The Ambrose Ehirim-Chidi Achebe Q & A Interview

Dr. Chidi Achebe, son of the literary icon, Professor Chinua Achebe, is a United States-based physician and was recently awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Award by Dartmouth College. In this interview he talks about his medical practice, his service to others, healthcare intervention, education, his mentor, his dad and lots more.

Excerpts:

Tell me a bit about yourself

I completed undergraduate studies in natural sciences, history and philosophy at Bard College; received an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health, and an MD at Dartmouth Medical School and an MBA degree at Yale University's School of Management.
I also completed residency in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, TX. For a brief period, I served as Medical Director of the Whittier Street Health Center (13 months); and then served as Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, Medical Director of Harvard Street Health Center before my appointment as the President and CEO of the Harvard Street Health Center.

Recently, you were awarded the Martin Luther King Social Justice Award from Dartmouth College. Tell me a bit more about your work that brought about this recognition.

I think the press release from our health center makes the point better than I could ever do: “After several years of work at various Boston health centers, Dr. Achebe now sees "the struggle against inequalities in health and health care for all vulnerable, underserved Americans, as the next stage of the Civil Rights movement;" and has dedicated his life's work to helping to solve the conundrum of health care inequity in America's health care system.

Dr. Achebe makes church calls, and speaks at youth summits, conventions, conferences, schools, barber shops - focal gathering areas where he can reach underserved patients - reminding the community of the value of health, preventive care, and the quality of service readily available at Harvard Street.

While expanding his unique implementation of “medicine without borders,” Achebe works as a passionate advocate for the global community through his writings that call attention to worldwide health concerns such as the HIV/AIDs pandemic and Prostate Cancer. His efforts have earned him a featured TV appearance on Basic Black; profile in the Boston Globe and AOL Black Voices, an interview on WUMB-FM's Commonwealth Journal (interviewed by the legendary Barbara Neely); and feature length articles in several international periodicals, journals, and newspapers.

Through his years of work, Dr. Achebe has become a leader in the battle for healthcare equality and serves on several boards and committees where he continues his passion to be at the vanguard of the quest to bridge disparities that exist in the health care system.”

Of all the things that you have done, which one stands out in your mind?

Service to others. My overall thrust in life is to be what my Dad; Professor Chinua Achebe calls a “servant leader.” Another great influence has been Robert K. Greenleaf whose classic work The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970 is monumental in its influence on me. In that essay, he said:

"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first; perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature."

So what aspect do you generally feel your services have done much in the community?

I feel that our work is ongoing. Our overall dream is community transformation that means that health care intervention has to work in concert with other strategies. Historically, most of the effective political, social and civil rights movements have required a myriad of interventions to be successful. Health Care should be seen as the nexus for not only bridging the disparities that exist within the society, but eliminating the long standing social pathologies such as low educational attainment and violence. Community Health Centers like Harvard Street Health Center can bring about this multi-purpose revolution with talent from different backgrounds that can play a critical role to this end. They can serve as vehicles for assessing and accurately communicating community perspectives and needs on the issue of health care disparities; as a clearinghouse for data and recognized authority on the issue; as a vehicle for educating and mobilizing large numbers of individuals and organizations to give leverage to initiatives relative to health care disparities; as a catalyst for community, business, and government involvement in the resolution of social pathologies such as community violence and crime, teenage pregnancy, etc. In addition health care centers can serve as magnets for adequate funding targeted at reducing health care disparities; and the establishment of a broad-based, statewide coalition of key stakeholders to monitor the implementation and impact of any Comprehensive Health Care Education and Violence prevention plans.

You are trained as an internist. And now you hold position as President and CEO of Harvard Street Health Center. Do you find it compatible with the administrative and technical aspect of your profession?

The fact that I hold business and public health degrees in addition to my medical degree is no accident. I was fortunate enough to be appointed a Medical Director very early on in my career – I was in my early thirties. I remember it made international headlines at the time! During my tenure, I realized that my financial/business knowledge was weak, so I decided to go back to school this time to get an MBA. I am not unique, at least in Boston, which you know is the pinnacle of Medical Science and Health Care in the United States- indeed in the world.

My mentor Dr. Gary Gottlieb – one of the most admired physician/business leaders in the country, and under whom I had the utmost privilege to study for a year during Business School – also holds both Medical and Business degrees; as do some others in Massachusetts and across the country. Dr. Gottlieb is the President and CEO of Partners Health Care (a Harvard university affiliated health system in Massachusetts that includes world class hospitals Brigham and Women’s hospital and Mass General Hospital, both in Boston). It should also be mentioned that several business Schools – Yale my alma mater, Duke and now Harvard business school have started a major focus on the health care segment of the American economy that makes up 16.9% of the GDP; in other words one of every six dollars spent in the US economy is toward health care related services, goods or products.

So my training is designed for my role and is consistent with what many experts think is a much needed ingredient to fix the ailing health care system and the US economy at large – medically trained individuals who also have a business background and are then prepared to bring to bear these myriad skills to the problems that plague the health system

Can you give me a rundown of day-to-day activities of those areas?

I do all the administrative work required of any Chief Executive – make sure the organization lives up to its mission and vision statements, help set company priorities and strategy, work and meet with the board, senior management, committees and serve as the face of the organization. I also help with fund raising and organizational as well as community development initiatives. In addition, my role requires that I make sure that the day to day activities of the organization run smoothly.

Which of those two aspects of your profession do you think consumes more of your time?

I am still in clinic 20 hours a week (which is equivalent to a half- time physician). On top of that I have the full time President and CEO position. So my week is usually a 60 hour week.

How is the Chinua Achebe Colloquium/Interview Series doing? Is it still vibrant doing what it is supposed to do?

It is going very well. A former United States ambassador to Nigeria described the annual gathering as “the best intellectual gathering focusing on Africa in the world.” The annual colloquium brings together an international group of scholars, officials from African governments, the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and other organizations for two days of intense deliberation and exchange of ideas on the importance of strengthening democracy and peace on the African continent. The next installment later this year will be the fourth in the series.

On Nd'Igbo and the upcoming generation, what's your opinion about an evolving concept of the Igbo nation?

