His
agent in London said he had died after a brief illness. Mr. Achebe had
used a wheelchair since a car accident in Nigeria in 1990 left him
paralyzed from the waist down.
Chinua Achebe (pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) caught the world’s attention with his first novel, “Things Fall Apart.”
Published in 1958, when he was 28, the book would become a classic of
world literature and required reading for students, selling more than 10
million copies in 45 languages.
The
story, a brisk 215 pages, was inspired by the history of his own
family, part of the Ibo nation of southeastern Nigeria, a people
victimized by the racism of British colonial administrators and then by
the brutality of military dictators from other Nigerian ethnic groups.
“Things
Fall Apart” gave expression to Mr. Achebe’s first stirrings of
anti-colonialism and a desire to use literature as a weapon against
Western biases. As if to sharpen it with irony, he borrowed from the
Western canon itself in using as its title a line from Yeats’s
apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming.”
“In
the end, I began to understand,” Mr. Achebe later wrote. “There is such
a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this
privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much
where, and as, they like.”
Though
Mr. Achebe spent his later decades teaching at American universities,
most recently at Brown, his writings — novels, stories, poems, essays
and memoirs — were almost invariably rooted in the countryside and
cities of his native Nigeria. His most memorable fictional characters
were buffeted and bewildered by the competing pulls of traditional
African culture and invasive Western values.
“Things
Fall Apart,” which is set in the late 19th century, tells the story of
Okonkwo, who rises from poverty to become a wealthy farmer and Ibo
village leader. British colonial rule throws his life into turmoil, and
in the end, unable to adapt, he explodes in frustration, killing an
African in the employ of the British and then committing suicide.
The
acclaim for “Things Fall Apart” was not unanimous. Some British critics
thought it idealized precolonial African culture at the expense of the
former empire.
“An
offended and highly critical English reviewer in a London Sunday paper
titled her piece cleverly, I must admit, ‘Hurray to Mere Anarchy!’ ” Mr.
Achebe wrote in “Home and Exile,”
a 2000 collection of autobiographical essays. Some critics found his
early novels to be stronger on ideology than on narrative interest. But
his stature grew, until he was considered a literary and political beacon, influencing generations of African writers as well as many in the West.
“It
would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African
writing,” the Princeton scholarKwame Anthony Appiah once wrote. “It
would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or
Pushkin influenced Russians.”
Mr.
Appiah, a professor of philosophy, found an “intense moral energy” in
Mr. Achebe’s work, adding that it “captures the sense of threat and loss
that must have faced many Africans as empire invaded and disrupted
their lives.”
Nadine
Gordimer, the South African novelist and Nobel laureate, hailed Mr.
Achebe in a review in The New York Times in 1988, calling him “a
novelist who makes you laugh and then catch your breath in horror — a
writer who has no illusions but is not disillusioned.”
Mr.
Achebe’s political thinking evolved from blaming colonial rule for
Africa’s woes to frank criticism of African rulers and the African
citizens who tolerated their corruption and violence. Indeed, it was
Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s and then its military dictatorship in
the 1980s and ‘90s that forced Mr. Achebe abroad.
In
his writing and teaching Mr. Achebe sought to reclaim the continent
from Western literature, which he felt had reduced it to an alien,
barbaric and frightening land devoid of its own art and culture. He took
particular exception to"Heart of Darkness,"the novel byJoseph Conrad,
whom he thought “a thoroughgoing racist.”
Conrad relegated “Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind,” Mr. Achebe argued in his essay “An Image of Africa.”
“I
grew up among very eloquent elders,” he said in an interview with The
Associated Press in 2008. “In the village, or even in the church, which
my father made sure we attended, there were eloquent speakers.” That
eloquence was not reflected in Western books about Africa, he said, but
he understood the challenge in trying to rectify the portrayal.
“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,’ ” Mr. Achebe said.
“And it is that speech that I knew I wanted to be written down.”
Albert
Chinualumogu Achebe was born on Nov. 16, 1930, in Ogidi, an Ibo
village. His father became a Christian and worked for a missionary
teacher in various parts of Nigeria before returning to the village. As a
student, Mr. Achebe immersed himself in Western literature. At the
University College of Ibadan, whose professors were Europeans, he read
Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and
Tennyson. But the turning point in his education was the required
reading of"Mister Johnson,"a 1939 novel set in Nigeria and written by an
Anglo-Irishman, Joyce Cary.
The
protagonist is a docile Nigerian whose British master ultimately shoots
and kills him. Like reviewers in the Western press, Mr. Achebe’s white
professors praised it as one of the best novels ever written about
Africa. But Mr. Achebe and his classmates responded with “exasperation
at this bumbling idiot of a character,” he wrote.
