So the giant of African letters, Chinua Achebe, certainly one of Nigeria and Africa’s most famous sons, is no more. Gone is the great man. The author of the seminal African novel in English, the iconic and world famous Things Fall Apart (1958), transitioned to the world of the ancestors on March 21, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, in the US.
He was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in the village of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, later shortening his name to Chinua Achebe to mark his own intellectual awakening and to effect a final and radical break with his colonial mis-education. His own parents had been among some of the early Christian converts in the country and because of that Achebe grew up seeing the world from the perspective of a colonial native elite, before eventually reckoning with his own Africanness and realizing that he probably had more in common with his own ‘pagan’, Igbo tribesmen than with the white missionary or colonial administrator.
Besides his most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, with its memorable but tragic characters like the protagonist Okonkwo, Achebe’s oeuvre of novels, poems and essays includes other well known titles like No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) which, together with the former, were originally written as one book until his publisher deemed it too long a book and broke it up into a trilogy. Together, the books seek to chronicle Nigeria’s long and difficult history and evolution from the pre-colonial era, through the advent of independence, and into the post colonial phase.
Achebe’s other well known books include the novels A Man of the People (1966), depicting the scourge of corruption in post-colonial Nigeria, and Anthills of the Savanna (1987); a book of poems Beware, Soul Brother, and Other Poems (1971) and a short-story collection Girls at War and Other stories (1973), two books that were based on the 1967-70 secessionist Biafran war in which more than a million people lost their lives – a real disaster in which his friend and compatriot, poet Christopher Okigbo, died on the frontlines fighting the Biafra cause, which Achebe also supported.
There were also some three other books of essays – Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), The Trouble With Nigeria (1983) and Hopes and Impediments (1989). Over the past few years, Achebe authored two more books: his memoirs The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009) and There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012).
Achebe’s lifelong project, as many commentators have noted, can be briefly described as being to portray African characters through their own voices and not from the standpoint of the European colonial narrative. He wanted ‘the other’, in this case the African, to represent himself/herself in the telling of their own story and to position the African character as fully human, with ordinary human foibles and failings, at the centre of their own narrative.
As a student, Achebe had originally gone to the University of Ibadan in order to study medicine, before determining that all he wanted to do was to become a writer and instead switching to study literature. He was particularly disturbed and angered by the portrayal of Africans as sub-humans in mainstream European literary discourses. Specifically, he had a lot of problems with the representation of the Nigerian character in Irish writer Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson.
Never one to shy away from controversy, in 1975 Achebe published his famous essay titled An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” in which he lambasted writer Joseph Conrad’s acclaimed novel, set in the Congo in the nineteenth century, as a racist and condescending representation of Africa and the Africans.
Many have credited Achebe as the founder of the genre of modern African literature. According to this view, the publication of his novel Things Fall Apart provided the necessary literary impetus and a blueprint which could be ÔÇô and was – readily adapted by writers from other parts of the continent to tell their own stories. Inspired by the stories told to him by his mother and older sister in his youth, Achebe, the master craftsman and wordsmith, had managed to accomplish this feat by blending a uniquely European literary form ÔÇô the novel – with his own Igbo oral traditions, complete with some of the more memorable quotes, idioms and characters in order to create a uniquely African ambience and resonance.
Indeed, one of my all-time favourite lines from the Achebe oeuvre is this one here, taken from the book Arrow of God, where one character states, “When a handshake goes beyond the elbow, we know it has turned to another thing”. Phew!
Throughout the years, Chinua Achebe led a principled and examplary life as a professor of literature, teaching at many universities in Africa, Europe and America. It speaks of Achebe’s principled disposition, too, that he twice turned down two presidential awards offered to him by the Nigerian government under current President Goodluck Jonathan and his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, citing Nigeria’s chaotic and unstable affairs under their respective watch.
It speaks also of Achebe’s humility that he has gone on record rejecting the notion that he was somehow the ‘father of the African novel’, insisting that new genre of African literature was the work of many minds and voices, all of which were equally important. This is despite the fact that Achebe was the founding editor of Heinemann’s iconic African Writers Series (AWS) ÔÇô the familiar orange coloured paperbacks adorning most school libraries and which helped bring African literature to worldwide audiences.
On my visit to Jamaica, some years ago, I was quite surprised and delighted to find my brother Ras Miguel Lorne’s bookshop in downtown Kingston stocking, among others, one or two copies of Things Fall Apart as well as Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat.
In his role as editorial adviser of the series, Achebe was instrumental in identifying and personally getting many famous African writers published. Indeed, Achebe read the manuscript of Ngugi’s unpublished Weep Not Child novel when he, and several African luminaries, attended the historic 1961 conference of African writers and intellectuals held at Makerere University in Uganda, where Ngugi, then an undergraduate student by the name of James Ngugi, was a sophomore at the institution.
There were other points of divergence, though, like on the use of English and other European languages in telling African stories. While Ngugi generally holds the view that Africans should write in their own mother-tongue and indigenous languages, Achebe tended to espouse a more pragmatic and practical view that if English could enable him to communicate more easily with his fellow countrymen from different linguistic backgrounds then it as well serve as a positive and useful medium.
Towards the end of his days, Chinua Achebe lived mostly in the US, largely on account of his medical condition after he was involved in some road accident in Nigeria in the early nineties which left him wheelchair bound. But he continued to teach, write and engage in lively and current debates in literature.
But perhaps the last word on Achebe’s impact on our social consciousness should go to Nelson Mandela who has been quoted as saying, in prison, Achebe was the writer “in whose company prison walls fell down.”
His death is a great loss to the development of a post-colonial African identity and consciousness.
