Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks on Connecting Cultures at 2012 Commonwealth Lecture
"I knew the basic facts of Nigerian history when I first read Chinua Achebe’s novels “Things Fall Apart” and “Arrow of God,” but it was those novels that made me realize that while I may very well know the facts, I did not really know the truths. Bloodless words like ‘pacification’ and ‘amalgamation’ and ‘indirect rule’ were the facts, but the truths were in the human stories. A respected man being flogged publicly by agents of the colonial government. A priest, once resplendent in his pride and stubbornness, now reduced to sitting on a cold prison floor because he had dared to reject an offer from a British district officer. And in images such as these, I learned a great truth which the history books said nothing about: the loss of dignity."
(Full text of lecture available for download here)
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