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LITERATURE & ARTS Tijan M. Sallah and Ngozi Okonjo-lweala. Chinua Achebe, Teacher of Light: A Biography. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003. 160 pp. Maps. Illustrations. $19.95. Paper.
This volume is a fitting tribute to a renowned African writer whose works have elicited worldwide critical praise. It is written in prose that flows with an ease and fluidity that almost resemble Achebe's own. In the book we meet a gifted and sensitive writer-activist who is deeply rooted in African and Igbo values and sensibilities. It is these values that enabled the young Achebe to navigate the African and Western/Christian worlds, both to transcend and ultimately to contest the absence of a positive and balanced view of Africa and Africans in the stories he so loved to read. By giving Africa and Africans a voice in world literature, Achebe has made a definitive statement that Africa and Africans matter. It is a role he has come to be identified with and one he performs repeatedly in his native Nigeria and elsewhere.
The first eight chapters detail Achebe's early childhood and education in Ogidi and then at University College, Ibadan. It was at Ibadan that Achebe realized that all the writers he had read growing up, including Joyce Gary...