Chino Achebe: the man and his works

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 from 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 or Chinua Achebe: The Man and His works can therefore end with the beginning of begin with the en chapter or simply move into the central chapter or living room and from the 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 concept 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 Zoera Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Are Washing 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 Chiuna Achebe: The Man and His Works has presented veritably a defense of the truth about Igbo / African culture and Equiano's recollection of it.