Chinua Achebe (/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbeɪ/ ; born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe; 16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.
Born in Ogidi, Colonial Nigeria, Achebe's childhood was influenced by both Igbo traditional culture and postcolonial Christianity. He excelled in school and attended what is now the University of Ibadan, where he became fiercely critical of how Western literature depicted Africa. Moving to Lagos after graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and garnered international attention for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. In less than 10 years he would publish four further novels through the publisher Heinemann, with whom he began the Heinemann African Writers Series and galvanized the careers of African writers, such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Flora Nwapa.
Achebe sought to escape the colonial perspective that framed African literature at the time, and drew from the traditions of the Igbo people, Christian influences, and the clash of Western and African values to create a uniquely African voice. He wrote in and defended the use of English, describing it as a means to reach a broad audience, particularly readers of colonial nations. In 1975 he gave a controversial lecture, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", which was a landmark in postcolonial discourse. Published in The Massachusetts Review, it featured criticism of Albert Schweitzer and Joseph Conrad, whom Achebe described as "a thoroughgoing racist." When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe supported Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the movement. The subsequent Nigerian Civil War ravaged the populace, and he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon became disillusioned by his frustration over the continuous corruption and elitism he witnessed. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the US in 1990 after a car crash left him partially paralyzed. He stayed in the US in a nineteen-year tenure at Bard College as a professor of languages and literature.
Winning the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, from 2009 until his death he was Professor of African Studies at Brown University. Achebe's work has been extensively analyzed and a vast body of scholarly work discussing it has arisen. In addition to his seminal novels, Achebe's oeuvre includes numerous short stories, poetry, essays and children's books. A titled Igbo chief himself, his style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. Among the many themes his works cover are culture and colonialism, masculinity and femininity, politics, and history. His legacy is celebrated annually at the Chinua Achebe Literary Festival.
Chinua Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 and baptised Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe.[1][a] His father, Isaiah Okafo Achebe, was a teacher and evangelist, and his mother, Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam, was the daughter of a blacksmith from Awka,[3] a leader among church women, and a vegetable farmer.[4][5] His birthplace was Saint Simon's Church, Nneobi, which was near the Igbo village of Ogidi; the area was part of the British colony of Nigeria at the time.[6] Isaiah was the nephew of Udoh Osinyi, a leader in Ogidi with a "reputation for tolerance"; orphaned as a young man, Isaiah was an early Ogidi convert to Christianity.[4] Both Isaiah and Janet stood at a crossroads of traditional culture and Christian influence, which made a significant impact on the children, especially Chinua.[1] His parents were converts to the Protestant Church Mission Society (CMS) in Nigeria.[7] As such, Isaiah stopped practising Odinani, the religious practices of his ancestors, but continued to respect its traditions. The Achebe family had five other surviving children, named in a fusion of traditional words relating to their new religion: Frank Okwuofu, John Chukwuemeka Ifeanyichukwu, Zinobia Uzoma, Augustine Ndubisi, and Grace Nwanneka.[2] After the youngest daughter was born, the family moved to Isaiah Achebe's ancestral town of Ogidi, in what is now the state of Anambra.[8]
Storytelling was a mainstay of the Igbo tradition and an integral part of the community. Achebe's mother and his sister Zinobia told him many stories as a child, which he repeatedly requested. His education was furthered by the collages his father hung on the walls of their home, as well as almanacs and numerous books—including a prose adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1590) and an Igbo version of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678).[9] Achebe eagerly anticipated traditional village events, like the frequent masquerade ceremonies, which he would later recreate in his novels and stories.[10]
In 1936, Achebe entered St Philips' Central School in the Akpakaogwe region of Ogidi for his primary education.[4][11] Despite his protests, he spent a week in the religious class for young children, but was quickly moved to a higher class when the school's chaplain took note of his intelligence.[12] One teacher described him as the student with the best handwriting and the best reading skills in his class. Achebe had his secondary education at the prestigious Government College Umuahia, in Nigeria's present-day Abia State.[13] He attended Sunday school every week and the special services held monthly, often carrying his father's bag. A controversy erupted at one such session, when apostates from the new church challenged the catechist about the tenets of Christianity.[14][b] Achebe enrolled in Nekede Central School, outside of Owerri, in 1942; he was particularly studious and passed the entrance examinations for two colleges.[6]
In 1948, Nigeria's first university opened in preparation for the country's independence.[15] Known as University College (now the University of Ibadan), it was an associate college of the University of London. Achebe was admitted as the university's first intake and given a bursary to study medicine.[15] During his studies, Achebe became critical of Western literature about Africa, particularly Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.[16] He decided to become a writer after reading Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary because of the book's portrayal of its Nigerian characters as either savages or buffoons.[17] Achebe recognised his dislike for the African protagonist as a sign of the author's cultural ignorance.[18] He abandoned medicine to study English, history, and theology,[19] a switch which lost him his scholarship and required extra tuition fees. To compensate, the government provided a bursary, and his family donated money—his older brother Augustine gave up money for a trip home from his job as a civil servant so Achebe could continue his studies.[20]
Achebe's debut as an author was in 1950 when he wrote a piece for the University Herald, the university's magazine,[21] entitled "Polar Undergraduate". It used irony and humour to celebrate the intellectual vigour of his classmates.[22] He followed with other essays and letters about philosophy and freedom in academia, some of which were published in another campus magazine called The Bug.[23] He served as the Herald's editor during the 1951–52 school year.[24] He wrote his first short story that year, "In a Village Church" (1951), an amusing look at the Igbo synthesis between life in rural Nigeria with Christian institutions and icons.[25] Other short stories he wrote during his time at Ibadan—including "The Old Order in Conflict with the New" (1952) and "Dead Men's Path" (1953)—examine conflicts between tradition and modernity, with an eye toward dialogue and understanding on both sides.[26][27] When the professor Geoffrey Parrinder arrived at the university to teach comparative religion, Achebe began to explore the fields of Christian history and African traditional religions.[28]
After the final examinations at Ibadan in year 1953, Achebe was awarded a second-class degree.[29] Rattled by not receiving the highest level, he was uncertain how to proceed after graduation and returned to his hometown of Ogidi.[30] While pondering possible career paths, Achebe was visited by a friend from the university, who convinced him to apply for an English teaching position at the Merchants of Light school at Oba. It was a ramshackle institution with a crumbling infrastructure and a meagre library; the school was built on what the residents called "bad bush"—a section of land thought to be tainted by unfriendly spirits.[31]
As a teacher he urged his students to read extensively and be original in their work.[32] The students did not have access to the newspapers he had read as a student, so Achebe made his own available in the classroom. He taught in Oba for four months. He left the institution in 1954 and moved to Lagos to work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS),[33] a radio network started in 1933 by the colonial government.[34] He was assigned to the Talks Department to prepare scripts for oral delivery. This helped him master the subtle nuances between written and spoken language, a skill that helped him later to write realistic dialogue.[35]
Lagos made a significant impression on him. A huge conurbation, the city teemed with recent migrants from the rural villages. Achebe revelled in the social and political activity around him and began work on a novel.[36] This was challenging since very little African fiction had been written in English, although Amos Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard and Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City were notable exceptions.[37] A visit to Nigeria by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956 highlighted issues of colonialism and politics, and was a significant moment for Achebe.[38]
Also in 1956, Achebe was selected to attend the staff training school for the BBC.[39] His first trip outside Nigeria was an opportunity to advance his technical production skills, and to solicit feedback on his novel (which was later split into two books). In London, he met the novelist Gilbert Phelps, to whom he offered the manuscript. Phelps responded with great enthusiasm, asking Achebe if he could show it to his editor and publishers. Achebe declined, insisting that it needed more work.[37]
Back in Nigeria, Achebe set to work revising and editing his novel; he titled it Things Fall Apart, after a line in the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. He cut away the second and third sections of the book, leaving only the story of a yam farmer named Okonkwo who lives during the colonization of Nigeria and struggles with his father's debtor legacy.[40][A 2] He added sections, improved various chapters, and restructured the prose.[40]
In 1957 he sent his only copy of his handwritten manuscript (along with the £22 fee) to a London manuscript typing service he had seen an advertisement for in The Spectator. He did not receive a reply from the typing service, so he asked his boss at the NBS, Angela Beattie, to visit the company during her travels to London. She did, and angrily demanded to know why the manuscript was lying ignored in the corner of the office. The company quickly sent a typed copy to Achebe. Beattie's intervention was crucial for his ability to continue as a writer.[40] Had the novel been lost, he later said, "I would have been so discouraged that I would probably have given up altogether."[40] The next year Achebe sent his novel to the agent recommended by Gilbert Phelps in London.[41][42] It was sent to several publishing houses; some rejected it immediately, claiming that fiction from African writers had no market potential.[43] The executives at Heinemann read the manuscript and hesitated in their decision to publish the book. An educational adviser, Donald MacRae, read the book and reported to the company that: "This is the best novel I have read since the war."[44] Heinemann published 2,000 hardcover copies of Things Fall Apart on 17 June 1958.[45] According to Alan Hill, employed by the publisher at the time, the company did not "touch a word of it" in preparation for release.[43]
