Other Books by Rose Ure Mezu

Women in Chains: Abandonment in Love Relationships in the Fiction of Selected West African Writers (1994) / Songs of the Hearth (1993) /

Homage to My People (2004) / A History of Africana Women's Literature (2004)

 Black Nationalists: Reconsidering Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. & Nkrumah (1999) Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works (2006)

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Books by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart /  Arrow of God / No Longer at Ease  / A Man of the People / Anthills of the Savannah

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Preface

to Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works (2006)

The several novels of Chinua Achebe can stand alone and can be read, appreciated, and studied in isolation. They also can form an integrated corpus some progressing either spatially, historically, and genealogically from one to the other. The chapters that form Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works by Rose Ure Mezu can be viewed and read in much the same way as Achebe’s novels. Each chapter while forming part of a whole can stand in isolation and on its own.

The work is not a novel to be read from the beginning to the end but should be seen as rooms with separate and connecting doors in a house each designed with a specific purpose in mind, sufficient unto itself yet forming part of the whole. These rooms or chapters may naturally share common walls and ideas which Dr. Rose Ure Mezu purposefully uses to reinforce the unit rather than repeat or duplicate parts of the whole. The reader of Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works can therefore end with the beginning or begin with the end chapter or simply move into the central chapter or living room and from there explore the house that Chinua Achebe built, or better still try to climb the iroko tree that Achebe planted with its foundations rooted in pre-colonial Africa and its branches extending to the diaspora.

Dr. Rose Ure Mezu, in this work, inaugurates a new tradition, juxtaposing Achebe’s thoughts and concepts and those of diasporan literary and cultural groundbreakers such as Olaudah Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, 1789) and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Are Watching God, 1937). Equiano’s work has lately become the focus of some controversies by some people who are neither Igbos nor inhabitants of Essaka. These people question, out of ignorance, the authenticity of Equiano’s place of birth. Without setting out to do so, Mezu in Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works has presented veritably a defense of the truth about Igbo / African culture and Equiano’s recollection of it. As pointed out in this work and as established by Cheikh Anta Diop and other scholars, Africa was not and is not culturally, socially, and technologically a tabula rasa.

Literature brings the world together, interlocks human experience and brings out the universal in the individual experience. Chinua Achebe in extolling the individual succeeded in celebrating humanity with his works and now Dr. Rose Ure Mezu has celebrated in this work the humanity of Chinua Achebe. It reads almost like a novel and certainly one would hope there will be a sequel to this volume.

Dr. S. Okechukwu Mezu

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Table of Contents