Icon inspired Mandela
Nigerian novelist was best known for Things Fall Apart
“I go at the pace of inspiration,” Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe once remarked.
If that somewhat measured approach to writing produced only a “limited harvest,” as Achebe himself seemed to believe, then it was limited only in the sense that the Gettysburg Address is brief.
Brief it might be, but Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is also wondrous — and the collected works of Chinua Achebe, few though they are, nonetheless chart the lifeblood of a country and a continent in a way no African writer had accomplished before: a way that’s universal.
In just five novels — among a total of 20 published books, including short stories, poems and essays — the Nigerian seemed to coax an entire literature into being, both for readers in Africa and for those in more distant lands.
“What Achebe’s work gave to me, when I was 10 years old, was permission to write stories about Nigerians,” author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun, once told Canadian literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse. “I really did not know it was possible to do that. I thought white people had to be in a book for it to be a book. And Achebe’s novels are fun. I love to fall into that world.”
Achebe died in Boston on Thursday, following what was described as a brief illness. He was 82.
“One of the great literary voices of his time, he was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him,” said a statement issued by Achebe’s family soon after his death.
Perhaps most familiar to readers in North America for his first novel, Things Fall Apart — a dagger-blade of a book that skewers the traumatic effects of British colonial rule on a Nigerian village — Achebe shied from nothing in his lifelong exploration of African culture and African people, depicting their extraordinary virtues as well as their foibles and occasional disasters.
“I speak as a black Canadian writer. This is a great loss for world literature.” GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE TORONTO’S POET LAUREATE
In Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, Achebe seemed to blame European paternalism for many of Africa’s troubles. But some three decades later, in Anthills of the Savannah, his final novel, the Nigerian wrote with equal force and conviction about the troubles that some Africans have brought upon their fellows and for which they alone are to blame.
The novel’s protagonist is newspa- per editor Ikem Osodi, who serves as a sort of sub-Saharan Everyman in a country known as Kangan — a thinly disguised Nigeria — ruled by a dictator named Sam. “It is a work in which 22 years of harsh experience, intellectual growth, self-criticism, deepening understanding and mustered discipline of skill open wide a subject to which Mr. Achebe is now magnificently equal,” wrote South African novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer in her review of the book in The New York Times. “There is only one comment left to make after turning the final page of Anthills of the Savannah: Now I know!” Almost all of Achebe’s works deal with Africa and especially Nigeria, a country that was for him both a home and in some ways a burden, as well as a turbulent source of literary inspiration and political woe. His 1966 novel, A Man of the People, ended with a description of a coup that seemingly foretold both a civil war and a bloody secessionist uprising in the Ibo homeland of Biafra, both of which occurred soon afterward — not in fiction but in fact. An Ibo himself, Achebe fell under immediate suspicion of having played a more direct role in a crisis he had only imagined. He was forced to flee Nigeria in fear for his life. It was a life lived in a not-always-easy balance between the traditional rhythms of Africa and the crosscurrents of European and North American culture, but Achebe remained true to his upbringing while serving as an unofficial ambassador representing Africa’s cities and savannahs before the postmodern melting pots of London and New York. He also took deadly aim at the arrogance and condescension often inherent in the literary depictions of Africa produced by even the most accomplished of white-skinned writers, from Joyce Cary to Joseph Conrad. Former South African president Nelson Mandela heralded Achebe as “the writer in whose company the prison walls came down.” He was also a writer who left a powerful and indelible impression upon people of all skin colours all over the world, but perhaps especially upon Africans themselves and those of the African diaspora. “Achebe was of primary importance to me,” said George Elliott Clarke, Toronto’s poet laureate and a scholar of African literature. “I speak as a black Canadian writer. This is a great loss for world literature.”