The book was received well by the British press, and received positive reviews from critic Walter Allen and novelist Angus Wilson. Three days after publication, The Times Literary Supplement wrote that the book "genuinely succeeds in presenting tribal life from the inside". The Observer called it "an excellent novel", and the literary magazine Time and Tide said that "Mr. Achebe's style is a model for aspirants".[46] Initial reception in Nigeria was mixed. When Hill tried to promote the book in West Africa, he was met with scepticism and ridicule. The faculty at the University of Ibadan was amused at the thought of a worthwhile novel being written by an alumnus.[47] Others were more supportive; one review in the magazine Black Orpheus said: "The book as a whole creates for the reader such a vivid picture of Igbo life that the plot and characters are little more than symbols representing a way of life lost irrevocably within living memory."[48] When Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, Achebe was promoted at the NBS and put in charge of the network's Eastern region coverage.[49] That same year Achebe began dating Christiana Chinwe (Christie) Okoli, a woman who had grown up in the area and joined the NBS staff when he arrived.[50] The couple moved to Enugu and began to work on his administrative duties.[50]
In 1960 Achebe published No Longer at Ease, a novel about a civil servant named Obi, grandson of Things Fall Apart's main character, who is embroiled in the corruption of Lagos.[51] Obi undergoes the same turmoil as much of the Nigerian youth of his time; the clash between the traditional culture of his clan, family, and home village against his government job and modern society.[52][53] Later that year, Achebe was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for six months of travel, which he called "the first important perk of my writing career".[54]
Achebe used the fellowship to tour East Africa. He first travelled to Kenya, where he was required to complete an immigration form by checking a box indicating his ethnicity: European, Asiatic, Arab, or Other. Shocked and dismayed at being forced into an "Other" identity, he found the situation "almost funny" and took an extra form as a souvenir.[54] Continuing to Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now united in Tanzania), he was frustrated by the paternalistic attitude he observed among non-African hotel clerks and social elites.[55] Achebe found in his travels that Swahili was gaining prominence as a major African language. Radio programs were broadcast in Swahili, and its use was widespread in the countries he visited. Nevertheless, he found an "apathy" among the people toward literature written in Swahili. He met the poet Sheikh Shaaban Robert, who complained of the difficulty he had faced in trying to publish his Swahili-language work.[56] In Northern Rhodesia (now called Zambia), Achebe found himself sitting in a whites-only section of a bus to Victoria Falls. Interrogated by the ticket taker as to why he was sitting in the front, he replied, "if you must know I come from Nigeria, and there we sit where we like in the bus."[57] Upon reaching the waterfall, he was cheered by the black travellers from the bus, but he was saddened by their being unable to resist the policy of segregation at the time.[57]
Two years later, Achebe travelled to the United States and Brazil as part of a Fellowship for Creative Artists awarded by UNESCO. He met with a number of writers from the US, including novelists Ralph Ellison and Arthur Miller.[58] In Brazil, he discussed the complications of writing in Portuguese with other authors. Achebe worried that the vibrant literature of the nation would be lost if left untranslated into a more widely spoken language.[59]
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On his return to Nigeria in 1961, Achebe was promoted at the NBS to the position of Director of External Broadcasting. One of his primary duties was to help create the Voice of Nigeria (VON) network, which broadcast its first transmission on New Year's Day 1962.[60] VON struggled to maintain neutrality when Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa declared a state of emergency in the Western Region, responding to a series of conflicts between officials of varying parties. Achebe became particularly saddened by the evidence of corruption and silencing of political opposition.[61] The same year he attended an executive conference of African writers in English at the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. He met with literary figures including Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, Nigerian playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka, and American poet Langston Hughes. Among the topics of discussion was an attempt to determine whether the term African literature ought to include work from the diaspora, or solely that writing composed by people living within the continent itself. Achebe indicated that it was not "a very significant question",[61] and that scholars would do well to wait until a body of work was large enough to judge. Writing about the conference in several journals, Achebe hailed it as a milestone for the literature of Africa, and highlighted the importance of community among isolated voices on the continent and beyond.[62]
While at Makerere, Achebe was asked to read a novel written by a student named James Ngugi (later known as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o) called Weep Not, Child. Impressed, he sent it to Alan Hill at Heinemann, which published it two years later to coincide with its paperback line of books from African writers.[63] Achebe also recommended works by Flora Nwapa.[64] Achebe became the General Editor of the African Writers Series, a collection of postcolonial literature from African writers.[63] As these works became more widely available, reviews and essays about African literature—especially from Europe—began to flourish.[65]
Achebe published an essay entitled "Where Angels Fear to Tread" in the December 1962 issue of Nigeria Magazine in reaction to critiques African work was receiving from international authors. The essay distinguished between the hostile critic (entirely negative), the amazed critic (entirely positive), and the conscious critic (who seeks a balance). He lashed out at those who critiqued African writers from the outside, saying: "no man can understand another whose language he does not speak (and 'language' here does not mean simply words, but a man's entire worldview)."[65] In September 1964 he attended the Commonwealth Literature conference at the University of Leeds, presenting his essay "The Novelist as Teacher".[66]
Achebe and Christie married on 10 September 1961,[49] holding the ceremony in the Chapel of Resurrection on the campus of the University of Ibadan.[67] Their first child, a daughter named Chinelo, was born on 11 July 1962.[68] They had a son, Ikechukwu, on 3 December 1964, and another boy, Chidi, on 24 May 1967. Their last child, a daughter, named Nwando, was born on 7 March 1970. When the children began attending school in Lagos, their parents became worried about the worldview—especially with regard to race, gender and how Africans were portrayed—expressed at the school, particularly through the mostly white teachers and books that presented a prejudiced view of African life.[68] In 1966, Achebe published his first children's book, Chike and the River, to address some of these concerns.[69]
Achebe's third book, Arrow of God, was published in 1964.[59] The idea for the novel came in 1959, when Achebe heard the story of a Chief Priest being imprisoned by a District Officer.[70] He drew further inspiration a year later when he viewed a collection of Igbo objects excavated from the area by archaeologist Thurstan Shaw; Achebe was startled by the cultural sophistication of the artefacts. When an acquaintance showed him a series of papers from colonial officers, Achebe combined these strands of history and began work on Arrow of God.[71] Like Achebe's previous works, Arrow was roundly praised by critics.[72] A revised edition was published in 1974 to correct what Achebe called "certain structural weaknesses".[73]
Like its predecessors, the work explores the intersections of Igbo tradition and European Christianity. Set in the village of Umuaro at the start of the twentieth century, the novel tells the story of Ezeulu, a Chief Priest of Ulu.[49] Shocked by the power of British imperialism in the area, he orders his son to learn the foreigners' secrets. Ezeulu is consumed by the resulting tragedy.[74] In a letter written to Achebe, American writer John Updike expressed his surprised admiration for the sudden downfall of Arrow of God's protagonist and praised the author's courage to write "an ending few Western novelists would have contrived".[68] Achebe responded by suggesting that the individualistic hero was rare in African literature, given its roots in communal living and the degree to which characters are "subject to non-human forces in the universe".[75]
Achebe's fourth novel, A Man of the People, was published in 1966.[76] A bleak satire set in an unnamed African state which has just attained independence, the novel follows a teacher named Odili Samalu from the village of Anata who opposes a corrupt Minister of Culture named Nanga for his Parliament seat. Upon reading an advance copy of the novel, Achebe's friend John Pepper Clark declared: "Chinua, I know you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a military coup!"[77] Soon afterwards, Nigerian Army officer Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu seized control of the northern region of the country as part of the 1966 Nigerian coup d'état. Commanders in other areas failed, and the coup was followed by a military crackdown. A massacre of three thousand people from the eastern region living in the north occurred soon afterwards, and stories of other attacks on Igbo Nigerians began to filter into Lagos.[78]
The ending of his novel had brought Achebe to the attention of the Nigerian Armed Forces, who suspected him of having foreknowledge of the coup. When he received word of the pursuit, he sent his wife (who was pregnant) and children on a squalid boat through a series of unseen creeks to the Eastern stronghold of Port Harcourt. They arrived safely, but Christie suffered a miscarriage at the journey's end. Chinua rejoined them soon afterwards in Ogidi. These cities were safe from military incursion because they were in the southeast, a part of the region that would later secede.[79]
Once the family had resettled in Enugu, Achebe and his friend Christopher Okigbo started a publishing house called Citadel Press to improve the quality and increase the quantity of literature available to younger readers. One of its first submissions was a story called How the Dog was Domesticated, which Achebe revised and rewrote, turning it into a complex allegory for the country's political tumult. Its final title was How the Leopard Got His Claws.[80] Years later a Nigerian intelligence officer told Achebe, "of all the things that came out of Biafra, that book was most important."[81]
In May 1967, the southeastern region of Nigeria broke away to form the Republic of Biafra; in July the Nigerian military attacked to suppress what it considered an unlawful rebellion.[82] The Achebe family narrowly escaped disaster several times during the war, including a bombing of their house.[83] In August 1967, Okigbo was killed fighting in the war.[84] Achebe was shaken considerably by the loss; in 1971 he wrote "Dirge for Okigbo", originally in the Igbo language but later translated to English.[85]
