“One of Africa’s most prominent literary icons, Chinua Achebe, has rejected a national honors award from his government in Nigeria in protest at the ‘dangerous’ state of the country,” according to a Reuters wire story. In a letter to Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, Achebe wrote, “Nigeria’s condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honor awarded me.” This, after another Nigerian literary giant, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, earlier this year “warned that Nigeria was heading for a ‘violent implosion.'”