Anniversary of historic Achebe-Baldwin meeting at UF still has significance in today's social climate
As a youth, reading Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” triggered a keen sense of awareness in me about African identity and literature. In other classes, I’d studied colonization and imperialism in a very distant and generic way, which is honestly generous considering typical U.S. curriculum standards. But there was something so intimate about imagining Okonkwo’s (the book’s protagonist) fate; once fueled by power and tradition, eventually his world was destroyed by English intrusion. With that book, Achebe introduced us to so many beautiful and ugly parts of Igbo culture that are distinctively African and in some ways universal: You see the value in family and community, how torturous toxic masculinity can be on a soul and how subtly one can put a knife to things that at one point held us all together.