Chinua Achebe

Nigerian novelist and poet

• Born: November 16, 1930
• Birthplace: Ogidi, Nigeria
• Died: March 21, 2013

Chinua Achebe’s first and best-known novel, Things Fall Apart, is a founding text of postcolonial African literature and has become a central work of world literature. His use of a mixture of simple English and Igbo phrases in his works, which include poetry and short stories as well as novels, reflects a uniquely African heritage.

Early Life

Chinua Achebe (CHIHN-wah ah-CHAY-bay) was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, a large Igbo (Ibo) village in the rainforest lands not far from the banks of the Niger River. He was the second youngest of six children born to Janet Iloegbunam Achebe and Isaiah Achebe, a teacher-catechist for the Church Missionary Society and one of the first people of his region to convert to Christianity. Achebe’s family was distinguished, as his grandfather had acquired three of the four possible titles in the village. Although as a boy he was educated as a Christian, learning to admire all things European and to reject things that were African, Achebe still was able to find beauty in traditional African culture. Since his father did not sever connections with his non-Christian relatives, Achebe established a relationship with his people’s traditional world.

Achebe began his education in the Christian mission school of his birthplace, first studying English when he was eight years old. At age fourteen, he won a scholarship to Government College Umahia and in 1948 was chosen to be one of the first students to study at University College, Ibadan (later the University of Ibadan). While attending Ibadan, Achebe rejected his given English name (Albert) and began to use the African name Chinualumogu (shortened to Chinua), which implies the meaning “God will fight for me.” He also dropped his planned study of medicine and instead chose to pursue a degree in literature, receiving his BA in 1953.

At this time, Achebe began to write short stories and essays, some of which centered on the conflict between Christianity and traditional African cultures, a subject that later would become the focal point for much of his work. After graduation, Achebe taught secondary school for less than a year before joining the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) as “talks producer” in 1954. He traveled to London in 1957 to study at the British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School and there encountered novelist Gilbert Phelps, who admired Achebe’s manuscript of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, and helped him find a publisher for the novel.

Life’s Work

In Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe focused on the Nigerian experience of European colonialism and dominance, developing his major themes from an African viewpoint and portraying the many aspects of the communal life of the Igbo people of Umuafia in the late nineteenth century at both the societal and individual levels. He wrote the book in part to correct the sympathetic but wrong-headed interpretations of Nigerian culture published by white novelists and amateur anthropologists. The novel is short, utilizing a close-knit style that creates an effective picture of the clash between the Igbo and European cultures at a time when white missionaries and officials were first penetrating eastern Nigeria.

The story focuses on two closely intertwined tragedies, the public tragedy of the destruction of Igbo culture by the influence of European culture and the individual tragedy of Okonkwo, an important resident of Umuafia who sees his traditional world changing and collapsing and is powerless to stop it. Things Fall Apart was met with wide critical acclaim and would eventually translated into more than fifty languages. Moreover, published just two years before Nigeria won independence from Great Britain, the novel portrayed the vitality of indigenous culture before colonial rule and helped fuel the nation’s optimism for its future.

Achebe’s second novel, No Longer at Ease , was published in 1960. As in his first novel, Achebe took the novel’s title from a poem by T. S. Eliot. This work examines African society in the era of independence and continues the saga of the Okonkwo family with Ox’s grandson Obi, an educated Christian who has left his village for a position as a civil servant in urban Lagos, Nigeria. The story deals with the tragedy of a new generation of Nigerians who, although educated and Westernized, are nevertheless caught between the opposing cultures of traditional Africa and urban Lagos.

In 1961, Achebe was appointed director of external broadcasting for Nigeria. This position required that Achebe travel to Britain as well as other parts of the world. That same year, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, with whom he would have four children. During this time, Achebe’s short-story collection The Sacrificial Egg, and Other Short Stories (1962) was published. Two years later, he completed Arrow of God (1964). In this, his third novel, Achebe once again paints a picture of cultures in collision, and once again his novel attracted much attention, which added to the high esteem in which he was already held. The novel tells the tragedy of Ezeulu, a spiritual and political leader in a village during the 1920s who must contend not only with the developing English colonial administration but also with Christianity. His attempts to honor his god, Ulu, and protect his village from famine backfire. As one who assumes responsibility for his culture and people, he nevertheless cannot adapt to changing circumstances and, eventually offending the British authorities, winds up in jail.

