West African Books

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 533 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

What makes fiction important 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I know this is the classic debate of all time when it comes to literature: Is it about beautifully written prose (THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE, incidentally, is a good example of this problem) or does it tell a compelling story? (yet the prose itself is not its strong point).

It seems that many works of fiction these days are of the former and unfortunately, not enough of the latter. I recently re-read this book along with another classic, JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, after a discussion I had with a friend about this very subject. As a middle-aged person, I often look back at the books that made a difference in my life and much of the time, it's not about the author's writing style. Achebe's is a plain, straightforward style, but it's what he is conveying that is so striking about this story. (I am a bit miffed at the "English" teachers and the like who are downing this book!) Bottom line: I was left with a lasting impression that stayed with me. I can't say that many books do this today.

All I can say is pick up this read and decide for yourselves. Bottom line, this story is just as relevant today as it was so many years ago when it first appeared. These issues are universal and the world today is replete with similar conflicts. It's unfortunate to have to go back in time to find classic works of fiction, but sometimes there are exceptions. Check out--SIM0N LAZARUS, a word of mouth wonder more should know about.

Editorial Review:

Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone - even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action. Will the great man's dangerous pride eventually destroy him?

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

            With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.           

           Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.

Collected Plays 2

Wole Soyinka

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Dance of the Forests 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Although I was introduced to this book because of an english assignment, I became entranced by the book by the first 10 pages. And although it is confusing at times, and a teacher explaining the story as you go along is a signifigant help, the lyrical blend of Western experimentalism and African folk tradition is quite inebriating. If you are at all interested in African folk lore, this play is a must read for you. Wole Soyinka is one of the most respected play writers in all of Africa, and this is one of his best works.

Editorial Review:

'"The Lion and the Jewel" alone is enough to establish Nigeria as the most fertile new source of English-speaking drama since Synge's discovery of the Western Isles.' - "The Times". The ironic development and consequences of 'progress' may be traced through both the themes and the tone of the works included in this second volume of Wole Soyinka's plays. "The Lion and the Jewel" shows an ineffectual assault on past tradition soundly defeated. In "Kongi's Harvest", however, the pretensions of Kongi's regime are also fatal. The denouement points the way forward. "The Two Brother Jero" plays pursue that way, the comic 'propheteering' of the earlier play giving way to the sardonic reality of "Jero's Metamorphosis". "Madmen and Specialists", Soyinka's most pessimistic play, concerns the physical, mental, and moral destruction of modern civil war.

The Famished Road

Ben Okri

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A beautiful story 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

A beautiful story. An African version of Magical Realism but still quite different.

Editorial Review:

In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story.

Death and the King's Horseman

Wole Soyinka

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

One Great Writer 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 16 people found this review helpful.

At a university seminar in the US recently, Prof. Soyinka was asked to respond to charges by certain critics that his writing wasn't 'African' enough. He responded, saying "The people who say these things, I refer to as neo-Tarzanists, people whose Africa is the Africa of Tarzan, swinging from tree to tree. That's not my Africa", he said, to a standing, thunderous ovation. It is difficult to imagine a writer in English today with a wider grasp of the language. Some of his work is unbelievable - metaphor, irony, the supernatural, interwoven with tragedy, lyricism, and language. Top-draw.

Editorial Review:

A Nobel Prize-winning playwright's classic tale of tragic decisions in a traditional African culture. Based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946, Wole Soyinka's powerful play concerns the intertwined lives of Elesin Oba, the king's chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer. The king has died and Elesin, his chief horseman, is expected by law and custom to commit suicide and accompany his ruler to heaven. The stage is set for a dramatic climax when Pilkings learns of the ritual and decides to intervene and Elesin's son arrives home.

Ake: The Years of Childhood

Wole Soyinka

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When he was 4 years old, spurred by insatiable curiosity and the beat of a marching drum, Wole Soyinka slipped silently through the gate of his parents' yard and followed a police band to a distant village. This was his first journey beyond Aké, Nigeria, and reading his account is akin to witnessing a child's epiphany:

The parsonage wall had vanished forever but it no longer mattered. Those token bits and pieces of Aké which had entered our home on occasions, or which gave off hints of their nature in those Sunday encounters at church, were beginning to emerge in their proper shapes and sizes.

He returned, perched upon the handlebars of a policeman's bicycle, "markedly different from whatever I was before the march." The reader's horizons feel similarly expanded after finishing this astonishing book.

