Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe’s ontological hopes, Sembene’s machines, Mda’s epistemological redness

On 23 August 1986, Chinua Achebe ([1988] 1989), widely considered the father of modern African Literature, delivered the Nigerian National Merit Award Lecture in Sokoto.1 His lecture, entitled ‘What has Literature Got to Do with It?’, was published two years later in Hopes and Impediments, a book which brings together some of his critical essays and lectures on a range of topics concerning literature, the arts, Africa’s relationship to Europe, the importance of real education, and most pivotally, the role of the imagination in forming a viable postcolonial modernity.