Writer who 'brought Africa to the world'

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Chinua Achebe, Nigerian-born novelist and poet. Picture: AP Source: AP

• OBITUARY
  Chinua Achebe
  Writer.
  Born Ogidi, Nigeria, November 16, 1930.
  Died Boston, US, March 21, aged 82.

NIGERIAN novelist and poet Chinua Achebe was, for Nelson Mandela, "the writer in whose company the prison walls fell down".

This was Mandela's tribute to Achebe on the occasion of the latter's 70th birthday in 2000. Mandela was acknowledging not only the comfort Achebe's writings had brought him during his own 27 years in prison but also what he considered to be the novelist's equal contribution as an African "freedom fighter".

According to Mandela, the greatness of Achebe, founding father of the modern African novel in English, lay in his having "brought Africa to the world" while remaining rooted as an African.
He was probably Africa's most widely read novelist. His first work, Things Fall Apart, which many felt should have won him the Nobel Prize in Literature, has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold more than 11 million copies. Published in 1958, when many African states were preparing for independence, it showed the impact of Western civilisation on a traditional African Ibo society without in any way romanticising the latter - a well-ordered, self-sufficient world that had already begun to fall apart before the arrival of Europeans, and particularly Christian missionaries, accelerated the process. It was a theme Achebe considered central to his life's work.

Achebe was born in 1930 to Christian parents in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, then a British colony. His father was an evangelist, but his great-grandfather had sent early missionaries packing "for their doleful singing". He was baptised Albert (after Prince Albert) Chinualumogu but, because the second name was "a full-length philosophical statement", he eventually dropped it for "something more business-like". He learned, first, his mother-tongue, Ibo, then, at the age of eight, the English of which he was to become a master.
Achebe was first educated at the local school provided for his village by the Church Missionary Society (at which his father taught), then at the Government Secondary School at Umuahia. He went on to be one of the first graduates, in 1953, of the new University College of Ibadan, where he studied English literature and was a contemporary of writer Wole Soyinka.
It was while at university that Achebe read what he called "some appalling European novels about Africa ... and realised that our story could not be told for us by anyone else no matter how gifted or well-intentioned". Things Fall Apart was to be his riposte, although its publication was five years away.
After graduation Achebe returned to Ogidi. He found a teaching position at a school, where he encouraged his pupils to read widely. It was a brief assignment: in 1954 an opportunity arose to join the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos.
The city, teeming with migrants from Nigeria's villages, was to make a significant impression on the aspiring writer. Achebe revelled in the richer social life and drew on his experiences in his second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), about a civil servant who becomes embroiled in the corruption.
In Lagos Achebe began work on Things Fall Apart and a first draft was completed by the time he was sent to Britain in 1956 for training at the BBC. It was in London that he made the literary contacts that eventually would see the work published by Heinemann in 1958, to mixed reviews in Britain and in West Africa.
Achebe had taken the title of Things Fall Apart from WB Yeats's poem The Second Coming: "Things fall part; the centre cannot hold." Set in the late 19th century, the novel depicts the tragedy of an ambitious and powerful traditional Ibo leader, Okonkwo, whose obsession with demonstrating strength and masculinity is founded on his perception of his own weak father. However, his instinctive violent reactions and blindness to changing circumstances bring him into a losing conflict with the new colonial authorities and the Christian missionaries they support, ending in Okonkwo's suicide - ironically an abomination against his own people's customs.
It wasn't long until Africans recognised the story in their own historical context. Success as a writer was matched by Achebe's rise within Nigerian broadcasting, where he became director of external broadcasting in 1961.
His growing literary stature was recognised when Heinemann asked him to be general editor of its African Writers series. Achebe, who believed in the importance of creating a community of African artists, recommended to his English publishers the work of another young African who was to become a big name: James Ngugi (later known as Ngugi wa Thiong'o).
Achebe's third book, Arrow of God, appeared in 1964. A Man of the People followed in 1966, and is an account of a corrupt politician who is destroyed by a military coup. As with his other works, it centres on a lack of stability because of two conflicting cultures.
Achebe's life took a different direction with the outbreak of civil war in 1967 with the Ibos of the eastern region attempting to establish an independent republic of Biafra. Achebe associated himself with the Biafran cause and worked for the rebel government until its defeat in 1970, an event that profoundly affected him. The Achebe family (he had married Christie Okoli in 1961) escaped disaster several times, and Chinua suffered personal anguish when his friend, poet Christopher Okigbo, with whom he had started a publishing house, was killed in the war.
Most of Achebe's work during this period took the form of poetry: many of these poems appeared in the 1971 collection Beware, Soul Brother.
At the end of the war Achebe returned with his family to Ogidi, where their home had been destroyed. Unable to travel because his passport had been revoked, he took a post as a research fellow at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. He was the founding editor of Okike, which was to become one of Africa's most influential literary publications. The following year, 1972, he took up a visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There he began to study perceptions of Africa in Western scholarship, before returning to Nsukka in 1976.
In 1987, after winning a host of literary awards, he released his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, which was nominated for the Booker Prize.
In 1990 Achebe was in a car accident in Lagos that left him paralysed from the waist down. He returned to academe in the US at Bard College in New York state, then Brown University in Rhode Island, and in 2007 won the Man Booker International Prize in recognition of his literary career. South African writer Nadine Gordimer, one of the judges, described him as "the father of modern African literature".
Last year he published There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. His account ends on a critical note, denouncing what he saw as the corruption and incompetence of Nigeria's politicians.
Achebe is survived by Okoli and their four children.
OBITUARY
Chinua Achebe
Writer.
Born Ogidi, Nigeria, November 16, 1930.
Died Boston, US, March 21, aged 82.


Source:The Times