[T]his is quite central to my fiction and to my analysis of the problems of creating a new nation today. Obviously, we can’t go back to a system in which every man is turning up in the village square—that’s in the past. But we have to find a way of dealing with the problems created by the fact that somebody says he’s speaking on your behalf, but you don’t know who he is. This is one of the problems of the modern world.

~ Chinua Achebe