Celebrating Chinua Achebe - A Literary Giant!

By Chidiebere Sullivan Nwuguru

“I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not… they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories,” Achebe recounted in an interview with the Paris Review. It was to salvage Africans from the dangers of having a foreigner tell their own story that led Achebe into the pursuit of writing. “There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man’s job. It's not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions,” he added. Before rising to stardom, even to the point of being widely regarded as the “Father of Modern African Literature”, Achebe grew up in a society that needed their stories to be told accurately in black and white, for the proper documentation and depiction of the people who are at the centre of the story; these needs would later open him up to ethereal and remote worlds as he fondly described.