Achebe’s straight telling of stories without analyzing why the characters in his stories did what they did, I think, is what made his writing irritating to me; I like writers who try to figure out why human beings do what they do, that is, writers who provide psychological explanation of the human phenomenon.  Why Chinua Achebe Annoyed Me  Ozodi Osuji  My antipathy to Chinua Achebe is well known.  The man simply annoyed me; I was so irritated by his writing that whenever I read one of his novels I would go into a funk. The rational part of me kept…

If you are around new age religionists you probably hear members say that our thinking produces the world we see.  A course in miracles says that perception is projection, that the world we see with our physical eyes is the outward mirror of our thinking. We think and our thinking is pictured for us to see, that nothing we see in our world is not the product of our thoughts. Along this line of reasoning our thinking is also said to produce the world we see in our nightly dreams. At night we sleep and see a world that looks…

Each of us believes that he or she has a self. So, what exactly is the self? We shall answer this question from many levels.  We shall begin at the empirical level, the human personality and then work our way to higher levels of the self, the part that is not empirical and not seem by people but that people believe is there. The self that the individual is conscious of is his self-concept, aka personality.  He is also aware that he is more than his personality, after all he knows that the term personality is derived from persona, mask.…

Some human beings are here to perform the function of telling their people and people in general the truth about them. Such persons, truth Sayers, are seldom appreciated for their function; indeed, the usual thing is to destroy them. Be that as it may, truth Sayers must perform their appointed function for on their role depends the wellbeing of mankind. I saw Igbos suffering from the delusion of grandeur that they are a special people. They actually believe in that psychosis. I undertook to disabuse them of that insanity and risked their rejection.  My job is done and I move…

In my previous article on the controversy between Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili and the reputation managers of the federal government over an offending sentence in Mrs. Ezekwesili’s UNN Convocation on January 24, 2013, I pointed out some errors or mistakes made by Mrs. Ezekewesili and then emphasized that they are not usual among economists and in public policy. I also noted that the offending sentence does not warrant the attack on the person of Mrs. Ezekwesili by Mr. Maku and Dr. Okupe. Clearly, the controversy has overshadowed the central messages of the lecture and the lessons the current administration and all…

Appreciating the ridiculous low self-regard in contemporary Africans, manifested in Africans tendency to insult each other and steal from one another, this paper asks whether the over one thousand years Africans spent in slavery is the cause of their obvious low self-esteem?  Did The Slave Experience Cause Africans Low Self Esteem?  Ozodiobi Osuji  For over a thousand years (from about 900 AD when Arabs began buying Africans) to about 1900 when both American and internal African slavery finally ended, Africans roamed around their continent capturing and selling their people to whoever wanted to buy them as slaves. It seems to…

Since Barack Obama became President of the United States, interest has increased about the Luo people of Kenya and the other Luo speaking nationalities in general. So, who are the Luo people? Of the over 42 ethnic groups that make up Kenya, the Luo are one of the most important. The Luo ethnic group is the third largest community in Kenya and makes up to 14% of the entire population. Also found in Uganda, Tanzania and Sudan, they are part of a larger group of ethnolinguistically related Luo peoples from South Sudan to Tanzania. They speak the Dholuo language. Luo…

Overview of the Book: A brilliant and very beautifully designed book. This is a dream book well realized. And it is edited by three professors and stands out as a highly commendable work. By and large, a book review of this significant work will follow soon. But rejoice with me with this breaking news of the publication of "The Kpim of Social Order: A Season of Inquiry, Meaning and Significance in the Modern World (2013)". This very book had long been awaited to come out from the press. It has got 678 pages organized in 40 chapters. To be fair, I cannot hold my excitement and appreciation to all who…

Hardly anyone remembers this headline on BBC News of Tuesday, 8 December 2009: “Nigerian hospital ‘overwhelmed by corpses from police’”, reported by Caroline Duffield, BBC News, Lagos. That hospital is the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8401119.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8400799.stm                        The short story most likely did not even register:  “A Nigerian hospital has told the BBC it is overwhelmed by the number of corpses being brought to them by police” …The Chief Medical Director at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu says his staff are being forced to carry out mass burials of between 70 and 80 bodies…