Chinua Achebe
1930 – 2013 · Nigeria
Known for: Author of Things Fall Apart and a founding figure of modern African literature
“He told the story from the inside, and the world had to listen.”
Biography
Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on 16 November 1930 near the Igbo village of Ogidi, in what was then colonial Nigeria. His father was a teacher and evangelist for the Church Mission Society and his mother a leader among the women of the church, so the household stood at the seam between Christian conversion and Igbo tradition, and respected both. Storytelling was the family currency: his mother and his sister Zinobia told him tales he asked for again and again, while his father's shelves held almanacs and books, among them Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in Igbo. He read early and well, went from St Philips' Central School to Government College Umuahia, and in 1948 entered the first intake of University College Ibadan on a bursary to study medicine. There he read the European novels of Africa, Conrad among them, and concluded that the continent he knew did not appear in them at all.
Achebe left Ibadan for Lagos and the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, and in 1958 he published Things Fall Apart. Written in English and built on Igbo proverb, oratory and folk tale, it told the collision of a village world with colonial rule from the inside, and became the most widely read, translated and studied African novel. No Longer at Ease followed in 1960 and Arrow of God in 1964, completing the African Trilogy, while A Man of the People in 1966 turned on the corruption of independent African politics. With Heinemann he began the African Writers Series, which put Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Flora Nwapa and a generation of others into print. His 1975 lecture An Image of Africa, on the racism of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, changed how a canonical text was read and became a founding document of postcolonial criticism.
When Biafra seceded in 1967 Achebe supported it and travelled as its envoy, appealing in Europe and the Americas for relief as the civil war starved the region. The defeat of 1970 and the corruption that followed left him disillusioned with Nigerian politics, and he taught for long stretches in the United States. A car crash in 1990 left him partially paralysed and he settled there, spending nineteen years at Bard College and from 2009 holding a chair in African studies at Brown University. Anthills of the Savannah appeared in 1987, and the Man Booker International Prize came in 2007. Chinua Achebe died on 21 March 2013. He rejected the title father of modern African literature whenever it was offered, and it has stayed attached to him ever since.