yields to stereotype and malice,” Achebe said during a 1998 lecture at Harvard University that cited Joyce Cary’s “Mister Johnson” as a special offender. “And it becomes doubly offensive when such a work is arrogantly proffered to you as your story. Some people may wonder if, perhaps, we were not too touchy, if we were not oversensitive. We really were not.”

Achebe could be just as critical of his own country. The novels “A Man of the People” and “No Longer at Ease” were stories of corruption and collapse that anticipated the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 and the years of mismanagement that followed. He not only supported Biafra’s independence, but was a government envoy and a member of a committee that was to write up the new and short-lived country’s constitution. He would flee from Nigeria and return many times and twice refused the country’s second-highest award, the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic, over the lawlessness in his home state of Anambra.

In 2011, Nigeria’s presidency said Achebe’s refusal “clearly flies in the face of the reality of Nigeria’s current political situation.” Achebe responded that “A small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom.”

“I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples,” Achebe warned.

Besides his own writing, Achebe served for years as editor of Heinemann’s “African Writer Series,” which published works by Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Biko and others. He also edited numerous anthologies of African stories, poems and essays. In “There Was a Country,” he considered the role of the modern African writer.

“What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue,” he wrote. “A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories — prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/agent-nigerian-author-chinua-achebe-who-wrote-things-fall-apart-xxxx-at-age-82/2013/03/22/4403921e-92eb-11e2-8e33-9cc6c739d012_story_2.html

Eko Ile: Still, no Nobel. It's like some Yeye Olympic athlete saying he got this and that award but not a single gold medal which is the ultimate prize ... Please cut out the BS.

No Nobel = Failure.

Will you shut up bigot. I am just giving honor to someone who led the way in African literature. This is not some contest that your warped mind probably cannot comprehend.

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“Now, I grew up among very eloquent elders. In the village, or even in the church, which my father made sure we attended, there were eloquent speakers. So if you reduce that eloquence which I encountered to eight words ... it’s going to be very different,” Achebe, who attacked the novel in a landmark lecture and essay “An Image of Africa,” told The Associated Press in 2008. “You know that it’s going to be a battle to turn it around, to say to people, ‘That’s not the way my people respond in this situation, by unintelligible grunts, and so on; they would speak.’ And it is that speech that I knew I wanted to be written down.”

His first novel was intended as a trilogy and the author continued its story in “No Longer At Ease” and “Arrow of God.” He also wrote short stories, poems, children’s stories and a political satire, “The Anthills of Savannah,” a 1987 release that was the last full-length fiction to come out in his lifetime. Achebe, who used a wheelchair in his later years, would cite his physical problems and displacement from home as stifling to his imagina

Achebe never did win the Nobel Prize, which many believed he deserved, but in 2007 he did receive the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honor for lifetime achievement. Achebe, paralyzed from the waist down since a 1990 auto accident, lived for years in a cottage built for him on the campus of Bard College, a leading liberal arts school north of New York City where he was a faculty member. He joined Brown in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature.

Achebe, a native of Ogidi, Nigeria, regarded his life as a bartering between conflicting cultures. He spoke of the “two types of music” running through his mind, Ibo legends and the prose of Dickens. He was also exposed to different faiths. His father worked in a local missionary and was among the first in their village to convert to Christianity. In Achebe’s memoir “There Was a Country,” he wrote that his “whole artistic career was probably sparked by this tension between the Christian religion” of his parents and the “retreating, older religion” of his ancestors. He would observe the conflicts between his father and great uncle and ponder “the essence, the meaning, the worldview of both religions.”

For much of his life, he had a sense that he was a person of special gifts who was part of a historic generation. Achebe was so avid a reader as a young man that his nickname was “Dictionary.” At Government College Umuahia, he read Shakespeare, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jonathan Swift among others. He placed his name alongside an extraordinary range of alumni — government and artistic leaders from Jaja Wachukwa, a future ambassador to the United Nations; to future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka; Achebe’s future wife (and mother of their four children) Christine Okoli; and the poet Christopher Okigbo, a close friend of Achebe’s who was killed during the Biafra war.

After graduating from the University College of Ibadan, in 1953, Achebe was a radio producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp., then moved to London and worked at the British Broadcasting Corp. He was writing stories in college and called “Things Fall Apart” an act of “atonement” for what he says was the abandonment of traditional culture. The book’s title was taken from poet William Butler Yeats’ ”The Second Coming,” which includes the widely quoted line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/agent-nigerian-author-chinua-achebe-who-wrote-things-fall-apart-xxxx-at-age-82/2013/03/22/4403921e-92eb-11e2-8e33-9cc6c739d012_story_1.html

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, pioneer of modern African literature, dies

NEW YORK — The opening sentence was as simple, declarative and revolutionary as a line out of Hemingway:

“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond,” Chinua Achebe wrote in “Things Fall Apart.”

Africans, the Nigerian author announced more than 50 years ago, had their own history, their own celebrities and reputations. Centuries of being defined by the West were about to end, a transformation led by Achebe, who continued for decades to rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country.

Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident, died at age 82 in Boston on Thursday after a brief illness. He lived through and helped define traumatic change in Nigeria, from independence to dictatorship to the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960s. He knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the United States but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honors from a government he refused to accept.

In traffic today in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, hawkers sell pirated copies of his recent memoir about the Biafra war, “There Was a Country.”

“What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war — ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery,” wrote Achebe, whose death was confirmed by Brown University, where he taught.

His eminence worldwide was rivaled only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and a handful of others. Achebe was a moral and literary model for countless Africans and a profound influence on such American-based writers as Ha Jin, Junot Diaz and Morrison, who once called Achebe’s work an “education” for her and “liberating in a way nothing had been before.”

His public life began in his mid-20s, when Nigeria was still under British rule. He was a resident of London when he completed his handwritten manuscript for “Things Fall Apart,” a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman’s downfall at the hands of British colonialists.

Turned down by several publishers, the book was finally accepted by Heinemann and released in 1958 with a first printing of 2,000. Its initial review in The New York Times ran less than 500 words, but the novel soon became among the most important books of the 20th century, a universally acknowledged starting point for postcolonial, indigenous African fiction, the prophetic union of British letters and African oral culture.

“It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing,” the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn’t only play the game, he invented it.”

“Things Fall Apart” has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. Achebe also was a forceful critic of Western literature about Africa, especially Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” standard reading for millions, but in Achebe’s opinion, a defining example of how even a great Western mind could reduce a foreign civilization to barbarism and menace.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/agent-nigerian-author-chinua-achebe-who-wrote-things-fall-apart-xxxx-at-age-82/2013/03/22/4403921e-92eb-11e2-8e33-9cc6c739d012_story.html

Professor Chinua Achebe has been getting a lot of accolades from news organizations in the United States. He was truly a rare bright spot in Nigeria's troubled history.

NPR, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and a host of other news organizations have written Op-Eds. I believe Chinua Achebe's contribution to humanity is set for stone.

The pen is definitely mightier than the sword.