Sunday, 10 May 2009, 10:15PM - 11:15PM
Two of Africa’s leading writers talk in depth to Melvyn Bragg in an extraordinary double edition of The South Bank Show; to transmit on two consecutive Sundays, the 10th and 17th May 2009. A fascinating insight into literary Africa, the film looks at the works of the multi award winning novelist Chinua Achebe, who wrote Things Fall Apart which is considered to be the greatest African novel of the 20th century; and Africa’s latest and hottest literary property Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
From different generations, Achebe and Adichie’s lives and paths seem to have crossed in many ways and have many similarities. Both are from Igboland in Nigeria and, in a chance in a million, Adichie was then brought up in Achebe’s old house in the university town of Nsukka.
Achebe was born in 1930 and his first novel Things Fall Apart tells the tale of how African and British culture collide in an Igbo village - and became the catchphrase used to describe the state that Africa is in. This and Achebe’s other works, are still an inspiration to writers worldwide, including Adichie: “It completely changed things for me. I started to realize that it was OK to write about my world, about people who looked like me and about things that were familiar to me. He is not just a writer, he’s an idol”.
In Africa Achebe is seen as an oracle, with an almost supernatural power to predict the future. His novels have prefigured much of the continent’s turbulent history: from the end of colonialism, through to the military dictatorships, war and famine. His life reads like one of his novels: surviving an assassination attempt, air raids and a near fatal accident that left him paralysed from the waist down. During his incarceration, Nelson Mandela read Achebe’s books, "in whose company the prison walls fell down"; and the film hears from former Robben island inmate Raks Seakhoa how they wrote out Achebe's Things Fall Apart by hand in prison, so all could read it.
The South Bank Show also meets thirty one year old Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who is from a very different Africa. She has already won the Orange Prize for her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, about the Biafran war. She is about to publish her latest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, of twelve stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. As Achebe says “Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.”
The South Bank Show revisits her Igbo village on the river Niger ferry with Adichie, and films the spectacles in the village square of a colourful masquerade and a wrestling match.
Contributors include: Nobel prize-winner, South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer; the former Biafran leader Chief Emeka Ojukwu and Africa’s own Laurence Olivier, Peter Odochie.
