Chinua Achebe

This critical study of the African writer, Chinua Achebe, has been revised and a new chapter added. Throughout there is an underlying concern with his system of values and its response to the turbulent history of modern Nigeria - colonialism, independence, political disillusionment and military rule. The study attempts to relate the novelist's career to the problematic role of the African writer, a role to which Achebe himself has contributed a great deal of thought in his various essays. The introduction presents the context in which he writes - in particular, the traditional ways of his own Igbo society, and the European contact with Africa. It is the complex and continuing interaction of these cultures that forms the central theme of most of his writings.