Toward A Restoration of Societal Ethos with Reference on Chinua Achebe’s Writings

Abstract

Traditional oral literature of Africa is counted as one of the most distinctly and varied categories of African literature with Chinua Achebe as pioneer. In his writings, Achebe takes on the roles of social commentator and crusader through the conduit of orature to criticize the devaluation of cultural and societal norms. His later novels can be read imbued with the lamentation of the death of moral and social values in Nigerian society; the unspoken degradation of Nigerian immigrants in Europe and America, and the frequency with which corrupt practices have undermined the nation’s development. This paper examines how Achebe’s writings canvasses for a re-examination of societal ethos, which demands that the contemporary Nigeria settles. Therefore, the necessary actions should be taken in restoring, maintaining and preserving the oral tradition. Preservation is not just limited to keeping the form of oral tradition in the community, but the values that contained in the oral tradition with the past by recovering social, moral and cultural codes for the restoration of human dignity.