Chinua Achebe: Father of African Literature and Voice of a Continent

Introduction

In the long and complex history of world literature, few writers have accomplished what Chinua Achebe accomplished with a single novel. When Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958, it did not merely introduce a new author to the reading public; it changed the terms on which African life, African history, and African humanity could be discussed in the English language. Before Achebe, the African in Western fiction was largely a figure of background, a presence defined by what he lacked in comparison to Europeans, a symbol of darkness and primitivity against which the European protagonist could measure his own civilization. After Achebe, the African was a full human being with an interior life, a complex social world, a set of values and traditions worthy of serious examination, and a history that had been disrupted and damaged by forces that were neither divine nor inevitable but were human, contingent, and therefore subject to moral evaluation.

Achebe achieved this revolution in literary perspective not by abandoning craft but by bringing to bear on the African experience the full resources of the English language and of novelistic form, while filling those forms with content, character, dialogue, and moral vision that were profoundly and specifically Igbo. He created something genuinely new: a literature that was rooted in African oral tradition, grounded in the specific social and spiritual world of the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria, and simultaneously accessible to readers across the world because it engaged universal themes of identity, belonging, conflict, and the terrible costs of pride and rigidity in the face of change.

The achievement would have been remarkable enough if Achebe had written only Things Fall Apart. But he went on to produce a body of work that continued to examine, from multiple angles and across multiple generations, the experience of Nigeria and Africa under the weight of colonialism, independence, and the painful complexities of the postcolonial condition. Through five novels, a collection of short stories, poetry, essays, and a memoir of the Nigerian Civil War, he remained one of the most important literary and intellectual voices in Africa for more than five decades. He taught at universities in America, engaged with the global literary and intellectual community, fought political battles through his writings, and refused, even when confined to a wheelchair, to be anything less than fully present to the world he had spent his life describing and defending.

He was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in the town of Ogidi in what is now Anambra State, Nigeria, and he died on March 21, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-two. In between those dates lies one of the most significant literary lives of the twentieth century, a life that touched nearly every major event in modern Nigerian and African history and that produced a body of work whose influence has shaped the way the world understands Africa and whose importance to African readers cannot be overstated.

Origins: Ogidi, Igbo Culture, and a Christian Household

The town of Ogidi in which Achebe was born and raised sits in what is now Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria, in the heartland of Igbo country. The Igbo people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, numbering in the tens of millions and distributed across a wide area of southeastern Nigeria. Their society, as Achebe was to describe it in extraordinary detail in his fiction, was organized around villages and clans, governed through a complex system of titled men, age groups, and community assemblies, and animated by a rich spiritual life that involved numerous deities, ancestor veneration, oracle consultation, and elaborate ceremonies marking the major transitions of individual and communal life.