Chinua Achebe

Childhood and early years

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 in Ogidi, in what was then colonial Nigeria and is now Anambra State, in the south-east of the country. His parents, Isaiah Okafo Achebe and Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam, had converted to the Protestant Church Missionary Society, yet the family kept a deep respect for Igbo traditions. His father had given up the religion of his ancestors but not their memory. The boy's full name was itself a prayer: Chinualumogu means roughly "may God fight on my side."

Two worlds coexisted in that household. His mother and his sister Zinobia told him folk tales, a central part of Igbo community life, while his father filled the walls with collages, almanacs and books, among them a prose version of A Midsummer Night's Dream and an Igbo rendering of The Pilgrim's Progress. Achebe eagerly awaited village festivals, such as the masquerade ceremonies he would later recreate in his novels and stories.

Schooling

He entered St Philips' Central School in 1936. Despite his protests, he spent a week in the religious class for the youngest pupils before the school chaplain noticed his intelligence and moved him to a higher form. One teacher described him as the pupil with the best handwriting and reading in his class. He attended Sunday school and the monthly evangelical services, often carrying his father's bag. At one of these gatherings a dispute broke out when apostates from the new church challenged the catechist on the principles of Christianity; Achebe later included a scene inspired by that episode in Things Fall Apart.

At twelve he moved to Nekede, near Owerri, to attend the Central School, where his elder brother John taught. There he came to appreciate mbari, a traditional art form that seeks the protection of the gods through sculptures and collages offered as symbolic sacrifice. In 1944 he passed the entrance examinations for the Government College in Umuahia, a school modelled on the British public school, founded in 1929 to educate the future Nigerian elite. Its standards were demanding and English was the only permitted language, a rule Achebe later described as an order to abandon one's mother tongues and speak the language of the colonisers. He finished secondary school in four years rather than five and spent much of his time in the school library. There he read Booker T. Washington, Swift, Stevenson and Haggard, and later admitted that as a young reader he had taken the side of the white characters against the Africans, whom he saw as savages.

University and the turn to literature

In 1948 Nigeria's first university opened at Ibadan, then University College and affiliated with the University of London. Achebe was among its first intake, with a bursary to study medicine. During these years he became a sharp critic of Western writing about Africa. Reading Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, which portrayed Nigerians as either savages or buffoons, filled him with such indignation that he resolved to become a writer, and he came to see his own dislike of the African protagonist as a sign of the author's cultural ignorance.

He gave up medicine for English, history and theology, a change that cost him his scholarship and required him to pay fees. His family helped; his brother Augustine gave up the money he had saved for a trip home from his civil service job. In 1950 he made his debut in the University Herald with "Polar Undergraduate," an ironic piece celebrating the intellectual energy of his classmates, and in 1951 he wrote his first short story, "In a Village Church," which blends rural Nigerian life with Christian institutions and imagery. Other stories from these years, including "The Old Order in Conflict with the New" and "Dead Men's Path," explore the clash between tradition and modernity and look for dialogue between the two sides. He graduated in 1953 with a second-class degree, which left him unsettled about his future.

Teaching and broadcasting in Lagos

Back in Ogidi, a university friend persuaded him to apply for an English teaching post at the Merchants of Light school in Oba. It was a modest institution with a meagre library and a dilapidated building, erected on land the residents called the "bad bush," thought to be haunted by hostile spirits. Achebe urged his pupils to read widely and to write originally, and he brought to the classroom the newspapers he had read as a student. He stayed four months.

In 1954 he took a post with the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, the radio network set up by the colonial government in 1933, and moved to Lagos. He was assigned to the Talks Department, preparing scripts for spoken delivery. The work taught him the subtle differences between written and spoken language, a skill he later used to write convincing dialogue. Lagos, a vast city full of migrants from the countryside, made a strong impression on him, and he began a novel at a time when almost no African fiction had been published in English. The exceptions were Amos Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard and Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City.

Things Fall Apart

In 1956 he went to London for training at the BBC staff school and handed his manuscript to the novelist Gilbert Phelps, who was enthusiastic and offered to show it to his publishers. Achebe declined, convinced it still needed work. Back in Nigeria he revised it heavily, cutting the second and third parts, keeping the story of Okonkwo, a yam farmer who lives through colonisation and struggles against the legacy of an indebted father, expanding some chapters and restructuring the prose. The title comes from a line in W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming."