The role of Nd'Igbo has been monumental from the birth of Nigeria. The greatest of Nigeria’s founding fathers, in my opinion, were mainly those from the East – the great Zik being the most significant of the lot. The war destroyed a lot of what we had. I was born three days before the war was declared - at the very beginnings of the war- and so cannot pretend to know what transpired during those horrendous two and a half years. I, like millions of other Nd'Igbo, Nigerians, Africans, admirers of Professor Achebe’s work around the world, can’t wait to lay my hands on his new book on Biafra- There was a country: A personal history of Biafra due out this Fall, 2012.

The war led to a scattering of the Igbos across the world – much like to tribes of Israel. A new generation of Igbo leaders can be found now across the world, working diligently in every known intellectual, business, and political endeavor. The challenge is to de-emphasize mammon worship and bring about an intellectual renaissance that will permanently restore Igbo land, Nigeria? and hence Africa on a path to permanent, sustainable development.

On a Nigerian national state, what are your thoughts on what had erupted over the years, especially the series of civil unrests, the Islamic militants and things like that since the Fourth Republic?

What has befallen us is the destruction of the culture of excellence and meritocracy that Zik’s generation put in place. It has been replaced by what Dad has termed the cult of mediocrity. We are playing with our “tenth eleven instead of our first eleven”- if I may be permitted to utilize a soccer allegory. Nigerians have some of the best and brightest people on the planet. The West knows this because Nigerians have been given plum jobs in Western establishments. The culture of mediocrity has been encouraged because competing ethnic groups believe they will benefit in such an arrangement. No country has EVER made it under such a chaotic system – where incompetence and corruption rule and the lust of money pervades every activity. The very destruction of Nigeria – nothing works – is a result of this “slumming down” of standards – perfected by the military – and continued by their really unprepared, inept civilian cohorts. Everyone knows that terrorists can only strive in chaotic environments – look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia etc. Unless Nigeria puts things right by placing into every conceivable position, the best and brightest Nigerians that can be found, it is doomed

Is the country heading toward the right direction and if not, what should be done?

Clearly not. Let me be clear about this: Nigeria must reestablish the culture of meritocracy that had an early death following independence. Nigerians must search, find and place the very best people in every conceivable public and private position as well as every level of government – local government, state, federal - or it will NEVER make it.

With a handful of business-related responsibilities, how do you account for your leisure time? What do you do?

I am grateful to GOD for my many blessing. I am blessed with a beautiful spouse and family- three wonderful boys. There is no greater blessing than the love of family… coming home after a long day’s work and hearing a greeting from your spouse and your boys running towards you yelling: “Daddy, Daddy.” That is enough to bring your blood pressure down. Thank God for our blessings.

Thank you.

Literature and Ethnicity: Address At The Garden City Literary Festival

(L-R: Emeka Anyaoku, Jesse Jackson and Rotimi Amechi at the Garden City Literary Festival. Photo Credit: 234 Next)

By Chinua Achebe, 234NEXT

Ethnicity is a somewhat problematic word. The great American Anthropologist and poet, Stanley Diamond, used such words as ethnic with complete and disarming respect, unlike most of us. Our use tends to be colored by guilt, condescension, or just awkwardness because this word and others in its category have suffered from cultural and racial politics and the politics of scholarship.

I looked up the word ethnic in my daughter's Random House College Dictionary. It had five definitions as follows:

1)pertaining to or characteristic of a people, especially a speech or culture group

2)referring to the origin, classification, characteristics etc. of such groups

3)pertaining to Non-Christians

4)belonging to or deriving from the cultural, racial, religious or linguistic traditions of a people or country especially a ‘primitive' one: ethnic dances

5)U.S. a member of an ethnic group especially one belonging to a minority group that is not part of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition.

This is clearly a word loaded with problems. Being the keynote speaker I could not evade drawing attention to this. Being first has its drawbacks. An Igbo children's chant says that the child who walks in front is the eye that spots evil spirits, the child in the rear has twisted fingers (I don't know why!); the middle child is the happy one.

Having spotted this evil spirit I shall simply step aside to the edge of the pathway and let it pass. I shall use ethnicity in the way I know Stanley [Diamond] intended it. I shall use it to mean those elements of history and culture which distinguish one group of people from their fellows. Put a little differently, ethnicity would comprise all those significant qualities of a people's character - qualities of mind and behavior which they acquired in their long struggle to domesticate the wilderness and make it their world; their physical and spiritual landscape.

We are talking then about deep, not surface issues; we are not talking about this morning's gossip but about matters which reach back to the beginnings of a people as a people. We are talking about their earliest memories which they consider important and wish to preserve and so recount in well-chosen, pleasing and memorable language. Finally we are talking also about the beginnings of literature. That is what ethnicity suggests to me.

Needless to say that these origins did not involve pen and paper or their ancestors of clay and papyrus. We may imagine some ancient poets making fun of those of their guild who were adopting the new-fangled habit of reading from heavy clay tablets intended for royal edicts and land measurements. This may be no idle imagination.

Oral literature

Several years ago I had invited a seventy-year old illiterate minstrel to recite his epic poetry at the University of Nigeria. His story of the exploits of the hero, Emeka Okoye, began, to everyone's surprise, with paper playing a singularly sinister role. Paper floating down from the sky one morning carried a commandment from the demi-god Enunyilimba prohibiting the eating or drinking of anything however small for seven markets or twenty eight days. The reason: this demi-god was going to feast above for one month and all the inhabitants of the world below must therefore honor him with starvation, on pain of instant death!

The notion of oral performance as serious literature is still received with suspicion or reluctance in many quarters, or at best perceived as a form that ended long ago, perhaps in the age of Homer. But that is far from the truth. The Somali, a pastoral/nomadic people in the Horn of Africa must be accounted among the world's most poetic people. Their life is permeated by the composition and recital of poetry ranging from simple domestic discourse about the superiority of the camel over goats and cows to the intense anti-colonial poetry directed against the British; the Italians and the Ethiopians. Sayyid Muhammad Abdille Hasan whom the British called the "Mad Mullah" is revered to this day not only because of his twenty-year struggle against three colonial powers, but primarily as the greatest poet in the Somali language. Now this language was first written down as recently as 1972.

It is important that we admit the category of oral literature with respect in this literary festival or else we shall have little to talk about beside already very-well-talked-about matters. For myself I am taking my bearing from oral literature.

During the European Middle Ages a succession of empires rose and fell in the West African grasslands or the Sahel. One of the most remarkable among these empires was Mali as remarkable as its founder, Sundiatta. Islam had penetrated into this part of Africa for at least one thousand years and had slowly superseded the indigenous African polytheistic religions. The creation story which I will now tell you quite obviously predates the coming of Islam to Mali:

At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk.

