Chinua Achebe, The Father of Modern African Literature

By Sharon Gatebi.

Who is Chinua Achebe?

The late Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is a famous Nigerian novelist, poet and also a critic who is regarded as a central figure in modern literature,he is best know for his influential works that explore themes of identity, culture, and also colonialism.  What made Chinua Achebe to become famous was his first novel “Things fall apart” that explained about the complexities of Africans identity in the face of colonisation.

Who is Chinua Achebe?

Chinua Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 in Saint Simon's Church, Nneobi, which was near the Igbo village of Ogidi that was a British Colony of Nigeria at that time.Chinua Achebe grew up embracing the traditions of the people of Igbo village which was story telling. He eagerly participated in the village events such as masquerade ceremonies, which he would later recreate later in his novels and stories. In 1936, Achebe  started his primary education in St Philips' Central School in the Akpakaogwe region of Ogidi for his primary education.Despite his protests, he spent a week in the religious class for young children, but was quickly moved to a higher class after the school's chaplain took note that he was very his intelligent.

Achebe later went ahead with his secondary education at the prestigious Government College Umuahia, in Nigeria which in the present-day known as Abia State. Achebe then enrolled in Nekede Central School, outside of Owerri, in 1942 where he did his finall examination giving him a chance to enroll into two collages.

In 1948,Achebe was admitted to the University Collage now known as University of Ibadan and which was the first University to be open in Nigeria in the preparation of the countries independence,the University was also an associate to the University of London. The famous poet and novelist was lucky since he got a fully funded scholarship to study medicine.  During his studies, Achebe became critical of Western literature about Africa, particularly Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness” He later decided to become a writer after reading “Mister Johnson’ by Joyce Cary because  the book's that portrayed its Nigerian characters as either savages or even more so buffoons. Achebe recognised his dislike for the African protagonist as a sign of the author's cultural ignorance. 

He abandoned medicine to study English, history, and theology, a switch which made him to loose his scholarship and required him extra tuition fees.which was later then compensated by the government whom provided a bursary, and his family donated money for his education.

Achebe's started his journey as an author in 1950 in the University where he wrote a piece for the university's magazine,entitled "Polar Undergraduate"which used irony and humour to celebrate the intellectual vigour of his fellow classmates. He then followed with writing other essays and letters about philosophy and freedom in academia, some of which were published in another campus magazine called The Bug.

. He also served as the Herald's editor during the 1951–52 school year.Achebe wrote his first short story that year, "In a Village Church" (1951), which was an amusing look at the Igbo synthesis between life in rural Nigeria with Christian institutions and icons.

The other short stories he wrote was during his time at Ibadan which included "The Old Order in Conflict with the New" (1952) and "Dead Men's Path" (1953) which examined the  conflicts between tradition and modernity with an eye toward dialogue and understanding on both sides. When the professor Geoffrey Parrinder arrived at the university to teach comparative religion, Achebe began to explore the fields of Christian history and African traditional religions.

After the final examinations at Ibadan in year 1953, Achebe was awarded a second-class degree,not receiving the highest level, he was uncertain how to proceed and after graduating he decided to returned to his hometown of Ogidi. While pondering possible career paths, Achebe was visited by a friend from the university, who convinced him to apply for an English teaching position at a school in Oba. It was a school that was give the name ”bad bush” because the people thought that the school was built in a land that had been tainted by unfriendly spirits. 

As a teacher he urged his students to read extensively and be original in their work.The students did not have access to the newspapers that they would read as a students, so Achebe made his own available in the classroom. He taught in Oba for four months and later he left the institution in 1954 and moved to Lagos to work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service radio network started in 1933 by the colonial government. He was assigned to the Talks Department to prepare scripts for oral delivery. This helped him master the subtle nuances between written and spoken language, a skill that helped him later to write realistic dialogue.

While in Lagos Achebe began to work on a novel which was influenced by the social and political activities that happened around him, although this was challenging since very little African fiction had been written in English Achebe did not give up but took it as a challage.In 1956, Achebe was selected to attend a staff training school for the BBC,this trip outside Nigeria was a great opportunity for Achebe to advance his technical production skills. During his visit in London he met the novelist Gilbert Phelps whom offered the manuscript and asked him to show his work to the editor and also publishers but Achebe declined insisting it needed more work.