A Man of the People , which would be Achebe’s last novel for more than two decades, was published in 1966. With this novel, Achebe continued to develop the urban themes that he had presented in No Longer at Ease, but this time with a satirical edge. Set in the early days of a newly independent African nation, the novel centers on a teacher who joins a political party intent on reform and reveals how corrupt politicians used to their own advantage the political system that they had inherited from the departed imperial power. The novel culminates in scandal, a rigged election, and a military coup—a stark picture of Africans, now distanced from their original culture, struggling to convert from colonialism to self-government. (The novel was published just as a real military coup occurred in Nigeria.)

After a massacre of Igbos in northern Nigeria in 1966, Achebe resigned his position with NBS and moved to the Eastern Region of Nigeria, where he intended to go into publishing. When the region declared its independence as the separate state of Biafra, however, Achebe became personally involved with the ensuing civil war, serving the short-lived Biafran government from 1967 to 1970. During this period of his life, Achebe produced only one piece of work, the children’s book Chike and the River (1966).

In the years following the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, Achebe produced three collections of poetry: Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems (1971, 1972), Christmas in Biafra, and Other Poems (1973), and Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo (1978). In addition, Achebe was a coeditor of Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry (1982). With this turn to poetry as a medium for his creative talents, Achebe was able to distinguish himself as both a great novelist and a fine poet. During this period, Achebe also wrote a collection of short stories entitled Girls at War (1983), most of them first published twenty years earlier during his student days; like his novels, the stories reflect conflicts between traditional and modern values. He also coedited another collection, African Short Stories (1984). In addition, he produced three works of juvenile literature as well as a number of essays. In the 1980s, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was adapted for stage, radio, and television.

In 1971, Achebe accepted a post at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. The following year, Achebe and his family moved temporarily to the United States, where he took a position with the University of Massachusetts as a professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies. In addition, during this period, he taught at several American institutions as a visiting professor. While in the United States, he was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Dartmouth College. Additionally, Achebe shared, with a Canadian, the 1972 Commonwealth Prize for the best book of poetry in his Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems. In 1976, he returned to Nsukka, where he held the rank of professor and edited Okike, a literary journal. In the 1980s, he was involved in politics, supporting a presidential candidate and briefly serving in the honorary role of deputy national president.

The year 1987 saw Achebe return to the novel as an expression of his now world-renowned talents. His work Anthills of the Savannah was well received and earned a nomination for the Man Booker Prize. According to Charles R. Larson, writing for the Chicago Tribune, “no other novel in many years has bitten to the core, swallowed and regurgitated contemporary Africa’s miseries and expectations as profoundly as Anthills of the Savannah.” The story is set in the fictional West African nation of Kangan and follows the careers of three childhood friends who enter politics. The ambition of one to become permanent president of the country eventually brings them all into conflict, and they all die in political violence, an indictment of the exploitation of power and use of violence for political ends.

Achebe wrote four collections of essays on political and literary subjects: Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), and Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (1988). In the last is a controversial essay that criticizes Joseph Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness (1902) for its racist, dehumanizing portrayal of Africans. He reemphasized this theme of Western intellectual condescension toward Africa in Home and Exile (2001).

In 1990, just after Achebe was chosen to be chair of the village council of Ogidi, where he lived, he was involved in a serious car accident. He subsequently had to use a wheelchair after a six-month recuperation in a London hospital. Shortly thereafter, he accepted a teaching position as Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. In 2009, Achebe became the David and Marianna Fischer University Professor and professor of Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he went on to hold several colloquia on such topical subjects as the Darfur crisis and the Arab Spring uprisings.

His final two publications were a collection of lectures and autobiographical essays entitled The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009) and a memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012). The latter generated strong reactions from both sides of the Biafran conflict.

