Introduction
•Published in 1958
• In 1960 there are only six
novels by Africans published
in the West.
•Achebe has been called the
Father of Modern African
Writing because he sort of
opened the door for
Africans to reclaim their
past and their traditions and
tell their own story in their
own way.
•Nigeria
•A postimperialist text
about
colonization in
Africa
•Late
nineteenth,
early 20th
century
•Ibo culture
African
Complexity
Social Systems
Cultural
Practices
Infrastructure
Values/Beliefs
Art, Expression,
Celebrations
Marlo, the narrator, says
at one point in Heart of
Darkness,
"These chaps had no
earthly reason for any
kind of scruple. Restraint?
I would just as soon of
expected restraint from a
hyena prowling among
the corpses of a
battlefield."
Achebe's novel is written
precisely to overturn this
image of Africa.
•Born in 1930 at the high watermark of British
Imperial involvement in Africa.
•He was raised in a Christian family.
•Baptized Albert, in honor of the Prince of Wales.
•Phenomenal student; went to an elite secondary school.
•Has said that when he read as a youth, Gulliver's Travels and
Treasure Island and David Copperfield, he found himself
siding with the white people.
•At university felt like that cannon was really coming out of
the author's cultural ignorance.
•Achebe wanted to learn about his own past through his own
people.
•He wanted to reflect the stories of his people, without a
white messenger.
Nigeria is an invention
of the British. The very
name itself was
conjured up by the wife
of the first and most
important British
Governor, Lord Lugard.
Political/Cultural
Imperialism
Spiritual Imperialism
•Nigerian
Independence: 1963
•What will we be?
•American Civil Rights
Movement
•What will we be?
Questions readers to look at
•How are beliefs are created
and destroyed?
•How do changes, both good
and bad, affect the group? The
individual?
•How does man process a
changing world? What is
gained and compromised?
•How do we move & progress
instead of regress when what
we know is taken from us?
•What causes some to fall
apart?
•The “Congo Village,” or Kongoslandsbyen, was a fake tribal village built in Frogner Park
for the 1914 Oslo World Fair. Visitors could pay to gawk at 80 African men, women and
children —apparently Congolese — living in thatched huts, wearing traditional
garments and doing “indigenous” things.
•In just five months it attracted 1.4 million visitors, or roughly half the population of
Norway. A newspaper at the time described it as “exceedingly funny” while another
enthused, “it’s wonderful that we are white!”
•Reopened in 2014 by two Norwegian artists, the recreation was sponsored by the
government as a project to open up dialogue on if Norway really is a post-racial society
freed from its often untold past.
•Bwa Mwesigire, a Ugandan academic has stated “We are not in a post-racial world.
[The artitsts] can’t exonerate themselves because they mean well. Indeed, if they are
serious about creating discussions of racism they ought to think deeper about the
likelihood that their project may entrench the same prejudices they claim to fight.”
•And Muauke B. Munfocol, a DRC-born Norwegian, questions the decision of the
Norwegian government to sponsor a human zoo, rather than put its money toward
more constructive forms of dialogue.