As the war intensified, the Achebe family was forced to leave Enugu for the Biafran capital of Aba. He continued to write throughout the war, but most of his creative work during this time took the form of poetry. The shorter format was a consequence of living in a war zone. "I can write poetry," he said, "something short, intense more in keeping with my mood [...] All this is creating in the context of our struggle."[86] Many of these poems were collected in his 1971 book Beware, Soul Brother. One of his most famous, "Refugee Mother and Child", spoke to the suffering and loss that surrounded him. Dedicated to the promise of Biafra, he accepted a request to serve as foreign ambassador, refusing an invitation from the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University in the US.[87][88][c] Meanwhile, their contemporary Wole Soyinka was imprisoned for meeting with Biafran officials and spent two years in jail. Speaking in 1968, Achebe said: "I find the Nigerian situation untenable. If I had been a Nigerian, I think I would have been in the same situation as Wole Soyinka is—in prison."[90] In his ambassador role, Achebe travelled to European and North American cities to promote the Biafra cause.[53]
Conditions in Biafra worsened as the war continued. In September 1968, the city of Aba fell to the Nigerian military and Achebe once again moved his family, this time to Umuahia, where the Biafran government had relocated. He was chosen to chair the newly formed National Guidance Committee, charged with the task of drafting principles and ideas for the post-war era.[91] In 1969, the group completed a document entitled The Principles of the Biafran Revolution, later released as The Ahiara Declaration.[92] In October of the same year, Achebe joined writers Cyprian Ekwensi and Gabriel Okara for a tour of the United States to raise awareness about the dire situation in Biafra. They visited thirty college campuses and conducted numerous interviews.[93] Although the group was well received by students and faculty, Achebe was shocked by the harsh racist attitude toward Africa he saw in the US. At the end of the tour, he said that "world policy is absolutely ruthless and unfeeling".[93]
The beginning of 1970 saw the end of the state of Biafra. On 12 January, the military surrendered to Nigeria, and Achebe returned with his family to Ogidi, where their home had been destroyed.[94] He took a job at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and immersed himself once again in academia. He was unable to accept invitations to other countries, however, because the Nigerian government revoked his passport due to his support for Biafra.[95] The Achebe family had another daughter on 7 March 1970, named Nwando.[96]
After the war, Achebe helped start two magazines in 1971: the literary journal Okike, a forum for African art, fiction, and poetry;[97] and Nsukkascope, an internal publication of the university.[98][99] Achebe and the Okike committee later established another cultural magazine, Uwa Ndi Igbo, to showcase the indigenous stories and oral traditions of the Igbo community.[100] Achebe handed over the editorship of Okike to Onuora Osmond Enekwe, who was later assisted by Amechi Akwanya.[101] In February 1972, Chinua Achebe released Girls at War, a collection of short stories ranging in time from his undergraduate days to the recent bloodshed. It was the 100th book in Heinemann's African Writers Series.[102]
The University of Massachusetts Amherst offered Achebe a professorship in September 1972, and the family moved to the United States. Their youngest daughter was displeased with her nursery school, and the family soon learned that her frustration involved language. Achebe helped her face what he called the "alien experience" by telling her stories during the car trips to and from school. As he presented his lessons to a wide variety of students (he taught only one class, to a large audience), he began to study the perceptions of Africa in Western scholarship: "Africa is not like anywhere else they know [...] there are no real people in the Dark Continent, only forces operating; and people don't speak any language you can understand, they just grunt, too busy jumping up and down in a frenzy".[103]
Achebe expanded this criticism when he presented a Chancellor's Lecture at Amherst on 18 February 1975, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness".[104] Decrying Joseph Conrad as "a bloody racist",[A 3] Achebe asserted that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness dehumanises Africans, rendering Africa as "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril."[A 4] Achebe also discussed a quotation from Albert Schweitzer, a 1952 Nobel Peace Prize laureate: "That extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a comment which has often been quoted Schweitzer says: 'The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother.' And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ theory of disease came into being."[A 5]
The lecture was controversial immediately following his talk. Many English professors in attendance were upset by his remarks; one elderly professor reportedly approached him, said: "How dare you!",[105] and stormed away. Another suggested that Achebe had "no sense of humour",[105] but several days later Achebe was approached by a third professor, who told him: "I now realize that I had never really read Heart of Darkness although I have taught it for years."[A 6]
Achebe's criticism has become a mainstream perspective on Conrad's work. The essay was included in the 1988 Norton critical edition of Conrad's novel. Editor Robert Kimbrough called it one of "the three most important events in Heart of Darkness criticism since the second edition of his book."[106] Critic Nicolas Tredell divides Conrad's criticism "into two epochal phases: before and after Achebe."[107] Asked frequently about his essay, Achebe once explained that he never meant for the work to be abandoned: "It's not in my nature to talk about banning books. I am saying, read it—with the kind of understanding and with the knowledge I talk about. And read it beside African works."[106] Interviewed on National Public Radio with Robert Siegel in October 2009, Achebe stated that he was still critical of Heart of Darkness. He tempered this criticism in a discussion entitled "'Heart of Darkness' is inappropriate", stating: "Conrad was a seductive writer. He could pull his reader into the fray. And if it were not for what he said about me and my people, I would probably be thinking only of that seduction."[108]
After his service at UMass Amherst and a visiting professorship at the University of Connecticut, Achebe returned to the University of Nigeria in 1976, where he held a chair in English until his retirement in 1981.[109] When he returned to the University of Nigeria, he hoped to accomplish three goals: finish the novel he had been writing, renew the native publication of Okike, and further his study of Igbo culture. In an August 1976 interview, he lashed out at the archetypal Nigerian intellectual, stating that the archetype was divorced from the intellect "but for two things: status and stomach. And if there's any danger that he might suffer official displeasure or lose his job, he would prefer to turn a blind eye to what is happening around him."[110] In October 1979, Achebe was awarded the first-ever Nigerian National Merit Award.[111]
After his 1981 retirement,[109] he devoted more time to editing Okike and became active with the left-leaning People's Redemption Party (PRP). In 1983, he became the party's deputy national vice-president. He published a book called The Trouble with Nigeria to coincide with the upcoming elections. On the first page, Achebe says: "the Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility and to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership."[112] The elections that followed were marked by violence and charges of fraud. Asked whether he thought Nigerian politics had changed since A Man of the People, Achebe replied: "I think, if anything, the Nigerian politician has deteriorated."[113] After the elections, he engaged in a heated argument—which almost became a fistfight—with Sabo Bakin Zuwo, the newly elected governor of Kano State. He left the PRP and kept his distance from political parties, expressing sadness with his perception of the dishonesty and weakness of the people involved.[114]
He spent most of the 1980s delivering speeches, attending conferences, and working on his sixth novel.[115] In 1986 he was elected president-general of the Ogidi Town Union; he reluctantly accepted and began a three-year term. In the same year, he stepped down as editor of Okike.[116]
In 1987 Achebe released his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, about a military coup in the fictional West African nation of Kangan.[117] A finalist for the Booker Prize, the novel was hailed in the Financial Times: "in a powerful fusion of myth, legend and modern styles, Achebe has written a book which is wise, exciting and essential, a powerful antidote to the cynical commentators from 'overseas' who see nothing ever new out of Africa."[118] An opinion piece in the magazine West Africa said the book deserved to win the Booker Prize, and that Achebe was "a writer who has long deserved the recognition that has already been accorded him by his sales figures."[118] The prize went instead to Penelope Lively's novel Moon Tiger.[119]
On 22 March 1990, Achebe was riding in a car to Lagos when an axle collapsed and the car flipped. His son Ikechukwu and the driver suffered minor injuries, but the weight of the vehicle fell on Achebe and his spine was severely damaged. He was flown to the Paddocks Hospital in Buckinghamshire, England, and treated for his injuries. In July doctors announced that although he was recuperating well, he was paralyzed from the waist down and would require the use of a wheelchair for the rest of his life.[120] Soon afterwards, Achebe became the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; he held the position for more than fifteen years.[121] Throughout the 1990s, Achebe spent little time in Nigeria but remained actively involved in the country's politics, denouncing the usurpation of power by General Sani Abacha.[122]
In 2000 Achebe published Home and Exile, a semi-biographical collection of both his thoughts on life away from Nigeria,[123] as well as discussion of the emerging school of Native American literature.[53][d] In October 2005, the London Financial Times reported that Achebe was planning to write a novella for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of short novels in which ancient myths from myriad cultures are reimagined and rewritten by contemporary authors.[53][124]
Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in June 2007.[125] The judging panel included American critic Elaine Showalter, who said he "illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies"; and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who said Achebe's "early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature."[125] The award helped correct what "many perceived as a great injustice to African literature, that the founding father of African literature had not won some of the key international prizes."[123] For the International Festival of Igbo culture, Achebe briefly returned to Nigeria to give the Ahajioku Lecture. Later that year he published The Education of A British-Protected Child, a collection of essays.[123] In autumn he joined the Brown University faculty as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies.[126] In 2010, Achebe was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for $300,000, one of the richest prizes for the arts.[127]
