A Laughing Giant

n 1998, at a lecture in Portland, Oregon, the United States, Chinua Achebe, 68 and already the father of modern African literature by numerous accounts, introduced himself with a joke. “I know I’m not very well known as a poet,” he said, “but some years ago, when I was invited to read by one of the colleges at Cambridge University in England, I read my poetry. And at the end of it, the chairman said ‘everybody knows about your fiction, why don’t we know a

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