Achebe's Book Hits 50

Celebrations are planned in cities across the US to celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the twentieth centuries greatest novels, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times pays tribute, and looks at how it has influenced other African authors.

Chris Abani, a nigerian author based in Los Angeles calls the book :

... inescapable. ... You're either working against it or within it; you're rejecting it or you're accepting it. But the conversation has to include it.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton University professor of philosophy points out that :

The book establishes a series of conventions on how things are to be written about . . . that had never been represented before. ... No one had taken the stately cadences of traditional African speech into English.

And Half a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Adichie says the novel led to:

... a glorious shock of discovery. It taught me that my world was worthy of literature, that books could also have people like me in them.

I count myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to teach the novel to a class of very enthusiastic Form Five students in Nigeria who made my experience of reading Achebe even more special.

Adichie's Desks

I wrote at the dining table when I could not use my father's desk because he was working or because a sibling was on the phone. The table, light green and long, was the family dumping ground -- of newspapers, university circulars, wedding invitations, bananas or groundnuts bought on the way home -- and the tiny ants that lived underneath it appeared after breakfast to crowd around bits of sugar or bread. I always cleared a space for myself at one end, opposite the grand old wood-paneled air conditioner, used so rarely that a puff of dust always burst out before cool air followed. It was noisy and, during birthdays when the parlor was filled with friends and food, graduations, baby showers for my sisters, the celebratory party when my mother was appointed registrar, there was always a loud vacuum-like sound of the air conditioner in the background.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminisces about the writing desks where she learned to write in this wonderfully atmospheric piece from The Washington Post.

(Photo taken from Adichie's website.)