THE GENOCIDE AGAINST IGBO NATION STILL HAUNTS NIGERIA

Topics:
- THE GENOCIDE AGAINST IGBO NATION STILL HAUNTS NIGERIA
- Achebe returns with long-awaited 'Biafra' memoir
- Literaryworld: My role in Biafran war, by Prof. Chinua Achebe
- Furore over Achebe's Biafran memoir
- Achebe's new book controversy: Civil war hasn't ended -Okorie
- Attack on Awo: Has Achebe gone too far?
- Gowon, Awo behind genocide -Col Achuzia
- My role in the civil war - Awolowo
- Genocide, 'Biafran' culpability and Achebe's impressions

An article by CHINUA ACHEBE 

 It is my impression that Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself and for his Yoruba people - and he's being criticized for it.

..Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people – mothers, children, babies, civilians – lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria.

As a writer I believe that it is fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our neighbours. Where there is justification for further investigation, justice should be served.
In the case of the Nigeria-Biafra war there is precious little relevant literature that helps answer these questions.

Renowned author, Chinua Achebe, dies at 82

From The Guardian - Nigeria

RENOWNED Nigerian author Chinua Achebe known as the father of African literature, has died at the age of 82. His death followed an illness from a hospital in Boston. 

Achebe, 82, was most famous for his ground breaking 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which dealt with the impact of colonialism on African society. Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10 million copies - and has been translated into more than 50 languages. He has been living in the US since 1990 following injuries from a car crash.

A novelist, poet and essayist, Achebe was perhaps best known for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, the story of the Igbo warrior Okonkwo and the colonial era, which has sold more than 10 million copies around the world and has been published in 50 languages.

Things Fall Apart is considered the most widely read book in modern African Literature. The book sold over 12 million copies and has been translated to over 50 languages worldwide.

Many of his other novels, including Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah, and A man of the People, were equally influential as well.

Prof Achebe was born in Ogidi, Anambra State, on November 16, 1930 and attended St Philips' Central School at the age of six. He moved away from his family to Nekede, four kilometres from Owerri, the capital of Imo State, at the age of 12 and registered at the Central School there.

He attended Government College Umuahia for his secondary school education. He was a pioneer student of the University College, now University of Ibadan in 1948. He was first admitted to study medicine but changed to English, history and theology after his first year.

Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel Anthills of the Savannah, and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".