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“... of representing the drama of a vast, unwieldy and refractory continent – a drama of becoming. Chinua Achebe has not escaped this penance. Reading through millions of words of public statements, of reviews and interviews, of adulation and accusation, one is struck by the high price he has paid for being Africa’s greatest indigenous ...”

“... of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, a lecture delivered by the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as long ago as 1974 and now collected in Hopes and Impediments. In City Without Walls, W.H. Auden included this squib: Even Hate should be precise: very few White Folks have fucked their mothers. A valid point, except that, in a ...”

“... unsatisfied with the administrative or diplomatic roles his fellow intellectuals took on; Chinua Achebe, his close friend, describes him as a man about whom there was a certain inevitability of drama and event. Mere months into the war, he died in battle. Achebe’s recollection of Okigbo’s death in There Was ...”

“... Chinua Achebe’s masterly novel concerns three powerful Africans. They are drawn on the dust-cover as three green bottles, from the English song: ‘If one green bottle should accident’ly fall ...’ One is the President of an African state, generally known as His Excellency, though his old schoolmates remember him as Sam ...”

“... and shit. The mood of his collection of short stories, Incidents at the Shrine, harks back to Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart, whose appearance in 1958 marked the beginning of modern African literature. In that novel Achebe described the changes that occurred within the Igbo society of Umuofia in Nigeria during ...”

“... 1968 to 1999 – deserves to be better known. Nervous Conditions has had many admirers, including Chinua Achebe, Alice Walker and Doris Lessing, who called it ‘the novel we have all been waiting for’. The first sentence is irresistible: ‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’ But Dangarembga spent four years trying to find a publisher for it and ...”

“... has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, over forty years after its end?’ Chinua Achebe asked in his memoir There Was a Country (2012), which considers whether Nigeria was guilty of genocide by enforcing starvation. Fictional accounts of the war aren’t lacking, though. Buchi Emecheta published hers, Destination Biafra, in ...”

“... of a handful of short stories published by a local press in Kenya. At the conference he approached Chinua Achebe, one of the stars of the event, whose novel Things Fall Apart had appeared four years earlier in Britain and gone on to become the first, and most enduring, title in the newly established Heinemann African Writers Series. Ngugi had the ...”

“... Trollope, Hegel and Trevor-Roper, all arch-priests of privilege, racism and class snobbery”.’ Chinua Achebe, says Hills, has made a more constructive point in this argument – simply that, even today, the whites do all the talking and the blacks are supposed to do the listening. To give Baroness Blixen her due, she did listen to Africans. The worst ...”

“... African darkness, and won’t endorse his way of sharing out blame between colonist and colonised. Chinua Achebe, among others, has led the attack on Conrad’s atavistic vision of the continent. The story of this conflict is told at some length in Rob Nixon’s book London Calling (1992), which also questions, from a similarly critical point of ...”

“... on Hamadhānī through Perry Anderson on Montesquieu and A.S. Byatt on Balzac to Simon Gikandi on Chinua Achebe. Moretti and his contributors have succeeded in making the study of the novel – if not the entire ‘literary field’ – ‘longer, larger and deeper’ than it was before, or than any single scholar could ever make ...”

“... active member of the Association of Nigerian Authors, and Soyinka, in the company of the novelist Chinua Achebe and the poet J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, made a much-publicised visit to the general to plead on behalf of their colleague. Babangida received them sympathetically, declared his own reluctance to spill blood and assured the delegation that he would ...”

“... of Russian writers, there’s a universality about him that finds echoes in non-Russians like Chinua Achebe or James Hogg who span the distance from village hearth to salon without feeling the need to pledge allegiance to one or the other. Leskov is the titular protagonist of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, where the critic offers ...”

“... on the ‘nigger question’, or Renan for his ideas about the ‘Semitic mind’? Some years ago Chinua Achebe attacked Conrad’s racism in Heart of Darkness, and found direct links between that work and the dehumanisation and exploitation of Africa. What he was trying to do was not to prevent Africans from reading Conrad, but rather to show them that ...”

“... view of scholarship and letters. Contributors included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as a cohort of South African writers who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned work ...”