Grace Awani Alele-Williams was born on December 16, 1932 and made history as the first Nigerian woman to become the head (Vice-Chancellor) of a Nigerian university i.e. the University of Benin. Born in Warri, Prof. Alele-Williams attended Government School, Warri, and Queen’s College, Lagos. She attended the Nigeria University College now the University of Ibadan, Oyo State South West Nigeria. Later she attended the University of Vermont and the University of Chicago all in the United States of America.
Her teaching career started at Queen’s School, Ede Osun State, where she was mathematics master from 1954 to 57. Dissatisfied with her situation at Queen's School, Alele managed to obtain financial assistance from the Nigerian Head of Service to attend the University of Vermont as a graduate assistant with the goal of becoming a secondary school teacher. She found the weather in Vermont to be cold and also experienced forms of segregation in the rural setting. Soon, however, Sputnik shifted America's attention to the importance of mathematics and education, and Alele had the opportunity to go to the University of Chicago, Columbia, or Harvard. She chose the University of Chicago, and in 1963 obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics education with a dissertation on "Dynamics Of Education In The Birth Of A New Nation: Case Study Of Nigeria."
Alele also married in 1963. Upon her return to Nigeria she became a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Ibadan. In 1965 she joined the faculty at the University of Lagos where she worked until 1985, becoming the first female professor of mathematics education in 1974. During this time she also directed the Institute of Education where she introduced programs to benefit teachers. She participated in the African Mathematics Programme, based at the Educational Development Center of Newton, Massachusetts, whose goal was to consider changes in mathematics education in Africa.
In 1985 Alele-Williams became the first female Vice-Chancellor of an African university when she accepted that position at the University of Benin. As she stated in the 2004 interview: "The excitement I felt on receiving the news from Professor Jubril Aminu (the then Minister of Education) had more to do with seeing it in terms of opening up the field for women than anything else. I saw it as an opportunity to show that women too could rise up to the occasion. Also, I knew what the weights of the expectations of the women were. They were eager to see how things would go and I was not going to let them down. Mind you, those who appointed me felt I was qualified for it; so it was not just a case of wanting to satisfy the yearnings of the womenfolk. It wasn't that simplistic." She remained as Vice-Chancellor until 1991.
By serving in various committees and boards, Alele-Williams had made useful contributions in the development of education in Nigeria. She was chairman of the curriculum review committee, former Bendel State 1973-1979. From 1979-1985, she served as chairman of the Lagos State Curriculum Review Committee and Lagos State Examinations Boards.
Alele-Williams was a member of governing council, UNESCO Institute of Education. She is also a consultant to UNESCO and Institute of International Education Planning. For a decade (1963-73) she was a member of the African Mathematics Programme, located in Newton, Massachusetts, United States. She was also vice-president of the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education and later president of the Nigerian chapter. Alele-Williams has published a book titled Modern Mathematics Handbook for Teachers. After serving as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Benin, she joined the board of directors of Chevron-Texaco Nigeria. She has 5 children and 6 grandchildren.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was born on the 13th of June 1954. She hails from the Umu Obi Obahai Royal Family of Ogwashi-Uku, Delta State Nigeria. Her father’s name is Professor Chukuka Okonjo. Ngozi was the former Finance Minister and later Foreign Affairs Minister of Nigeria, notable for being the first woman to hold either of those positions. She served as Finance Minister from July 2003 until her appointment as Foreign Affais Minister in June 2006. She resigned as Foreign Affairs Minister in August 2006. Okonjo-Iweala was considered as a possible replacement for former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. On October 4 2007 she was appointed as Managing Director of the World Bank by World Bank President Robert Zoellick.
Dr. Ngozi Iweala-Okonjo was educated at Harvard University (A.B. Magna Cum Laude 1977) and earned her Ph.D. in regional economics and development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is married - her husband is from Umuahia, Abia State - and they have four children. The eldest, Onyinye Iweala received her Ph.D. in Experimental Pathology from Harvard University in 2008 and currently attends Harvard Medical School. Her son, Uzodinma Iweala, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Beasts of No Nation (2005).
Prior to her ministerial career in Nigeria, Okonjo-Iweala was vice-president and corporate secretary of the World Bank Group. She left the World Bank after she was appointed to President Obasanjo's cabinet as Finance Minister on 15 July 2003.
In October 2005, she led the Nigerian team that struck a deal with the Paris Club, a group of bilateral creditors, to pay a portion of Nigeria's external debt (US $12 billion) in return for an $18 billion debt write-off. Prior to the partial debt payment and write-off, Nigeria spent roughly U.S. $1 billion every year on debt servicing, without making a dent in the principal owed.
Okonjo-Iweala also introduced the practice of publishing each state's monthly financial allocation from the federal government in the newspapers. She was instrumental in helping Nigeria obtain its first ever sovereign credit rating (of BB minus) from Fitch and Standard & Poor's. Nigeria is considered to have defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1983 (debt rescheduling is considered a type of default by rating agencies).
She resigned as Nigeria's Foreign Minister on August 3, 2006 following her sudden removal as head of Nigeria's Economic Intelligence team by President Olusegun Obasanjo. She left office at the end of August 2006.
On October 4, 2007, World Bank President Robert Zoellick appointed her to the post of Managing Director, effective December 1, 2007.
In 2007, Okonjo-Iweala's NGO, NOI Global Consulting, partnered with the Gallup Organization to introduce an opinion poll, the NOI poll, into the Nigerian polity. She is a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Okonjo-Iweala also serves on the Advisory Board of the Global Financial Integrity Program and on the Board of Directors of the World Resources Institute.
Honors and awards
Time Europe Hero 2004
This Day Nigeria Minister of the Year 2004
Euromoney Magazine Global Finance Minister of the year 2005
Financial Times/The Banker African Finance Minister 2005
Nigerian of the Year 2006
Honorary Doctorate from Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Honorary Doctorate from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland.
Honorary Doctorate from Colby College, Maine, USA.
Honorary Doctorate from Northern Caribbean University, Mandeville, Jamaica.
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on 16 November 1930. He a renowned is a novelist, poet, professor and critic. He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Raised by Evangelical Protestant parents in the Igbo village of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe writes his novels in English and has defended the use of English, a language of colonizers, in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" became the focus of controversy, for its criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist".
When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a devoted supporter of Biafran independence and served as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The war ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed.
In 1967 Achebe co-founded a publishing company at Enugu with his friend, the poet Christopher Okigbo, who was killed during the Nigerian Civil War. Achebe was appointed research fellow at the University of Nigeria, and after serving as professor of English, he retired in 1981. Since 1985, Achebe has been a professor emeritus. From 1971 he has edited Okike, the leading journal of Nigerian new writing. He has also held the post of Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There he met James Baldwin, also a faculty member, who was Professor of African studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Council at Anambra State University of Technology, Enugu.
Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958, It is an unsentimental novel that depicts the life of Okonkwo, ambitious and powerful leader of an Igbo community, who counts on physical strength and courage. Okonkwo's life is good: his compound is large, he has no troubles with his wives, his garden grows yams, and he is respected by his fellow villagers. When Okonkwo accidentally kills a clansman, he is banished from the village for seven years. But the vehicle for his downfall is his blindness to circumstances and the missionary church, which brings with it the new authority of the British District Commissioner. The story is set in the 1890s, when missionaries and colonial government made its intrusion into Igbo society. In this process Okonkwo is destroyed, because his unwillingness to change set him apart from the community and he is fighting alone against colonialism. Achebe took the title of the book from William Butler Yates's The Second Coming - "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
A Man of the People (1966) is a satire of corruption, and power struggles in an African state in the 1960s. The central characters are the Minister of Culture, Nanga, the man of the people, and teacher Odili, an African Lucky Jim, who tells the story. Odili stands against the government, but not because of ideological reasons. He has personal interests: Nanga has seduced his girl friend. Their political confrontation becomes violent, Nanga's thugs inflict havoc and chaos, and the army responds by staging a coup.
Achebe has also written collections of short stories, poetry, and several books for juvenile readers. His essays include BEWARE, SOUL BROTHER (1971), about his experiences during the Civil War. He has received a Margaret Wrong Prize, the New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and the 2007 Man Booker International award. As the director of Heineman Educational Books in Nigeria, he has encouraged and published the work of dozens of African writers. He founded in 1984 the bilingual magazine Uwa ndi Igbo, a valuable source for Igbo studies.
Achebe's own literary language is standard English blended with pidgin, Igbo vocabulary, proverbs, images and speech patterns. Achebe shows his skills as a storyteller in 'The Madman' in which the social customs of the Ibo-speaking people are strongly present. In the richly layered narrative a nameless madman gets his revenge. Nwibe, an honored member of a distant town Ogbu, plans to go to the market. There in the market he had once chased a madman out of his hut and sent his children to throw stones at him. As he washes by the river, the madman takes his cloth. Nwibe runs naked after him, shouting 'Stop the madman.' The thief with the cloth disappears in the crowd, and Nwibe is taken to a medicine-man, but he has lost his social position. "For how could a man be the same again of whom witnesses from all the lands of Olu and Igbo have once reported that they saw today a fine, hefty man in his prime, stark naked, tearing through the crowds to answer the call of the market-place. Such a man is marked forever."
Arrow of God (1994) is set in the 1920s. The central character is Ezeulu, priest, who sends one of his sons to missionary school and gains in some respect the approval of the English district superintendent. However, Ezeulu is doomed, because when defending the traditions of his people he is unyielding, unable to reach a compromise, and afraid of losing his authority.
As an essayist Achebe has gained fame with his collections MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY (1975), HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS (1988) and his long essay THE TROUBLE WITH NIGERIA (1983). In 'An Image of Africa' (1975) Achebe criticizes Conrad's racism in Heart of Darkness. He has defended the use of the English language in the production of African fiction, insisting that the African novelist has an obligation to educate, and has attacked European critics who have failed to understand African literature on its own terms. Achebe has defined himself as a cultural nationalist with a revolutionary mission "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement." But Achebe has not stopped criticizing postcolonial African leaders who have pillaged economies. During the military dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha he left Nigeria several times. When the 70th birthday of the patriarch of the modern African novel was celebrated at Bard College, on November 2000, Wole Soyinka said: "Achebe never hesitates to lay blame for the woes of the African continent squarely where it belongs."
Achebe's novels and writings focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and later returned in 1990 after a car accident left him partially disabled. He is currently the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, United States.
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to be so honoured. In 1994, he was designated United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Goodwill Ambassador for the promotion of African culture, human rights, freedom of expression, media and communication.
Wole Soyinka is one of the most prominent members of the eminent Ransome-Kuti family, his mother Grace Eniola, was the daughter of Rev. Cannon JJ Ransome-Kuti, sister to Olusegun Azariah Ransome-Kuti and Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, making Soyinka cousins to the late Fela Kuti, the late Beko Ransome-Kuti, the late Olikoye Ransome-Kuti and Yemisi Ransome-Kuti.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family, specifically, a Remo family in Isara-Remo in 1934. He received a primary school education in Abeokuta and attended secondary school at Government College, Ibadan. He then studied at the University College, Ibadan (1952-1954) and the University of Leeds (1954-1957) from which he received an honours degree in English Literature. He worked as a play reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London before returning to Nigeria to study African drama. He taught in the Universities of Lagos, Ibadan, and Ife (becoming Professor of Comparative Literature there in 1975).
Soyinka has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring parties. While in prison he wrote poetry which was published in a collection titled Poems from Prison. He was released 22 months later after international attention was drawn to his imprisonment. His experiences in prison are recounted in his book The Man Died: Prison Notes.
He has been an outspoken critic of many Nigerian administrations and of political tyrannies worldwide, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. A great deal of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". This activism has often exposed him to great personal risk, most notable during the government of General Sani Abacha (1993-1998). During Abacha's regime, Soyinka left the country on voluntary exile and has since been living abroad (mainly in the United States, where he was a professor at Emory University in Atlanta). When civilian rule returned in 1999, Soyinka accepted an emeritus post at Obafemi Awolowo University on the condition that the university bar all former military officers from the position of chancellor. Soyinka is currently the Elias Ghanem Professor of Creative Writing at the English department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the President's Marymount Institute Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US. In 2005, he became one of the spearheads of an alternative National conference - PRONACO.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu State South East Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where Adichie grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka, one of six siblings in a middle-class family. Both her parents (who are still alive) worked at the university - her father as a mathematics professor, her mother as an administrator. The family lived, by sheer coincidence, in a former home of Chinua Achebe, Nigeria's most famous novelist. But, Adichie says, they weren't especially bookish, and she says that her early interest in literature set her apart from her siblings, and made her decision to become a writer more acceptable to her parents.
Adichie attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale.
Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Prospect, and The Iowa Review among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught Introductory Fiction. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Achievements
2001 Received a BA in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University.
2003 Her first novel, Purple Hibiscis, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Completed a creative writing MA at Johns Hopkins university, Baltimore.
2007 Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Biafran war, won the Orange Prize.
2008 Graduated with an MA in African Studies from Yale University.
Click to read full interview with The Sun.
(Courtesy: en.wkipedia.org, kirjasto.sci.fi, agnesscott.edu, guardian.co.uk, halfofayellowsun.com)
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