Then Doondari came and he created the stone.

Then the stone created iron;

The iron created fire;

And fire created water;

And water created air.

Then Doondari descended the second time.

And took the five elements.

And he shaped them into man.

But man was proud.

Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man.

But when blindness became too proud, Doondari created sleep, and sleep defeated blindness;

But when sleep became too proud, Doondari created worry, and worry defeated sleep;

But when worry became too proud,

Doondari created death, and death defeated worry.

But when death became too proud,

Doondari descended for the third time,

And he came as Gueno, the eternal one

And Gueno defeated death.

There are many things one could say about this wonderful story but I will settle for only one - the constant battle the Creator wages, to maintain the integrity of his world in the face of insidious threat from pride. Four times Doondari has to create an agent to defeat pride. And four times it rises and fights again. And it was man's pride that began it all.

The Fulani people who made this story before the corning of Allah were obviously concerned about pride. The theology behind the story is not concerned about seven deadly sins, but only one.

In the 1950s after one thousand years of Islam, a young Fulani from Senegal who had received the best education the French could give to a brilliant colonial subject wrote a novel about the plight of his people after their defeat and subjugation by French arms and policies.

One of the major characters in the novel has this to say:

If it were still only a matter of ourselves, of the conservation of our substance, the problem would have been less complicated: not being able to conquer them, we should have chosen to be wiped out rather than to yield. But we are among the last men on earth to possess God as He veritably is in His Oneness ... How are we to save Him?

The point being made here may elude anyone who has not read Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novel: Ambiguous Adventure so I will summarize it:

"We the Diallobe people," it says "would have had no excuse to continue living after our fathers were defeated by French arms; we would have had every justification in committing suicide. But we are among the few in the world who truly understand God. If we should die what would happen to God then?"

Now that-is hardly a declaration of modesty. In fact it is pretty arrogant. It would seem that the pride which the Diallobe people meditated upon is a living problem still with these people in spite of a thousand years of Islam, in spite of a history that has experienced imperial grandeur of their own making as well as the ultimate humiliation of defeat and colonialization by strangers.

We are thus talking about qualities at the core of a people's character. Something which survives time and events and can ferry across from oral poetry in an African language to modern fiction written in French. We are not talking about transitory fads and fashions.

Unusual creation story

I take my second example from my own people - the Igbo of South-Eastern Nigeria, and a very different kind of creation myth. Unlike the Fulani story which takes place in a remote, ethereal setting, the Igbo story like the Igbo themselves, is very much down to earth.

The crux of this story is that one morning Chukwu, the Creator, looks down and beholds the king of Nri and the King of Adama sitting disconsolate on an anthill surrounded by marshy ground (It is not clear whether there are two kings or one king with two titles: for simplicity I shall assume only one). Chukwu asks him what the matter is and the king replies that the soil is too moist to plant the yam which Chukwu had directed him to plant during an earlier discussion. As a result of this failure of the crop, the story tells us that people are wandering through the bush like wild animals. So Chukwu sends Eze Nri to Awka, the town of blacksmiths to invite one of them to blow on his bellows and make the soil dry.

This is an unusual creation story. It is not the drama of creation that it is concerned with. The world is already made and functioning somehow. But it is not perfect. Man complains to God about this and holds conversations with him to bring about changes and improvements, specifically the tremendous transition of mankind from wanderers in the bush to settled agriculturalists using-iron tools.

The Igbo people who made this story are famous (or notorious according to one's point of view) for their belief in conversation even with God. Unlike their neighbours, they do not care for kings and kingdoms. They were not easy to colonise; the British described them as argumentative. Why the British would consider the Igbo habit of arguing as surprising, is the real surprise. Why would people who dare argue with the Creator of the world be intimidated by white district officers some of whom were in their twenties? The Igbo did not care for Empires; they preferred small-scale village communities where every adult male was the king of his own household and could take part in decision-making and every adult woman in (admittedly less frequent) women's decision-making.

I hope you will not expect me to demonstrate in detail how the world of ‘Things Fall Apart' and the world of ‘Arrow of God' derive their substance and ambience from these primordial conversations between the first Igbo people and their Creator.

When the British colonised Nigeria they had a lot to learn - some of them did, but some of them, unfortunately, did not. It was bad enough that the Igbo had no kings and no horses, but to also demand a hearing was just too much! What the uninitiated members of Britain's imperial service did not realise was that the Igbo got away long ago talking back to God Himself. That is a major element of their ethnicity and it will be present in their life and literature.

I want now to address briefly the question posed in what appears like a sub-title to the main subject: To what degree is all literature shaped by the cultural contexts of the authors?

The creative enterprise is a magical space onto itself - the mind in mutual collaboration with the world and its elements to produce something of aesthetic value. Creative writers are like painters, using words to paint a literary tapestry. I think that words have a magic, that human situations- one's environment, culture, ‘ethnicity' as we have spent time re-discovering - can be unburdened to join other factors wordsmiths use to create literary magic - that extra dimension that the writer can conjure up by placing ideas about the human condition side by side on paper.

I suppose that cultural contexts is another name for what we have so far been calling the factors of ethnicity. Quite clearly these factors do shape literature. The cultural context within which a writer finds him/herself is relevant in so far as it brings something of literary value - contributes to the world story - and does not claim superiority over, deny, obscure or jaundice, even oppress other perspectives or stories. But having said that let me now admit that there are other factors and not least among them is the genius and free-will of the author.

I left this factor out of account until now, for a purpose. Good literature, whether oral or written, will bear the marks of the author's culture as well as his or her own personal signature.

Culture is a shared commodity. It implies community. The behavior of one person is not called culture; but the action of one person can influence the culture of the group, and even change it.

Individual autonomy

Western literature played a central role in promoting the ideal of individual autonomy. As Lionel Trilling tells us, Western literature has in the last one hundred and fifty years held "an intense and adverse imagination of the culture in which it has its being". It has promoted the view of society and of culture as a prison-house from which the individual must escape to find freedom and fulfillment.

If this is so then it seems to me that a real parting of the ways may have occurred between Western literature and its own origins, to say nothing of other literatures.

