At a crucial point in the history of culture, a new generation of educated "natives" were finally able to use the tools they acquired through their encounter with the West to decode the deepseated images of colonial representation and re-code new images of the self in order to escape stultification. In this context, Achebe's article "An Image of Africa" (1975) became one of the first postcolonial attempts at re-reading canonical English texts (even before the term post-colonial was coined). In 1978, Said published his seminal book Orientalism theorizing many of the points raised by Achebe in his article. This study aims at examining the similarities and differences between these two influential writers who are situated both spatially and temporally at what Achebe calls "the crossroads of culture." **********
