out generations of professionals and personalities who have risen to the pinnacles of their careers. He is a world-renowned Achebe scholar. In this interview with Edozie Udeze, Anyadike who will be retiring next month bares his mind on a number of burning issues, ranging from the RUGA controversy to the place of literary narratives, science fiction and story-telling in the reordering of the society.
The writer also has a very crucial role to play, except that if you write and nobody reads, it makes no meaning. A literary book is only appreciated when it is read and all the components applied to help the society. It is not that enough books have not been written in that regard. The people we call our assembly men and women; people who occupy leadership positions do not read what has been written.
One of the foremost areas of literature for which you are known is that you are an Achebe scholar. At what point in your academic career did you choose to tow that part and why? That’s exactly what I am trying to say that in Government College Umuahia, I never knew I would encounter him so closely in real life. It was when I came here as a student and in my final year he came to deliver that lecture that I encountered him. At the lecture he was also honoured by the University, in what I think was his first honorary degree by any Nigerian University. So he gave that lecture, a seminal paper on ‘The truth of fiction’. That was the title of the paper.
Well, there are always different forms of literature, the ones our grandfathers told. The ones our grandmothers also told; all kinds of story-tellers. So, it differentiates between stories told over time and Achebe happens to be in the latter category. He happens to have written these stories very well. He is no doubt a story-teller, an excellent story-teller. He told stories with a lot of wisdom, a lot of idioms and proverbs with which he embellished his stories.
It has become something that I am passionate about now. Yes. Time has come when I realize that every culture needs to be preserved and promoted. We need to preserve the language of the people. First of all, if you want to get to the people you write so that the majority of the people can read. And then do the people really want to read stories written in local languages? But if you write in those languages people may like to read them.