The father of Western philosophy says: I think, therefore I am. The unknown formulator of the great Bantu assertion says Umuntu, Ngumuntu Ngabantu: a person is a person because of other persons. The Igbo put it proverbially: if a person feels an itch in the back he calls his fellow to scratch him; an animal scratches itself against a tree.

Georges Braque, co-founder of cubism, once described perspective as "a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress." Perspective is important but it is also a one-eyed view which can degenerate into mere draughts-manship. Perhaps the celebration of individualism, another one-eyed view of the world, can now use a little redressing in Western literature.

Complex union

The story of Nigeria is one steeped in ethnic and religious tensions and complexity. ‘Ethnicity' in the Nigerian context has not evolved, through ‘a post-primordial civic nationalism' into a blissful, common national identity, as seen in say Switzerland. Until the day "the Swissification of ethnic conflict" arrives, Nigerians, particularly its writers, should not be satisfied with sweeping the matter ‘under the rug.'

For those who are not proficient in Nigeria's recent political history it might be useful to point out that the word ethnic was not always ‘the ugly girl that many took to bed at night, but denied during the daytime'. My generation remembers a Nigeria that was once a land of great hope and progress, a nation, a nation of immense resources at its disposal - natural resources, but even more so human resources.

Nigeria possesses a great diversity of vibrant peoples who have not always been on the best of terms, but those of us who are old enough remember periods in our history when collaborations across ethnic and religious divides produced great results.

The Nigeria - Biafra war changed the course of Nigeria. One can summarise the conflict as one precipitated by the bile of ethnic hatred. It was such a cataclysmic experience that for me it virtually changed the history of Africa and the history of Nigeria. Everything I had known before, all the optimism had to be rethought. For me, this traumatic event changed my writing for a time, which found expression in a different genre - poetry.

Since the war, Nigerians have been subjected to a clique of military and civilian adventurers and a political class that have exploited the ethnic divisions in Nigeria. This group, unfortunately, has been completely corrupted - spearheading the enormous transfer of the country's wealth into private bank accounts, a wholesale theft of the national resources needed for all kinds of things - for health, for education, for roads. The result has been that the nation's infrastructure was left to disintegrate unleashing untold suffering on millions of innocent people.

This development has been made easy by Nigerian academics who have presided over the liquidation of the university system and the rise of a culture of anti-intellectualism in Nigeria. One of the ways we have done it is our obsession for office. Twenty-five years ago, university professors were held in very high esteem. Today, I don't think anybody thinks very much of them, and quite frankly, I think it is our own making. What happens when a university Vice-Chancellor in Nigeria is about to leave office? You ought to see the trips made up and down to government houses in Abuja, begging for cabinet positions.

What upsets me is that this entire mess Nigeria finds itself in was quite avoidable. The leadership appears not to really care for the welfare of the country and its people. If a political class-including intellectuals, university professors, and people like that, who have read all the books and know how the world works - if they had based their actions on principle rather than on opportunity, Nigeria would not be in this predicament. But Nigerian leaders, beginning with the military dictators, looked around and saw what they could buy intellectuals. Anybody who called himself president would immediately find everyone lining up outside his home or his office to be made minister of this or that. And this is what they have exploited they have exploited the divisions, the ethnic and religious sectionalisation in the country. You have leaders who see nothing wrong in inciting religious conflict between Christians and Muslims. It's all simply to retain power. So you find a different kind of alienation.

In the past in Igbo land, if something kept happening and happening, or if somebody kept failing and failing, the people would go and consult an oracle. They call it Iju Ase. In the modern world, the systems that cause these failures are examined. But frankly, I would suggest that Nigeria has decided to put merit aside and bring up whatever considerations, and that is one of the things that happened to us. And the modern world has not been created on considerations outside of merit.

Missed opportunities

I despair over Nigeria daily. On the missed opportunities of Nigeria: the fact that nobody has had the imagination to say, ‘Look I'm going to transcend all this ethnic pettiness and become the leader of modern Nigeria' because this is important for Africa, this is important for the world. So, let's stop all this nonsense about religion, about tribe and so on. Let's organise Nigeria and make it a working entity so that it can fulfill its mission in the world.

There is a great deal of work for the Nigerian writer - indeed all writers. If the society is healthy, the writer's job is limited - which is not the situation in Nigeria. On the other hand, if a society is ill the writer has a responsibility to point it out even if it produces headaches in the halls of power!

The role of a writer in a society such as ours besieged with many pathologies - ethnic bigotry, political ineptitude, corruption, and the cult of mediocrity - is not an easy or rigid one. Nigerian writers can choose to turn away from the reality of Nigeria's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. I hope we all choose the later.


Achebe, David and Marianna Fisher University professor and professor of Africana Studies, Brown University, Rhode Island, USA delivered this address at the Garden City Literary Festival which ended in Port Harcourt, Rivers State yesterday. His son Chidi read the paper on his behalf.

Interview with Ngozi Achebe

Ngozi Achebe was born in England by Augustine Ndubuisi Achebe and Matilda Chikodili Achebe. She was raised in Nigeria and also spent time in Englnd, her place of birth. She picked up interest in 15th and 16th Century West African history in which she was inspired for writing Onaedo - The Blacksmith's Daughter, her debut novel. In this interview published exclusively at Life & Time Magazine, she talks about her debut novel and other challenging issues.

Excerpt:

Before we proceed in this interview, we would like to know who you are.

I was born in London to an engineer Augustine Achebe and his wife a Matilda, a nurse. I was raised in Nigeria and later when I became a medical doctor I did go back to England to do further training. Then I came over to the USA to be close to my sisters who had come over earlier. I still have a full time medical practice.
I also have two children Jennifer and Nnamdi who are always my first priority in all I do.


The moment you created in your thoughts penning “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter,” what went through your mind, and the environment in which this compelling novel began?

I have always been fascinated by fifteenth and sixteenth century West Africa, the period just around the Portuguese arrival; a period that is unfortunately not taught very well in Nigeria. I imagine what one group must have thought of the other without looking only through the prism of slavery. It all came from this curiosity to know more and share my findings in a dramatic way. Hence Onaedo.

You are in the medical arts, and one would expect you should be writing on the profession you were trained. How and why did you pick up the idea to write about a world of strong women and culture conflicts which the novel depicts?


When I started researching the story I felt I had to create characters that everybody could identify with. Even if you were not African you knew this father, this brother, this aunt this young woman. An ancient story with a modern dimension. We are not so different after all.