In 2012, Achebe published There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.[128] The work re-opened the discussion about the Nigerian Civil War. It would be his last publication during his lifetime;[129] Achebe died after a short illness on 21 March 2013 in Boston, United States.[130] An unidentified source close to the family said that he was ill and was hospitalised in the city.[129] The New York Times described him in his obituary as "one of Africa's most widely read novelists and one of the continent's towering men of letters."[130] The BBC wrote that he was "revered throughout the world for his depiction of life in Africa".[131] He was buried in his hometown of Ogidi.[132]
The style of Achebe's fiction draws heavily on the oral tradition of the Igbo people.[133] He incorporates folk tales into his stories, exposing community values in both the content and the form of storytelling. For example, the tale about the Earth and Sky in Things Fall Apart emphasises the interdependency of the masculine and the feminine.[134][A 7] Although Nwoye enjoys hearing his mother tell the tale, Okonkwo's dislike for it is evidence of his imbalance.[134]
Achebe used proverbs to describe the values of the rural Igbo tradition. He includes them throughout the narratives, repeating points made in conversation. Critic Anjali Gera notes that the use of proverbs in Arrow of God "serves to create through an echo effect the judgement of a community upon an individual violation."[135] The use of such repetition in Achebe's urban novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, is less pronounced.[135]
Achebe's short stories are not as widely studied as his novels, and Achebe himself did not consider them a major part of his work. In the preface for Girls at War and Other Stories, he writes: "A dozen pieces in twenty years must be accounted a pretty lean harvest by any reckoning."[136] Like his novels, the short stories are heavily influenced by the oral tradition. They often have morals emphasising the importance of cultural traditions, as influenced by folk tales.[137]
During decolonisation in the 1950s, a debate about choice of language erupted and pursued authors around the world. Achebe's work is scrutinised for its subject matter, insistence on a non-colonial narrative, and use of English. In his essay "English and the African Writer", Achebe discusses how the process of colonialism—for all its ills—provided colonised people from varying linguistic backgrounds "a language with which to talk to one another". As his purpose is to communicate with readers across Nigeria, he uses "the one central language enjoying nationwide currency".[A 8] Using English also allowed his books to be read in the colonial ruling nations.[138]
Achebe recognises the shortcomings of what Audre Lorde called "the master's tools". In another essay, he notes:
In another essay, he refers to James Baldwin's struggle to use the English language to accurately represent his experience and his realisation that he needed to take control of the language and expand it.[140] Achebe's novels were a foundation for this process; by altering syntax, usage, and idiom, he transformed the language into a distinctly African style.[141] In some spots this takes the form of repetition of an Igbo idea in standard English parlance; elsewhere it appears as narrative asides integrated into descriptive sentences.[142]
In his early writing, a depiction of the Igbo culture itself is paramount. Critic Nahem Yousaf highlights the importance of these depictions: "Around the tragic stories of Okonkwo and Ezeulu, Achebe sets about textualising Igbo cultural identity".[143] The portrayal of indigenous life is not simply a matter of literary background, he adds: "Achebe seeks to produce the effect of a precolonial reality as an Igbo-centric response to a Eurocentrically constructed imperial 'reality' ".[144] Certain elements of Achebe's depiction of Igbo life in Things Fall Apart match those in Olaudah Equiano's autobiographical Narrative. Responding to charges that Equiano was not actually born in Africa, Achebe wrote in 1975: "Equiano was an Igbo, I believe, from the village of Iseke in the Orlu division of Nigeria".[145]
A prevalent theme in Achebe's novels is the intersection of African tradition (particularly Igbo varieties) and modernity, especially as embodied by European colonialism. For example, the village of Umuofia in Things Fall Apart is violently shaken with internal divisions when the white Christian missionaries arrive. Nigerian English professor Ernest N. Emenyonu describes the colonial experience in the novel as "the systematic emasculation of the entire culture".[146] Achebe later embodied this tension between African tradition and Western influence in the figure of Sam Okoli, the president of Kangan in Anthills of the Savannah. Distanced from the myths and tales of the community by his Westernised education, he does not have the capacity for reconnection shown by the character Beatrice.[147]
The colonial impact on the Igbo in Achebe's novels is often affected by individuals from Europe, but institutions and urban offices frequently serve a similar purpose. The character of Obi in No Longer at Ease succumbs to colonial-era corruption in the city; the temptations of his position overwhelm his identity and fortitude.[148] Having shown his acumen for portraying traditional Igbo culture in Things Fall Apart, Achebe demonstrated in No Longer at Ease an ability to depict modern Nigerian life.[149]
The standard Achebean ending results in the destruction of an individual, which leads to the downfall of the community. Odili's descent into the luxury of corruption and hedonism in A Man of the People, for example, is symbolic of the post-colonial crisis in Nigeria and elsewhere.[150] Even with the emphasis on colonialism, Achebe's tragic endings embody the traditional confluence of fate, individual and society, as represented by Sophocles and Shakespeare.[151]
Achebe seeks to portray neither moral absolutes nor a fatalistic inevitability. In 1972, he said: "I never will take the stand that the Old must win or that the New must win. The point is that no single truth satisfied me—and this is well founded in the Igbo worldview. No single man can be correct all the time, no single idea can be totally correct."[152] His perspective is reflected in the words of Ikem, a character in Anthills of the Savannah: "whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism."[153] In a 1996 interview, Achebe said: "Belief in either radicalism or orthodoxy is too simplified a way of viewing things ... Evil is never all evil; goodness on the other hand is often tainted with selfishness."[154]
The gender roles of men and women, as well as society's conceptions of the associated concepts, are frequent themes in Achebe's writing. He has been criticised as a sexist author, in response to what many call the uncritical depiction of traditionally patriarchal Igbo society, where the most masculine men take numerous wives, and women are beaten regularly.[155] Paradoxically, Igbo society immensely values individual achievement but also sees the ownership over or acquisition of women as a signifier of success.[156] The African studies scholar Rose Ure Mezu suggests that Achebe is representing the limited gendered vision of the characters, or that he purposefully created exaggerated gender binaries to render Igbo history recognizable to international readers.[157] Conversely, the scholar Ajoke Mimiko Bestman has stated that reading Achebe through the lens of womanism is "an afrocentric concept forged out of global feminism to analyze the condition of Black African women" which acknowledges the patriarchal oppression of women and highlights the resistance and dignity of African women, which enables an understanding of Igbo conceptions of gender complementarity.[158]
According to Bestman, in Things Fall Apart Okonkwo's furious manhood overpowers everything "feminine" in his life, including his own conscience, while Achebe's depiction of the chi, or personal god, has been called the "mother within".[159] Okonkwo's father was considered an agbala—a word that refers to a man without title, but is also synonymous with 'woman'. Okonkwo's feminization of his father's laziness and cowardice is typical of the Igbo perspective on any man seen as unsuccessful.[160] His obsession with maleness is fueled by an intense fear of femaleness, which he expresses through the physical and verbal abuse of his wives, his violence towards his community, his constant worry that his son Nwoye is not manly enough, and his wish that his daughter Ezinma had been born a boy. The women in the novel are obedient, quiet, and absent from positions of authority—despite the fact that Igbo women were traditionally involved in village leadership.[161] The desire for feminine balance is highlighted by Ani, the earth goddess, and the extended discussion of "Nneka" ("Mother is supreme") in chapter fourteen.[162] The perseverance and love from Okonkwo's second wife Ekwefi towards Ezinma, despite her many miscarriages, is seen as a tribute to Igbo womanhood, which is typically defined by motherhood.[163] Okonkwo's defeat is seen by Mezu and literature scholar Nahem Yousaf as a vindication of the need for a balancing feminine ethos.[160][164] Bestman argued that Okonkwo's failures are tied to his contempt for and fear of women and his inability to form quality personal relationships with the women in his life.[159] Achebe expressed frustration at frequently being misunderstood on this point, saying that "I want to sort of scream that Things Fall Apart is on the side of women [...] And that Okonkwo is paying the penalty for his treatment of women; that all his problems, all the things he did wrong, can be seen as offenses against the feminine."[165] On this, Bestman states that Okonkwo's violent and vehement anti-women position is the exception, not the norm, within his community of Umuofia and the wider Igbo society.[166]
Chinua Achebe on being called the "father of African literature"[167]
Achebe is regarded as the most dominant and influential writer of modern African literature,[168][169] and has been called the "father of African literature",[169][170] the "founding father of African literature",[123] and the "'father of the African novel in English".[171][e] Achebe rejected such descriptions as patronising and eurocentric, which were qualities his work sought to critique in the first place. He countered white descriptions of himself as such by claiming that "education is lacking in most of those who pontificate".[173][174] Things Fall Apart has been described as the most important book in modern African literature[175] and was described as his masterpiece by critic Dwight Garner.[176] Selling over 20 million copies worldwide, it has been translated into 57 languages,[177] making Achebe the most translated, studied, and read African author.[169][178] His legacy as a writer is particularly unique in regard to its substantial impact on not only African literature but Western literature as well.[179][180]
At the ceremony for his honorary degree from the University of Kent, professor Robert Gibson said that the Nigerian writer "is now revered as Master by the younger generation of African writers and it is to him they regularly turn for counsel and inspiration."[181] In November 2015 the theme of the Pan African Writers' Association's 22nd International African Writers' Day and three-day conference was "Celebrating the Life and Works of Chinua Achebe: The Coming of Age of African Literature?"[182][183] The scholar Simon Gikandi, recalling the schooling of himself and his classmates in Kenya, said Things Fall Apart "changed the lives of many of us".[184] The anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela remarked that "There was a writer named Chinua Achebe [...] in whose company the prison walls fell down".[184]
