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1. You read Things Fall Apart. Then you skipped the next four decades. Now you can’t stop talking about Adichie.

2. You think Soyinka is the only African Nobel Laureate. This is either because you are plain and simply ignorant or maybe you do know of Gordimer and Coetzee and Mafouz but haven’t yet figured out that there is such a thing as a white African or that Egyptians are Africans. Yeah…either way, you’re ignorant. 

3. You can’t name two African science fiction writers. I take that back. You can’t name one African science fiction writer.

4. You keep saying Achebe is the father of African LITERATURE. Word of warning: careful where you say something like that. You could get slapped.

5. You are a believer in the ultimate African literary conspiracy—Achebe hijacked the African Writers Series and tried to make clones of himself by forcing African writers to write like himself.

6. Adichie and Teju Cole are the only contemporary African authors alive, as far as you’re concerned. They are perfectly perfect and can do no wrong. Everything they utter is pure divine truth. If you were God, you’d make them fall in love and get married and give birth to little Ifemelus and Juliuses…Thank God you’re not God!

7. Every African novel is a window into the soul of Africa. So you insist that your cousin going off to Peace Corp in Zambia should read Things Fall Apart or Wizard of the Crow because in your mind all African novels are pretty much anthropological tracts.

8. You’ve never read any work by Amos Tutuola but pretend you have anytime his name comes up in conversation.

9. You’ve not read a novel written by an author from, at least, one of these five countries: Equatorial Guinea, Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mozambique.

10. If you’ve included anywhere in your book review of an African novel: “Such and such novel is a powerful and evocative examination of [insert social issue here].”