Achebe Honoured
on June 14, 2007
Category: Nigeria, Literature
One of Nigeria’s greatest writers and political commentators, Chinua Achebe was honoured yesterday by being awarded the Man Booker Prize for fiction.
In their tribute, the UK Guardian mentions Achebe’s famous essay responding to the racism of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” , A critique of Conrad’s work which “dehumanizes Africa” and which he describes as fulfilling the desire “need” [Europe]
in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.
Achebe was chosen from a host of well known literary names such as Margaret Atwood d Michael Ondaatje, Doris Lessing, Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie. Achebe is now the second Nigerian to win a literary award this week following Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who won the Orange Prize for Literature for a second time with her novel Half of a Yellow Sun.
Tags: Chinua Achebe; Nigeria; Man Booker
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11 Comments so far
1. Morphological Confetti
June 14th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
This is a great honor! Things Fall Apart was my introduction to African Lit in college. Congratulations Mr. Achebe.
2. Rethabile
June 14th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Pity the man has never had a Nobel Prize. He’s a brilliant writer who is the father of the modern African novel. Was it because his words denounced the West?
I’m happy for him and for African writing as a whole.
3. Sokari
June 14th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Rethabile@probably. He has never been recognised like other post colonial writers and one wonders whether his critique of Conrad thereafter in his work has been the price. You know how these people work. I believe ethnic Nigerian politics also have played a contribution to his marginalisation ie being an Igbo though he has never in my opinion been a secessionist. as for me I would have chosen him 10 times over Soyinka who speaks in Euro language whereas Acebe speaks in the langugage of the people.
4. Beauty
June 15th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
For the students of life (literature), because stories are about life and the people that give us those honourable tales are special. This Achebe piece taken from “Another Africa” is very special. Even the sketchiest telling of this story such as I have done here still reads like a fairy tale, not because it did not happen but because we have become all too familiar with the Africa of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” its predecessors going back to the sixteenth century and its successors today in print and electronic media. This tradition has invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up.
5. Sokari
June 15th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
BeautY@ I am so happy to see you are back - talk soon I hope
6. Beauty
June 15th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Sokari, Chinua Achebe is worth more than the sum of those “owanbe nobel prizes”. Net result from those are more strife, hate and warfare in our world today. To have a thing of beauty and of life, think Chinua Achebe. Thank you, Achebe.
7. Beauty
June 15th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
love the BeautY@, hmmm, another name change might be on the cards but hey, “Name ist Schall und Rauch.” (Goethe’s Faust), loosely translated, that corresponds to Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?”
8. Beauty
June 15th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
love the BeautY@, hmmm, another name change might be on the cards but hey, “Name ist Schall und Rauch.” (Goethe’s Faust), loosely translated, that corresponds to Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?” Ask Achebe.
9. Beauty
June 15th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Chinua Achebe, wrote 24 years ago;
to suggest that Nigerians are fundamentally different from any other people in the world. Nigerians are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable; they will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and inconvenient. The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
10. Brian
June 15th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I think Achebe’s lack of a long overdue Nobel Prize also related to the fact that he is not particularly media-genic and tends to stay out of the media spotlight for the most part.
I don’t think there’s any need to badmouth Soyinka, who I appreciate as well. But Achebe is the father of the modern African novel and a brilliant essayist. He is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century of any nationality and it’s a crime against literature that he hasn’t been so honored yet by the Nobel committee.
11. Brian
June 15th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I think what I meant to say above is that Achebe doesn’t go out of his way to court the western media. Not to imply that he was a recluse or something like that.