Outside of Africa, Achebe's impact resonates strongly in literary circles. Novelist Margaret Atwood called him "a magical writer—one of the greatest of the twentieth century". Poet Maya Angelou lauded Things Fall Apart as a book wherein "all readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents and friends and themselves along Nigerian roads".[185] Nobel laureate Toni Morrison noted that Achebe's work inspired her to become a writer and "sparked her love affair with African literature".[17]
Achebe received over 30 honorary degrees from universities in Nigeria, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, including Dartmouth College, Harvard, and Brown.[186] Among his other honours are the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1972);[187] the Nigerian National Order of Merit, the Order of the Federal Republic (1979);[187][188] an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982);[189] the St. Louis Literary Award (1999);[190] the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2002);[191] the Man Booker International Prize (2007);[125] and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010).[127] In 1992 he became the first living writer to be represented in the Everyman's Library collection (reprints of classic literature) published by Alfred A. Knopf.[186] He was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations Population Fund in 1999.[192]
Although he accepted numerous honours from the Nigerian government, Achebe refused its Commander of the Federal Republic award in 2004.[188] Citing his frustration with the political environment, he explained:
In 2011, Achebe was again offered the Commander of the Federal Republic, but he declined it asserting "the reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed let alone solved. It is inappropriate to offer it again to me".[188] Then-President Goodluck Jonathan claimed that Achebe's refusal was regrettable and may have been influenced by misinformation, but said he still held him in high regard.[188]
Despite his international renown, Achebe never received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which some—particularly Nigerians—viewed as unjust.[173] In 1988 Achebe was asked by a reporter for Quality Weekly how he felt about never winning a Nobel Prize; he replied: "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize ... Literature is not a heavyweight championship. Nigerians may think, you know, this man has been knocked out. It's nothing to do with that."[193] Despite his own indifference, Soyinka reports that immediately after Achebe's death he received a great many letters urging him to nominate Achebe posthumously. Soyinka denied such requests, explaining that Achebe "is entitled to better than being escorted to his grave with that monotonous, hypocritical aria of deprivation's lament, orchestrated by those who, as we say in my part of the world, 'dye their mourning weeds a deeper indigo than those of the bereaved'. He deserves his peace. Me too! And right now, not posthumously."[173]
Bard College founded the Chinua Achebe Center in 2005, to "create dynamic projects for the most talented of a new generation of writers and artists of African origin."[194] Bard also established a Chinua Achebe Fellowship in Global African Studies.[123] Achebe was created the "Ugonabo" of Ogidi, a Nigerian chieftain, by the people of his ancestral hometown in 2013. In Igbo culture, taking a title such as this is the highest honour a man may receive.[195] On Achebe's 86th birthday in 2016, young writers in Anambra State began the Chinua Achebe Literary Festival.[196] In December 2019, a memorial bust commemorating Achebe and the opening of the Chinua Achebe Literary Court was unveiled at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.[197] Achebe was honoured as Grand Prix de la Mémoire (Grand Prize for Memory) of the 2019 edition of the Grand Prix of Literary Associations prize.[198]
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Things Fall Apart is the debut novel of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958.[1] It depicts the events of pre-colonial life in Igboland, a cultural area in modern-day southeastern Nigeria, and the subsequent appearance of European missionaries and colonial forces in the late 19th century. It is seen as an archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first such novels to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely studied in English-speaking countries around the world. The novel was first published in the United Kingdom in 1958 by William Heinemann Ltd and became the first work published in Heinemann's African Writers Series.
The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an influential leader of the fictional Igbo ("Ibo" in the novel) clan of Umuofia. Among other things, he is a feared warrior and a local wrestling champion. [2]The novel is split into three parts, with the first describing his family, personal history, his violent exterior and tortured soul, and the customs and society of the Igbo. The second and third sections introduce the influence of European colonialism and Christian missionaries on Okonkwo, his family, and the wider Igbo community.
Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work along with Arrow of God (1964). Achebe states that his two later novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants, are spiritual successors of the previous novels in chronicling African history.
The title is a quotation from "The Second Coming", a poem by W. B. Yeats.
Most of the story takes place in the fictional village of Iguedo, which is in the Umuofia clan. The place name Iguedo is only mentioned three times in the novel. Achebe more frequently uses the name Umuofia to refer to Okonkwo's home village of Iguedo. Umuofia is located west of the actual city of Onitsha, on the east bank of the Niger River in Nigeria. The events of the novel unfold in the 1890s.[3] The culture depicted, that of the Igbo people, is similar to that of Achebe's birthplace of Ogidi, where Igbo-speaking people lived together in groups of independent villages ruled by titled elders. The customs described in the novel mirror those of the actual Onitsha people, who lived near Ogidi, and with whom Achebe was familiar.
Within forty years of the colonization of Nigeria, by the time Achebe was born in 1930, the missionaries were well established. He was influenced by Western culture but he refused to change his Igbo name Chinua to Albert. Achebe's father Isaiah was among the first to be converted in Ogidi, around the turn of the century. Isaiah Achebe himself was an orphan raised by his grandfather. His grandfather, far from opposing Isaiah's conversion to Christianity, allowed his Christian marriage to be celebrated in his compound.[3]
Achebe wrote his novels in English because he felt that the written standard Igbo language was stilted, which he connected to the fact that the standard was deliberately created by combining various dialects. In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Achebe said, "the novel form seems to go with the English language. There is a problem with the Igbo language. It suffers from a very serious inheritance which it received at the beginning of this century from the Anglican mission. They sent out a missionary by the name of Dennis. Archdeacon Dennis. He was a scholar. He had this notion that the Igbo language—which had very many different dialects—should somehow manufacture a uniform dialect that would be used in writing to avoid all these different dialects. Because the missionaries were powerful, what they wanted to do they did. This became the law. But the standard version cannot sing. There's nothing you can do with it to make it sing. It's heavy. It's wooden. It doesn't go anywhere."[4]
Achebe's choice to write in English has caused controversy. While both African and non-African critics agree that Achebe modelled Things Fall Apart on classic European literature, they disagree about whether his novel upholds a Western model, or, in fact, subverts or confronts it.[5] Achebe continued to defend his decision: "English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it. Also, in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language of colonization itself. It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway."[6]
Achebe is noted for his inclusion of and weaving in of proverbs from Igbo oral culture into his writing.[7] This influence was explicitly referenced by Achebe in Things Fall Apart: "Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten."
The novel's protagonist, Okonkwo, is famous in the villages of Umuofia for being a wrestling champion. Okonkwo is strong, hard-working, and strives to show no weakness or fear. He is characterized as being starkly different from his father, Unoka, who had been a debtor unable to support his wife or children, and who preferred playing his flute over conflict. Okonkwo therefore works to build his wealth entirely on his own from a young age, as his father had not left him any inheritance. Okonkwo is also obsessed with his masculinity, and he works hard to hide any emotion other than anger. As a result, he often beats his wives and children and he is unkind to his neighbours. However, his drive to escape the legacy of his father leads him to be wealthy, courageous, and powerful among the people of his village. He is a leader of his village, Umuofia, having attained a position in his society for which he has striven all his life.[8]
Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken as a peace settlement between Umuofia and another clan after Ikemefuna's father killed an Umuofian woman. The boy lives with Okonkwo's family and Okonkwo grows fond of him, although Okonkwo does not show his fondness so as not to appear weak. The boy looks up to Okonkwo and considers him a second father. The Oracle of Umuofia eventually pronounces that the boy must be killed. Ezeudu, the oldest man in the village, warns Okonkwo that he should have nothing to do with the murder because it would be like killing his own child – but to avoid seeming weak and feminine to the other men of the village, Okonkwo disregards the warning from the old man, striking the killing blow himself. For many days after killing Ikemefuna, Okonkwo feels guilty and saddened.
Shortly after Ikemefuna's death, things begin to go wrong for Okonkwo. He falls into a depression and has nightmares. During a gun salute at Ezeudu's funeral, Okonkwo's gun accidentally explodes and kills Ezeudu's son. He and his family are exiled to his motherland, the nearby village Mbanta, for seven years to appease the gods he has offended.
While Okonkwo is away in Mbanta, he learns that white men are living in Umuofia with the intent of introducing their religion, Christianity. As the number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people grows and a new government is introduced.[9] The village is forced to respond with either appeasement or resistance to the imposition of the white people's nascent society. Okonkwo's son Nwoye starts getting curious about the missionaries and the new religion. After he is beaten by his father for the last time, he decides to leave his family behind and live independently. He wants to be with the missionaries because his beliefs have changed while being introduced to Christianity by the missionary, Mr. Brown. In the last year of his exile, Okonkwo instructs his best friend Obierika to sell all of his yams and hire two men to build him two huts so he can have a house to go back to with his family. He also holds a great feast for his mother's kinsmen, where an elderly attendee bemoans the current state of their tribe and its future:
Okonkwo also receives news about the problems in his fatherland due to the missionaries. The Christians disregarded explanations of the area's religious traditions by Igbo people and told them they must give up speaking with ancestors, spirits, and non-Christian gods, such as Chukwu.
