Chinua Achebe, noted Nigerian writer perhaps most famous for his novel Things Fall Apart
. NYT. A/V Club.
Achebe’s name was frequently tossed around as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, but he had to content himself with winning pretty much everything else, including the Booker Prize in 2007. But in his final years, he twice rejected honors from the Nigerian government, rather than be seen as complicit in what he called “a small clique of renegades” who had transformed “my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom.” He reserved perhaps his greatest impatience for those who accused him of blaming colonialism for all of Africa’s woes. “Some people think,” he told a Paris Review interviewer in 1993, “’Well, what he’s saying is we must praise his people.’ For God’s sake! Go and read my books.”
And:
Mr. Achebe’s political thinking evolved from blaming colonial rule for Africa’s woes to frank criticism of African rulers and the African citizens who tolerated their corruption and violence. Indeed, it was Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s and then its military dictatorship in the 1980s and ‘90s that forced Mr. Achebe abroad.
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