“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Among the 20 to 30 million Igbo people in Nigeria there is a widespread belief that the Igbo originated in ancient Israel. Recently a number of Igbo Jewish communities have been established in Nigeria. Although some Igbo have made their way to Israel, the Israeli public is largely unaware of the fact that that there are in addition of 20 to 30 million people in Nigeria that are called by some, 'the Jews of West Africa.' This book offers for the first time an in-depth study and a genealogical history of the Igbo's long term narrative of a possible Jewish origin.

The contributors to this volume draw from history, literature, philosophy and anthropology to address the intersection between the Igbo and the outside world and how this encounter shaped the currents of slavery, colonialism and the accompanying social transformations Igboland and across the African diaspora.

Ohadike (Cornell U.) examines the organization and strength of African resistance movements against European colonialism with particular reference to the small-scale communities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. Samuel Fury Childs Daly examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. In these dangerous conditions, many people survived by engaging in fraud, extortion, and armed violence. When the fighting ended in 1970, these survival tactics endured, even though Biafra itself disappeared from the map. Based on research using an original archive of legal records and oral histories, Daly catalogues how people navigated conditions of extreme hardship on the war front, and shows how the conditions of the Nigerian Civil War paved the way for the country's long experience of crime that was to follow.