Albert Chinualumogu Achebe,
82, died in a hospital in Boston after a brief illness, on March 22,
2013. He was widely regarded as the father of modern African
literature, and lived and worked as a professor in the United States
in recent years, most recently at Brown University in Rhode Island.
Nobel prize winner, Wole Soyinka; poet, John Pepper Clark; fellow
Nigerian who died in the Biafrah war of the 70s, Christopher Okigbo;
and Chinua Achebe were the 'brother' African writers of the 50s and 60s.There was a minor 'literary' furore in Malaysia in 2006 about Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the news of which took a trip around the world. Malaysia had banned Things Fall Apart. This is what happened: we had ordered copies of the books, which we had kept in stock since we opened in 1999, but were told by our distributors that they could not supply us because the book had been 'banned' by the government. So, because the book was being used in schools, we had to tell that to many of our customers who were teachers and students. You can imagine their reaction. Blogs were the 'in' thing at the time, not Facebook.
'Banning' books in Malaysia has many dimensions, not always done in accordance to the law. One can speculate, from past experience, what happened at the customs this time though. I'd go with arbitrary confiscation (because we checked and didn't find the title on the 'banned; list), to scare the hell out of the importer. Why? We have absolutely no idea. Maybe, he said something wrong, or didn't do something right. Or, he did nothing at all. But, it appeared to have worked; after that the importer became a little paranoid about bringing in anything. Proscribing books by harassment works, and is effective. And the Minister can honestly say that the book is not on the 'list', foreign do-gooders will be happy with the reply (tick), and the importer will never see the books again.
I have checked the latest KDN list, and Things Fall Apart is not on it. Maybe, it never was. Or, maybe, the cynic in me says, they did a Winston Smith on it and erased the past, changed history. I notice that the title on breast feeding I saw several years ago is not on it now, either.
