Fulford on Achebe and Nigeria
Here. Fulford waits for the new African novel, without any reference to recent writing from anywhere on the continent. Lazy so-and-so. His sentence "Today, Africa awaits a young version of Achebe who can condemn all those forces that so callously betrayed the promise of his continent." is about as insightful as writing "Today, Canada awaits a new leader who will give significance to this vast yet irrelevant country."
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4 comments:
But you cannot compare on those terms, are you suggesting African literature is irrelevant?
I think he means Fulford's analysis is irrelevant not African Literature. What's more interesting to me are the comments on the article. Someone thinks Africa would have been better off if the Europeans stayed on a little longer.
I read the article. Most inane
very irritating. He might as well have titled it "Achebe Revisits Darkest Nigeria"
He writes: "When he set out to be a writer, Achebe began a campaign against the treatment of Africans in European literature. He decided that writers such as John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard had pictured Africans as savages, and even Joseph Conrad, despite the sympathy he expressed in Heart of Darkness, failed to grasp how Africans saw their lives." But the tone of his article seems to be to prove that Achebe was mistaken and that Nigeria is a "heart of darkness" after all....
See:
-colossal failure of Africa.
-post-colonial Nigeria of today, afflicted by corruption, militarism, hunger, tribal warfare and AIDS. One of Achebe’s characters says, “Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever.” That sounds like Africa. (WTF???)
--the chaos and degradation of Nigerian life kept intruding.
--They are by all accounts death traps, their roadsides littered with the burnt-out corpses of automobiles.
But, yes, probably the worst sentence is that last one....
Today, Africa awaits a young version of Achebe who can condemn all those forces that so callously betrayed the promise of his continent.
Has he read ANY African/Nigerian literature other than Things Fall Apart?
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