# Quote — Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

> The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near.

- Author: [Chinua Achebe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chinua-achebe.md)
- Book: [Home and Exile](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chinua-achebe/home-and-exile.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chinua_Achebe#Home_and_Exile_(2000)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/chinua-achebe/home-and-exile/the-igbo-nation

## More from this book

> The dispossession that caused my shrillness is in retreat though the marks of its pillage are still everywhere. I can see, in spite of them, that I have come a long way.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chinua-achebe/home-and-exile/the-dispossession-that.md)

> The Igbo people of Southern Nigeria are more than ten million strong and must be accounted one of the major peoples of Africa. Conventional practice would call them a tribe, but I no longer follow that convention. I call them a nation

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chinua-achebe/home-and-exile/the-igbo-people.md)

> In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/chinua-achebe/home-and-exile/in-the-end.md)