Returning from exile, Okonkwo finds his village changed by the presence of the white men. After a convert commits the crime of unmasking an elder as he embodies an ancestral spirit of the clan, the village retaliates by destroying a local Christian church. In response, the District Commissioner representing the colonial government takes Okonkwo and several other native leaders prisoner pending payment of a fine of two hundred bags of cowries. Despite the District Commissioner's instructions to treat the leaders of Umuofia with respect, the native "court messengers" humiliate them, doing things such as shaving their heads and whipping them. As a result, the people of Umuofia finally gather for what could be a great uprising. Okonkwo, a warrior by nature and adamant about following Umuofian custom and tradition, despises any form of cowardice and advocates war against the white men.
When messengers of the white government try to stop the meeting, Okonkwo beheads one of them. Because the crowd allows the other messengers to escape and does not fight alongside Okonkwo, he realizes with despair that the people of Umuofia are not going to fight to protect themselves – his society's response to such a conflict, which for so long had been predictable and dictated by tradition, is changing. When the District Commissioner, Gregory Irwin, comes to Okonkwo's house to take him to court, he finds that Okonkwo killed himself because he saw that he was fighting the battle alone and his tribe had given up. Among his own people, Okonkwo's actions have tarnished his reputation and status, as it is strictly against the teachings of the Igbo to commit suicide. Obierika struggles not to break down as he laments Okonkwo’s death. As Irwin and his men prepare to bury Okonkwo, Irwin muses that Okonkwo's death will make an interesting chapter - or "a reasonable paragraph, at any rate" - for his written book, "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger".
- Okonkwo, the protagonist, has three wives and ten (total) children and becomes a leader of his clan. His father, Unoka, was weak and lazy, and Okonkwo resents him for his weaknesses: he enacts traditional masculinity. Okonkwo strives to make his way in a culture that traditionally values manliness.
- Ekwefi is Okonkwo's second wife. Although she falls in love with Okonkwo after seeing him in a wrestling match, she marries another man because Okonkwo was too poor to pay her bride price at the time. Two years later, she runs away to Okonkwo's compound one night and later marries him. She receives severe beatings from Okonkwo just like his other wives; but unlike them, she is known to talk back to Okonkwo.
- Unoka is Okonkwo's father, who defied typical Igbo masculinity by neglecting to grow yams, take care of his wives and children, and pay his debts before he dies.
- Nwoye is Okonkwo's son, about whom Okonkwo worries, fearing that he will become like Unoka. Similar to Unoka, Nwoye does not subscribe to the traditional Igbo view of masculinity being equated to violence; rather, he prefers the stories of his mother. Nwoye connects to Ikemefuna, who presents an alternative to Okonkwo's rigid masculinity. He is one of the early converts to Christianity and takes on the Christian name Isaac, an act which Okonkwo views as a final betrayal.
- Ikemefuna is a boy from the Mbaino tribe. His father murders the wife of an Umuofia man, and in the resulting settlement of the matter, Ikemefuma is put into the care of Okonkwo. By the decision of Umuofia authorities, Ikemefuna is ultimately killed, an act which Okonkwo does not prevent, and even participates in, lest he seems feminine and weak. Ikemefuna became very close to Nwoye, and Okonkwo's decision to participate in Ikemefuna's death takes a toll on Okonkwo's relationship with Nwoye.
- Ezinma is Okonkwo's favorite daughter and the only child of his wife Ekwefi. Ezinma, the Crystal Beauty, is very much the antithesis of a normal woman within the culture and Okonkwo routinely remarks that she would've made a much better boy than a girl, even wishing that she had been born as one. Ezinma often contradicts and challenges her father, which wins his adoration, affection, and respect. She is very similar to her father, and this is made apparent when she matures into a beautiful young woman who refuses to marry during her family's exile, instead choosing to help her father regain his place of respect within society.
- Obierika is Okonkwo's best friend from Umuofia. Unlike Okonkwo, Obierika thinks before he acts and is, therefore, less violent and arrogant than Okonkwo. He is considered the voice of reason in the book, and questions certain parts of their culture, such as the necessity to exile Okonkwo after he unintentionally kills a boy. Obierika's own son, Maduka, is greatly admired by Okonkwo for his wrestling prowess.
- Chielo also called the "Oracle of the Hills and the Caves", is the priestess of Agbala (a deity). She has a double life, both a woman of Umofia and a priestess, this brings her independence because she has a symbolic role. Chielo symbolises Fate throughout the novel.
- Ogbuefi Ezeudu is one of the elders of Umuofia.
- Mr. Brown is an English missionary who comes to Umuofia. He shows kindness and compassion towards the villagers and makes an effort to understand the Igbo beliefs.
- Mr. Smith is another English missionary sent to Umuofia to replace Mr. Brown after he falls ill. In stark contrast to his predecessor, he remains strict and zealous towards the Africans.
Things Fall Apart is regarded as a milestone in Anglophone African literature, and for the perception of African literature in the West. It has come to be seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English,[3][6] and is read in Nigeria and throughout Africa. It is studied widely in Europe, India, and North America, where it has spawned numerous secondary and tertiary analytical works. It has achieved similar status and repute in Australia and Oceania.[10][3] Considered Achebe's magnum opus, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.[11] Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[12] The novel has been translated into more than 50 languages, and is often used in literature, world history, and African studies courses across the world.
Achebe is now considered to be the essential novelist on African identity, nationalism, and decolonization. Achebe's main focus has been cultural ambiguity and contestation. The complexity of novels such as Things Fall Apart depends on Achebe's ability to bring competing cultural systems and their languages to the same level of representation, dialogue, and contestation.[6]
Reviewers have praised Achebe's neutral narration and have described Things Fall Apart as a realistic novel. Much of the critical discussion about Things Fall Apart concentrates on the socio-political aspects of the novel, including the friction between the members of Igbo society as they confront the intrusive and overpowering presence of Western government and beliefs. Ernest N. Emenyonu commented that "Things Fall Apart is indeed a classic study of cross-cultural misunderstanding and the consequences to the rest of humanity, when a belligerent culture or civilization, out of sheer arrogance and ethnocentrism, takes it upon itself to invade another culture, another civilization."[13]
Achebe's writing about African society, in telling from an African point of view the story of the colonization of the Igbo, was noted at its publication in Europe and America to help combat the systemic Western misconception that African culture was savage and primitive. In Things Fall Apart, western culture is portrayed as being "arrogant and ethnocentric," insisting that the African culture needed a leader. As it had no kings or chiefs, Umuofian culture was vulnerable to invasion by western civilization. It is felt that the repression of the Igbo language at the end of the novel contributes greatly to the destruction of the culture. Although Achebe favours the African culture of the pre-western society, the author attributes its destruction to the "weaknesses within the native structure." Achebe portrays the culture as having a religion, a government, a system of money, and an artistic tradition, as well as a judicial system.[14]
The publication of Achebe's Things Fall Apart helped pave the way for numerous other African writers. Novelists who published after Achebe were able to find an eloquent and effective mode for the expression of the particular social, historical, and cultural situation of modern Africa.[5] Before Things Fall Apart was published, most of the novels about Africa had been written by European authors, portraying Africans as savages who were in need of western enlightenment.
Achebe broke from this outsider view, by portraying Igbo society in a sympathetic light. This allows the reader to examine the effects of European colonialism from a different perspective.[5] He commented: "The popularity of Things Fall Apart in my own society can be explained simply ... this was the first time we were seeing ourselves, as autonomous individuals, rather than half-people, or as Conrad would say, 'rudimentary souls'."[6] Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has described the work as "the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of the African character, rather than portraying the African as an exotic, as the white man would see him."[15]
The language of the novel has not only intrigued critics but has also been a major factor in the emergence of the modern African novel. Because Achebe wrote in English, portrayed Igbo life from the point of view of an African man, and used the language of his people, he was able to greatly influence African novelists, who viewed him as a mentor.[6]
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Discussion on the 50th anniversary on Things Fall Apart featuring Achebe, March 24, 2008, C-SPAN |
Achebe's fiction and criticism continue to inspire and influence writers around the world. Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning novelist in a 7 May 2012 article in Newsweek, "Hilary Mantel's Favorite Historical Fictions", lists Things Fall Apart as one of her five favourite novels in this genre. A whole new generation of African writers – Caine Prize winners Binyavanga Wainaina (current director of the Chinua Achebe Center at Bard College) and Helon Habila (Waiting for an Angel [2004] and Measuring Time [2007]), as well as Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation [2005]), and Professor Okey Ndibe (Arrows of Rain [2000]) count Chinua Achebe as a significant influence. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of the popular and critically acclaimed novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), commented in a 2006 interview: "Chinua Achebe will always be important to me because his work influenced not so much my style as my writing philosophy: reading him emboldened me, gave me permission to write about the things I knew well."[6]
Things Fall Apart was listed by Encyclopædia Britannica as one of "12 Novels Considered the 'Greatest Book Ever Written'".[16]
The 60th anniversary of the first publication of Things Fall Apart was celebrated at the South Bank Centre in London, UK, on 15 April 2018 with live readings from the book by Femi Elufowoju Jr, Adesua Etomi, Yomi Sode, Lucian Msamati, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Chibundu Onuzo, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Ben Okri, and Margaret Busby.[17][18]
On 5 November 2019 BBC News listed Things Fall Apart on its list of the 100 most influential novels.[19]
A radio drama called Okonkwo was made of the novel in April 1961 by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. It featured Wole Soyinka in a supporting role.[20]
In 1970, the novel was made into a film starring Princess Elizabeth of Toro, Johnny Sekka and Orlando Martins by Francis Oladele and Wolf Schmidt, executive producers Hollywood lawyer Edward Mosk and his wife Fern, who wrote the screenplay. Directed by Jason Pohland.[21][Filmportal 1]
In 1987, the book was made into a very successful miniseries directed by David Orere and broadcast on Nigerian television by the Nigerian Television Authority. It starred several established film actors, including Pete Edochie in the lead role of Okonkwo and Justus Esiri as Obierika, with Nkem Owoh and Sam Loco Efe in supporting roles.[22]
In 1999, the American hip-hop band the Roots released their fourth studio album Things Fall Apart in reference to Achebe's novel.
