Such is the tyranny of the English Language and its Literary Canon for those still suffering under the yoke of the colonial complex , that such controversies continue to flare through the medium of the English Language in diverse social media and in some so called third world academic journals.
At the same time, we cannot say that there are no such controversies about innovative people writing in their own mother tongues, dialects, traditions, although, perhaps, if Soyinka had written exclusively in Yoruba, for his Yoruba folks, and Chinua had also flexed his literary muscles in Igbo, and Jesus had originally only spoken Fulani , and the Quran had originally been revealed in Hausa, then the controversies may have mostly been about which of these languages - as translated - was a more eloquent or a more powerful vehicle for saying what God or the writers are communicating to their local and worldwide readers…
I personally indulged - but not exhaustively with one Anthony Swerling an Englishman who - I think, playing to the Swedish gallery was insistent that August Strindberg is "greater" than William Shakespeare ( I think that his Swedish girlfriend must have been giving it to him good)
Similar rivalries in appreciation such as who is greater, Mozart or Beethoven ?
Ghana or Nigeria ?
Who in his right mind can deny the poetic genius of Chinua Achebe ?
Who else, which other omnipotent and omniscient anti-Colonial writer would have most appropriately given - perhaps - especially so to the homosexual, such an evocative baptismal name of the British Colonial District Commissioner as "Mr. Winterbottom" - a bottom, no doubt that would have been finding some solace in the tropical heat - more than enough reason for his emigration to the Igboland part of Nigeria - and I imagine as coming straight from As You Like It, Winterbottom either whistling or singing with Shakespeare, Under the Greenwood Tree
Which other writer would have baptised such a character "Mister Winterbottom" ?
Certainly not Joyce Cary , a veritable Mr Winterbottom himself, and certainly not the one some people in this forum so love to hate : Soyinka's Nobel Brother, fellow Nobel Literature Laureate Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul FRAS TC ….
As the wisest Solomon who had so many wives told us in Ecclesiastes, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." , and about that kind of intriguing headline - for Achebe's fans that kind of inquiry is at the same level as other impertinences, controversies and blasphemies such as
"Does God exist?"
Did Shakespeare write his plays?
Did Noah's flood ever happen ?
Were the Children of Israel ever in Egypt?
When it comes to Authorship we ought not to subtract the possible role of the editor/s
So, if Amos Tutuola or maybe even Sam Selvon had been subjected to the editorial savagery and the wanton butcheries of the purveyors of Nigerian Big Grammar Buckingham Palace English, all originality would have been squashed, "corrected " and erased from the original drafts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard would not have been published in 1952 in England, by Faber & Faber.
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