Novelist, Teacher and Essayist, Chinua Achebe has won almost all international honours for writing. Exaggeration or not, he is one of Africa’s best known storytellers whether in novel or in short stories. Even in radio interviews, Chinua Achebe radiates the wisdom of sages. His 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart has become a staple in schools all over Africa and the United States as a fine example of the early African writings English. This year, fifty years after the publication of that classic – the first in what would later become a popular trilogy – Things Fall Apart has been translated into almost all major languages of the world and has become one of the most popular novels from Africa. Chinua Achebe himself last year won the International Man Booker Prize for his works.

I first read his book for children Chike and the River while I was in primary school, age ten or thereabout. I have not read it again since then. But thinking about it, genius is the best word for the capability of one man to write so smoothly for children as he does for adults. And Chinua Achebe is not just a man; he is an outstanding one, and a role model for that matter. He was a third of the three-man delegation that went into Dodan Barracks seat of Nigerian government in 1988 to plead with the then dictator Babangida to grant reprieve for a fellow writer/soldier Mamman Vatsa said to be involved in a coup d’etat against the dictator. Vatsa was eventually killed in a triumph of military justice over compassion. In 2005/6, he rejected a “national honour” offered by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, to protest the ruling party’s complicit acquiescence to a rule of barbarity especially in his home state.

His autobiography, Reflections of a British Protected Child is soon to be published, perhaps to coincide with the fifty year anniversary of his popular novel.

We have fumed, we have speculated. We have even sometimes protested by ignoring the entire process altogether over the years for what we called an unfair passing over that seemed to dog our beloved writer. It is now the seasons of the Nobel again, time again for new speculations about the winners of this year’s prestigious prizes instituted by the Irish inventor Alfred Nobel. Will Achebe win?

The African section of the Literature Hall of Fame of the prestigious Nobel Academy now has the slender list of names like Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, and Naguib Mahfouz if we ignore the problem of geography that permits the omission of Toni Morrison and Dereck Walcott. It does however reflect a needless denial of much needed and oft-neglected African perspective in world literatures.

The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature will be announced on the 9th October after a several meeting of the Nobel committee members and consultants to evaluate the qualifications of the nominees.