Africa has lost its penultimate cultural giant, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. His most famous work, Things Fall Apart, is the ground on which the modern African novel is built. Indeed, the appearance of this book, which happened near the middle of the previous century, marked the arrival of the African as a national subject. If one thinks this was late, recall that the German as a formal national subject only appeared in 1871. Achebe's next novel, No Longer at Ease, presented the African as a post-colonial subject. Achebe came from the vanishing world of giants.

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