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Links for Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"
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| Wonders
of the African World. Companion Web site to PBS series by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. From his introduction: "Let's face it -- think of
Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine
and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly
great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as
splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth? Join me on the
journey from Zanzibar to Timbuktu, the Nile River Valley to Great
Zimbabwe, the slave coast of Guinea to the medieval monasteries of
Ethiopia in search of the lost wonders of the African world. Shall we
begin?" |
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For scholarly approaches
to Achebe and African postcolonial literature, see Chinua
Achebe An Overview, from Brown University, Postcolonial
and Postimperial Literature An Overview, and
Postcolonial
Literature in Africa An Overview |
| NPR's
May 30, 1996 Talk of the NationBook Club of the Air, discusses Things Fall
Apart, with Abiola Irele, of Ohio State University. Real Audio File |
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The National Museum of African Art
offers a rich on-line collection of exhibits from the Smithsonian National Museum of
African Art. On African art, also see African Culture and Aesthetics
at the Kennedy
Center's African
Odyssey. |
| Smithsonian
Natural History Web African Voices "African Voices is a permanent
exhibition that examines the diversity, dynamism, and global influence of
Africa’s peoples and cultures over time in the realms of family, work,
community, and the natural environment. |
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"Included are historical and contemporary objects
from the Museum’s collections, as well as commissioned sculptures,
textiles, and pottery. Video interactives and sound stations provide
selections from contemporary interviews, literature, proverbs, prayers,
folk tales, songs, and oral epics." |
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The
Baobab Project, Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University.
"Founded in 1994, the Baobab Project was established to make African
visual culture available to a broader audience, as well as to create a
research tool which can be used by scholars and students alike. |
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Our investigation focuses on why certain cultures,
places and periods have encouraged creativity and innovation in the arts;
that is, what are the social contexts and institutions that promote
acceptance of artistic innovation." Especially valuable are the Multimedia
Narratives, which examine "scholarly topics concerning
creativity and within the field of African Art History.: |
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G.
I. Jones -- S.E. Nigerian Art and Culture "This is an archive of
digitized photographs depicting the arts and cultures of southeastern
Nigeria. The collection includes examples from Ibibio, Igbo, Ijo and Ogoni
speaking peoples. All of the photographs were taken in the 1930s by the
late G.I. Jones, Department of Social Anthropology, University of
Cambridge." |
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"The majority of the images are from the Igbo
speaking regions where Jones conducted most of his research. The materials
included here represent only a sample of the complete Jones collection.
The photographs are unique for the creative brilliance of the art
represented, the quality of the photography itself, and the cultural and
historical significance of photographic records from this time period in
Nigeria." |
| There are a number
of good sites which have information on the contemporary
situation in Nigeria. See the Washington Post's Special Reports from Nigeria,
and Nigeria
in Depth, the BBC's After Abacha: Special report Nigeria in transition,
and Wole Soyinka's Towards a Sustainable Vision of Nigeria.
You can read an extensive report from Human Rights Watch on
Nigeria at THE PRICE OF OIL. |
African Ceremonies Passages Brooklyn Museum of Art
"Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher's lifelong commitment to
photographing the anishing rituals and customs of tribal
African cultures culminates in their monumental masterwork,
AFRICAN CEREMONIES. Ten years in the making, this definitive work contains nearly 850 full-color photographs covering |
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| dozens of ceremonies that span the human life
cycle: from birth and initiations, through courtship and marriage, royal coronations, seasonal rituals and healing exorcisms, to death." |
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Nigeria: Still the Engine for
Africa? August 24 2000. The Connection with Christopher Lydon.
has a Real Audio file of a show with guests Father Kukah, Secretary General of the Bishop's
Council of Nigeria, Karl Maier, Contributor to The Economist and
The Washington Post; Salih Booker, Director of the Africa Policy
Information Centre in Washington, D.C.; and Wole Soyinka, Nobel
Prize Winner. |
The White Man's Burden and Its Critics,
by jim Zwick, has Rudyard Kipling's classic exhortation to empire
and more than fifty
contemporary responses to the poem in verse, essays, political cartoons, and advertising.
It's a great place to examine the imagery and rhetoric of
colonialism. |
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LPCA Text Archives - Buntungu's Mokingi mwa Mputu
The text presented here, "Mokingi mwa Mputu" (Boloki for "A trip to Europe"),
is the story of a Congolese young man, Buntungu, who writes about his visit to England in 1895-1897. Prepared by Michael
Meeuwis, Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders & University of Antwerp: "It seemed to me that this popular narrative, containing
features of performance, reflecting local forms of literacy, and catalysing African perceptions of Europe at such an early time in the
colonial history of Central Africa, is interesting enough to be made publicly available again." |
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WashingtonPost.com African Lives
has a series of articles on the contemporary everyday lives
of Africans. |
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