30 Days of Chinua Achebe

Hello!

I’m back again after being away for a while. I felt like I had run out of things to say but I just couldn’t delete the blog. So here I am full of new ideas that I can’t wait to share with you!

Why Achebe?

With everything happening around the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality globally, with the killing of George Floyd in the U.S and 14-year-old Frank Mugala at home in Zambia, I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I needed a way to release all my frustration and elevate Black voices. I remembered the 50 days of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin challenges I had done last year and felt like I could use that as my release.

So, I started with an African Author, to get me started with a voice somewhat closer to home. Chinua Achebe understood the importance of telling stories to give a voice to the voiceless. In a time, such as this when we can either protest, petition or educate ourselves, I choose to educate myself and share what I learn.

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Achebe and I

I was never really a fan of his work until I took Critical Thinking in my first year of university. Exploring his book, Things Fall Apart, through the lens of race and colonialism in that class opened me up to his work. So, I read it twice for that class. When I picked up Things Fall Apart again, it was at the start of the 30 days of Chinua Achebe challenge. As I read Achebe’s interviews and watched them on YouTube the meaning of Things Fall Apart shifted for me.

Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart because he realized that the literary world was missing something. At the time literary depictions of Africa and its people were of “savages” and “uncivilized” people. He realized that what was missing was the depiction of Africa from an African perspective. He wrote the story he wanted to read.

Being the son of a missionary and going to school with children from families that hadn’t converted to Christianity gave him a unique perspective that enabled him to write his first three books: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God. What I loved about Things Fall Apart is that he told it like it was, he wrote from what he knew. He explored the simplicity, the beauty and the ugliness of life before colonialism while giving the reader enough space to make their own assessments and judgments.

Professor Achebe

My biggest lesson from Chinua Achebe, is that representation matters. It’s a lesson the world is still waking up to. Things won’t change if the untold stories remain untold. It’s these stories that connect us as people and help us understand each other a little bit better. So if you have a story that you want told, find a way to tell it.

Love & Light

Kombe

P.S. : If you’d like to do the 30 days of Chinua Achebe challenge click here!