It is a heart-wrenching account of the grandchild of the main character in Things Fall Apart, who joins the Nigerian colonial civil service after receiving a British education but struggles to escape the conflicting mores of his family – a tragic modern protagonist with a foot in both camps. Perhaps the most relevant of Achebe's works to my generation is No Longer at Ease, the second book of his trilogy, which powerfully exposed the difficulty of navigating a world where one is expected to partake of western secular education and all the values and privileges that comes with it, and still be hostage to the commanding beliefs of one's own culture. Once things did fall apart, with the west fully taking the reigns of governance either directly or by proxy, what replaced the old way? An uncomfortable mix of modern and traditional that still ended in tragedy. Yes, tribal society Africa was strong and functional, but Christian missionaries would not have made any inroads were there not dissatisfaction with its brutal justice, ethnic discrimination and religious rigidity.Īchebe's writing isn't anything as banal as cultural relativism – something he has been accused of – but a powerful refutation of the fact that before the white man, Africa was a 'blank sheet of civilisation'. Achebe was the first African writer who painted a non-romantic picture of this tribal life without apologising for the bad, or praising the good. As an African Arab growing up in post-colonial east Africa, I had not read before an indigenous interpretation of regional history that wasn't either a non-critical celebration of pre-colonial past, or a wretched condemnation of it as one that must be deficient if it succumbed so easily to invasion.

Chinua achebe's