Last year saw Netflix inking a deal with Mo Abudu to adapt the literary works of Lola Shonenyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, and also Wole Soyinka’s 1975 play Death and the King’s Horseman. Nigeria has produced a churn of great literary products that can serve as source materials for television and film. In parallel, such is what that has just happened to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease.
According to reports, Dayo Ogunyemi of 234 Media and Joe Seldner of Seldner Media have acquired the rights to adapt these iconic books by Achebe into television adaptations. The chairman and CEO of AIDE, African Integrated Development Enterprise, Chidi Chike Achebe, who is the late novelist’s son, shared on his LinkedIn page that “Things Fall Apart – Achebe’s magnum opus – and other novels of the African Trilogy – No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God – are going to be adapted for global television audiences.
As most know, Things Fall Apart is the debut novel of Achebe published in 1954 which depicted pre-colonial life in Southeastern Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans in the 19th century. Its protagonist Okonkwo was a complex character and through his eyes, we saw the shifts of a society under the regime of colonization. The 1987 adaptation produced by NTA starred Pete Edochie playing Okonkwo, but this latest television treatment of the novel hopes to bring the essence of the story to a newer audience.
No cast or release date has been announced yet.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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