The South Bank Show: A Tale of Two Writers

25th March 2009

Two of Africa’s leading writers talk in depth to Melvyn Bragg in an extraordinary double edition of The South Bank Show, which is to transmit on two consecutive Sundays (10 and 17 May 2009). A fascinating insight into literary Africa, the film looks at the works of the multi award-winning novelist Chinua Achebe, whose novel Things Fall Apart is considered to be the greatest African novel of the 20th century, as well as at Africa’s latest and hottest literary property, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

From different generations, Achebe and Adichie’s lives and paths seem to have crossed in many ways and have many similarities. Both are from Igboland in Nigeria and – in a chance in a million – Adichie was brought up in Achebe’s old house in the university town of Nsukka.

Achebe was born in 1930 and his first novel, Things Fall Apart, tells the tale of how African and British culture collide in an Igbo village. Its title has become the catchphrase used to describe the state that Africa is in. This, and Achebe’s other works, are still an inspiration to writers worldwide, including Adichie: "It completely changed things for me. I started to realise that it was OK to write about my world, about people who looked like me and about things that were familiar to me. He is not just a writer, he’s an idol."

In Africa, Achebe is seen as an oracle, with an almost supernatural power to predict the future. His novels have prefigured much of the continent’s turbulent history, from the end of colonialism through to military dictatorships, war and famine. His life reads like one of his novels: he has survived an assassination attempt, air raids and a near-fatal accident that left him paralysed from the waist down. During his incarceration, Nelson Mandela read Achebe’s books, "in whose company the prison walls fell down". The film includes an interview with former Robben Island inmate Raks Seakhoa, who reveals how they wrote out Things Fall Apart by hand in prison so that everybody could read it.

The South Bank Show also meets 31-year-old Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is from a very different Africa. She has already won the Orange Prize for her second novel, Half Of A Yellow Sun, whose subject is the Biafran war. She is about to publish her latest book, The Thing Around Your Neck, consisting of 12 stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. As Achebe says: "Here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers." The South Bank Show revisits her Igbo village on the river Niger and films spectacles in the village square, such as a colourful masquerade and a wrestling match.

Contributors include Nobel prize-winner, South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer; the former Biafran leader Chief Emeka Ojukwu; and Africa’s own Laurence Olivier, Peter Odochie.