Nigerian statesman dies
Chinua Achebe, 82, helped define country after revolution,
The opening sentence was as simple, declarative and revolutionary as a line out of Hemingway:
“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond,” Chinua Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart.
Africans, the Nigerian author announced more than 50 years ago, had their own history, their own celebrities and reputations.
Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident, who died at age 82 after a brief illness, continued for decades to rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country.
Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary change in Nigeria, from independence to dictatorship to the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960s.
He knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the United States, but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honours from a government he refused to accept.
Even in traffic today in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, hawkers sell pirated copies of his recent civil war memoir.
“What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war — ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery,” wrote Achebe, whose death was confirmed Friday by his literary agent, Andrew Wylie.
His eminence worldwide was rivalled only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and a handful of others.
Achebe was a moral and literary model for countless Africans and a profound influence on such U.S. writers as Ha Jin, Junot Diaz and Morrison, who once called Achebe’s work an “education” for her and “liberating in a way nothing had been before.”
His public life began in his mid20s. He was a resident of London when he completed his handwritten manuscript for Things Fall Apart, a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman’s downfall at the hands of British colonialists.
Turned down by several publishers, the book was finally accepted by Heinemann and released in 1958 with a first printing of 2,000.
The book’s initial review in The New York Times ran less than 500 words, but the novel soon became among the most important books of the 20th century, a universally acknowledged starting point for postcolonial, indigenous African fiction.