The novelist, poet, and critic Chinua Achebe died on the 22nd of March. Born in East Nigeria, Achebe grew up in an Igbo village and went on to win a prestigious scholarship at the University of Ibadan. As a young man his nickname was ‘Dictionary’. His career began with broadcasting and ended with a professorship at Brown University. Achebe was the winner of the Man Booker International Literature Prize and described by Nelson Mandela as a writer ‘in whose company the prison walls fell down’.
Achebe’s most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, was released in 1962. It was the first book to tell the story of colonialism from an African perspective; it gave the voiceless a voice. Things Fall Apart explores Achebe’s own experience of the conflict between modern Africa and its traditional oral history. That it remains pertinent today is demonstrated by the fact that it has sold 10 million copies worldwide and has been published in 50 different languages. Following its success, Heinemann launched a series of books entitled the African Writers Series, and Achebe was made the first editor.
The status of Africa and African writers necessarily affected Achebe throughout his career. He was keenly aware of the clash of cultures between Africa and the West – both during and after the colonial era. This is most apparent in his famous response to the well-loved novel, Heart of Darkness. In a lecture of 1975 Achebe declaimed the demeaning cultural assumptions underlying the work and accused Joseph Conrad of racism. Despite being outspoken against Conrad, Achebe has never shied away from criticising Africa. In Things Fall Apart, it is Okonkwo’s pride and love of tradition that lead to his downfall. This underlines the many ways in which nationalism and out-dated understanding can be destructive. Achebe was also critical of Nigeria, both in his life and his work. He twice refused the country’s second-highest award, the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic as a public stance against the government.
Achebe will be remembered worldwide as the ‘father’ of African literature. In Anthills of the Savannah he wrote that it ‘is the story that owns us’. The true magic of Achebe’s fable-like stories is that they weave the reader into the fabric of the African oral tradition of storytelling. Old proverbs are ‘the palm oil with which words are eaten’. The brilliance of his imaginative powers sprung from the legends of the Igbo people.
