Monday, November 16, was the posthumus birthday of award-winning novelist, poet and African literary giant, late Chinua Achebe. He would have been 85 years old if he were still alive.
So popular are Chinua Achebe’s books that students of literature constructed a sentence with three of his books, “When the Arrow of God was No Longer At Ease, Things Fall Apart.”
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart was Achebe’s first novel and it was published in 1958. It became an instant hit all over the world. The book is one of the most widely read book in modern African literature and acclaimed to be a pioneer of what has become a genre of African fiction.
No Longer At Ease
After Things Fall Apart, Achebe wrote No Longer At Ease which is a sequel to Things Fall Apart. It is a story of a civil servant in a post-independence Lagos. The book was dedicated to his wife whom he was dating at the time.
Arrow of God
This novel explores the intersections of Igbo tradition and European Christianity. It is a book that was inspired by a story Achebe heard in 1959 of a how chief priest was imprisoned by a district officer.
A Man of The People
This happened to be Achebe’s fourth book and it talked about the corruption of African politicians after attaining independence which later made the military to take over government. Although he never mentioned Nigeria, his friend JP Clark wrote about the book: “Chinua, I know you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a military coup!” The first Nigerian military coup occurred months after the book was published and this made the Nigerian military suspect that Achebe had a foreknowledge of the 1966 coup.
There Was A Country
This was Chinua Achebe’s last book before he died. The book There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra generated heated arguments as it reopened talk on the Nigerian Civil war of 1967-1970.
During the civil war, Achebe supported the Biafran independence.
No comments:
Post a Comment