Wole Soyinka: From Ake to the World Stage

Prayers and God's Ways

"Not for the first time, I noticed that God had a habit of either not answering one's prayers at all, or answering them in a way that was not straightforward."

Wole Soyinka, Ake: The Years of Childhood

Top 10 Books About Nigeria

Nigeria has a terrible image – as a land of email scammers, obscene corruption and religious bigotry and violence – but the stereotypes only tell part of a more complex, and often more attractive, truth. Nigeria is a land of rich cultures, stunning artistic achievement and industrious and resourceful people. Here are 10 books that show Nigeria in all its cruelty and folly, but also its beauty, generosity and humor.

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

As a young man Achebe read the canon of western literature, but could not find his own people's story there. So he set about writing a tragic tale: of how a vulnerable society, and a flawed man, could not cope with the military superiority and crushing arrogance of the white invaders. Millions of readers around the world have since identified with Things Fall Apart as the definitive account of what happened to their own societies when the Europeans arrived. Invariably the colonial legacy was destructive and destabilising, and one that "Nigeria", a British invention, has never quite recovered from.