(1930- ) novelist Albert
Chinualumogu Achebe (ah CHAY bay) was born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, when Nigeria was a British colony. His father, Isaiah Okafor Achebe, was raised according to the traditions of the Ibgo people but converted to Christianity and became a church teacher. His mother, Janet Achebe, told him traditional folktales as he was growing up. Achebe learned to respect the old ways even as his country was adopting new ones.
After studying at University College in Ibadan, Achebe received a B.A. from London University in 1953. He became a producer and eventually a director for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. In 1961, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, with whom he had four children. After establishing his reputation as a writer, he left broadcasting in 1966. When civil war broke out the following year—eastern Nigeria, the Igbo homeland, attempted to secede from the Nigerian federation as a new country called Biafra—he traveled abroad to promote the Biafran cause. Beware, Soul Brother (1971) describes his war experiences, including his family’s narrow escape when their apartment was hit by a bomb. In 1976, he became professor of English at the University of Nigeria. A serious car accident in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist down. He is now professor of literature at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley.
In Home and Exile (1988), Achebe writes that he decided to become a writer after reading Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson. Critics praised the book’s realistic portrayal of Africa, but Achebe thought its Nigerian hero was “an embarrassing nitwit.” He decided that “the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else, no matter how gifted and well-intentioned.” His novels tell the story of Nigeria “from the inside,” from Igbo resistance to British colonization through the coup that established the commander of the Nigerian army, General Ironisi, as head of state in 1966.
Critical Analysis
Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), tells the story of Okonwo, a great man among his people but someone who cannot adapt to the changes brought by colonization. Achebe does not idealize the old ways, but he presents them as worthy of respect. However, as Okonkwo’s son Obierika tells him, “he [the white man] has put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart.” Okonkwo’s refusal to adapt leads him to violence and ultimately to destruction. As Achebe explained in a 2000 interview in Atlantic, “With the coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was incorporated …with a whole lot of other people with whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact before____You had to learn a totally new reality, and accommodate yourself to the demands of this new reality, which is the state called Nigeria.”
Things Fall Apart established Achebe as “the founding father of modern African literature,” according to Harvard philosopher K. Anthony Appiah. Achebe was the first novelist to present colonization from an African point of view. He also introduced what he calls a “new English,” using Igbo proverbs and pidgin English to express the African oral tradition in English. As editor of the journal Okike, which he founded in 1971, Achebe continues to promote new African writing.
The most influential of his works, Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than 50 languages. In the Atlantic interview, Achebe explains its appeal: “There are many, many ways in which people are deprived or subjected to all kinds of victimization—it doesn’t have to be colonization. Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story.”
At the beginning of Achebe’s second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), Okonkwo’s grandson Obi is on trial for accepting bribes. Obi is one of the educated elite to whom the British plan to turn over the government when Nigeria becomes independent. “Like his grandfather, Obi was another victim of cultural conflict,” notes Bernth Lindfors. “Obi had been weaned away from traditional values but had not fully assimilated Western ideals; having no firm moral convictions, he was confused by his predicament and fell.” Torn between tradition and modern ways, Obi—and his generation—are “no longer at ease.”
Arrow of God (1964) is set in the 1920s. Enzelu, chief priest of the patron god of his Igbo village, finds himself caught in a conflict between his people and British colonial administrators, who want to make him village chieftain. Gerald Moore, in Seven African Writers, notes that “As in Achebe’s other novels, it is the strong-willed man of tradition who cannot adapt, and who is crushed by virtues in the war between the new, more worldly order, and the old conservative values of an isolated society.”
The narrator of Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People, is involved in a fictional coup that foreshadows the actual coup the occurred the year the novel was published. Odili, a schoolteacher, at first supports M. A. Nanga, a villager who has become minister of culture, but runs against him when he realizes that Nanga abuses his power. Although set in the fictional Republic of Kangan, the satire has obvious parallels to present-day Nigeria. The novel reflects the conviction Achebe expressed in The Trouble with Nigeria (1983): “Hopeless as it may seem today, Nigeria is not absolutely beyond redemption. Critical, yes, but not entirely hopeless. Nigerians are what they are only because their leaders are not what they should be.”
In 1979, Achebe received the Order of the Federal Republic for his contributions to African literature. “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them,” he reflected in Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975). Today, he is recognized as the first African to adapt the conventions of the European novel successfully and is Africa’s most widely translated writer.
Works about Chinua Achebe
Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Lindfors, Bernth. Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
Moore, Gerald. Seven African Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
