Editorial: Journal of Corporate Citizenship (62)

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them (Chinua Achebe). The late Nigerian novelist, poet, professor and critic Chinua Achebe was perhaps his country's most celebrated sensemaker, storyteller and thinker. Achebe's post-colonial novel Things Fall Apart explores his Igbo people's traditions, beliefs and values through the eyes of Okonkwo, a community leader and local wrestling champion, and charts the hero's eventual demise following the arrival of British colonialism and Christian missionaries. The evocative title of Achebe's novel comes from the opening lines of Irish poet W.B. Yeats's apocalyptic The Second Coming, which has echoes of the fall of Okonkwo and his Igbo traditional community's parallel disintegration and despair.