Achebe And The Quest For Nobel Prize

[Shola Sholaz]

The controversies that trailed Prof. Achebe's last book—There Was a Country: A Personal History Of Biafra—came from different perspectives. While some people saw the book as one that came to shed more light on the events of the Nigerian/ Biafran war, others saw it as a book that should not have been published in the first place. The proponents of the second group came up with so many reasons—from the book being an attack on some personalities and a particular ethnic group, to Achebe being anti-Nigeria, one whose book, they claim, fanned the embers of disunity. But one of the reasons given by this group that caught my attention was the one that said that Achebe was bitter with a particular ethnic group because he failed to win the Nobel Prize in Literature which a kinsman of this ethnic group won in 1986. Even now that he has died, some articles have been written on this issue of Nobel Prize