AP
In this January 22, 2008 photo, Nigerian-born novelist and poet Chinua
Achebe speaks about his works and his life at his home on the campus of
Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Achebe, who wrote the
classic "Things Fall Apart," has died. He was 82.
Chinua Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman
and dissident who gave literary birth to modern Africa with Things Fall Apart and continued for decades to rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country, has died. He was 82.
Mr. Achebe died following a brief illness, said his agent, Andrew Wylie.
“He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose
wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him,” Mr. Wylie
said.
As a Nigerian, Mr. Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary
change in his country, 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 honors from a
government he refused to accept.
Turned down by several publishers, Things Fall Apart was finally accepted by Heinemann and released in 1958 with a first printing of 2,000. Its 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, the prophetic union
of British letters and African oral culture.
“It would be impossible to say how Things Fall Apart influenced
African writing,” the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once
observed. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English
writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn’t only play the
game, he invented it.”
Things Fall Apart has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide
and has been translated into more than 50 languages. Mr. Achebe also was
a forceful critic of Western literature about Africa, especially Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, standard reading for millions, but
in Mr. Achebe’s opinion, a defining example of how even a great Western
mind could reduce a foreign civilization to barbarism and menace.
“Now, I grew up among very eloquent elders. In the village, or even in
the church, which my father made sure we attended, there were eloquent
speakers. So if you reduce that eloquence which I encountered to eight
words ... it’s going to be very different,” Mr. Achebe told The Associated Press
in 2008. “You know that it’s going to be a battle to turn it around, to
say to people, ‘That’s not the way my people respond in this situation,
by unintelligible grunts, and so on; they would speak.’ And it is that
speech that I knew I wanted to be written down.”
Mr. Achebe never won the Nobel Prize, which many believed he deserved,
but in 2007 he did receive the Man Booker International Prize, a
$120,000 honour for lifetime achievement. Mr. Achebe, paralysed from the
waist down since a 1990 auto accident, lived for years in a cottage
built for him on the campus of Bard College, a leading liberal arts
school north of New York City where he was a faculty member. He joined
Brown University in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature.
‘Two types of music’
Mr. Achebe, a native of Ogidi, Nigeria, regarded his life as a bartering
between conflicting cultures. He spoke of the “two types of music”
running through his mindIbo legends and the prose of Dickens. He was
also exposed to different faiths. His father worked in a local
missionary and was among the first in their village to convert to
Christianity. In Mr. Achebe’s memoir There Was a Country, he
wrote that his “whole artistic career was probably sparked by this
tension between the Christian religion” of his parents and the
“retreating, older religion” of his ancestors. He would observe the
conflicts between his father and great uncle and ponder “the essence,
the meaning, the worldview of both religions.”
For much of his life, he had a sense that he was a person of special
gifts who was part of an historic generation. Mr. Achebe was so avid a
reader as a young man that his nickname was “Dictionary.” At Government
College, Umuahia, he read Shakespeare, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson
and Jonathan Swift among others. He placed his name alongside an
extraordinary range of alumni government and artistic leaders from Jaja
Wachukwa, a future ambassador to the United Nations; to future Nobel
laureate Wole Soyinka; Achebe’s future wife (and mother of their four
children) Christine Okoli; and the poet Christopher Okigbo, a close
friend of Achebe’s who was killed during the Biafra war.
After graduating from the University College of Ibadan, in 1953, Achebe
was a radio producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp., then moved to
London and worked at the British Broadcasting Corp. He was writing
stories in college and called Things Fall Apart an act of
“atonement” for what he says was the abandonment of traditional culture.
The book’s title was taken from poet William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming, which includes the widely quoted line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
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.” Africans, Mr. Achebe had announced, had their
own history, their own celebrities and reputations. In mockery of all
the Western books about Africa, Achebe ended with a colonial official
observing Okonkwo’s fate and imagining the book he will write- “The
Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.” Mr. Achebe’s
novel was the opening of a long argument on his country’s behalf.
“Literature is always badly served when an author’s artistic insight
yields to stereotype and malice,” Mr. Achebe said during a 1998 lecture
at Harvard University that cited Joyce Cary’s “Mister Johnson” as a
special offender. “And it becomes doubly offensive when such a work is
arrogantly proffered to you as your story. Some people may wonder if,
perhaps, we were not too touchy, if we were not oversensitive. We really
were not.”
Mr. Achebe could be just as critical of his own country. The novels A Man of the People and No Longer at Ease
were stories of corruption and collapse that anticipated the Nigerian
civil war of 1967-70 and the years of mismanagement that followed. He
not only supported Biafra’s independence, but was a government envoy and
a member of a committee that was to write up the new and short-lived
country’s constitution. He would flee from Nigeria and return many times
and in 2004 refused the country’s second-highest award, the Commander
of the Order of the Federal Republic, in protest over conditions under
President Olusegun Obasanjo.
“For some time now, I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and
dismay,” he said in an open letter to the President, referring to
allegations of corruption and lawlessness in Mr. Achebe’s southeastern
home state of Anambra.
“A small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high
places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless
fiefdom. ... I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our
shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples.”
Besides his own writing, Achebe served for years as editor of
Heinemann’s “African Writer Series”, which published works by Nadine
Gordimer, Stephen Biko and others. He also edited numerous anthologies
of African stories, poems and essays. In There Was a Country, he considered the role of the modern African writer.
“What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous
African literary renaissance was overdue,” he wrote. “A major objective
was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our
continent, and to recast them through stories prose, poetry, essays, and
books for our children. That was my overall goal.”
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