Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, an Igbo town in what was then the British colony of Nigeria ^[1]. His father, Isaiah Okafo Achebe, worked as a teacher and evangelist for the Church Missionary Society, and the household combined Christian practice with the older Igbo world that surrounded it. That double inheritance, church hymns on one side and the ceremonies and proverbs of Ogidi on the other, gave the future novelist his earliest education in how two systems of belief could occupy the same ground ^[2].

He learned to read early and grew up on the books available in a mission home: the Bible, school primers, and later the colonial adventure fiction of writers such as Rider Haggard and John Buchan. As a boy he identified with the white protagonists of those stories, an experience he later described as a warning about what happens when a people consume only narratives written about them by outsiders ^[2].

Achebe's academic record carried him through Government College, Umuahia, one of the most selective secondary schools in West Africa, and then in 1948 to University College, Ibadan, in its founding class ^[1]. He entered on a scholarship to study medicine but switched to English, history, and theology after his first year, surrendering the scholarship to do so. At Ibadan he began publishing sketches and essays in student magazines, and he dropped the name Albert in favor of Chinua ^[3].

After graduating in 1953, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos, where he worked on scripts and rose to direct external broadcasting for the network ^[1]. Radio work sharpened his ear for spoken English and gave him steady employment while he wrote fiction at night. The novel he was drafting grew partly out of irritation: he had read Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, a colonial novel set in Nigeria that was praised in Britain, and found its Nigerian characters hollow. He decided the answer was not complaint but a better book ^[2].

That book became Things Fall Apart, published by Heinemann in London in 1958. It follows Okonkwo, a proud wrestler and farmer in a fictional Igbo village, through his rise, his exile, and his collision with British missionaries and colonial administrators at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel told the story of colonization from the inside of the community being colonized, in an English flexed to carry Igbo proverbs and speech rhythms ^[4].

Initial printings were modest, but the novel found readers steadily, then massively. It was adopted in schools across Africa, translated into dozens of languages, and eventually sold many millions of copies worldwide, figures often placed above ten million and frequently cited as making it the most read work of modern African fiction ^[4]. In 1962 Heinemann made Achebe the founding general editor of its African Writers Series, a paperback list that brought writers from across the continent, including Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Flora Nwapa, to international audiences ^[5].

Among Chinua Achebe achievements, the novels stand first. Things Fall Apart opened a loose trilogy on the Igbo encounter with colonialism: No Longer at Ease (1960) traced the corruption of Okonkwo's grandson in late colonial Lagos, and Arrow of God (1964) returned to a village setting to study a chief priest caught between his god and the British administration ^[1]. A Man of the People (1966) turned satire on the politicians of independent Nigeria and, appearing just before Nigeria's first military coup, seemed uncomfortably prophetic to many readers ^[3].

Achebe was also a formidable critic. His 1975 lecture at the University of Massachusetts, later published as "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," argued that Joseph Conrad's celebrated novella reduced Africans to scenery and called Conrad's portrayal racist. The essay provoked lasting controversy and permanently changed how Heart of Darkness is taught and debated ^[6].

His honors accumulated across five decades. He received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972 for Beware, Soul Brother, poems written during and after the Nigerian civil war, and in 2007 he won the Man Booker International Prize for his body of work ^[4]. He collected honorary doctorates from more than thirty universities. He also twice declined the Nigerian national honor of Commander of the Federal Republic, in 2004 and again in 2011, citing his objections to misgovernment in the country ^[7].

The Nigerian civil war cut Achebe's life in two. When the eastern region seceded as Biafra in 1967 after massacres of Igbo people in the north, Achebe sided with the new republic and traveled abroad as one of its envoys, speaking to foreign audiences about the blockade and the famine that killed vast numbers of Biafran civilians ^[3]. His Lagos career was over; his family moved repeatedly to escape the fighting, and a close friend, the poet Christopher Okigbo, died at the front in 1967 ^[2].

The war reshaped his writing. For years he published poetry, short stories, and essays rather than novels, saying that the scale of the catastrophe made extended fiction feel impossible for a time. Girls at War and Other Stories appeared in 1972, and his essay collections, including Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) and The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), pressed his argument that Nigeria's central problem was a failure of leadership ^[1].

He returned to the novel with Anthills of the Savannah (1987), a study of friendship and tyranny in a fictional West African state, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize ^[4]. Near the end of his life he published There Was a Country (2012), a personal history of Biafra that reignited Nigerian debate about the war more than four decades after it ended ^[7].

Achebe married Christiana Chinwe Okoli, known as Christie, in 1961; they had met while both worked in broadcasting in Lagos ^[3]. The couple raised four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi, and Nwando. Christie Achebe pursued an academic career of her own in psychology and education, and the family's homes, first in Nigeria and later in the United States, doubled as gathering places for writers and students ^[2].

A road accident in Nigeria in 1990 left Achebe paralyzed from the waist down. He spent months in hospital in London, then accepted a teaching position at Bard College in New York State that came with the medical support he now needed. He used a wheelchair for the remaining twenty three years of his life and spoke about the injury with characteristic dryness rather than self pity ^[7].

Friends and students described a soft spoken man whose authority came from precision rather than volume. He remained deeply attached to Ogidi and to Igbo custom, holding the traditional title of Ugonabo of Ogidi, and he continued to insist that the proverb, in Igbo speech, is the palm oil with which words are eaten, a line he had planted in his first novel ^[2].

From 1990 to 2009 Achebe taught at Bard College as the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature, mentoring writers while continuing to lecture internationally ^[1]. In 2009 he moved to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies, the post he held until his death ^[8].

Recognition kept arriving in his final decade. The Man Booker International Prize in 2007 was followed by the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2010, and Things Fall Apart's fiftieth anniversary in 2008 brought celebrations on several continents ^[4]. He continued to intervene in Nigerian public life from abroad, refusing national honors and criticizing successive governments in essays and interviews ^[7].

Achebe died on March 21, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 82, after a short illness ^[8]. His funeral in Nigeria that May drew national leaders and ordinary readers to Ogidi, where he was buried on the grounds of his home. Tributes came from heads of state, from Nelson Mandela, who had earlier called him a writer in whose company the prison walls fell down, and from novelists across the world ^[7].

The basic Chinua Achebe facts, five novels, decades of essays and poems, a global classic taught in classrooms on every continent, only sketch the scale of his influence. Things Fall Apart is routinely credited with opening international publishing to African fiction, and the Heinemann African Writers Series he shaped carried more than three hundred titles into print ^[5].

Writers who followed him have been explicit about the debt. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who grew up in a house the Achebe family had once occupied on the University of Nigeria campus in Nsukka, has described his work as the permission slip for her own; Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer both praised his example, and he is frequently, if loosely, called the father of modern African literature, a label he himself resisted ^[4].

Any full Chinua Achebe biography ends with an argument he won. He maintained that the story of Africa told only by outsiders would always be, in the terms of the proverb he liked to cite, the hunter's version of the hunt, and that the lions needed their own historians. His novels supplied that history in fiction, and universities, prizes, and literary festivals bearing his name now sustain the tradition he started ^[6].