Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) was a Nigerian novelist whose 1958 debut, Things Fall Apart, became modern African literature's most widely read work. He served the Biafran government during Nigeria's 1967–1970 civil war, later recounting it in his 2012 memoir There Was a Country. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 and died in Boston in 2013.

Early life and education

Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on 16 November 1930 in Ogidi, in what is now Anambra State, in south-eastern Nigeria, among the igbo people ^S1. He won a scholarship to Government College Umuahia at the age of 14, and in 1948 entered University College Ibadan — then an affiliate of the University of London and the first university in the territory — as part of its founding cohort of students, graduating with a degree in English literature in 1953 ^S2. In 1954 he joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos as a talks producer, travelling to London in 1957 for further training at the BBC's staff school before returning to Nigeria, where he was appointed the service's director of external broadcasting in 1961 ^S2

Things Fall Apart and the early novels

His debut novel, Things Fall Apart, appeared in 1958 from the London publisher Heinemann, which went on to build its influential African Writers Series partly around its success; the book follows the wrestler and farmer Okonkwo through the disruption of a fictional Igbo village community by British colonial administration and Christian missionary activity in the late nineteenth century ^S1. It has since sold more than 20 million copies and been translated into more than fifty languages, making it the most widely read single work of modern African fiction ^S1. Achebe followed it with three further novels set in Nigeria across the colonial and early independence periods — No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966) — before civil war interrupted his fiction writing for two decades ^S1^S2

The Nigerian Civil War and Biafra

When Nigeria's Eastern Region declared itself the independent Republic of Biafra in 1967, Achebe backed the secession and served the Biafran government through the war that followed, until Biafra's surrender in January 1970 ^S2. Shortly before the war, in Lagos, he had co-founded the publishing venture Citadel Press with the poet Christopher Okigbo, who was killed fighting for Biafra in 1967 ^S1. Achebe did not return to sustained fiction after the war; instead, the conflict shadowed his writing for more than four decades until he addressed it directly in his final book, the memoir There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, published by Penguin in October 2012 — a work its publisher describes as combining "history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection" ^S3

Academic career and later life

After the war Achebe took a post at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1971, before a five-year professorship in Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1972 to 1976 ^S1^S2. He went on to teach for some fifteen years at Bard College in New York state and, from 2009, held the position of David and Marianna Fisher University Professor at Brown University ^S1. A car accident in Nigeria in 1990 left him paralysed from the waist down and reliant on a wheelchair for the rest of his life, prompting his subsequent relocation to the United States ^S1

Man Booker International Prize and a rejected label

In 2007 Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, a career-achievement honour then judged by Elaine Showalter, Nadine Gordimer and Colm Tóibín, ahead of a shortlist that had included Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan ^S7. Achebe has often been described in reviews, obituaries and prize citations as the "father" or "founding father" of (modern) African literature — a characterisation this article attributes rather than asserts, since Achebe himself objected to it ^S1^S5^S6. In a 2009 interview reported by The Guardian, he made clear his dislike of the label, regarding it as inaccurate given earlier Nigerian and African writers who had published before him ^S6

Death and legacy

Achebe died on 21 March 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 82, after an unspecified illness ^S4. His body was returned to Nigeria and buried in his hometown of Ogidi, where thousands of mourners attended his funeral ^S5. Alongside Things Fall Apart, his wider body of essays, poetry and fiction — and his role, however contested its exact framing, in establishing a body of postcolonial Nigerian literature written in English — remains central to how nigerian literature is taught and discussed internationally ^S1^S2