In 1999, a theatrical production of Things Fall Apart adapted by Biyi Bandele was performed at the Kennedy Center.[23]
- Achebe, Chinua. The African Trilogy. (London: Everyman's Library, 2010) ISBN 9781841593272. Edited with an introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The book collects Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God in one volume.
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Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82
Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author and towering man of letters whose internationally acclaimed fiction helped to revive African literature and to rewrite the story of a continent that had long been told by Western voices, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 82.
His agent in London said he had died after a brief illness. Mr. Achebe had used a wheelchair since a car accident in Nigeria in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Chinua Achebe (pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) caught the world’s attention with his first novel, “Things Fall Apart.” Published in 1958, when he was 28, the book would become a classic of world literature and required reading for students, selling more than 10 million copies in 45 languages.
The story, a brisk 215 pages, was inspired by the history of his own family, part of the Ibo nation of southeastern Nigeria, a people victimized by the racism of British colonial administrators and then by the brutality of military dictators from other Nigerian ethnic groups.
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“Things Fall Apart” gave expression to Mr. Achebe’s first stirrings of anti-colonialism and a desire to use literature as a weapon against Western biases. As if to sharpen it with irony, he borrowed from the Western canon itself in using as its title a line from Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming.”
“In the end, I began to understand,” Mr. Achebe later wrote. “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.”
Though Mr. Achebe spent his later decades teaching at American universities, most recently at Brown, his writings — novels, stories, poems, essays and memoirs — were almost invariably rooted in the countryside and cities of his native Nigeria. His most memorable fictional characters were buffeted and bewildered by the competing pulls of traditional African culture and invasive Western values.
“Things Fall Apart,” which is set in the late 19th century, tells the story of Okonkwo, who rises from poverty to become a wealthy farmer and Ibo village leader. British colonial rule throws his life into turmoil, and in the end, unable to adapt, he explodes in frustration, killing an African in the employ of the British and then committing suicide.
ADVERTISEMENT
The acclaim for “Things Fall Apart” was not unanimous. Some British critics thought it idealized precolonial African culture at the expense of the former empire.
“An offended and highly critical English reviewer in a London Sunday paper titled her piece cleverly, I must admit, ‘Hurray to Mere Anarchy!’ ” Mr. Achebe wrote in “Home and Exile,” a 2000 collection of autobiographical essays. Some critics found his early novels to be stronger on ideology than on narrative interest. But his stature grew, until he was considered a literary and political beacon, influencing generations of African writers as well as many in the West.
“It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing,” the Princeton scholarKwame Anthony Appiah once wrote. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.”
Mr. Appiah, a professor of philosophy, found an “intense moral energy” in Mr. Achebe’s work, adding that it “captures the sense of threat and loss that must have faced many Africans as empire invaded and disrupted their lives.”
Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and Nobel laureate, hailed Mr. Achebe in a review in The New York Times in 1988, calling him “a novelist who makes you laugh and then catch your breath in horror — a writer who has no illusions but is not disillusioned.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Achebe’s political thinking evolved from blaming colonial rule for Africa’s woes to frank criticism of African rulers and the African citizens who tolerated their corruption and violence. Indeed, it was Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s and then its military dictatorship in the 1980s and ‘90s that forced Mr. Achebe abroad.
In his writing and teaching Mr. Achebe sought to reclaim the continent from Western literature, which he felt had reduced it to an alien, barbaric and frightening land devoid of its own art and culture. He took particular exception to"Heart of Darkness,"the novel byJoseph Conrad, whom he thought “a thoroughgoing racist.”
Conrad relegated “Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind,” Mr. Achebe argued in his essay “An Image of Africa.”
“I grew up among very eloquent elders,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2008. “In the village, or even in the church, which my father made sure we attended, there were eloquent speakers.” That eloquence was not reflected in Western books about Africa, he said, but he understood the challenge in trying to rectify the portrayal.
“You know that it’s going to be a battle to turn it around, to say to people, ‘That’s not the way my people respond in this situation, by unintelligible grunts, and so on; they would speak,’ ” Mr. Achebe said. “And it is that speech that I knew I wanted to be written down.”
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on Nov. 16, 1930, in Ogidi, an Ibo village. His father became a Christian and worked for a missionary teacher in various parts of Nigeria before returning to the village. As a student, Mr. Achebe immersed himself in Western literature. At the University College of Ibadan, whose professors were Europeans, he read Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Tennyson. But the turning point in his education was the required reading of"Mister Johnson,"a 1939 novel set in Nigeria and written by an Anglo-Irishman, Joyce Cary.
The protagonist is a docile Nigerian whose British master ultimately shoots and kills him. Like reviewers in the Western press, Mr. Achebe’s white professors praised it as one of the best novels ever written about Africa. But Mr. Achebe and his classmates responded with “exasperation at this bumbling idiot of a character,” he wrote.
He soon joined a generation of West African writers who in the 1950s were coming to the realization that Western literature was holding the continent captive. A fellow Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, opened the floodgates with his 1952 novel, “The Palm-Wine Drinkard.”
After graduating from college in 1953, Mr. Achebe moved to London, where he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation while writing stories. It was in London that he wrote “Things Fall Apart,” in longhand.
ADVERTISEMENT
After returning to Nigeria to revise the manuscript, he mailed it — the only existing copy — to a London typing service, which promptly misplaced it, filling Mr. Achebe with despair. It was discovered only months later.
Publishers initially passed on the manuscript, doubting that African fiction would sell, until an adviser at the Heinemann publishing house seized on it as a work of brilliance.
In his second novel, “No Longer at Ease,” in 1960, he tells the story of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi, who learns to fit into British colonial society. Raised as a Christian and educated in England, Obi abandons the countryside for a job as a civil servant in Lagos, which was the capital at the time. Cut off from traditional values, he succumbs to greed and in the end is prosecuted for graft.
In his third novel, “Arrow of God” (1964), Mr. Achebe reverts to the setting of an Ibo village in the early 20th century. The village priest, Ezeulu, sends his son, Oduche, to be educated by Christian missionaries in the hope that he will learn British ways and thus help protect his community. Instead Oduche becomes a convert to colonialism and attacks Ibo religion and culture.
The Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran war, shattered Mr. Achebe’s hopes for a more promising postcolonial future, and deeply affected his literary output. The scene was set for war when, in January 1966, Ibo army officers killed the prime minister and other officials and seized power. Seven months later, the insurgents were ousted in a counter-coup by military commanders from the Muslim northern region.
Before the year ended, Muslim troops had massacred some 30,000 Ibo people living in the north. In 1967 the Ibo then seceded from Nigeria, declaring the southeastern region the independent Republic of Biafra, and the civil war began in earnest, raging through 1970 until government troops invaded and crushed the secessionists.
Mr. Achebe’s fourth novel, “A Man of the People,” published in early 1966, had predicted this course of events with such accuracy that the military government in Lagos decided he must have been a conspirator in the first coup, an accusation he denied. Mr. Achebe fled, settling in Britain with his wife, Christiana; their two sons, Ikechukwu and Chidi; and two daughters, Chinelo and Nwando. (Information about his survivors was not immediately available.)
After the civil war, Mr. Achebe returned to Nigeria for two years before accepting faculty posts in the 1970s at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut. He returned home again in 1979 to teach English at the University of Nigeria.
The civil war was the theme of many of his writings during these years. Among the most prominent were a book of poetry, “Beware Soul Brother” (1971), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and a short-story collection,"Girls at War,” which appeared in 1972.
ADVERTISEMENT
But for more than 20 years a case of writer’s block kept him from producing another novel. He attributed the dry spell to emotional trauma that had lingered after the civil war.
“The novel seemed like a frivolous thing to be doing,” he told The Washington Post in 1988.
That year Mr. Achebe finally published his fifth novel, “Anthills of the Savannah,” the story of three former school chums in a fictional country modeled after Nigeria. One of them becomes a military dictator; another is appointed minister of information; and the third is named editor of the leading newspaper. All meet violent ends.
The novel was widely admired. Discussing it in 1988 in The New York Review of Books, the Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson wrote: “Chinua Achebe says, with implacable honesty, that Africa itself is to blame, and that there is no safety in excuses that place the fault in the colonial past or in the commercial and political manipulations of the First World.”
