Stats: 3,191,609 members, 7,944,805 topics. Date: Tuesday, 10 September 2024 at 04:41 AM |
Nairaland Forum / Nairaland / General / Politics / Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements (14102 Views)
Awolowo's Daughter To Achebe: We Are Disappointed / Achebe On Awolowo: Has He Gone Too Far? / Awolowo Was Driven By An Overriding Ambition For Power-chinua Achebe (2) (3) (4)
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (Reply) (Go Down)
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 9:51pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
INTERVIEWER |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 9:51pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
INTERVIEWER 1 Like |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 9:52pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
INTERVIEWER |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 9:53pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
INTERVIEWER |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 9:54pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by dayokanu(m): 9:57pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
ckkris: Can you show me evidence that Awolowo prevented Azikwe from becoming Premier? and present result of that said election to back your assertion |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by EkoIle1: 10:27pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
Unfortunately for the bitter and disgruntled old man, he was too mediocre and tribalistic mentally and in writing to nab the ultimate award and achievement in his very line of occupation which is the Nobel. ......but you can't feel sorry for him because at least, he won the NL hall of shame award. That's a major consolation. 2 Likes |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by dayokanu(m): 10:29pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
He was a great fiction writer though he had problems with the truth and accepting fate he died a bitter man bitter against Awo, Bitter against the Nobel committee, Bitter against Yorubas, Bitter against Nigeria In short he died miserable in spirit 1 Like |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:33pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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. |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by Ribaman(m): 10:36pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
alaoeri: Pls save my ignorance who's Achebe & wetin he do for Nigeria?I guess you think you are very funny?!?!?!? |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:37pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by EkoIle1: 10:38pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
TheBookWorm: 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. 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. |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:39pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
More “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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 10:39pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/22/chinua-achebe-grandfather-african-literature-dies-aged-82 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by Ribaman(m): 10:39pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
dayokanu: He was a great fiction writer though he had problems with the truth and accepting fate Why are you spewing this amount of hatred and bigotry? I don't know if you are aware of the this dictum " from the abundance of the heart, speaketh the mouth" |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:40pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
Eko Ile: 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. |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:43pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:46pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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. ![]() 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. |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by EkoIle1: 10:46pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
TheBookWorm: Shut up. Na only get mouth to speak? lol @ who led the way. He lead the way by peddling hate, bitterness, tribalism and bigotry alright...lmao 1 Like |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 10:47pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
Besides his own writing, Achebe served for years as editor of Heinemann’s “African Writer Series,” Things Fall Apart was the first book in the series. African Writers Series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Writers_Series |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:47pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
The Overlooked Novels ![]() 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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:49pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:51pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
![]() |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 10:58pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
![]() ![]() |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by Kingslaw(m): 11:00pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
May our God accept your soul in Jesus name.amen |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 11:03pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
POSTSCRIPT: CHINUA ACHEBE, 1930-2013 Posted by Philip Gourevitch ![]() 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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 11:08pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 11:12pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by TheBookWorm: 11:16pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
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 |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by tpia5: 11:37pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
Achebe's parents were married by G T Basden, the well known author and authority on Igbo people, whose writings are considered among the foremost works chronicling igbo culture and tradition. G T Basden was the person Mr Brown in Things fall Apart (an easygoing and well liked missionary in the novel) was based on. Achebe was raised christian by his parents, but his dad's brother remained traditionalist, and he learned about african traditional religious practices from his extended relatives. 1 Like |
Re: Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Achievements by dayokanu(m): 11:40pm On Mar 22, 2013 |
Riba_man: You mean Ashebe was speaking out of the abundance of hatred in him? |
Oshiomhole Denies Blasting Aisha Buhari / Atiku Abandoned Us When Lagos LG Allocation Was Seized – Tinubu / Osinbanjo To Be Forced To Resign Over Trademoni Theft To Be Replaced by 5%er
(Go Up)
Sections: politics (1) business autos (1) jobs (1) career education (1) romance computers phones travel sports fashion health religion celebs tv-movies music-radio literature webmasters programming techmarket Links: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) Nairaland - Copyright © 2005 - 2024 Oluwaseun Osewa. All rights reserved. See How To Advertise. 115 |