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.
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?
