Colonial Subversions

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. --Lionel Thrilling

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe's blazing Things Fall Apart. The book was published approximately two years before Nigeria gained its independence from the British in 1960. This to say, without gripe: it is as old as Nigeria has been a postcolonial country that has remained somewhat "insubvertible" in a historical sense.