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The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

Chinua Achebe

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Chinua Achebe
Age: 82 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 16
Died: 2013
Died: March 22
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
Needs
Term
Contact
Years
Five
Slavery
Lurid
Lasts
Slave
Africans
Last
Trade
Presented
Light
Terms
Produced
Body
Hundred
European
Reason
Literature
Justify
Need
Four
Africa

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A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines I never learned to type very well.
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I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
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The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.” “That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.
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As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
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Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
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The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
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When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.
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I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
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Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
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Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
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When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.
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Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
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Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
Chinua Achebe
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I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.
Chinua Achebe
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Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.
Chinua Achebe
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My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take.
Chinua Achebe
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Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. How much longer do you think you will live? she asked. You are already a skeleton. Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.
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A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
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When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
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