Lit Notes

  THE NOVELIST AS TEACHER             Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, thinker, poet and a very important figure in African literature, is the author of great novels like Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. This is a speech that was given by Achebe at Leeds University in 1965. Achebe begins his famous essay The Novelist as Teacher by saying that writing novels in Nigeria, in Africa is a new phenomenon. Unlike Europe and America, where novels have been written and read for a very long time, novels were written in African literature only in the twentieth century. So the history of the novel in African literature is relatively recent. Achebe also says that the relationship between readers and writers in Africa is complex and cannot be as easily defined as it is in Europe.             Chinua Achebe says that his purpose in writing this essay is to explain society’s ...