Chinua Achebe, a literary icon of the 20th century, is widely regarded as Africa's best novelist to date, and one of the world's greatest. The essays in this book provide global perspectives of Achebe as an artist with a proper sense of history and an imaginative writer with an inviolable sense of cultural mission and political commitment. Omenka is the first of a two volume celebration of this modern African literary tradition, which owes much of its origin to Achebe's landmark classic novel, Things Fall Apart, the most widely read African novel.