Dis hartseer om te hoor van Achebe wat nou in die Afrika Paradys verkeer, hou die dinge warm daar!
Ek lees hier http://mg.co.za/article/2013-03-28-00-chinua-achebe-without-the-story-we-are-blind
For Achebe, no other writer encapsulated “the Western project” as much as Joseph Conrad. Writing in a 1975 essay, An Image of Africa, Achebe argued that the novel Heart of Darkness “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, an antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization”. Conrad’s descendants still walk among us. And Achebe returned to confront them in the essay Africa’s Tarnished Name, in The Education of a British-Educated Child.
“The vast arsenal of derogatory images of Africa amassed to defend the slave trade and, later, colonisation gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or, rather, not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day,” Achebe wrote. Even though the sensational “African” novels that were popular in the 19th century have trickled to a “virtual stop, their centuries-old obsession with lurid and degrading stereotypes of Africa has been bequeathed to the cinema, to journalism, to certain varieties of anthropology, even to humanitarianism and missionary work itself”. Who can ever forget the Economist’s 2000 cover that indicted Africa as “The Hopeless Continent”, or how Africans on brochures from non-governmental organisations or on television are still the poster children of misery?
Achebe started studying medicine at the University of Ibadan before discovering his love for literature — to its eternal shame, the University of Cambridge wouldn’t accept him for postgraduate studies. When he started studying literature at the university’s college in Ibadan, Achebe complained about Joyce Cary’s racist novel, Mr Johnson, until an outraged white lecturer said to him: “Why don’t you write your own novel?” He did just that — turning out the classic Things Fall Apart.
Achebe is the perfect embodiment of the proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Yet he was a typical colonial child, raised on a literature in which the black person was the savage, a menace to the peace of the white man. As a child of one of the earliest converts to Christianity in Nigeria, Achebe naturally took the side of the white man until much later.
When he eventually revised his own prejudices against the “uncivilised” black, he “realised 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 said in an interview with the Paris Review.
This is not the place to mourn Achebe; his long life has been exemplary. Perhaps more than anyone else — and this explains the moniker “Achebe: father of African literature” — he set the template for the darker peoples of the world to own and tell their own stories.
The Nobel Prize for Literature, perhaps the grandest acknowledgement, sadly eluded him. Maybe Achebe’s project was too radical for those good people in Stockholm. Yet adulation continued to come his way; the simplest and perhaps most profound praise came in 1990 at his 60th birthday celebrations in Nigeria from his friend, the American scholar and novelist Michael Thelwell. In his keynote speech, Thelwell spoke of Achebe as “eagle on iroko”. The master of the sky and West Africa’s largest tree (considered sacred and therefore not to be chopped down).
Those two metaphors say it all.
Nobel???
Selfs poepolle soos JM Coetzee, en Obama het die Nobel gekry...vir wat??
Francois Williams
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All other trees may be chopped down.