• • These are the preoccupations of the first two lectures. The third lecture and essay in this book deals with the present situation and the balance of the forces or as Achebe puts it the balance of stories. As usual Achebe speaks through stories. 'Let us imagine a man who stumbles into an alien ritual in its closing stages when the devotees are winding down to a concluding chorus of amens, and who immediately and enthusiastically takes up the singing with such loudness and gusto that the owners of the ritual stop their singing and turn, one and all, to look in wonder at this postmodernist stranger.

'A rare opportunity to glimpse a bit of the man behind the monumental novels.' --Chicago Tribune Powerful and deeply personal, these three essays by the great.

Their wonder increases tenfold when they ask the visitor later what kind of modernism his people had had, and it transpires that neither he nor his people have ever heard the word modernism.' Here Achebe was making reference to a statement which Buchi Emecheta made to Adeola James some years ago. By Kole Omotoso Now that I have read these three essays I can understand why the British reviews of this book, reviewing it along with other books from and about Africa, gave it such a short shrift. The issues which Chinua Achebe writes about here so touchingly have to do with other issues which he had written about before, things which those not particularly involved would know nothing about and so be unable or unwilling to write about.

They were entitled 'My Home Under Imperial Fire', 'The Empire Fights Back' and 'Today, the Balance of Stories'. All these are continuations of previous issues and they are definitely a deepening of the issues under discussion and, as usual, they are all three delightful lectures fascinating to read. It is quite clear that Achebe's argument is that stories might look innocent to children, adults need to know that the telling of stories is not innocent. While we have a line up of the usual suspects - Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary, Elspeth Huxley - Achebe increases the material on the argument by putting into the bowl the contribution of a contemporary English writer FJ. Pedler, author of West Africa.

It is in this book that Pedler makes the following statement which Achebe quotes: 'It is misleading when Europeans talk of Africans buying a wife.' 'But what I find truly remarkable,' writes Achebe, 'about Pedler's book is the prominence he gave to, and the faith he had in, African literature that was not even in existence yet: A country's novels reveal its social condition. West Africa has no full-length novels, but a few short stories may serve the purpose.'