This morning, I woke up to the horrible news of Chinua Achebe’s passing.  Weird, how just yesterday I had ordered his latest book “There was a Country”, a memoir on the Biafran war.  My goodness, how can Achebe be gone?  I have all his books in my home library.  Just yesterday, I was talking about how great his sense of humor was.  My goodness, I was dreaming about reading more books from Achebe.  What kind of thing is this?Chinua Achebe, you have inspired me… you have made me want to be a blogger… You have made me want to be a writer, an activist, and a truth speaker … hopefully, one day I will write books as funny as you did.

A friend’s dad went to school with Chinua Achebe, and he had this moral story to tell about Achebe: ” You can never be who you are not and never force your child to be what they were NOT meant to be.  Achebe’s parents always wanted him to be a medical doctor.  While in school, science was a struggle for him.  But once he got back into himself and did what God had planned for him, the sky became his limit.”

So long to the Father of African literature, the inspiration to generations of writers, the maestro himself.  Today, I truly felt like ‘things were falling apart.’

Here is a peace I wrote about him back at the very beginning of my blog: see… he was the first article I published in my ‘Great Literature’ section. Chinua Achebe: A Writer like No Other.