Homage to Chinua Achebe

Abstract

The publication in 1958 of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was experienced as a significant literary and cultural event in Africa, probably no more so than in his own country, Nigeria, and at his alma mater, University College, Ibadan. I was an undergraduate there at the time, and have retained a vivid memory of its enthusiastic reception by the handful of students and Nigerian faculty who represented what we had then of an interpretive community for what was just beginning to emerge as a new literature in Africa. Achebe's work could not have appeared at a more propitious time, confirming with the force of its achievement a development for which the signs seemed encouraging and yet, at the same time, undecidable. It is important to recall the specific local context in which Achebe's work appeared, in order to understand the intensity of the response it elicited. The year before its publication, Olumbe Bassir, a professor of Biochemistry at Ibadan, had ventured outside his professional field to bring out, under the imprint of the university press, a slim volume entitled West African Verse, an anthology that included poems by both English-speaking and French-speaking poets. It is of considerable interest to observe that it was in this anthology that students at Ibadan first encountered the poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor and the work of other Negritude poets that he had himself brought together in his historic Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache, published in Paris by Presses Universitaires de France in 1948.