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Review
Achebe’s three lectures included in Home and Exile explore the Nigerian writer’s intellectual development within the context of Africa and its troubled colonial and post-colonial history past. Perhaps best known for Things Fall Apart, his novel from 1958, Achebe’s novels draw upon the historical and contemporary situation confronting Africa. Achebe urges other African writers not to undervalue their continent and to draw upon the African experience and its literary traditions rather than looking to emulate English and European literary models. Achebe’s opening lecture includes anecdotes from his childhood, describing growing up among the Igbo people while also having an English education. He recounts the writers that made an impact on him as a young man as well as some of the major political figures and events of the time. In discussing other writers, Achebe comments on the struggle many post-colonial African writers have had in asserting their African identity amidst the continuing influence of the English literary establishment. Achebe also explores how some European authors have portrayed Africa. In a review of the book Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “In all Achebe’s writing there is an intense moral energy, as there is wherever he speaks about the task of the writer...in language that captures the sense of threat and loss that must have faced many Africans as empire invaded and disrupted their lives...his convictions are as clear and as strong and as elegantly expressed and his moral commitments as passionate as one could hope for. Of Related Interest: Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria by Wendy Griswold.
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