Chima Anyadike and Kehinde A. Ayoola, eds, Blazing the Path:Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart

Ibadan: HEBN Publishers, 2012. Pbk. 329 pp. £24.95, available from African Books Collective.

ISBN 978 978 081 184 6

To mark the fiftieth anniversary in 2008 of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, conferences, seminars and commemorative events were held all over the globe, including the United States, Britain, France, India, and Africa. Such gatherings were the occasion not only for celebration of Achebe’s groundbreaking achievement as a writer, but also for consideration of this novel’s reception in different times and places, its own history, and its influence on subsequent reading and writing of African fiction. This volume, edited by two academics from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, consists mainly of lectures and papers given at that university as part of the worldwide celebration of Things Fall Apart’s Golden Jubilee. It also includes essays previously published elsewhere by the poet Niyi Osundare, and the distinguished academics Professors Dan Ivezbaye and Olufemi Taiwo.

Obafemi Awolowo University was the first Nigerian university to award Chinua Achebe an Honorary Doctorate, and it was on that occasion, in 1978, that Achebe delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Truth of Fiction’ (later revised and published as an essay in Hopes and Impediments). In his characteristically thoughtful and thought-provoking keynote address for the 2008 Conference Biodun Jeyifo takes Achebe’s lecture as his starting point in order to ‘affirm but at the same time problematize the consecration of Things Fall Apart as a classic of world literature.’ (3-4). Why, he asks, has Things Fall Apart become the single Achebe novel that every critic of African literature is called upon to write about, when in his view both Arrow of God and Anthills of the Savannah are better novels? And why is it Achebe rather than Senghor, Laye, Oyono, Ngu∼gı∼, or Aidoo who has come to be the representative African writer? Jeyifo suggests that the status of Things Fall Apart as a world classic derives from the fact that it speaks to the ‘defining phenomenon in the encounter between continents and peoples of the world’, i.e., the experience of colonialism, but unlike all other colonial novels is entirely free of racism and ethnocentrism.