Let’s talk about “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter,” from Chapter 1 through 8 and a 16th Century West Africa explored by the Portuguese. First, why 16th Century West Africa, tracing back to the Portuguese exploration and the slave trade?

The Portuguese age of exploration and its impact on the African continent, is a poorly told story in Nigeria, at least in the schools I went to. I wanted to tell this story from a view point that is not often heard. I really wanted people to see how fascinating that whole period was, to see that everything was not all black and white, but was also in varying shades of gray.

The characters are amazing and very familiar with ones upbringing, How did you come up with all these characters like Amechi, Udemezue, Adanma, Dualo, Oguebie, Eneda, Ugodi and the rest in a storytelling typical of growing up in the woods, and a story that had the same resemblance of a commune and a normal village life from around how one grew up?


I did grow up in the woods! During the Nigerian/Biafran civil war we all escaped into the interior, and there my siblings and I experienced village life first hand. It was fascinating and I’m thankful I had that opportunity for this total immersion in this culture even though I could have done without the war part! All those characters are familiar - they are our everyday friends, relatives and acquaintances.

Now that your juiced novel “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter” has done pretty much well as I can tell, coupled with the reviews which is still overwhelmingly pouring in, what should we be looking for in your next project? A storytelling-fictional characters, or something of a non-fictional characters like the pogrom, life events, and, or biography, or maybe some unpublished works, sort of?


My next project, now in later stages of completion, is a coming of age novel, about a girl growing up in the midst of a war. It is purely fictional but is based on some experiences of mine and others during the period of the civil war that engulfed Nigeria in the 60’s leading to the creation of the short-lived republic of Biafra which was in south eastern Nigeria. I’m excited about it, because it has been a labor of love. I was writing it before I diverted into ‘Onaedo’. I also have other works in progress but will not talk about them yet.



We discussed in several occasions about the pogrom and civil war in your native land, and how vile that was while back from London which I’m still sure you remember what it looked like. Besides the novel “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter”, could you tell us a little bit about your experience as a child and why horrors of war especially the most blood soaked event in Africa, the anti-Igbo pogrom, must not cease to be told?

War is never good and a fratricidal one such as the Nigerian/Biafran war is even worse. It was a sad time. A government should protect its own citizens from atrocity otherwise it is not really a government at all. The Nigerian government then failed to do so for one section of its population and failed to stop the genocide that took place. I was a child at the time but I remember the anguish of it all. We should tell these stories so that never, never again. Evil pervades when good men do nothing. I want to believe we have come a long way from that.


Besides your profession as a medical doctor and your passion to pen down your thoughts as in “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter,” what else fascinates you as in passion and things like that?

I love to hike and explore especially with family. I try to be as physical as possible, and as a medical doctor, I try to lead a healthy life so I’m an example to my patients. I’m also an avid reader. I used to draw and paint at one time but I wasn’t that good at it, so I gave it up. My sisters loved them though and a few hang still in their homes and offices.

Did your Uncle Chinua Achebe’s works inspire you to follow the literary giant’s footsteps?

I have been asked that question often and the answer has to be yes .Growing up in his shadow has been a great influence in my life. My one regret is not starting early to get my work published but my people have a saying that whatever time in the day you wake up, becomes your own morning.

I read your uncle Chinua Achebe’s piece “Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope” for the New York Times and he seems to be still angry regarding the state of affairs in a African national state. Uncle Chinua Achebe writes:

“In my mind, there are two parts to the story of the African peoples ... the rain beating us obviously goes back at least half a millennium. And what is happening in Africa today is a result of what has been going on for 400 or 500 years, from the “discovery” of Africa by Europe, through the period of darkness that engulfed the continent during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and through the Berlin Conference of 1885. That controversial gathering of the leading European powers, which precipitated the “scramble for Africa,” we all know, took place without African consultation or representation. It created new boundaries in ancient kingdoms, and nation-states resulting in disjointed, inexplicable, tension-prone countries today.”

What’s your take on Uncle Chinua Achebe’s comment? Are his comments still relevant today and how the flow has changed over time?

I agree that European colonialism did not augur well for Africans, however I also believe that despite all those early missteps that we should have fashioned our own path by now. A country like Nigeria blessed with rich resources and people should have done better at fifty years of independence. Some of our wounds I’m afraid are self-inflicted. Uncle Chinua speaks passionately for Nigeria at all times and his disappointment is palpable. He is of a generation that dreamed big dreams for us and most of it has remained unrealized.

What do you think Uncle Chinua Achebe’s talking about here, and why is he still angry despite the novel “Things Fall Apart,” over fifty years ago that had foretold the social problems in such a society?

I think his novel ‘A Man of The People’ is even more relevant in speaking to how far or not we have traveled. I read that book again recently and it was difficult for me to believe that that book was written in 1966. It’s like Nigeria hasn’t moved, hasn’t made significant progress in social and economic justice for the average Nigerian in over 40 years. It’s even worse today because there has been a systematic wipe out of the middle class which was not the case in 1966. It’s really a crying shame.

Did you see yourself putting up characters in the novel “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter?

I did try to dissociate myself from the characters but as a writer there’s always a part of you in one or two of your characters. I don’t fight it; I just go with the flow of whatever works to bring a character to life.


What do people around you tell you about the novel “Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter”?

Most say they love it, a few tell me what I should remedy or what I didn’t get right, how I should have made this person do this or that person do the other. I take it all in good humor. I appreciate each reader and each critic or critique no matter how outlandish - and I have had a few of those! It makes me all around, a better writer.

How about a movie deal on “Onaedo”?

I’m all ears! If it comes, I will be ready.

Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope

By Chinua Achebe, New York Times



AFRICA has endured a tortured history of political instability and religious, racial and ethnic strife. In order to understand this bewildering, beautiful continent — and to grasp the complexity that is my home country, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation — I think it is absolutely important that we examine the story of African people.

In my mind, there are two parts to the story of the African peoples ... the rain beating us obviously goes back at least half a millennium. And what is happening in Africa today is a result of what has been going on for 400 or 500 years, from the “discovery” of Africa by Europe, through the period of darkness that engulfed the continent during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and through the Berlin Conference of 1885. That controversial gathering of the leading European powers, which precipitated the “scramble for Africa,” we all know took place without African consultation or representation. It created new boundaries in ancient kingdoms, and nation-states resulting in disjointed, inexplicable, tension-prone countries today.

