a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery." Mister Johnson, Achebe writes, "open my eyes to the fact that my home was under attack and that my home was not merely a house or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story." The students saw the Nigerian hero as an "embarrassing nitwit," as Achebe writes in his new book, Home and Exile, and detected in the Irish author's descriptions of Nigerians "an undertow of uncharitableness.
Time magazine had recently declared Mister Johnson the "best book ever written about Africa," but Achebe and his classmates had quite a different reaction. Achebe read it while studying at the University College in Idaban during the last years of British colonial rule, and in a curriculum full of Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, Mister Johnson stood out as one of the few books about Africa. Anthony Appiah, could very well be traced to his encounter in the early fifties with Joyce Cary's novel Mister Johnson, set in Achebe's native Nigeria.
in the English language," in the words of the Harvard University philosopher K. Chinua Achebe's emergence as "the founding father of African literature.
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