Mr. Achebe barely had time to savor the acclaim before the car accident outside Lagos that injured him. He received medical treatment in London and moved to the United States, taking a teaching post at Bard College in the Hudson River valley, where he remained until 2009. He received the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2007. Last fall he published “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.”
The return of civilian, democratic rule to Nigeria in 1999 prompted Mr. Achebe to visit for the first time in almost a decade. He met the newly elected president,Olusegun Obasanjo, and cautiously praised him as the best possible leader “at this time.” He also traveled to his native village, Ogidi.
Mr. Achebe returned to the United States, but his heart remained in his homeland, he said.
“People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America, since I have now been living here some years,” Mr. Achebe wrote in “Home and Exile.” His answer was “that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.”
Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82
Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author and towering man of letters whose internationally acclaimed fiction helped to revive African literature and to rewrite the story of a continent that had long been told by Western voices, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 82.
His agent in London said he had died after a brief illness. Mr. Achebe had used a wheelchair since a car accident in Nigeria in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Chinua Achebe (pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) caught the world’s attention with his first novel, “Things Fall Apart.” Published in 1958, when he was 28, the book would become a classic of world literature and required reading for students, selling more than 10 million copies in 45 languages.
The story, a brisk 215 pages, was inspired by the history of his own family, part of the Ibo nation of southeastern Nigeria, a people victimized by the racism of British colonial administrators and then by the brutality of military dictators from other Nigerian ethnic groups.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Things Fall Apart” gave expression to Mr. Achebe’s first stirrings of anti-colonialism and a desire to use literature as a weapon against Western biases. As if to sharpen it with irony, he borrowed from the Western canon itself in using as its title a line from Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming.”
“In the end, I began to understand,” Mr. Achebe later wrote. “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.”
Though Mr. Achebe spent his later decades teaching at American universities, most recently at Brown, his writings — novels, stories, poems, essays and memoirs — were almost invariably rooted in the countryside and cities of his native Nigeria. His most memorable fictional characters were buffeted and bewildered by the competing pulls of traditional African culture and invasive Western values.
“Things Fall Apart,” which is set in the late 19th century, tells the story of Okonkwo, who rises from poverty to become a wealthy farmer and Ibo village leader. British colonial rule throws his life into turmoil, and in the end, unable to adapt, he explodes in frustration, killing an African in the employ of the British and then committing suicide.
ADVERTISEMENT
The acclaim for “Things Fall Apart” was not unanimous. Some British critics thought it idealized precolonial African culture at the expense of the former empire.
“An offended and highly critical English reviewer in a London Sunday paper titled her piece cleverly, I must admit, ‘Hurray to Mere Anarchy!’ ” Mr. Achebe wrote in “Home and Exile,” a 2000 collection of autobiographical essays. Some critics found his early novels to be stronger on ideology than on narrative interest. But his stature grew, until he was considered a literary and political beacon, influencing generations of African writers as well as many in the West.
“It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing,” the Princeton scholarKwame Anthony Appiah once wrote. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.”
Mr. Appiah, a professor of philosophy, found an “intense moral energy” in Mr. Achebe’s work, adding that it “captures the sense of threat and loss that must have faced many Africans as empire invaded and disrupted their lives.”
Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and Nobel laureate, hailed Mr. Achebe in a review in The New York Times in 1988, calling him “a novelist who makes you laugh and then catch your breath in horror — a writer who has no illusions but is not disillusioned.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Achebe’s political thinking evolved from blaming colonial rule for Africa’s woes to frank criticism of African rulers and the African citizens who tolerated their corruption and violence. Indeed, it was Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s and then its military dictatorship in the 1980s and ‘90s that forced Mr. Achebe abroad.
In his writing and teaching Mr. Achebe sought to reclaim the continent from Western literature, which he felt had reduced it to an alien, barbaric and frightening land devoid of its own art and culture. He took particular exception to"Heart of Darkness,"the novel byJoseph Conrad, whom he thought “a thoroughgoing racist.”
Conrad relegated “Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind,” Mr. Achebe argued in his essay “An Image of Africa.”
“I grew up among very eloquent elders,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2008. “In the village, or even in the church, which my father made sure we attended, there were eloquent speakers.” That eloquence was not reflected in Western books about Africa, he said, but he understood the challenge in trying to rectify the portrayal.
“You know that it’s going to be a battle to turn it around, to say to people, ‘That’s not the way my people respond in this situation, by unintelligible grunts, and so on; they would speak,’ ” Mr. Achebe said. “And it is that speech that I knew I wanted to be written down.”
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on Nov. 16, 1930, in Ogidi, an Ibo village. His father became a Christian and worked for a missionary teacher in various parts of Nigeria before returning to the village. As a student, Mr. Achebe immersed himself in Western literature. At the University College of Ibadan, whose professors were Europeans, he read Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Tennyson. But the turning point in his education was the required reading of"Mister Johnson,"a 1939 novel set in Nigeria and written by an Anglo-Irishman, Joyce Cary.
The protagonist is a docile Nigerian whose British master ultimately shoots and kills him. Like reviewers in the Western press, Mr. Achebe’s white professors praised it as one of the best novels ever written about Africa. But Mr. Achebe and his classmates responded with “exasperation at this bumbling idiot of a character,” he wrote.
He soon joined a generation of West African writers who in the 1950s were coming to the realization that Western literature was holding the continent captive. A fellow Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, opened the floodgates with his 1952 novel, “The Palm-Wine Drinkard.”
After graduating from college in 1953, Mr. Achebe moved to London, where he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation while writing stories. It was in London that he wrote “Things Fall Apart,” in longhand.
ADVERTISEMENT
After returning to Nigeria to revise the manuscript, he mailed it — the only existing copy — to a London typing service, which promptly misplaced it, filling Mr. Achebe with despair. It was discovered only months later.
Publishers initially passed on the manuscript, doubting that African fiction would sell, until an adviser at the Heinemann publishing house seized on it as a work of brilliance.
In his second novel, “No Longer at Ease,” in 1960, he tells the story of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi, who learns to fit into British colonial society. Raised as a Christian and educated in England, Obi abandons the countryside for a job as a civil servant in Lagos, which was the capital at the time. Cut off from traditional values, he succumbs to greed and in the end is prosecuted for graft.
In his third novel, “Arrow of God” (1964), Mr. Achebe reverts to the setting of an Ibo village in the early 20th century. The village priest, Ezeulu, sends his son, Oduche, to be educated by Christian missionaries in the hope that he will learn British ways and thus help protect his community. Instead Oduche becomes a convert to colonialism and attacks Ibo religion and culture.
The Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran war, shattered Mr. Achebe’s hopes for a more promising postcolonial future, and deeply affected his literary output. The scene was set for war when, in January 1966, Ibo army officers killed the prime minister and other officials and seized power. Seven months later, the insurgents were ousted in a counter-coup by military commanders from the Muslim northern region.
Before the year ended, Muslim troops had massacred some 30,000 Ibo people living in the north. In 1967 the Ibo then seceded from Nigeria, declaring the southeastern region the independent Republic of Biafra, and the civil war began in earnest, raging through 1970 until government troops invaded and crushed the secessionists.
Mr. Achebe’s fourth novel, “A Man of the People,” published in early 1966, had predicted this course of events with such accuracy that the military government in Lagos decided he must have been a conspirator in the first coup, an accusation he denied. Mr. Achebe fled, settling in Britain with his wife, Christiana; their two sons, Ikechukwu and Chidi; and two daughters, Chinelo and Nwando. (Information about his survivors was not immediately available.)
After the civil war, Mr. Achebe returned to Nigeria for two years before accepting faculty posts in the 1970s at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut. He returned home again in 1979 to teach English at the University of Nigeria.
The civil war was the theme of many of his writings during these years. Among the most prominent were a book of poetry, “Beware Soul Brother” (1971), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and a short-story collection,"Girls at War,” which appeared in 1972.
ADVERTISEMENT
But for more than 20 years a case of writer’s block kept him from producing another novel. He attributed the dry spell to emotional trauma that had lingered after the civil war.
“The novel seemed like a frivolous thing to be doing,” he told The Washington Post in 1988.
That year Mr. Achebe finally published his fifth novel, “Anthills of the Savannah,” the story of three former school chums in a fictional country modeled after Nigeria. One of them becomes a military dictator; another is appointed minister of information; and the third is named editor of the leading newspaper. All meet violent ends.
The novel was widely admired. Discussing it in 1988 in The New York Review of Books, the Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson wrote: “Chinua Achebe says, with implacable honesty, that Africa itself is to blame, and that there is no safety in excuses that place the fault in the colonial past or in the commercial and political manipulations of the First World.”
Mr. Achebe barely had time to savor the acclaim before the car accident outside Lagos that injured him. He received medical treatment in London and moved to the United States, taking a teaching post at Bard College in the Hudson River valley, where he remained until 2009. He received the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2007. Last fall he published “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.”
The return of civilian, democratic rule to Nigeria in 1999 prompted Mr. Achebe to visit for the first time in almost a decade. He met the newly elected president,Olusegun Obasanjo, and cautiously praised him as the best possible leader “at this time.” He also traveled to his native village, Ogidi.
Mr. Achebe returned to the United States, but his heart remained in his homeland, he said.
“People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America, since I have now been living here some years,” Mr. Achebe wrote in “Home and Exile.” His answer was “that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.”
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