He
soon joined a generation of West African writers who in the 1950s were
coming to the realization that Western literature was holding the
continent captive. A fellow Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, opened the
floodgates with his 1952 novel, “The Palm-Wine Drinkard.”
After
graduating from college in 1953, Mr. Achebe moved to London, where he
worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation while writing stories.
It was in London that he wrote “Things Fall Apart,” in longhand.
After
returning to Nigeria to revise the manuscript, he mailed it — the only
existing copy — to a London typing service, which promptly misplaced it,
filling Mr. Achebe with despair. It was discovered only months later.
Publishers
initially passed on the manuscript, doubting that African fiction would
sell, until an adviser at the Heinemann publishing house seized on it
as a work of brilliance.
In his second novel, “No Longer at Ease,”
in 1960, he tells the story of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi, who learns to
fit into British colonial society. Raised as a Christian and educated in
England, Obi abandons the countryside for a job as a civil servant in
Lagos, which was the capital at the time. Cut off from traditional
values, he succumbs to greed and in the end is prosecuted for graft.
In
his third novel, “Arrow of God” (1964), Mr. Achebe reverts to the
setting of an Ibo village in the early 20th century. The village priest,
Ezeulu, sends his son, Oduche, to be educated by Christian missionaries
in the hope that he will learn British ways and thus help protect his
community. Instead Oduche becomes a convert to colonialism and attacks
Ibo religion and culture.
The
Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran war, shattered Mr.
Achebe’s hopes for a more promising postcolonial future, and deeply
affected his literary output. The scene was set for war when, in January
1966, Ibo army officers killed the prime minister and other officials
and seized power. Seven months later, the insurgents were ousted in a
counter-coup by military commanders from the Muslim northern region.
Before
the year ended, Muslim troops had massacred some 30,000 Ibo people
living in the north. In 1967 the Ibo then seceded from Nigeria,
declaring the southeastern region the independent Republic of Biafra,
and the civil war began in earnest, raging through 1970 until government
troops invaded and crushed the secessionists.
Mr.
Achebe’s fourth novel, “A Man of the People,” published in early 1966,
had predicted this course of events with such accuracy that the military
government in Lagos decided he must have been a conspirator in the
first coup, an accusation he denied. Mr. Achebe fled, settling in
Britain with his wife, Christiana; their two sons, Ikechukwu and Chidi;
and two daughters, Chinelo and Nwando. (Information about his survivors
was not immediately available.)
After
the civil war, Mr. Achebe returned to Nigeria for two years before
accepting faculty posts in the 1970s at the University of Massachusetts
and the University of Connecticut. He returned home again in 1979 to
teach English at the University of Nigeria.
The civil war was the theme of many of his writings during these years. Among the most prominent were a book of poetry, “Beware Soul Brother” (1971), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and a short-story collection,"Girls at War,” which appeared in 1972.
But
for more than 20 years a case of writer’s block kept him from producing
another novel. He attributed the dry spell to emotional trauma that had
lingered after the civil war.
“The novel seemed like a frivolous thing to be doing,” he told The Washington Post in 1988.
That
year Mr. Achebe finally published his fifth novel, “Anthills of the
Savannah,” the story of three former school chums in a fictional country
modeled after Nigeria. One of them becomes a military dictator; another
is appointed minister of information; and the third is named editor of
the leading newspaper. All meet violent ends.
The
novel was widely admired. Discussing it in 1988 in The New York Review
of Books, the Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson wrote: “Chinua Achebe
says, with implacable honesty, that Africa itself is to blame, and that
there is no safety in excuses that place the fault in the colonial past
or in the commercial and political manipulations of the First World.”
Mr.
Achebe barely had time to savor the acclaim before the car accident
outside Lagos that injured him. He received medical treatment in London
and moved to the United States, taking a teaching post at Bard College
in the Hudson River valley, where he remained until 2009. He received
the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2007.
Last fall he published “There Was a Country: A Personal History of
Biafra.”
The
return of civilian, democratic rule to Nigeria in 1999 prompted Mr.
Achebe to visit for the first time in almost a decade. He met the newly
elected president,Olusegun Obasanjo, and cautiously praised him as the
best possible leader “at this time.” He also traveled to his native
village, Ogidi.
Mr. Achebe returned to the United States, but his heart remained in his homeland, he said.
“People
have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about
America, since I have now been living here some years,” Mr. Achebe wrote
in “Home and Exile.” His answer was “that America has enough novelists
writing about her, and Nigeria too few.”
4yrs Ago Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82
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