During the colonial period, struggles were fought, exhaustingly, on so many fronts — for equality, for justice, for freedom — by politicians, intellectuals and common folk alike. At the end of the day, when the liberty was won, we found that we had not sufficiently reckoned with one incredibly important fact: If you take someone who has not really been in charge of himself for 300 years and tell him, “O.K., you are now free,” he will not know where to begin.

This is how I see the chaos in Africa today and the absence of logic in what we’re doing. Africa’s postcolonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves, forgotten their traditional way of thinking, embracing and engaging the world without sufficient preparation. We have also had difficulty running the systems foisted upon us at the dawn of independence by our colonial masters. We are like the man in the Igbo proverb who does not know where the rain began to beat him and so cannot say where he dried his body.

People don’t like this particular analysis, because it looks as if we want to place the blame on someone else. Let me be clear, because I have inadvertently developed a reputation (some of my friends say one I relish) as a provocateur: because the West has had a long but uneven engagement with Africa, it is imperative that it also play an important role in forging solutions to Africa’s myriad problems. This will require good will and concerted effort on the part of all those who share the weight of Africa’s historical albatross.

In Nigeria, in the years before we finally gained independence in 1960, we had no doubt about where we were going: we were going to inherit freedom; that was all that mattered. The possibilities for us were endless, or so it seemed. Nigeria was enveloped by a certain assurance of an unbridled destiny, by an overwhelming excitement about life’s promise, without any knowledge of providence’s intended destination.

While the much-vaunted day of independence arrived to much fanfare, it rapidly became a faded memory. The years flew past. By 1966, Nigeria was called a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The national census was outrageously stage-managed to give certain ethnic groups more power; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were corrupted by foreign business interests.

The political situation deteriorated rapidly and Nigeria was quickly consumed by civil war. The belligerents were an aggrieved people in the southeast of the nation, the Biafrans, who found themselves fleeing pogroms and persecution at the hands of the determined government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which had been armed to the teeth by some of the major international powers. My fellow Biafrans spent nearly three years fighting for a cause, fighting for freedom. But all that collapsed and Biafra stood defeated.

It had been a very bitter experience that led to the hostilities in the first place. And the big powers got involved in prolonging it. You see, we, the little people of the world, are constantly expendable. The big powers can play their games, even if millions perish in the process. And perish they did. In the end, more than a million people (and possibly as many as three million), mainly children, died either in the fighting or from starvation because of the Nigerian government’s economic blockade.

After the civil war, we saw a “unified” Nigeria saddled with an even more insidious reality. We were plagued by a home-grown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry and corruption of the ruling class. Compounding the situation was the fact that Nigeria was now awash in oil boom petrodollars. The country’s young, affable head of state, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, ever so cocksure following his civil war victory, was proclaiming to the entire planet that Nigeria had more money than it knew what to do with. A new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to this day.

What can Nigeria do to live up the promise of its postcolonial dream? First, we will have to find a way to do away with the present system of political godfatherism. This archaic practice allows a relative handful of wealthy men — many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs — to sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials, chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference.

And we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian. Today, we have a system where only those individuals who can pay an exorbitant application fee and finance a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury are the ones able to run for the presidency.

But we must also remember that restoring democratic systems alone will not, overnight, make the country a success. Let me borrow from the history of the Igbo ethnic group. The Igbo have long been a very democratic people. They express a strong anti-monarchy sentiment with the common name Ezebuilo, which translates to “a king is an enemy.”

There is no doubt that they experienced the highhandedness of kings, so they decided that a king cannot be a trusted friend of the people without checks and balances. And they tried all kinds of arrangements to whittle down the menace of those with the will to power, because such people exist in large numbers in every society. So the Igbo created all kinds of titles which cost very much to acquire. In the end, the aspirant to titles becomes impoverished in the process and ends up with very little. So that individual begins again, and by the time his life is over, he has a lot of prestige, but very little power.

This is not a time to bemoan all the challenges ahead. It is a time to work at developing, nurturing and sustaining democracy. But we also must realize that we need patience and cannot expect instant miracles. Building a nation is not something a people do in one regime, in a few years, even. The Chinese had their chance to emerge as the leading nation in the world in the Middle Ages, but were consumed by interethnic political posturing and wars, and had to wait another 500 years for another chance. America did not arrive at its much admired democracy overnight. When President Abraham Lincoln famously defined democracy as “the government of the people, by the people, for the people” he was drawing upon classical thought and at least 100 years of American rigorous intellectual reflection on the matter.

Sustaining democracy in Nigeria will require more than just free elections. It will also mean ending a system in which corruption is not just tolerated, but widely encouraged and hugely profitable. It is estimated that about $400 billion has been pilfered from Nigeria’s treasury since independence. One needs to stop for a moment to wrap one’s mind around that incredible figure. It is larger than the annual gross domestic products of Norway and Sweden. This theft of national funds is one of the factors essentially making it impossible for Nigeria to succeed. Nigerians alone are not responsible. We all know that the corrupt cabal of Nigerians has friends abroad who not only help it move the billions abroad but also shield the perpetrators from persecution.

Many analysts see a direct link between crude oil and the corruption in Nigeria, that creating a system to prevent politicians from having access to petrodollars is needed to reduce large-scale corruption. For most people, the solution is straightforward: if you commit a crime, you should be brought to book. But in a country like Nigeria, where there are no easy fixes, one must examine the issue of accountability, which has to be a strong component of the fight against corruption.

Some feel that a strong executive should be the one to hold people accountable. But if the president has all the power and resources of the country in his control, and he is also the one who selects who should be probed or not, clearly we will have an uneven system where those who are favored by the emperor have free rein to loot the treasury.

Nigeria’s story has not been, entirely, one long, unrelieved history of despair. At the midcentury mark of the state’s existence, Nigerians have begun to ask themselves the hard questions. How does the state of anarchy become reversed? What measures can be taken to prevent corrupt candidates from recycling themselves into positions of leadership? Young Nigerians have often come to me desperately seeking solutions to several conundrums: How do we begin to solve these problems in Nigeria where the structures are present but there is no accountability?

