THINGS FALL APART IN NIGERIA

Taking my mind back to the event of last week,my younger brother who is a graduate told me he has never read or come across or seen the book THINGS FALL APART by chinua achebe.He was stuck in traffic and saw them hawking his books and decided to get THINGS FALL APART out of curiosity to read and know what all the hullabaloo is about the book.I just kept on gaping at him with my mouth open in shock.THINGS FALL APART is probably the most authentic narrative ever written about life in Nigeria, Thousands of copies are still sold every year in the United States alone and millions of copies have been sold around the world in many translations .Things fall apart was a ground breaking work,  We took our place as a country among other great works by other authors around the world in popular schools like HAVARD, OXFORD etc.Yet in our own country this classic is almost a visitor to this generation.What happened i asked myself ? Where have we lost it ? The Americans still preserve histories till date in her books by her authors and generations of americans grow up to know the stories of the battle at the watergate ,stories about Abraham lincoln and how America came to be.What then is happening to Nigeria and our educational system? Are these books only meant to be read by writers or people that read English or literature? I don't think so.A child would pass through primary and secondary school and would never read or see these classics? It's a Sacrilege in my opinion, almost an abomination. It means one day I would ask a child in this generation if he/she has ever heard of CHINUA ACHEBE and the answer I might recieve is NO , is he a musician? We have gotten to that point and I feel sad that in this generation,most children would not be privileged to read the works of these great historians, most of these authors age gracefully with most of them dead and their books buried with them.These books are now considered old and extinct and removed from the educational syllabus.I was born in the 90's ,practicaly in this generation but I was privileged by some divine encounter to read the books of these historians,taking me to the 70 ' s and preserving the history of our fore -fathers in my head so I can tell it to my kids someday.Stories of the NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR,Stories of the tribes and there origin.A yoruba child might know how to speak yoruba but he/she might never know why his customs came to be, why they postrate on the floor to greet their elders or how they settled in the west.So much knowledge wasted, unknown and lost to this generation.Godbless chimamanda adichie author of (Half of a yellow sun and Purple hibiscus ) at least her books are in still in circulation,she tried to tell only a fragment of what would have been.I am privileged to read and to have connected to these writers somehow through their works and that to me is a blessing I can never take for granted.These men, these authors are true icons and pacesetters, please let's try to preserve history and may we never forget what was to what is . If we don't know what was or where we are coming from, we can never be certain of were we are heading.Let us all pick a book today , a book that matters, a book that spans across generations, a book that preserves history and may we never be lost in our own motherland .