Chinua Achebe Quotes

“The Igbo people of Southern Nigeria are more than ten million strong and must be accounted one of the major peoples of Africa. Conventional practice would call them a tribe, but I no longer follow that convention. I call them a nation.

"Here we go again!," you might be thinking.
Well, let me explain. My Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines tribe as follows: "group of (esp. primitive) families or communities linked by social, religious or blood ties and usually having a common culture and dialect and a recognized leader." If we apply the different criteria of this definition to Igbo people we will come up with the following results:

a. Igbo people are not primitive; if we were I would not be offering this distinguished lecture, or would I?;
b. Igbo people are not linked by blood ties; although they may share many cultural traits;
c. Igbo people do not speak one dialect; they speak one language which has scores of major and minor dialects;
d. and as for having one recognized leader, Igbo people would regard the absence of such a recognized leader as the very defining principle of their social and political identity.”
― Chinua Achebe, Home & Exile

“The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near.”
― Chinua Achebe, Home & Exile

“I believe myself that a good writer doesn't really need to be told anything except to keep at it. Chinua Achebe”
― Chinua Achebe

“It is not bravery when a man fights with a woman.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Chinua Achebe, the master craftsman, came and went, and wrote his stories on the sands of time, deeply, but with the friendliest and wittiest simplicity ever, and left behind an unfathomable and large watering hole from which a young generation of Nigerian and African writers freely drinks and draws literary nourishments. I am yet to come across a novel written by an African that’s better than his Arrow of God.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“You may quarrel, but let it not end in fighting.”
― Chinua Achebe, Arrow Of God

“Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a landmark of African literature. If you can identify New York City with the Statue of Liberty, you can also identify the landscape of African literature with Achebe’s novel.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu