AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

Wednesday, September 18th, 2013

The story of how the most famous portrait of a young Chinua Achebe was taken

When the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died this April, one of the photographs used repeatedly to illustrate stories or obituaries was a portrait taken of him in 1959 by the American photographer Eliot Elisofon. It is useful to unpack the image, a conventional portrait of Achebe leaning on a desk with two copies of Things Fall...