(By OkeyNdibe)--Two Saturdays ago, I had the privilege of giving a
keynote at an international conference organized at the Senate House of the
University of London to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow
of God.
Okey Ndibe The two-day celebration was an impressive
gathering of scholars who have devoted time to the study and explication of
Achebe’s work as a novelist, cultural activist and intellectual. Among the
luminaries who offered stimulating papers were John Gikandi of Princeton University,
Harry Garuba (who traveled from his South African location), and T. Vijay
Kumar. The first day of the conference, Femi Osofisan, a polyglot who is at
once an incisive scholar, extraordinary dramatist, and novelist directed a
dramatization of Arrow that brought home in a powerful way the millenarian
tension in Achebe’s most important—even if not most well known—fictive work.
Akachi Ezeigbo, a novelist and professor at the University of Lagos, capped off
the second and final day of the event by performing an Igbo dirge for Achebe.
The two-day conference was altogether moving. The
brilliance of many of the presentations was matched by the conference’s festive
air. It all showed the potential power of rich, deep cultural production. In
their wide-ranging, multidisciplinary engagement with Achebe’s grandest novel,
several presenters sought to underscore how literary creativity can illuminate
a people’s social experience and embody a broad range of their dreams.