In 1957 he sent the only copy to a London typing service. When no reply came, his boss at the broadcasting service, Angela Beattie, visited the firm during a trip to London and demanded an explanation; the manuscript had been left lying in a corner. Achebe later said that had it been lost he would probably have given up writing altogether. In 1958 a London agent sent the novel to several publishers. Some rejected it on the grounds that fiction by African writers had no market. Heinemann hesitated until its educational adviser, Donald MacRae, who had just returned from travelling in West Africa, read it and reported that it was the best novel he had read since the war. On 17 June 1958 Heinemann published 2,000 hardcover copies. The British press praised it. In Nigeria the reception was cooler, and at Ibadan some academics found it amusing that a former student could have written anything worthwhile.

The book follows Okonkwo's fall in the village of Umuofia as missionaries and colonial administrators arrive. Achebe explored the conflict between Igbo culture and Christianity, themes already present in his stories. It became the most widely read, studied and translated African novel, with sales above eight million copies and translations into around fifty languages. Wole Soyinka called it the first novel in English to speak from within African character rather than presenting the African as an exotic figure, as the white man usually did.

Marriage, family and later novels

In 1958 he began courting Christiana Chinwe Okoli, and they married in 1961 in the chapel of the University of Ibadan. They had four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi and Nwando. Troubled by the picture of childhood conveyed in Lagos schools, with mostly white teachers and prejudiced textbooks, Achebe published his first children's book, Chike and the River, in 1966.

No Longer at Ease (1960) followed Obi, the grandson of Okonkwo, a civil servant caught up in the corruption of Lagos. The trilogy was completed by Arrow of God (1964), set in the village of Umuaro at the start of the twentieth century, which follows the priest Ezeulu. Confronted with British power, he sends his son to learn the foreigners' secrets, and the result is tragedy. The American writer John Updike admired the daring of an ending few Western novelists would have dared to write. In these years Achebe toured East Africa on a Rockefeller fellowship in 1960 and in 1962 travelled to the United States and Brazil on a UNESCO grant, meeting writers including Ralph Ellison and Arthur Miller and discussing the difficulties of writing in languages with limited reach.

At the broadcasting service he helped found the Voice of Nigeria, the country's international station, which began transmitting in 1962. That year he attended a conference of African writers in English at Makerere in Kampala, where he met Wole Soyinka, Kofi Awoonor and Langston Hughes. He also helped launch Heinemann's African Writers Series, which gave visibility to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Flora Nwapa. In his 1962 essay "Where Angels Fear to Tread" he criticised outsiders who judged African writing: no one can understand another whose language he does not speak, and language, he stressed, means not only words but a whole worldview. In 1966 he published A Man of the People, a satire on corruption in a newly independent African state. Soon afterwards a military coup took place in January 1966, and friends warned him that the authorities linked him to the events. The family had to flee to the south-east, the region that would become Biafra, where they faced grave danger.

Biafra and the war

In May 1967 the south-eastern region declared itself the Republic of Biafra. Achebe committed himself to the cause, acted as its ambassador and appealed to Europe and America for help as famine and violence devastated the population. His friend Christopher Okigbo was killed fighting in August 1967, and Achebe later wrote the poem "Dirge for Okigbo" in his memory. During the war the family was forced to leave Enugu, and bombing destroyed their house. When the federal government retook the region in 1970, Achebe briefly joined political parties but soon grew disillusioned by the corruption and elitism he saw and withdrew from active politics.

In the 1970s he spent long periods in the United States. In 1975 he gave the lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," in which he described Joseph Conrad as a thoroughgoing racist. Published in The Massachusetts Review, it became a landmark of postcolonial criticism and provoked fierce debate.

Final years and legacy

After a car accident in 1990 left him partly paralysed, he returned to the United States, where he taught for about nineteen years at Bard College. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 and from 2009 until his death was professor of African studies at Brown University. He died in Boston on 21 March 2013.

His work includes novels, short stories, poems, essays and children's books. His style draws heavily on Igbo oral tradition, combining straightforward narration with folk tales, proverbs and oratory. He was concerned throughout with culture, colonialism, relations between men and women, politics and history. Although he is often called the father of modern African literature, he rejected that label. His legacy is celebrated each year at the Chinua Achebe Literary Festival.