This article also appears as the introduction to Chinua Achebe’s "The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God" now available through Everyman’s Library.

When, in 1958, the London publishers William Heinemann received a manuscript of Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart," they were unsure whether to publish it. The central question, according to editor Alan Hill, was this: "Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African?" Not only were there a mere handful of examples of African writing in English at the time – such as Amos Tutuola’s surreal "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" and Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of contemporary Lagos, "People of the City" – but none of them had the ambition, the subtlety, or the confidence of "Things Fall Apart."

Continue Reading...

We made, I thought, a strange search party. True, we'd spent two years learning analytical and procedural rules for getting and spending, but the world? Social institutions, laws, decisions about the liberty of others? Surely a new world implied a new or expanded ethics, and we'd barely sniffed that. During the previous year, as economies from Thailand to Indonesia had collapsed, I'd heard that taxes were always hateful and that one could profitably choose currency trades based on which nations were crushing street riots. While largely mum on the ethics of those ideas, we'd hotly debated the relative virtues of the phone call and the personal meeting. All our models assumed a world in which everyone was party to our methods and understood our systems of measurement. With the ever-increasing speed of the global marketplace, that assumption has begun to worry professors, students and recent alumni from some of the country's top business schools.

Continue Reading...