When Chinua Achebe returned back to Nigeria he continued to work on his novel which was called “Things Fall Apart” where he edited a line in the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. He then cut away the second and third sections of the book, leaving only the story of a yam farmer named Okonkwo who lives during the colonization of Nigeria and struggles with his father's debtor legacy. He also added sections that improved various chapters, and restructured the prose.

The novel was sent to several publishing houses, some rejected it immediately claiming that fiction from African writers had no market potential but an educational adviser, Donald MacRae, read the book and reported to the company that: "This is the best novel I have read since the war." When Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, Achebe was promoted at the NBS and put in charge of the network's Eastern region coverage. That same year Achebe began dating Christiana Chinwe Okoli, a woman who had grown up in the area and who had also joined the NBS staff when he arrived. The couple later moved to Enugu and began to work on his administrative duties.

In 1960 Achebe published a book by the name” No Longer at Ease” a novel about a civil servant named Obi, grandson of “Things Fall Apart's” a main character, who is embroiled in the corruption of Lagos.

Obi undergoes the same turmoil as much of the Nigerian youth of his time which was the clash between the traditional culture of his clan, family, and home village against his government job and modern society. later that year, Achebe got awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for six months of travel. Achebe used the fellowship to tour East Africa. He first travelled to Kenya, where he was required to complete an immigration form by checking a box indicating his ethnicity of European, Asiatic or Arab he them Continued to Tanganyika and Zanzibar now united in Tanzania, he was frustrated by the  attitude he observed among non-African hotel clerks and social elites. Achebe found in his travels that Swahili was gaining prominence as a major African language. Radio programs were broadcast in Swahili, and its use was widespread in the countries he visited. 

On his return to Nigeria in 1961, Achebe was promoted at the NBS to the position of Director of External Broadcasting and one of his primary duties was to help create the Voice of Nigeria (VON) network. Later Chinua Achebe and  Christie Chinwe Okoli got married on September 10 the same year and had they were blessed by four children who were born between the year 1962-1970, they had two daughters named Chinelo and Nwando, and twin sons named Ikechukwu and Chidis. 

The same year he attended an executive conference of African writers in English at the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. He met with literary figures where he even read novel written by a student named James Ngugi later known as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o called Weep Not, Child. Impressed, he sent it to Alan Hill at Heinemann, which published it two years later to coincide with its paperback line of books from African writers.

In December 1962  Achebe published an essay entitled "Where Angels Fear to Tread” in the Nigeria Magazine in reaction to critiques African work was receiving from international authors.. He lashed out at those who critiqued African writers from the outside, saying: "no man can understand another whose language he does not speak. In September 1964 he attended the Commonwealth Literature conference at the University of Leeds, presenting his essay "The Novelist as Teacher".

In 1964, Achebe's third book, “Arrow of God” was published his idea for the novel came in 1959, when Achebe heard the story of a Chief Priest being imprisoned by a District Officer. He later drew further inspiration a year later when he viewed a collection of Igbo objects excavated from the area by archaeologist Thurstan Shaw; Achebe was startled by the cultural sophistication of the artefacts. When an acquaintance showed him a series of papers from colonial officers, Achebe combined these strands of history and began work on “Arrow of God”.

Later in the year 1966 Achebe published his fourth novel, A Man of the People, it explained the satire set in an unnamed African state which had just attained independence, the novel follows a teacher named Odili Samalu from the village of Anata who opposes a corrupt Minister of Culture named Nanga for his Parliament seat. The ending of his novel had brought Achebe to the attention of the Nigerian Armed Forces, who suspected him of having foreknowledge of the coup. When he received word of the pursuit, he sent his wife (who was pregnant) and children on a boat through a series of unseen creeks to the Eastern stronghold of Port Harcourt.

They arrived safely, but unfortunately Christie suffered a miscarriage at the journey's end. Chinua rejoined with his familly soon afterwards in Ogidi. These cities were safe from military incursion because they were in the southeast, a part of the region that would later secede.

In May 1967, the southeastern region of Nigeria broke away to form the Republic of Biafra that was in July where the Nigerian military attacked to suppress what it considered an unlawful rebellion. The Achebe family narrowly escaped the war, including a bombing of their house. later that year In August 1967, Okigbo was killed fighting in the war this affected Achebe and in 1971 he wrote "Dirge for Okigbo",  which was in Igbo language but later translated to English.