Achebe’s literary works were widely honored. He received the Nigerian National Trophy, two Nigerian National Merit Awards, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 2007, he was awarded a Man Booker Prize, England’s most prestigious literary honor, for his career. Recipient of some thirty honorary doctorates, Achebe was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For Achebe, political critique even extended into the realm of recognition. In 2004, he refused to accept the title of commander of the Federal Republic, Nigeria’s second-highest honor, to protest government policies under President Olusegun Obasanjo. Seven years later, President Goodluck Jonathan reoffered the honor, which Achebe again rejected, citing lack of progress on the issues he had previously outlined.

Achebe died on March 21, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife, Christie, and their children, Chinelo, Nwando, Ikechukwu, and Chidi. His funeral, held in Ogidi that May, was attended by throngs of fans as well as prominent politicians, some of whom Achebe had criticized for corruption.

Significance

Achebe was among the founders of the new literature of Nigeria, which has flourished since the 1950s. It is a literature that draws on traditional oral history as well as a modern, rapidly changing African society. As a founder of this movement, Achebe paved the way for other notable African writers such as Elechie Amadie and Cyprian Ekwensi. In addition, he influenced an entire second generation of African writers. Achebe also helped shape and set into place the now characteristic features of the African novel, especially the effective use of very simple language, peppered with African words and proverbs highly reminiscent of traditional African speech patterns. As Bruce King commented in Introduction to Nigerian Literature, “Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature.” His choice to write in English, the language of colonizers, initially attracted critical scrutiny from other African writers, but Achebe justified the decision as the best way to effectively communicate to the widest audience both within and without Africa. Still, in many ways he adapted English in a new way, making it clear that the writing comes from an African perspective.

Achebe’s novels, which comment strongly on the stages of change that have affected the entire African continent since the turn of the twentieth century, are not only chronicles of events and trends in African history but also extremely artistic expressions that contain a definite purpose. Unlike many novelists, Achebe rejected the notion that the writer is an individual who writes for his or her own personal pleasure or merely for the purpose of artistic expression. Instead, Achebe considered the novelist an educator. For example, in an interview with Bernth Lindfors, Achebe stated,

One big message of the many that I try to put across, is that Africa was not a vacuum, before the coming of Europe, that culture was not unknown in Africa, that culture was not brought to Africa by the white world.

Through his novels, his poetry, his short stories, his career as an educator, and his editing of the African Writers series for Heinemann Educational Books, Achebe succeeded in founding and nurturing a major literary movement of the twentieth century. Indeed, in 2007, African writer Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel laureate, hailed Achebe as “the father of modern African literature.”

Bibliography

Booker, M. Keith, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood, 2003. Print.

Bosah, Chukwuemeta, ed. Celebrating Chinua Achebe: Essays on His Life, Legacy and Works. New Albany: Ben Bosah, 2013.

Cartney, Wilfred. Whispers from a Continent: The Literature of Contemporary Black Africa. New York: Random, 1969. Print.

"Chinua Achebe." Economist, Economist Newspaper Limited, 30 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Emenyonu, Ernest N., and Iniobong I. Uko, eds. Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. 2 vols. Trenton: Africa World, 2003–4. Print.

Githae-Mugo, Micere. Visions of Africa. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978. Print.

Gambrell, Jon. "Hundreds Attend Nigerian Writer Chinua Achebe's Funeral." Independent. Independent.co.uk, 24 May 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Gourevitch, Philip. "Postscript: Chinua Achebe, 1930–2013." New Yorker. Condé Nast, 22 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Heywood, Christopher. A Critical View on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. London: British Council, 1985. Print.

Innes, Lyn. "Chinua Achebe Obituary." Guardian 22 Mar. 2013: 58. Print.

Owomoyela, Oyekan. African Literatures: An Introduction. Waltham: Crossroads, 1979. Print.

Ravenscroft, Arthur. Chinua Achebe. New York: Longmans, 1969. Print.

Sallah, Tijan M., and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Chinua Achebe, Teacher of Light: A Biography. Trenton: Africa World, 2003. Print.

Wren, Robert M. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. New York: Longman, 1980. Print.