Madi,

I thank you for posting this great piece from Mr. Adenuba. Achebe is simply
the greatest African writer of all time. Don't forget the opening vignette
to the greatest African novel of all:

Things Fall Apart
The center cannot hold
The falcon cannot bear the falconer
Mere anachy is loose unpon the world.

I red it in 1983 when I was in Form 3. The lines stuck w/ me, because there
is no better opening to a novel.

I wish Achebe a Happy Birth day!

Saul



>From: Madiba Saidy <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: "Things Fall Apart" at 69
>Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 20:38:39 -0800
>
>FYI.
>
>Cheers,
>         Madiba.
>--
>We shall all live. We pray for Life, Children, a good harvest and
>happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good
>for me. Let the Kite perch and let the Eagle perch too. If one says no to
>the other, let his wing break. --Chinua Achebe, (Things Fall Apart).
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>GUARDIAN
>
>Tuesday, 16 November 1999
>
>Achebe and our places of memory
>
>By Don Adinuba
>
>ADMITTEDLY, seldom can anyone who appreciates Chinua Achebe's greatness as
>one of 20th century's most gifted personalities fail to be moved by the
>spectacle of his present physical condition. We are only consoled by the
>awareness that, as Christie, the writer's graceful and adorable academic
>wife, has remarked pointedly, we recognise and pay homage to Chinua Achebe
>not because of his legs but because of his writing, a concomitant of his
>prodigious mental depth and philosophical range. His faculties are today as
>penetrating as they have ever been, as they were in 1958 when he published
>the world classic Things Fall Apart, at age 28. The more fascinating and
>deeper part of a recent meeting between Achebe and Mbadinuju was the naming
>of the road linking Government House in Awka with the legislative building
>and the judicial offices for the writer of genius. With the naming of this
>major road for him, Achebe has become, to the best of my knowledge, the
>first Nigerian artist to have a street named after him in a capital city,
>all the more so by the government.
>
>Some people may not consider this honour a big deal. Nigerian streets,
>after
>all, bear the names of all manner of people, including those who in a saner
>society would have been dead or in jail for heinous crimes against their
>own
>people. Some may even wonder whether Achebe needs to have a street named
>for
>him in his state capital when he was in 1978 named the first recipient of
>the National Merit Award, the country's highest honour for intellectual
>achievement. Or when he has for decades been one of the very few foreigners
>to be admitted into the highly revered cult of the American Modern Language
>Association. Or when his books have been translated into scores of
>languages
>and he is in high demand in the most important of places the world over.
>Isn't Achebe the winner of numerous prestigious prizes and the recipient of
>over 30 honorary doctoral degrees, by far the highest number for any
>African
>after former President Nelson Mandela? Achebe is one of the few
>iconographic
>figures in world history whose novels are compulsory reading for students
>in
>fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy,
>history, religion, comparative theology, political science, etc. For
>instance, Claude Ake, the late eminent scholar of political economy, is
>known to have insisted on his students reading Achebe's A Man Of The People
>before taking them in courses on Nigerian politics and government. And in
>several universities the world over, Achebe's novels are compulsory for
>courses on African and Third World societies. Achebe, of course, remains
>the
>greatest individual influence on an entire generation of African writers.
>Declares distinguished Somali writer Nurudin Farah: "I've always held
>Achebe's writing in the highest esteem, believing it to be the most
>singular
>contribution the continent of African has made to world literature... He
>has
>no equal among us and many of us owe a great deal to him."
>
>Still, the honour done him by the Anambra State Government is significant.
>Achebe is a world citizen who is very much conscious of his roots which he
>regards as the source of his artistic accomplishment and virtuosity. At the
>time of the car accident in 1990, he was the president of the Ogidi
>Development Union, a post he took seriously, and he invested immeasurable
>time, mental and intellectual resources in it. "One of the most appealing
>aspects of Achebe's presence," says Michael Thelwell, the Jamaican
>professor
>at the University of Massachusetts, "is the sense of his being anchored in
>community. Within a personality of great complexity, an integrity of
