When Giants Disagree: What Achebe, Soyinka and Ngugi can Teach Young Writers Today
There is something I have always believed: when elders disagree, it is not the quarrel we should focus on, but the wisdom struggling to be heard underneath. That is how the famous clash of ideas between Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o always feels to me. These three titans of African literature were not arguing about trivial things. They were asking a question so big that even today, young writers still whisper it to themselves: What truly makes a story African?
Ngũgĩ, bold and unafraid, stood on the side of language as homeland. To him, an African writer who abandons African languages is like a man carrying firewood for another man’s kitchen — helpful perhaps, but homeless. He believed literature written in English or French could never fully hold the soul of the people. If you want African stories to smell like African earth, then write in African tongues.
Achebe, calm and precise as ever, did not shake the table; he simply turned it around. English, he argued, was already woven into our story. We did not choose it, but it chose us, and now we must decide what to do with it. Achebe bent English until it wore Igbo proverbs like necklaces. He was fighting for identity; the idea that the African voice can live anywhere, even in the grammar of colonizers.
And then Soyinka, with the confidence of a man who has no interest in small cages, refused to let the argument swallow the craft. For him, the writer must be free — free to choose language, free to mould his story, free to chase truth wherever it hides. Soyinka cared about excellence first. He seemed to say, “Tell the story well. Let the rest arrange itself.”
What I find beautiful is that these men never fully agreed, yet none of them was wrong. Their disagreement formed a kind of triangle that still holds African literature together. Ngũgĩ protects the roots. Achebe expands the soil. Soyinka opens the sky. And for young writers today, especially those growing up with a mix of English, Pidgin and mother tongue tumbling through their heads, their lesson is surprisingly simple: there is more than one way to tell your truth.
Some of you write in straightforward English because it feels clean, safe, and familiar. Others sprinkle Pidgin because that is how your emotions breathe. Some of you write in Igbo or Yoruba because certain feelings simply refuse to be translated. And none of these choices makes you less of a writer.
What matters is that the language you choose must serve the message, not distort it. Your story should sound like you, the real you, not the version of yourself you think would impress strangers.
Find your voice, dear writer; protect it, and use it boldly.
