Education Quote by Chinua Achebe

Achebe’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as a civics lesson: democracy is not a ceremonial object, polished on election day and stored the rest of the decade. The genius is in the domestic verb choice - “put away” - which shrinks grand political failure down to a familiar habit of neglect. It suggests democracy doesn’t collapse only through coups and constitutions; it also dies through everyday disuse, when people outsource agency to strongmen, parties, or “big men” and then act surprised when power hardens without them.

The subtext is discipline. “Practicing” frames self-government less as a birthright than as a muscle: it atrophies when unused, strengthens through repetition, and demands patience with messy process. Achebe is also quietly rejecting the romance of the reset button, the idea that a nation can hibernate through authoritarian rule and then reemerge with democratic instincts intact. His “11th year” image feels pointedly postcolonial: countries pushed through abrupt state-building, then battered by military regimes, patronage systems, and civic fatigue. The calendar becomes a moral timeline - time doesn’t heal political damage; participation does.

“We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again” is the hardest turn. It implies a loss of civic literacy, not just corrupted leaders. Achebe places responsibility where it’s uncomfortable: on citizens, institutions, and culture, not solely on villains at the top. Coming from a novelist who chronicled the wreckage of power and the seductions of authority, the sentence reads like a warning: the cost of democratic neglect is not only bad governance, but the slow erosion of the very capacity to imagine shared rule.