Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe: The Answer to Someone Else's Novel

He had gone to university to study medicine. Then, at University College Ibadan, he read Joyce Cary's *Mister Johnson* — an English novel about a Nigerian — and something in it was so wrong that it redirected his life. He switched to English, history and theology, and set out to correct the record. Ten years later he published *Things Fall Apart*, which has since sold more than twenty million copies in fifty-seven languages and become the most widely studied, translated and read African novel ever written. Nelson Mandela said of him: "There was a writer named Chinua Achebe... in whose company the prison walls fell down."

Ogidi: Between Church and Shrine

He was born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe on 16 November 1930 at Saint Simon's Church in Nneobi, near the Igbo village of Ogidi, in colonial Nigeria. His father, Isaiah, was a teacher and evangelist for the Church Mission Society; his mother, Janet, was a church leader and a farmer. He grew up precisely on the seam that his fiction would spend fifty years examining — a Christian household inside a living Igbo world, with the old religion still practised down the road.

He went to St Philips' Central School and then to Government College Umuahia, before entering University College Ibadan in 1948 on a medical bursary.

The Insult That Made a Novelist

The Cary episode matters because of what Achebe took from it. He did not conclude that Europeans should stop writing about Africa. He concluded that Africans had to write their own account, in a form the world already read, and that the account had to be complicated enough to be believed — not a rebuttal, a replacement.

He graduated with a second-class degree in 1953, taught briefly at the Merchants of Light school, and in 1954 joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos, in the Talks Department. Radio taught him the thing his novels are best at: the exact distance between how people speak and how they are written down. He married Christiana Chinwe Okoli on 10 September 1961; they had four children.

Things Fall Apart

Heinemann printed 2,000 copies in 1958. The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a man of standing in a functioning Igbo society, and of what arrives to end it — and it insists on the society being fully realised, with its own laws, cruelties, humour and moral arguments, before the missionaries appear. That structural decision is the whole achievement. Colonialism cannot be shown as a loss unless the reader has first been made to understand what there was to lose.

*No Longer at Ease* (1960) followed Okonkwo's grandson through post-independence corruption. *Arrow of God* (1964) returned to the collision of tradition and colonial administration. *A Man of the People* (1966) satirised Nigerian politics and depicted a military coup with what turned out to be prophetic accuracy.

Editor, and Biafra

As general editor of Heinemann's African Writers Series, Achebe did something arguably as consequential as his own novels: he built the shelf. He brought through Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's *Weep Not, Child* and the work of Flora Nwapa, and turned a scattering of individual writers into a visible body of literature.

Then Nigeria fell apart. When the southeast seceded as Biafra in May 1967, Achebe backed it. He co-founded Citadel Press with the poet Christopher Okigbo, who was killed that year. He served as a Biafran ambassador and toured North America arguing the case. He wrote poetry out of it, including "Refugee Mother and Child." His family survived bombings; after Nigeria's victory in 1970, their house in Ogidi was destroyed.

He taught at the University of Nigeria from 1970, founded the literary journal *Okike* in 1971, and held a chair in English until retiring in 1981. *Anthills of the Savannah* (1987), a novel of a fictional West African coup, was a Booker Prize finalist.

The Essay That Split a Field

In 1975 he delivered the lecture that made him a critic as well as a novelist. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's *Heart of Darkness*" called Joseph Conrad "a thoroughgoing racist" and argued that his novel reduces a continent to "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity." Published in *The Massachusetts Review* and later carried in the Norton critical edition of the novel it attacks, the essay permanently changed how *Heart of Darkness* is read. The critic Nicolas Tredell described it as dividing Conrad criticism "into two epochal phases: before and after Achebe."

The Wheelchair Years

On 22 March 1990 a car accident left him paralysed from the waist down. He spent the following decades in the United States: more than fifteen years as Charles P. Stevenson Professor at Bard College, and from 2007 until his death as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies at Brown. He collected more than thirty honorary degrees, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1972), the Nigerian National Order of Merit (1979), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2002), the Man Booker International Prize (2007) and the $300,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010). In 2004 he refused the Nigerian government's Commander of the Federal Republic award, citing the state of the country's politics. He published *There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra* in 2012, reopening a wound Nigeria had spent forty years not discussing. He died in Boston on 21 March 2013 and was buried in Ogidi.

Why Chinua Is Called a Genius

The specific innovation is linguistic. Achebe wrote English that carries Igbo inside it — proverb, oral cadence, the rhythms of a language that is not English — and he did it without exoticism or footnotes, so that the novel reads as though it were always meant to work this way. He defended the choice of English as practical, the only language that could reach across Nigeria's own linguistic divisions and out to the world. Toni Morrison credited his work with making her a writer. Margaret Atwood called him "a magical writer — one of the greatest of the twentieth century." The *New York Times* called him one of the continent's "towering men of letters." Twenty million copies of a first novel written by a broadcasting employee in his twenties is not a critical fashion.

The counter-case begins with Achebe himself, who flatly rejected the title routinely hung on him. He called "father of modern African literature" "patronising and eurocentric," and said such descriptions showed that "education is lacking in most of those who pontificate." Wole Soyinka went further, dismissing the label as "a tag of either literary ignorance or 'momentary exuberance'" and asking whether those using it had "the sheerest acquaintance with the literature of other African nations" — Africa had literatures long before 1958, and the paternity claim erases them. Soyinka also questioned the African Writers Series itself, warning that it risked becoming a "ghetto classification" that segregated African writing rather than admitting it. And there is the plain shape of the career: the reputation rests overwhelmingly on a novel published when he was twenty-eight, with *Anthills of the Savannah* reaching a Booker shortlist and no further. Achebe's own view is the most useful correction — he was not the beginning of anything, he was the moment the world was finally obliged to notice.

Legacy

*Things Fall Apart* is taught on every continent, which is exactly the outcome its author intended when he abandoned medicine over a bad English novel. The African Writers Series he edited changed which books existed. And the Conrad essay ensured that the most famous European novel about Africa can no longer be read without an African voice in the room — which may be the most precise revenge in literary history.

Achievements

• Peace Prize of the German Publishers' and Booksellers' Association — 2002
• International Booker Prize — 2007
• Nigerian National Order of Merit Award — 1979
• International Nonino Prize — 1994
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — 2002
• Notable work: Things Fall Apart
• Notable work: No Longer at Ease
• Notable work: Arrow of God
• Notable work: A Man of the People