Every industry has its fair share of dramas. Think of Jaguar
vs. Prezzo, or Ronaldo vs. Messi. In the African literary scene, the all out
battle was between Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Soyinka says that after he
won the Nobel Prize, the relations between him and Chinua Achebe strained.
However, he says they were not ‘personal enemies’, as each
occupied different orbits and galaxies. He tells the New
York based Sahara reporters,
“Chinua and I occupied different orbits. We each had our own tastes
and our own
principles. People should respect that. He however disputes that Chinua Achebe
was the grandfather of African literature, calling such assertions ‘simplistic’.
He however thinks Achebe has a great place in the hall of fame of
‘storytellers’.
In parting words, he says Chinua’s latest novel, “There was
a country”, which chronicles the civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, was in
bad taste, a book that should never have been written in the first place, as it
diminished Achebe’s place as a nationalist, and only reduced him to a champion
of his ethnic group, the Igbo.
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