Nobel laureate Soyinka is a prolific playwright, poet, novelist, and critic, but seems to have found his purest voice as an autobiographer. Aké: The Years of Childhood is a memoir of stunning beauty, humor, and perception--a lyrical account of one boy's attempt to grasp the often irrational and hypocritical world of adults that equally repels and seduces him. Soyinka elevates brief anecdotes into history lessons, conversations into morality plays, memories into awakenings. Various cultures, religions, and languages mingled freely in the Aké of his youth, fostering endless contradictions and personalized hybrids, particularly when it comes to religion. Christian teachings, the wisdom of the ogboni, or ruling elders, and the power of ancestral spirits--who alternately terrify and inspire him--all carried equal metaphysical weight. Surrounded by such a collage, he notes that "God had a habit of either not answering one's prayers at all, or answering them in a way that was not straightforward."

In writing from a child's perspective, Soyinka expresses youthful idealism and unfiltered honesty while escaping the adult snares of cynicism and intolerance. His stinging indictment of colonialism takes on added power owing to the elegance of his attack. He also spears Nigeria's increasing Westernization, its movement toward modernity and materialism, as he describes his beloved village markets deteriorating from a "procession of magicians" to rows of "fantasy stores lit by neon and batteries of coloured bulbs" where the "blare of motor-horns compete with a high-decibel outpouring of rock and funk and punk and other thunk-thunk from lands of instant-culture heroes."

The book closes with an 11-year-old Soyinka preparing to enroll in a government college, declaring it "time to commence the mental shifts for admittance to yet another irrational world of adults and their discipline." Aké is an eloquent testament to the wisdom of youth. --Shawn Carkonen

No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

No Longer At Ease 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

After writing "Things Fall Apart", Achebe again comes to us with a masterpiece sequel tiled "No Longer At Ease". This book depicts Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of the Okonkwo in the former. He is an honorable character who comes to a tragic end because of the corruption going on around him, this book also depicts the assimilation that the Nigerians go through and their identity shaken with waves and waves of European influence. A book more concerned over the social issues that the Nigerians at the time felt for their time. This is also shown in Africa today, where corruption run rampant and those in power care nothing about those without power. A powerful novel indeed.

The Trouble with Nigeria 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Although considered a sequel to "Things Fall Apart," "No Longer at Ease" stands on its own and does not require that you read Achebe's more famous work (assuming you've somehow made it through school and managed to escape its ubiquity). It's probably more accurate to say that "No Longer at Ease" is a retelling set in modern Nigeria, and it is as great as--perhaps better than--his earlier work.

Obi Okonkwo is the grandson of Okonkwo, the central character in "Things Fall Apart" (and, other than thematic similarities, this is the only direct link between the two books). With the assistance of fellow villagers who had "made it" in the larger world, Obi leaves home for schooling in England and returns to a civil service job in the colonial administration of Nigeria. Because he is one of the select representatives of his village to receive such treatment, expectations are high: he is to live like a member of his class, entertain like a prince, and pay back his educational expenses. He also finds out quickly that his position on the Scholarship Board, recommending prospective students, is a magnet for bribery.

Here, Achebe forsakes the quasi-mythical storytelling tone of "Things Fall Apart" in favor of a more realist style--and this novel, I think, is both stronger and more accessible as a result. In both works, though, Achebe examines how native culture and tradition come into conflict with Western conventions and materialism. Not only is Obi is torn between the often contradictory demands of success and politesse, but he must also face the patronizing racism of his white superiors and the "backward" conventions of his own people. He falls in love with a woman, only to find her spurned by his people because she is "osu"--an outcast. "It was scandalous," Obi thinks, " that in the middle of the twentieth century a man could be barred from marrying a girl simply because her great-great-great-great-grandfather had been dedicated to serve a god, thereby setting himself apart and turning his descendents into a forbidden caste to the end of the Time."

Unable to satisfy either his family and friends or his British overlords, Obi is headed for the nearly preordained downfall that opens the book. It's a tragedy that underscores all of Achebe's works, which critically examine both Western attitudes toward Africa and the corruption in his native homeland. (The title of this review, in fact, is appropriated from one of Achebe's nonfiction works.) It is not modernization per se to which Achebe objects (after all, he now lives in the United States), but the racism and marginalization that accompanied and have superseded imperialism and that created unreasonable expectations for Nigerians. Through the prism of fiction, "Things Fall Apart" represents powerfully the paradoxes of African life in a Western world.

Editorial Review:

The story of a man whose foreign education has separated him from his African roots and made him parts of a ruling elite whose corruption he finds repugnant.  More than thirty years after it was first written, this novel remains a brilliant statement on the challenges still facing African society.

A Man of the People

Chinua Achebe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Perhaps Achebe's Best 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I loved "Things Fall Apart", and it was what got me to fall in love with African literature in the first place-and download a list of Africa's 100 greatest works of literature in order to try to feed my passion! (I'm not sure how far into it I am now!) It is a masterpiece and so moving.

