Showing posts with label Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Show all posts

Saturday, December 10, 2022

There Was A Country…Remembering Chinua Achebe

 By Banji Ojewale

In the distant past, you wouldn’t talk about Chinua Achebe without instant reference to his mountaintop novel, Things Fall Apart. He was inseparable from his literary creature that outstripped its creator. But Achebe was lucky: he was spared the tragedy of bringing forth a monster which would fatally prey on its Frankenstein god. Achebe’s own genie was genial. Upon escape from the bottle-cage, it gave the illustrious novelist a new identity tag: Africa’s foremost storyteller.

*Achebe 

However, 2012 would deliver another lingering literary lease to this great man of letters. He wrote There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra. More than five decades had passed to serve as a hiatus between the book of Achebe’s youth and the new product of his advanced age. Both were mileposts, the one his first published novel (1958), and the other his last huge work before his death in 2013.

But when on November 16, 2022, the world quietly observed the eminent raconteur’s 92nd posthumous birthday, we were all drawn to his latter-day effort rather than to the one that lionized him. Why?

Monday, September 27, 2021

2023: For Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, Son Of Mauritanian Cow Seller Who Speaks For The North

 By Lasisi Olagunju

Alhaji Baba Ahmed, a Mauritanian cow seller, plied his trade from his country to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and to Dahomey (now Benin Republic). Business was very good but at a point, his customers in Dahomey, with impunity, refused to pay for his cows. Is it not the law that every seller must collect the proceeds of his sale? This was not the case with the cow seller who was not a son-of-the-soil in Dahomey. 

*Hakeem Baba-Ahmed and President Buhari 

The options before him were very limited. My people say if the landlord offends the tenant, it is the tenant who must go; again, if it is the tenant who has wronged the landlord, it is still the tenant who must go. This trader from Mauritania had to move out of Dahomey, leaving his money behind. And he moved, crossing over to Nigeria; first to Sokoto and later to Zaria. He entered Nigeria all alone but soon found Zaria a very conducive environment for his business, for his Islamic scholarship and for raising a family (See Daily Trust of Saturday, January 13, 2018). The Mauritanian finally settled in Zaria around 1920 - that was about 100 years ago - and died on November 5, 1987 in Zaria, reportedly at the age of 104 (see Facebook post of Abdulrahman M. Baba-Ahmed of 9 July, 2021).