The Human Rights Warrior

Nelson Mandela read Chinua Achebe when he was in prison and reportedly described him as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.”  I read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in college, three decades after it was written, required reading on a syllabus that only included one African author.  I read his other books later, as well as some of his essays.  The obituaries describe him as an African Literary Titan and a “towering man of letters”.  True words, but he was more than that.  Much has and will be written about Chinua Achebe as the writer that wrested writing about Africa – that vast and varied Africa, as if one writer could ever represent it – back from the West.

There is one poem by Chinua Achebe that has stayed with me for many years, not because it captures the global themes of colonialism or tradition v…

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