ABSTRACT
In a television programme to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said she and Achebe ‘share a nostalgia for something better [and] we wish we didn’t have the bitter history we have’.4 Adichie was not yet born when Achebe’s novel came out, yet the two Nigerian writers are linked by their longings for the future, and despair over the past, of their country. When independence arrived for Nigeria, it could have been offered, in Wole Soyinka’s words, ‘as a model of tolerance, but [it] has suffered, in the intervening period, a spate of religion-motivated violence on an unprecedented scale, and is fast becoming only another volatile zone of distrust, unease and tension’.5 A land of immense resources, human and material, post-independence Nigeria is now ‘a sorry spectacle’.6 As a result, many writers have left the country, including Achebe, Soyinka, and Adichie, while remaining active in Nigerian literary and cultural life.
