Nigeria Senate Celebrates Achebe
We must learn to give honour to whom it is due. In an age where people seek fame at any costs regardless of process the Nigerian Senate finally honored one who became famous for his literary prowess and sustained it by the content of his character. This blog was always about celebrating African heroes and today we acknowledge none other than the late, great Chinua Achebe. Known world wide as Africa's greatest story teller, Chinua Achebe died on the 21st of March 2013, aged 82. AS A boy Chinua Achebe so loved reading that his friends called him “Dictionary”. He lived in the library at Government College in Umuahia, in south-eastern Nigeria, devouring Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats. “They were not about us or people like us,” he would say later in his soft, measured voice. But even John Buchan’s stories, in which heroic white men battled and worsted repulsive natives, excited rather than troubled him. It was all “wonderful preparation” fo...