The beginning of 1970 saw the end of the state of Biafra. On 12 January, the military surrendered to Nigeria, and Achebe returned with his family to Ogidi, where their home had been destroyed. He took a job at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and immersed himself once again in academia. He was unable to accept invitations to other countries,because the Nigerian government revoked his passport due to his support for Biafra.

After the war, Achebe helped start two magazines in 1971,the literary journal Okike, a forum for African art, fiction, and poetry. Achebe and the Okike committee later established another cultural magazine which was  “Uwa Ndi Igbo” that was to showcase the indigenous stories and oral traditions of the Igbo community. He later handed over the editorship of Okike to Onuora Osmond Enekwe, and was then assisted by Amechi Akwanya. In February 1972, Chinua Achebe released “Girls at War” a collection of short stories ranging in time from his undergraduate days to the recent bloodshed. It was the 100th book in Heinemann's African Writers Series.

In September 1972 Achebe was offered a professorship in the University of Massachusetts Amherst where the familly later rellocated to the United States. Their youngest daughter was displeased with her nursery school, and the family soon learned that her frustration involved language. Achebe helped her face what he called the "alien experience" by telling her stories during the car trips to and from school. Achebe then expanded his criticism when he presented a Chancellor's Lecture at Amherst on 18 February 1975, " Conrad's Heart of Darkness". Decrying Joseph Conrad as a racist",Achebe asserted that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness it dehumanises Africans, rendering Africa as "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril."

Retirement and politics

After his service at UMass Amherst and a visiting professorship at the University of Connecticut, Achebe returned to the University of Nigeria in 1976, where he held a chair in English until his retirement in which was 1981,When he returned to the University of Nigeria, he hoped to accomplish three goals that was to finish the novel he had been writing, renew the native publication of Okike, and further his study of Igbo culture. In October 1979, Achebe was awarded the first-ever Nigerian National Merit Award. And later After his 1981 retirement, he devoted more of his time to edit Okike and became active with the left-leaning People's Redemption Party (PRP). In 1983, he became the party's deputy national vice-president. Achebe then published a book called “The Trouble with Nigeria” to coincide with the upcoming elections,he spent most of the 1980s delivering speeches, attending conferences, and working on his sixth novel. In 1986 he was elected president-general of the Ogidi Town Union he reluctantly accepted but then began a three-year term. In the same year, he also stepped down as editor of Okike.

Anthills and paralysis

In 1987 Achebe released his fifth novel “Anthills of the Savannah” about a military coup in the fictional West African nation of Kangan. The novel was a powerful fusion of myth, legend and modern styles, Achebe had written a book that is seen as a powerful antidote to the cynical commentators from 'overseas' who see nothing ever new out of Africa. Unfortunately as Achebe was riding in his car to Lagos on March 22 1990,he got into a fatal accident with his son who got minor injuries but Achebe himself was not as fortunate he got paralyzed from the waist down and would require the use of a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Even after the unfortunate events Soon afterwards, Achebe became the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York where he held the position for more than fifteen years. Throughout the 1990s, Achebe spent little time in Nigeria but remained actively involved in the country's politics, denouncing the usurpation of power by General Sani Abacha.

Late years and death 

In 2000 Achebe published a book by the name “ Home and Exile”, a semi-biographical collection of both his thoughts on life away from Nigeria, as well as a discussion of the emerging school of Native American literature.Achebe was then awarded the Man Booker International Prize in June 2007,the award helped correct what many perceived as a great injustice to African literature, that the founding father of African literature had not won some of the key international prizes. In 2010, Achebe was then awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for $300,000, one of the richest prizes for the arts. Later in 2012, Achebe published “here Was a Country” A Personal History of Biafra. The work then re-opened discussions about the Nigerian Civil War. Umfortunately this was his last publication during his lifetime.

 Achebe died after a short illness on 21 March 2013 in Boston, United States. The New York Times described him in his obituary as "one of Africa's most widely read novelists and one of the continent's towering men of letters." The BBC wrote that he was "revered throughout the world for his depiction of life in Africa". He was buried in his hometown of Ogidi.