African Series
Throughout his long career, Achebe was a voice for the peoples of Africa and also a formative influence on a new generation of African writers. This volume of tributes and reflections is a fitting testament to his legacy.
The madman.--The voter.--Marriage is a private affair.--Akucke.--Chike's school days.--The sacriticial egg.--Vengeful creditor.--Dead men's path.--Uncle Ben's choice.--Civil peace.--Sugar baby.--Girls at war.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Copyright date: August 1, 1991
About the Author
Niyi Osundare
Poet, dramatist, critic, essayist, and media columnist, Niyi Osundare has authored over ten volumes of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, a book of essays, and numerous articles on literature, language, culture, and society. He regards his calling as a writer and his profession as a teacher as essentially complementary.
He was educated on three continents: B.A. (Honours) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, M.A. from the University of Leeds in England, and Ph.D. from York University, Toronto, Canada. The wide and varied exposure accruing from this has proved very useful for his writing and teaching careers. Born in Nigeria, one of the most linguistically and culturally heterogeneous countries in the world, he learnt early in life the complexities and challenges of diversity.
He began his teaching career at the University of Ibadan in 1974 and rose to the position of full professor there in 1989. From 1993 to 1997, he was the chair of its Department of English. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990 to 1991, and in 1991/92, an associate professor of English at the University of New Orleans, where he returned as full professor in 1997, and was selected university research professor in 2001. His areas of specialization are African literature, literature of the African diaspora, literary stylistics, sociolinguistics, and creative writing
This play satirises the decay in the university system in Nigeria as symptomatic of larger social ills: prostitution, religious zeal and cultism, corruption and social injustice.
In the drama, a young woman, Beatrice, is raped by a group of cultists. The perpetrators are brought to court. But as the judge turns out to be an aunt of one of the cultists, the court is corrupted as she bribes the police to release her nephew.
About the Author:
Olu Obafemi is a playwright, poet and scholar. He is Professor of English at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria, and President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). He is a notable critic of contemporary theatre in Nigeria.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The late Ola Rotimi is one of Nigeria's most well known playwright and Professor of Dramatic Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University
Book by Chinua Achebe
Chike and the River is a children's story by Chinua Achebe. It was written in 1966, and was the first of several children's stories Achebe would write.
Published: 1966
Author: Chinua Achebe
Original language: English
Genres: Children's literature, Novel
― Chinua Achebe, Morning yet on creation day: Essays
Book by Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe's books are being read throughout the Engish-speaking world. They have been translated into more than fifty languages. ... Google Books
Authors: Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors
Copyright date: October 1, 1997
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987
One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing ...
Author: Chinua Achebe
Copyright date: 1988
This is an African retelling of Euripides: an unnervingly topical story of a people and a beloved city destroyed by the brutality of war. The play was first performed in Lagos in 2003 under the distinguished director Chuck Mike, and subsequently toured the UK.
The author introduces his work:
‘In 1821, the combined forces of the armies of two Yoruba kingdoms ransacked the city of Owu. Owu was a model city-state, one of the most prosperous and best organised of those times. The Allied Forces attacked it with the pretext of liberating the flourishing market…they slaughtered all the males and carried the females into slavery. Owu was never rebuilt…So it was quite logical that as I pondered over this adaptation of Euripides’ play in the season of the Iraqi war that the memories awakened in me should be those of the tragic Owu war…’
About the Author
Femi Osofisan
Femi Osofisan is a prolific Nigerian critic, poet, novelist, and playwright whose work attacks political corruption and injustice, was born in Erunwon village in the old Western Region of Nigeria and educated at the universities of Ibadan, Dakar, and Paris; he is a professor of drama at the University of Ibadan. Among the literary awards and commendations he has won are prizes from the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) for both drama (1980) and poetry (1989) and in 2004 he was awarded the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), the highest academic prize in that country.
In this collection of short stories, Aidoo elevates the mundane in women's lives to an intellectual level in an attempt at challenging patriarchal structures and dominance in African society. Written from a child's perspective, Aidoo subverts the traditional beliefs and assumptions about the child's voice. Her inimitable sense of style and eloquence, explores love, marriage and relationships with all the issues they throw up for the contemporary African woman. In doing so, she manages to capture the very essence of womanhood.
"The New Tribe" tells the story of Chester's long search for his true identity, and the challenges he faces as a black child in a white family.
House Of Symbols is a remarkable achievement in plot, style, characterization, atmosphere and every other thing that goes into a powerful novel. It is the story of the sensitive Osai as well as his Eaglewoman into whose bag 'money flows like the Otaru River.' Terror mingles with humor, pain with pleasure in this fascinating saga set in a town in Eastern Nigeria.
This is a profoundly written book, a work of immense significance which fills an aching vacuum in African Literature
-The Lumina
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is Professor and head of the department of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. She is a prolific writer, with over 50 publications, including 14 books and numerous journal articles. She has won at lea4A four major creative writing prizes, including ANA Prizes for Prose Fiction and Women Writing, and WORDOC Short Stone Competition. She was a visiting Commonwealth Fellow at SOAS, the University of London in 1989/90 and a Research Fella' at University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa in 1999/2000.
The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. THINGS FALL APART is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within
novel is generally a satirical attack on the Ghanaian
society during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime and the period
immediately after independence in the 1960s. It is often claimed to rank with "Things Fall Apart" as one of the high points of post-colonial African Literature.
A quote from Chapter 6:
"And where is my solid ground these days? Let us say just that the cycle from birth to decay has been short. Short, brief. But otherwise not at all unusual. And even in the decline into the end there are things that remind the longing mind of old beginnings and hold out the promise of new ones, things even like your despair itself. I have heard this pain before, only then it was multiplied many, many times, but that may only be because at that time I was not so alone, so far apart. Maybe there are other lonely voices despairing now. I will not be entranced by the voice, even if it should swell as it did in the days of hope. I will not be entranced, since I have seen the destruction of the promises it made. But I shall not resist it either. I will be like a cork. It is so surprising, is it not, how even the worst happenings of the past acquire a sweetness in the memory. Old harsh distresses are now merely pictures and tastes which hurt no more, like itching scars which can only give pleasure now. Strange, because when I can think soberly about it all, with out pushing any later joys into the deepr past, I can remember that things were terrible then. When the war was over the soldiers came back to homes broken in their absence and they themselves brought murder in their hearts and gave it to those nearest them. I saw it, not very clearly, because I had no way of understanding it, but it frightened me. We had gone on marches of victory and I do not think there was anyone mean enough in spirit to ask whether we knew what we were celebrating. Whose victory? Ours? It did not matter. We marched, and only a dishonest fool will look back on his boyhood and say he knew even then that there was no meaning in any of it. It is so funny now, to remember that we all thought we were welcoming victory. Or perhaps there is nothing funny here at all, and it is only that victory itself happens to be the identical twin of defeat.