Achebe's Fiction and Contemporary Nigerian Politics
[based on Contemporary Authors]

[Added by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University]


Achebe uses language, which he sees as a writer's best resource, to expose and combat the propaganda generated be African politicians to manipulate their own people. Faced with his people's growing inferiority complex and his leader's disregard for the truth, the African writer cannot turn his back on his culture, Achebe believes. "A writer has a responsibility to try and stop [these damaging trends] because unless our culture begins to take itself seriously it will never....get off the ground." He states his mission in his essay "The Novelist as Teacher": "Here is an adequate revolution for me to espouse -- to help my society regain belief in itself and to put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement. And it is essentially a question of education, in the best sense of that word. Here, I think, my aims and the deepest aspirations of society meet."


Postcolonial OV Africa OV nigeria OV