Chinua Achebe International Symposium and 10th Memorial Celebration Hold At Princeton University

Princeton University’s Africa World Initiative and Program in African Studies in partnership with The Christie and Chinua Achebe Foundation are hosting the Chinua Achebe Symposium and 10th Anniversary Memorial Celebration on September 29th and 30^th, 2023.

The symposium on September 29, with an international cast of senior and emerging scholars, marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Achebe’s blistering political treatise The Trouble With Nigeria. Three panels will examine new directions in Achebe studies, the politics of canonicity, and African literatures in the age of historical reckonings, while a roundtable discussion focuses on leadership and statecraft in Nigeria and Africa.

Achebe: The Leadership Crisis in Nigerian Politics

The Leadership Crisis in Nigerian Politics

By Chinua Achebe

David and Marianna Fisher University Professor, Brown University, RI, USA 

There is a story about Bernard Shaw arriving at the New York harbour, and being immediately surrounded by journalists as he stepped off the ship. But before even the quickest of them could open his mouth, the celebrated playwright stopped them cold as he fired off: ‘Don’t ask me what you should do to be saved; the last time I was here I told you and you haven’t done it!’

 

I feel very much the same way about what is happening in Nigeria. We know what we should do, yet we refuse to do it. Instead we have been “blowing grammar” all over the country as if our problem stems from

insufficient argument. So I have turned down or simply ignored all previous invitations to join the talking.

 

My little book The Trouble with Nigeria published twenty seven years ago on the eve of Shagari’s second term opens with these words:

                

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigeria character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership…

 

So the question of leadership was and is, pre-eminent, in my view, among Nigeria’s numerous problems. The little book does go on to identify other perennial issues such as tribalism, corruption, indiscipline, social injustice, preference for mediocrity over excellence, etcetera. But my thesis is that without good leadership, none of the other problems stands a chance of being tackled, let alone solved.

New Perspectives On Dynamics Of Leadership In Africa

Book Review

Book: Tomorrow’s leaders

Author: Andrew Okhenoaghue Umoru

Publishers: Blueshield Publishers

Pagination: 124

Reviewer: Banji Ojewale

In 1983 Chinua Achebe, late Nigerian writer and critic, was a lone voice as he mourned the death and dearth of strategic leadership in his country. His intervention through the slim nonfiction, The Trouble With Nigeria, was mocked when it wielded the sledgehammer on Nigeria and argued that flailing leadership was primarily responsible for the country’s seasonal misery and crises. This eminent novelist of universal acclaim held that poor management of our enormous resources was the cauldron brewing the challenges besieging the land.

But a great community of critics rose after reading the book to give their fellow critic a sarcastic riposte: the troubles with Nigeria were too complex to be dealt with so simplistically in a small book and by attributing them to one single origin.

Nigeria: Where The Dead Lead The Living

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

If the German-speaking Jewish writer Franz Kafka were in Nigeria now, he would observe that it is not only in the imaginative space that there are boundless possibilities in the depiction of the human condition. A validation of his art would have been that his brand of surrealism that is a staple of the imaginative provenance has assumed actuality in the human realm. In that case, Kafka would have been spared being sniggered at on account of Samsa Gregor, a human being, mutating into a vermin in his The Metamorphosis.

*Buhari 

This kind of validation was the lot of Chinua Achebe when his prediction in A Man of the People of the epochal termination of the nation’s first democratic experience was fulfilled by the military who sacked the wayward politicians of the 1960s and triggered a series of cataclysmic events that provoked the civil war. But Kafka and Achebe would have been at the same time amused and shocked that the boundless and surrealistic possibilities in their fictional worlds could be located in the realm of actuality in Nigeria – even beyond their imagination.

Chinua Achebe At 86: A Tribute

By Dan Amor

When the celebrated and consummate novelist, Prof. Chinua Achebe died on Thursday March 21, 2013 in a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America at 82, his loss was mourned not only by African writers but by statesmen and citizens of the world whom one would not readily accuse of an interest in literature. What this means is that the romantic emphasis upon the human ego which is implied in the last degree of subjectivity in romantic thought brought about a characteristic motif in the twentieth-century social life-the cult of the superman, the leader, the hero, the born man of genius, who can raise himself above the common herd and lead his people to greater height of attainment than mankind had previously reached. There seems to be a commonly held view, even among literary practitioners, that Achebe was a genius- the Eagle on Iroko in the African literature forest. He was a novelist. But there are novelists and there are novelists.

*Chinua Achebe 

In fact, there were great novelists before him in the vast cosmos of comparative literature: Henry James, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence, etcetera. Yet, Achebe was a logical successor to these great men of letters in the last literary generation of the twentieth century. Prof. Abiola Irele, easily one of Africa's most distinguished literary scholars and critics, noted in his reaction to the news of Achebe's death: "My first reaction when I heard the news of Achebe's death was of sadness. I am very sad to hear the news of the death of Achebe. It is a great loss. I have known him since 1962. He was a wonderful man personally. Somehow, he was not sentimental. It was Achebe who shaped African literature and gave it a standing in the world. It is something that should be commended".

There was indeed no African writer who ever influenced the thinking of his time, either in his literary output or political interventions, more than Achebe. By working so conscientiously at the interface between indigenous and English literatures, Achebe more than any living African novelist, has cultivated the English language with superstitious veneration. No writer has conceived it possible that the dialect of peasants and market women should possess sufficient energy and precision for a majestic and durable work. Achebe ventures African thought into the English language with remarkable simplicity. He detects the rich treasures of thought and diction, which still lay latent in their ore in the African traditional life. He refines them into purity and burnishes them into splendor thus fitting them for every purpose of use and magnificence.