>identity: On the one hand, a charming and sophisticated man of our time,
>travelled, worldly. On the other, the rooted dignity and calm of a
>responsible African elder fully integrated into the daily life and rhythm
>of
>community."
>
>The honour to Achebe is significant for another reason: homage to a man of
>learning, scholarship, wisdom and integrity rather than to a man of raw
>power and money. Since 1985, major streets, institutions and monuments in
>Nigeria have been named for the Babangidas and the Abachas in keeping with
>the feudal and imperial concept of power and of conquer and subjugation.
>The
>Kano State Government House was in the last few years named for Sani Abacha
>until last June, though the state's stadium is still called the Sani Abacha
>Stadium. A major Federal Government housing estate near Sheraton Hotel in
>Abuja is still named for Abacha's first son, Ibrahim Abacha, just like a
>public motor park in Owerri, Imo State. The press centre in Government
>House
>in Lagos was named for him until Governor Bola Tinubu changed it recently.
>Such examples are legion.
>
>Our universities, supposedly centres of ethical integrity, have not fared
>better. The University of Nigeria awarded, with great fanfare, an honorary
>doctorate to Mrs. Maryam Babangida during her hey-day, and Nnamdi Azikiwe
>University followed suit immediately Mrs. Maryam Abacha appeared on the
>scene as the first lady. Jeremiah Useni used to receive degrees and
>certificates from Nigerian higher institutions almost every weekend during
>his days as the powerful minister of the Federal Capital Territory.
>Abdulkareem Adisa got quite a number when he was the Minister of Works and
>Housing. Dan Etete, Abacha's Minister of Petroleum Resources, received a
>doctorate from the University of Port Harcourt at the height of the energy
>crisis which paralysed the entire nation. Edo State University announced it
>was conferring an honorary Doctorate of Letters on Abacha's pugnacious
>Foreign Affairs Minister Tom Ikimi in appreciation of his "area boy"
>diplomacy. Indeed, there is a "crisis in the temple," as venerable Pius
>Okigbo has observed of Nigerian universities. Which is why it is surprising
>that Ismaila Gwarzo and Hamza El-Mustapha, Abacha's ruthless security
>operatives, have not been decorated by our institutions for their high
>regard for the dignity of the human person. The duo of Babangida and Abacha
>truly perverted our social values, the greatest calamity to befall a
>nation.
>Under the duo, Nigerians became mammon disciples, worshipping at shrines of
>gods that always fail, as Edward Said, the scintillating Palestinian
>scholar
>at Columbia University in New York, observed in his BBC prestigious Reith
>Lecture series, now published as a book under the title Representations Of
>The Intellectual.
>
>Do we ever reflect on the implications of holding up Babangida and Abacha
>as
>well as their wives and children as role models? What legacy are our
>universities creating when they honour such barely literate but wealthy and
>ex-powerful government officials as Adisa, Etete, Useni, etc? Which of our
>universities is today proud to have bestowed honorary doctorates on Ani,
>Ikimi, and wives of Abacha and Babangida? No wonder, we are still stuck in
>history, wedded to the primitive age of mankind. We canonise iniquity.
>
>When we honour someone with an honorary degree or name an institution or
>monument for him or her, we are, ipso facto, creating a value system which
>will either ruin or salvage the larger society. "Every country," argues
>Richard Bernstein, the engaging American journalist and social thinker, in
>his seminal book, Dictatorship of Virtue, "has what the French historian
>Pierre Nora has called les lieux de memoire, 'the places of memory.' Nora
>defined them as the 'most striking symbols' that give a people their
>identity, 'the holidays,' the insignia, the monuments and memorials, the
>objects of veneration, the dictionaries and museums." The French, great
>lovers of the intellectual and philosophical tradition, as of their wine,
>name their streets and public places for writers, thinkers, scientists and
>truly great statesmen and personages in their march of civilisation. Nora
>records "historical moments as the anniversaries of the births of Voltaire
>and Rousseau, the funeral of Victor Hugo, the centennial observation in
>1879
>of the great revolution" as some of the places of memory in France. It was
>within this stream of consciousness that President Charles de Gaul
>proclaimed about a radical writer and philosopher: "Jean Paul-Satre is
>France!" As Chinua Achebe today marks his 69th birthday anniversary, we
>stand in awe before the Eagle on the Iroko.
>
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