Chinua Achebe: Africa ’ s literary lion
IT is perhaps a fitting irony that on South Africa’s Human Rights Day, news began to break in Nigeria of the death of Africa’s most widely read novelist, Chinua Achebe. Achebe had been a tireless campaigner for human rights for more than half a century and believed, as he once told the Paris Review, that “writers are not only writers, they are also citizens . . . My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve humanity. Not to indict”.
The author of five novels as well as essays, short stories and children’s books, Achebe was regarded as the father of African literature thanks to his first novel, Things Fall Apart, which was published in 1958. It has been translated into more than 50 languages, has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and is the most widely read African novel to date. The story of Okonowo, an Igbo yam farmer in Nigeria in the 19th century during the early days of British colonialism, the novel was described by fellow Nigerian writer and Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka as “the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character rather than . . . as the white man would see him”.
Nelson Mandela once said that Achebe’s writing “brought Africa to the rest of the world” and that he was
1930-2013
“the writer in whose company the prison walls came down”. Nadine Gordimer described his work as “a joy and an illumination to read”.
As one of the founders of the Heinemann African Writers Series, Achebe was hugely instrumental in bringing the work of African writers to the world. Through his academic work he made a significant contribution to the field of African Studies, most famously in his 1975 lecture on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which he described the author as “a bloody racist”.
He was also a critic of the corruption that ravaged his beloved Nigeria in the wake of independence from colonial rule in 1960.
Born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was the fifth of six sons of an evangelist father who, with Achebe’s mother, spent 35 years travelling the country spreading the gospel.
A gifted student, Achebe devoured literature from an early age and studied it as part of his degree at the University College of Ibadan. Here he read stories in which, as he told the Paris Review, “[ I] didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of the savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people . . . That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter . . . Once I realised that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions”.
After leaving Nigeria with his wife and four children in the aftermath of the Biafran war, Achebe spent his remaining years teaching in the US, most recently at Brown University. He returned regularly to Nigeria and it was there, in 1990, that he was involved in a car accident that left him paralysed from the waist down.
Four of his five novels were published by 1966. In 1987 Achebe was short-listed for the Booker prize for his fifth and final novel, Anthills of the Savannah. In 2007 he was awarded the inaugural Man Booker international prize. His most recent book, There Was A Country, is a memoir of his experiences as an ambassador for the Biafran government.
Achebe said that each of his novels tried to be different to reflect the complexity of the human story, a position captured in a saying from Igbo culture that he quoted in an interview: “If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you’re rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world ’ s stories should be told — from many different perspectives. ”— Tymon Smith