ONE initial step is to change the nation’s Official Secrets Act. Incredible as it may seem, it is illegal in Nigeria to publish official government data and statistics — including accounts spent by or accruing to the government. This, simply, is inconsistent with the spirit and practice of democracy. There is now a freedom of information bill before the National Assembly that would end this unacceptable state of affairs. It should be passed, free from any modifications that would render it ineffectual, and assented to by President Goodluck Jonathan. This can and should be achieved before the presidential election in April.

In the end, I foresee that the Nigerian solution will come in stages. First we have to nurture and strengthen our democratic institutions — and strive for the freest and fairest elections possible. That will place the true candidates of the people in office. Within the fabric of a democracy, a free press can thrive and a strong justice system can flourish. The checks and balances we have spoken about and the laws needed to curb corruption will then naturally find a footing.

And there has to be the development of a new patriotic consciousness, not one simply based on the well-worn notions of the “Unity of Nigeria” or “Faith in Nigeria” often touted by our corrupt leaders; but one based on an awareness of the responsibility of leaders to the led and disseminated by civil society, schools and intellectuals. It is from this kind of environment that a leader, humbled by the trust placed upon him by the people, will emerge, willing to use the power given to him for the good of the people.

Hoha! (Pointblank)

""It is no hyperbole that Anambra will provide the litmus test for democracy, and the existence of Nigeria as a single entity. We witnessed how Anambra was handed over as a private fiefdom of political godfathers by a former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. We saw how a President connived...and personally managed the stealing of a governorship mandate."

-------Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka on the fate of the nation as the upcoming off-year election in Anambra State draws closer.


"Things fall Apart was the balm, keeping us alive in the face of tremendous suffering in prison” – Nelson Mandela to the BBC after release from jail. When an art transcends time, and touches the people from Japan to Iceland, Kenya to Chile, then that art or literature is an enduring treasure. Those are the creations of gifted artists. Achebe is one of the few world geniuses and certainly and unquestionably, one of the the best ever novelists. His ‘Things Fall Apart’ was extraordinary in the ’50’s and fifty years later, quite as profound as ever."

Ruth J. Simmons, President, Brown University on the Chinua Achebe Colloquium held at Brown University.


"Despite the multi-billion dollar or multi- trillion naira budgets, Nigeria, with a population of over 140 million, is still grappling with 103 public and private universities, in addition to dozens of polytechnics and colleges of education, while the USA, with a population of about 300 million is having over 5,700 universities and Japan with a population of about 127 million, has over 1,200 universities. Out of over one million candidates that sat for the universities entrance examinations yearly in recent times, only about 300,000 were offered admission yearly by the universities and about 50 per cent of this figure graduate on annual basis with poverty/unemployment passports issued to them. Our health sector is also nothing to write home about. Tens of millions of Nigerians are still drinking acidic water from unprotected sources. Our agriculture is steadily drifting towards pre-subsistence level. The Malaysians and Indonesians, who came to us in the 1960s and 1970s, so as to be taught the secrets of palm tree cultivation, weeding and harvesting, have not only mastered them, but also they have mechanised the palm industry, which now earns them billions of dollars annually and feeds millions of their skilled and unskilled nationals."

-------Emeka Umeagbasi, Chairman, Board of Trustees, International Society for civil liberties and the Rule of Law on why Nigeria needs a 'radical' revolution speaking to journalists on the state of the troubled nation.


"Most, if not all of the indices of failed states, declare Nigeria well on its way to joining that disreputable club. Nigeria boasts a government unable to deliver basic social services. It is plagued by corruption so endemic and monumental it is hard to separate it from state policy. It lacks the capability or discipline to prevent threats to public safety and national integrity and is assailed by active challenges to its legitimacy. The latest disaster of a re-run election in Ekiti state, meant to correct the errors of the first, proved an even greater show of shame."

-------Ogaga Ifowodo, Poet, Lawyer and PhD candidate, Cornell University on a "yea" and "nay" debate on whether Nigeria is a failed state published by BBC News.


"It is obvious, all the signs of a state heading for failure - where a constitutional authority increasingly shows an inability to provide basic services like guaranteeing security to life and property, maintenance of economic and social services, infrastructure and food security - are not evident. On the contrary, for the first time in the country's history, Nigeria is attempting to address its economic and social infrastructure inadequacies. The economy has never been more open to new investors and the government recognises the imperative for private-sector investments in critical infrastructure such as power, transportation and energy."

-------Waziri Haruna Ahmadu, former Health and Agriculture Secretary, and adviser to the ailing President Umaru Yar'adua on why he thinks Nigeria is not a failed state.

Chinua Achebe Still Got Game

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
By Chinua Achebe
Alfred A. Knopf
208 pages. $24.95

Growing up and as youngsters dealing with academia at the secondary level, "we the boys" talked a whole lot about scholarship and applauded the works of our literary idols -- Chinua Achebe, John Munonye, Adiele Afigbo, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Agostinho Neto, Cyprien Ekwensi, Kofi Awoonor, Ali Mazrui, Meja Nwangi, Dominic Mulaisho, Elechi Amadi and uncountable others. We talked quite a bit as aspiring scholars to a point our mothers, whichever house we had convened would stuff our mouth with food to quiet us for the fact we talked too much on issues of the day as they did look forward to a developed youngish intellectuals. But time did fly, just like that.

And as a whole lot, too, has changed over the years based practically on generational thing that popped up with new era, anyone who thought Chinua Achebe was done writing his fascinating stories or had called it quits in using his pen to express his feelings about societal ills and "naked dictatorship" of colonialism, and at the same time educating our minds with his brilliant essays, storytelling and wit in literature, ought to stop by any bookstore and ask about the literary giant's newest entry on the bookshelves.

Or if you are too lazy to walk or drive to a good bookstore in your hood, just google "The Education of a British-Protected Child" and sample a few of the hundreds of thousands of entries found there on the subject matter. I was even baffled from what I saw wondering about a book just released in less than a week and how it has collected over six hundred and something thousand entries. And who are these people curious about Achebe's new book? Would it mean they have been waiting for his new release since he has not written a book in twenty years? Or would it be the master storyteller is back again and everybody is eager to check it out, known for who he is?

Well, I did stop by many of the bookstores in my neck of the wood upon hearing Achebe has written a new book which would be his first new book in twenty years. First, I had called Random House for a copy which was kind of late not knowing the protocol was something I should have taken care of earlier; that is, if I had intended to read the book. I'm quite sure I have gone through that before, with a different publishing house, though. In that quest,I had called Borders to find out if Achebe's book has arrived the shelves. The sales clerk at Borders, the one at Howard Hughes Center Promenade in Culver City, told me they've "sold out." She requested for an order immediately which would however take about a week to reach me. I had no nerves to wait. I called some other branches in the Southland. All that I called either sold out or haven't received shipment yet.

