Even though writers like Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi had published novels early in the 1950s, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 Things Fall Apart was the one that started the African literary renaissance of the 1960s. The book, which was one of the first African novels to gain global recognition, has since been translated into 57 languages and sold over 20 million copies. It also made Achebe the most translated African writer of all time and earned him the label “patriarch of African literature.”
Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in 1930, in the region of southeastern Nigeria known as Igboland into cultural crossroads. (He dropped his first name because it was a “tribute to Victorian England”). His parents were Christian converts but other relatives still practised the traditional Igbo faith, in which people worship a variety of gods, and are believed to have their own personal guiding spirit, called a chi. This duality he lived through greatly fascinated Achebe. “The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together, like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully,” he later wrote.
The family spoke Igbo at home but Achebe started to learn English in school. It was when he was exposed to colonialist literature such as “Prester John,” John Buchan’s novel about a British adventurer in South Africa. That book has this famous line: “That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility.” It was Achebe’s first taste of erasure and racism in the ideas Westerners popularised about Africa even though he didn’t realise it at the time.
In one essay, “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” he wrote, “I did not see myself as an African to begin with. . . . The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts.”
When he was at the University College, Ibadan (Now University of Ibadan), he came across the novel “Mister Johnson,” by the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary, who had spent time as a colonial officer in Nigeria. By this time, Achebe had outgrew his admiration for the imperialists and was absolutely repulsed by the portraiture of his country Cary had painted in words. In Cary’s words, the “jealous savages . . . live like mice or rats in a palace floor”; dancers are “grinning, shrieking, scowling, or with faces which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman, like twisted bags of lard.”
Cary’s writing carried the typical colonialist tropes of the time, framing African as “unhuman” and somehow, less. That was what Achebe considered dangerous.“It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity,” he wrote later. This vision of leveraging on the moral power of fiction for change would guide all of Achebe’s future work.
After graduating from the university, he taught English at a local school for four months before securing a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBC) during the mid-fifties. This was when he started work on “Things Fall Apart”. By the time Achebe submitted the manuscript to publisher William Heinemann, African fictional novels as a form were still young. Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954) were the only African fictional works in English at the time but they only enjoyed readership within the country. Achebe’s approach represented a new take, showing the collision of old and new ways of life to potent effect.
After “Things Fall Apart” was published in 1958 and it achieved the success it did, Heinemann soon asked him to sign on as general editor of its African Writers Series in 1962. He held that position, without pay, for 10 years. He was instrumental in Heinemann publishing the works of Flora Nwapa, John Munonye, and Ayi Kwei Armah – all of whom went on to become important figures of African literature. Then came the Nigreian civil war.
His novel “A Man of the People” (1966), a political satire, had predicted the war so accurately, it was thought that he might have been in on the plot. He fully supported Biafra, travelling to London to promote awareness of the war and helped write the official declaration of the “Principles of the Biafran Revolution” in 1969. Achebe also stopped writing fiction and instead turned to poetry – “something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood.” At the end of the war, between one and two million Igbos had died.
After a 1990 accident which put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, he moved to the US and took a position as Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, just outside New York, USA. he held that position for 18 years. Next, he took a role as David and Marianna Fisher Professor and Professor of African Studies at Brown University. He held the position till his death in 2012 aged 82. Achebe was survived by his wife Christiana Chinwe Okoli and four children.
Growing up in a dichotomy of culture and politics was very instrumental in shaping Achebe’s unique worldview. He wanted the African narrative to be told by Africans and without remorse or empathy for anything else. He was a visionary who saw the world for what it was and made African literature globally relevant. Without Achebe, African literature might still be considered second-rate. Even today, his influence can still be felt in the works of many a Nigerian authors. Chimamanda Adichie, Nigeria’s biggest literary export in recent times, even lived in his old house in Nsukka with her family for a while. Adichie has spoken about discovering his work at the age of about ten. Until then, she said, “I didn’t think it was possible for people like me to be in books.”