We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
Tyger Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry.
—William Blake, “The Tyger,” Songs of Innocence and ExperienceLet us help one another to find a way out of Darkest Africa. The impenetrable jungle around us is not darker than the dark primeval forest of the human mind uncultured. We must emerge from the savage backwoods and come into the open where nations are made.
—Attoh Ahuma, The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness[In 1977] I told [my third year English class at the University of Nairobi] … “I want to attempt a class analysis of Chinua Achebe's fiction from Things Fall Apart to Girls at War. I want … to trace the development of the messenger class from its inception as actual messengers, clerks, soldiers and road foremen in colonialism as seen in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, to their position as the educated ‘been-tos’ in No Longer at Ease; to their assumption and exercise of power in A Man of the People; to their plunging of the nation into intra-class civil war in Girls at War.”
—Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the MindSons and Fathers; Or, Locating the Present in the Future Anterior of the Past
Introducing the Picador collection of his first three novels in 1988—the collection goes by the title The African Trilogy—Chinua Achebe steps back for one reflexive moment to make a candid observation about his relation to his father. Recalling that the man was “a devout evangelist,” Achebe reveals a father whose wholehearted devotion to the brave new white dispensation, introduced by the colonial encounter, was matched by an iron resolution to make a clean break with his traditional Igbo past. As far as the novelist can recall, he “never divulged to me before he passed on” the “sensational masquerade dancing” that he did “before he renounced the devil and all his works” (xi). The devil and all his works: this language we will surely recognize as one whose inscription and meaning appear in the very order of colonialist diagnosis, which, as divulged in the last chapter, contrives to impose on Africa her burden of worldlessness.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
