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Ex-South African President to deliver lecture in celebration of Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ @60

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Ex-South African President to deliver lecture in celebration of Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ @60

Former President of South Africa Mr. Kgalema Motlanthe is scheduled to deliver the Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum Lecture to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of ‘Things Fall Apart’- a novel regarded as perhaps the most widely read book in modern African literature.

That much information was made known via a statement credited to Dr. Chidi Achebe, Director of the Foundation and President and CEO of African Integrated Development Enterprise Inc.

Reports say the Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum is being organized as a high profile international platform to discuss Africa’s challenges in keeping with Professor Chinua Achebe’s life’s work.

The event which will have a round-table discussion with the former South African President, and a distinguished panel of scholars is being organised in conjunction with the City College of New York and the Christie and Chinua Achebe Foundation.

The lecture is coming months after the BBC in an article published in its culture section rated ‘Things Fall Apart’ as one of the top 10 stories that changed the world.

Published Tuesday, May 22, the list was arrived at after votes were cast by renowned writers, critics and academics in an attempt to arrive at the most influential and enduring works of fiction ever written.

Read also: Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ listed among 12 “Greatest Books Ever Written”

“Published within my lifetime, it has been possible to see the effect of a single work of fiction in offering a radically different ‘view of Africa’,” says novelist Beverley Naidoo. “The European colonial narrative could never be the same after this first work by Achebe was published.”

It’s “an empowering African novel: it brought African experience to the world like no other African fiction has”, according to Dominica Dipio, Associate Professor of Literature at Makerere University in Uganda. Noun Fare, a novelist and journalist from Togo, calls Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel “a milestone in African literature. It has come to be seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and is read in Nigeria and throughout Africa”.

The rating by the BBC came a month after the same book by Chinua Achebe was ranked by the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of the twelve novels considered the “Greatest Books Ever Written”.

According to the compilation written by John Pecoraro, the book ‘Things Fall Apart’ which now exists in 57 translations across the world, with 20 million copies sold worldwide is one of the greatest ever written novels on the website of Encyclopaedia Britannica in recent times.

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