As it happened and coincidentally, I was heading to Long Beach when I bumped into Borders on Bellflower Blvd. I walked in and asked for Achebe's new entry. The sales clerk ran the author's name and found out they haven't received shipment yet. He placed a copy on hold for me. When the shipment arrived, I was called to "come and pick the book up."

And I did get the copy on time for early review. From the preface in which the author tells us about the fiftieth year anniversary of Things Fall Apart, the breaking news of his auto accident relayed to his wife, his family's reaction to that and sixteen well-written essays, Achebe literally wrote his memoirs in The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays." Achebe talked about his two daughters, Chinelo and Nwando; and his two boys, Ikechukwu and Chidi who gave him all the support he needed when he was involved in an automobile accident that nearly cost him his life.

In the first essay, The Education of a British-Protected Child, Achebe did not find colonialism funny, especially the result of lack of profound leadership in Nigeria, and even assuring his readers that he would not give "a discourse on colonialism," he could not "swallow" the fact that colonialism was damaging to the African continent pointing out briefly the evils of colonial rule:

"In my view, it is gross crime for anyone to impose himself on another, to seize his land and his history, and then to compound this by making out that the victim is some kind of ward or minor requiring protection. It is too disingenous. Even the aggressor seems to know this, which is why he will sometimescomouflage his brigandage with such brazen hypocrisy."

Achebe was born in Ogidi 78-years ago in what use to be a Southern Protectorate of British Empire, and then Eastern Region, now Anambra State of a fabricated nation-state ordained by the colonists. His father, an early convert was a teacher for the missionaries. Receiving his early education at Church Missionary Society Primary School, he attended Government College, Umuahia, and then proceeded to University College, Ibadan, for his first degree. He became a writer rather than "a clear-cut scholar," supposedly his dream when Trinity College, Cambridge, declined his application for admission. Being turned down for post-graduate studies at Trinity College, he found work as a producer at Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation.

On What is Nigeria to me? Achebe spoke very ill of a country that was just six years old with the sudden eruption of chaos leading to the pogrom and civil war. He applauds the country as a child that is "gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward." Writing with emotion, his tale of experience in Lagos during the crisis when alcohol-addled soldiers' crackdown on Igbos and their properties coupled with a telephone call alerting him "armed soldiers" who had been on the rampage came looking for him and in his own words because of the book that he wrote, A Man of the People.

Achebe wrote with anger and distress [my emphasis], a war that was deliberately programmed to wipe out the Igbo people from the face of this planet in retaliation to where a group of young military officers organized themselves in what would be Nigeria's first military coup and a topple of its First Republic. And just like the counter coup, J.T.U Aguiyi-Ironsi and his host Adekunle Fajuyi were kidnapped, flogged and murdered in the most brutal of circumstances on the orders of Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, while 4th Batallion commanding officer J Akahan kept himself busy rounding up Igbo millitary officers and killing them in an immense scale.

Or the six-year-old boy in Minna, at school and witnessing a band of northern nihilists and hoodlums walk into his classroom and stab his teacher with a machete, a native Yoruba who was mistaken for Igbo, bleeding from her wounds to death. That being emphasized by me, Achebe is totally disappointed with Nigeria not because of the hoodlums and nihilists but because of the federal government that stood by and allowed such horrific events to unfold.

Why the pogrom was going on in the north, Igbo people were also sought in Lagos by drunken "federal troops" who had launched a search and kill attack. Meanwhile, Achebe had whisked his wife and kids back to the East while he stayed-put to await the outcome of the carnage unleashed by the nihilists, hoodlums and "federal troops." In Lagos, Achebe hid from place to place until he luckily escaped the federal troops who had launched a manhunt for him. In that very situation, Achebe finds it difficult to forgive "Nigeria" for what it did to his kith and kin. The northerners and their collaborators had a masterplan since the revenge in the counter coup, allegedly, wasn't enough, and if the conflict had ended after the counter coup, Achebe had this to say:

If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the north and unleashed waves of brutal massacres, which Colin Legum of 'The Observer' was the first to describe as a pogrom. It was estimated that thirty thousand civilian men, women and children died in these massacres. Igbos were fleeing in hundreds of thousands from all parts of Nigeria to their homeland in the east I was one of the last to flee from Lagos. I simply could not bring myself quickly enough to accept that I could no longer live in my nation's capital, although the facts clearly said so. One Sunday morning I was telephoned from Broadcasting House and informed that armed soldiers who appeared drunk had come looking for me to test which was stronger, my pen or their gun!

The offense of my pen was that it had written a novel called A man of the People, a bitter satire on political corruption in an African country that resembled Nigeria. I wanted the novel to be a denunciation of the kind of independence we were experiencing in postcolonial Nigeria and many other countries in the 1960s, and I intended to scare my countrymen into good behavior with a frightening cautionary tale. The best monster I could come up with was a military coup d'etat, which every sane Nigeria at the time knew was rather far-fetched!...

As one reads on, Achebe tells us about his travels to many African countries in which he acknowledged "the chief problem was racism." He did go on to tell us about Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, Chukwuemeka Ike, I.N.C. Aniebo and Ken Saro-Wiwa who were all products of Government College, Umuahia, and what they read in those days at the school library -- Treasure Island, Tom Brown School Days, The Prisoner of Zender, David Copperfield -- which had nothing to do with African literature.

In Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature, and as a founding editor of The African Writers Series, he told us about the gathering of African writers in 1962 at Makerere University , Kampala, Uganda, which included the poet Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi, and Obi Wali he said "was himself a teacher of literature and a close friend of the poet Christopher Okigbo, might have been expected to lead the way along the lines of his prescription; but what he did was abandon his acdemic career for politics and business." Achebe was disappointed in Wali's move.

Achebe wrote extensively on African Literature as Restoration of Celebration, Teaching Things Fall Apart, Martin Luther King Jr. and The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics.

The book, a reflection of events takes us aback to take a look at Africa's past which literally has been a tragedy. Nobel Laureate, Tony Morrison simply put it thus: "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe. For passion, intellect and crystalline prose, he is unsurpassed."

Without question, Chinua Achebe still got game.