However, I have to admit there is something so perfect about "A Man of the People", so witty, so well-written, so perfect, so flawless, that it might be better than "Things Fall Apart". Since this book takes place during the post-colonial period, it has a completely different tone than Things Fall Apart. For one thing, it uses a smattering of pidgin (a Nigerian combination of indigenous words, English and slang), which is hard to understand for outsiders to the culture but fascinating-only a little is used and doesn't at all detract from understanding the novel if you're not a native speaker, and it adds a lot of flavor.

Achebe's masterful writing and talent at crafting stories-saying more with subtlety than many have said with bombast- is what makes this book worth reading if you're not interested in Africa in particular. If you are interested in Africa, this is an important exploration of the post-colonial situation. The narrator, part of the educated elite, becomes enamored of the so-called "Man of the People", a man who embodies a Nigerian postcolonial political leader of a certain kind-always ready to take a bribe, charming, populist, and utterly corrupt.

At first the narrator is intrigued by the Man of the People, and admires his style. The realization of what men like this are doing to his country forces the narrator to realize what is at stake when the nation allows itself to accept thievery as a cultural value. Although he is initially immature and moved to vengeance because the "Man of the People" beds his girl, he rapidly matures and comes to identify with his idealist friends, a couple who have not abandoned their optimism and compassion for the people.

A Must-Read, and one of my favorite books of all time.

Editorial Review:

By the renowned author of Things Fall Apart, this novel foreshadows the Nigerian coups of 1966 and shows the color and vivacity as well as the violence and corruption of a society making its own way between the two worlds.

Joys of Motherhood

Buchi Emecheta

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Bitterness of Motherhood 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Buchi Emecheta, writes with piercing teeth and gouging fingers: irony, sarcasm, and anger are her appendages: orphan, arranged marriage object, immigrant to England, five children by 22, marriage terminator, single mother acquiring degree in sociology, messaged writer.

The setting for "The Joys of Motherhood" is in Lagos, Nigeria, between the 1930's and the 1960's. Lagos, the capital of the British colony of Nigeria, is primarily Yoruba; the main characters are Igbo.

Change from chiefdoms to the city: "Men here [in Lagos] are too busy being white men's servants to be men. We women mind the home. Not our husbands. Their manhood has been taken away from them. The shame of it is that they don't know it. All they see is the money, shining white man's money"

Community versus individual: The scene is an attempted suicide in Lagos. "You are simply not allowed to commit suicide in peace, because everyone is responsible for the other person. Foreigners may call us a nation of busybodies, but to us, an individual's life belongs to the community not just to him or her. So a person has no right to take it while another member of the community looks on. He must interfere, he must stop it happening."

Religion: "Her new Christian religion taught her to bear her cross with fortitude. If hers was to support her family, she would do so, until her husband found a new job."

War: The context is the forced draft of Nigerians into the army during World War II: "For me to be married to a soldier, a plunderer and killer of children.... I don't know how I would feel if I was asked to kill people who had never offended me."

Men and Women: "God when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody's appendage?"

Motherhood: "When the children were good they belonged to the father; when they were bad, they belonged to the mother. Every woman knew this."

Editorial Review:

...a graceful, touching, ironically titled tale. - John UpdikeA new edition of her classic novel to coincide with the publication of her other works in the African Writers Series. Nnu Ego is a woman devoted to her children, giving them all her energy, all her worldly possessions, indeed, all her life to them -- with the result that she finds herself friendless and alone in middle age. This story of a young mother's struggles in 1950s Lagos is a powerful commentary on polygamy, patriarchy, and women's changing roles in urban Nigeria.

Arrow of God

Chinua Achebe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Achebe's Arrow 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 20 people found this review helpful.

Like Chinua Achebe's first novel (Things Fall Apart), Arrow of God takes us back to the traditional village culture of the Igbo nation in Western Nigeria, tracing its destruction under British colonial rule. Once again, too, the story centers on a tribal elder who embodies the old ways so profoundly that he will be destroyed along with them. Achebe uses fiction to do what ethnology can never accomplish: to take us "inside" an indigenous culture, letting us see and feel how its customs and beliefs support the rhythms of daily living. With an extraordinary blend of sympathy and detachment, he captures the human tragedy in the destruction of a way of life.

The Best Achebe Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I know that many people have read Things Fall Apart, but that is not his greatest novel. I was not forced to read any of his books. I was just curious. It exposed me to some of the greatest literature I could ever have known. Arrow of God is by far my favorite Achebe book. So if you think Things Fall Apart is good, Arrow of God is so much deeper. You get to know the characters so much better. You feel like you are part of the scene. It is more personal. You see more into different people's lives. I read a lot of books. This one is one of my favorite.

Editorial Review:

Set in the Ibo heartland of eastern Nigeria, one of Africa's best-known writers describes the conflict between old and new in its most poignant aspect: the personal struggle between father and son.