“Being and Becoming African as a Permanent Work in Progress: Inspiration from Chinua Achebe’s Proverbs”.
This lecture explores what we could learn about being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress from how Chinua Achebe adopts and adapts Igbo proverbs in his writings. I am particularly interested in how being African is claimed and denied in history, socio-anthropologically, and politically. Achebe found in proverbs a powerful resource of complicated repertoires from which he has drawn to nourish his characters and oil their experiences and relationships, depicting their multi-facetedness and celebrating their humanity.
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