Salon.com > Nigeria

Author Chinua Achebe dies at 82

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:42:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Chinua Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident who gave literary birth to modern Africa with "Things Fall Apart," has died. He was 82.

Achebe's death was confirmed by his agent.

For decades, Achebe penned novels, stories and essays to rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country.

His eminence worldwide was rivaled only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and a handful of others. Achebe was a moral and literary model for countless Africans and a profound influence on such American writers as Morrison, Ha Jin and Junot Diaz.

As a Nigerian, Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary change in his country, from independence to dictatorship to the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960s. He knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the United States, but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honors from a government he refused to accept. "

BlackBerry still has fans in Nigeria

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:40:00 +0000

I clicked on YouTube’s play button and waited for the stylish, sassy, sometimes scary clique of upwardly mobile Nigerian women known as the BlackBerry Babes to load on my laptop. And then I waited. And waited. At the time, I was working for an NGO in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, where Internet connections rival Canadian dial-up speeds circa 1995.

Finally, the popular Nollywood film series appeared on the screen. Produced in 2011 and 2012, the six low-budget BlackBerry Babes instalments chronicle the absurd social aspirations of four middle-class Nigerian women—a kind of Sex and the City Goes to West Africa. Instead of shoes, though, the women covet Canada’s fashionable hand-helds. In one memorable scene, the incredulous Keisha breaks up with her cash-strapped boyfriend because he won’t buy her the gadget she wants: “Without you buying me the BlackBerry phone, there is no basis for this relationship right now.”

“There Was a Country,” Chinua Achebe’s long-awaited memoir of Biafra

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0000

“There Was a Country” is a book title that is loaded with sadness because of its use of the past tense: There was a country, but it is a country no longer. The country in question is Biafra, the losing side in the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970. Chinua Achebe was its leading poet and cultural ambassador, and, now, its defining historian.

Achebe’s history is rooted in the personal, a choice that begins to seem a moral rather than an aesthetic one as “There Was a Country” proceeds. History, he seems to be saying, is something that happens to human beings, to individuals, to families, to cultures. The fates of empires and great leaders are not insignificant, but the significance of empires and great leaders is rooted not in their power, glory or reach, but rather in the disruptions and occasional blessings they visit upon individuals, families and cultures.

So Achebe, fittingly, doesn’t begin with war. He begins with memoir and family history, in the spirit of the Igbo proverb that says that “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.”

Today’s news in pictures

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:33:00 +0000

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Aided by Yes Men, activists strike at Shell

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:07:00 +0000

Shell blocked employees' access to an activist website providing information about harm wrought by the oil giant's drilling plans in West Africa.

In a Yes Men-aided stunt, activist group People Against Legalizing Murder (PALM), posing as an internal Shell division, emailed 71,010 shell employees directing them to a site with information about a human rights case -- Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum -- being argued by the U.S. Supreme Court. The email encouraged recipients to spread the word and even tweet their feelings on the case to Oprah.

The website, which highlighted Shell's presence in Nigeria, was blocked to Shell employees within minutes. The activist group, which allegedly received employee emails from a Shell insider, was swift to change the site's URL and re-email the oil company employees.

"Surely most Shell employees, like most people, don't want multinationals to get away with murder just because murder's convenient," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Lab, which provided technical assistance for the action.

A release from PALM and the Yes Lab elaborates on the reason for the stunt:

Drone marketplace takes flight globally

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:37:00 +0000

Every two years, the world's aerospace industry descends on this town in the London exurbs in the heat of summer.

Military delegations and civilian groups spend tens of billions of dollars on the hot, big-ticket items displayed in over 105,000 square meters of exhibition space.

And no displays received more interest this year than those of the latest drones.

This year, 107,000 delegates schmoozed at 1,500 stands at the week-long event, which traces its beginnings back to the 1920s. Combining the raw business climate of the global arms market and the excitement of an air show, more than $72 billion in contracts were signed before the trade fair ended.

An as yet undetermined chunk of that was spent on drones, or "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" in the parlance of the arms industry.

"We don't call them drones, because there's always a man in the loop, we prefer UAV or UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems)," said Michael Toscano at a pre-Farnborough conference at Britain's Defense Academy.

Al-Qaida rising in Africa

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:27:00 +0000

NAIROBI, Kenya — Al Qaeda-inspired militancy is on the rise in Africa as disparate groups with local grievances find common cause in the global terror group’s tactics and ideology and, in turn, offer it new theaters of operation.

Military pressure, drone strikes and the assassination of Osama bin Laden have diminished Al Qaeda globally, leaving it weaker than at any point since its first terrorist spectacular, the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But while Al Qaeda central wanes, affiliates elsewhere are growing stronger, nowhere more so than in Africa, where groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), Boko Haram and Al Shabaab are finding ways of hitching Al Qaeda’s ideology to their local struggles.

“Africa represents a fertile ground for diminished ‘Al Qaeda-core’ to re-group, re-energize and re-launch its mission of global jihad," according to a recent report by the Royal United Service Institute, a London-based think tank.