Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
Born	(1930-11-16) November 16, 1930 Ogidi, Nigeria
Occupation	Novelist, Poet, Short story writer
Nationality	Nigerian
Period	1958-present

Chinua Achebe (born November 16, 1930) is a Nigerian novelist and poet, an esteemed and controversial literary critic, and one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century. A diplomat in the ill-fated Biafran government of 1967-1970, Achebe's work is primarily interested in African politics, the depiction of Africa and Africans in the West, and the intricacies of pre-colonial African culture and civilization, as well as the effects of colonialization on African societies.

Achebe's 1958 magnum opus Things Fall Apart, a historical novel that considers the effects of colonialization on Igbo society, has been translated into over 50 languages. Well known for his classic critical text on Joseph Conrad, Achebe's 2001 Home and Exile reiterated his long-standing opinion that Africa and Africans were being inaccurately and unfairly marginalized by European and Western-oriented intellectuals.

Early life

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria on November 16, 1930, the son of Protestant converts. He attended Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947, and the University of Ibadan from 1948 to 1953. At the University of Ibadan, then known as the University of London, Achebe studied English, history and theology. The University of Ibadan produced a plethora of remarkable poets and authors in the years before and after Achebe's presence there, including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, John Pepper Clark, and Christopher Okigbo. Okigbo, a friend and associate of Achebe, would lose his life in the war and humanitarian catastrophe that was to befall the region during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, and many of these same intellectuals would figure prominently in either documenting or participating in the events.

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Things Fall Apart, Anchor trade paperback cover

Achebe's defining work, Things Fall Apart, was published in 1958, and is often considered among the finest novels ever written. Having sold over 10 million copies around the world, it has been translated into 50 languages, making Achebe the most translated African writer of all time. Things Fall Apart has also appeared on numerous lists of the 100 greatest novels of all time, including those published in Norway (Norwegian Book Club), England (Guardian and Observer), America (Radcliffe Publishing Course list of top 100 novels of the 20th century) and Africa (Africa's Best Books of the 20th Century). Achebe proceeded to study broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corporation, becoming the first Director of External Broadcasting at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1961.

During the civil war, he worked for the Biafran government as an ambassador, an experience that informed and inspired much of his work, including his celebrated poem, "Refugee Mother and Child."

A founding editor of Okike, Achebe was also active in the Igbo-language journal of poetry and literary criticism Uwa ndi Igbo, as well as numerous other publications. The founding editor of the African Writers Series, a body of work that has emerged as a cornerstone of postcolonial literature, Achebe was instrumental in introducing the world to new writing from Africa.

Later life

His treatise of literary criticism, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", has become one of the most influential, controversial, widely studied and debated essays of its kind in classrooms around the world. Decrying Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist", Achebe asserts that Conrad's famous novel dehumanizes Africans, rendering Africa as "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril."

Many scholars have suggested that Achebe has had to bear a heavy burden both for his criticism of Conrad, and for his more general criticism of the innate racism of European and Western civilization. Despite a lifetime as "a literary champion of his people and crusader for the dignity of the voiceless and dispossessed everywhere," Achebe has never received a Nobel Prize, a curious omission that has been criticized as perhaps owing to his acerbic criticism of "white racism".

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them.

— Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975

In criticizing Albert Schweitzer, a 1952 Nobel Peace Prize laureate himself, Achebe was attacking a man widely revered in the West for his "reverence for life", an esteemed paragon of Western liberalism; while Achebe was not the first critic to allege Schweitzer's presumption of superiority over his African patients, Achebe was perhaps the most prominent voice to articulate the criticism. Achebe may have further alienated the Nobel Prize committee with his 1985 criticism of V.S. Naipaul as "a brilliant writer who sold himself to the West... And one day he'll be 'rewarded' with maybe a Nobel Prize or something." Naipaul won a Nobel Prize in 2001.

Paralyzed from the waist down in a 1990 car accident, Achebe is currently Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Upstate New York. He is married to Professor Christie Chinwe Achebe, with whom he has four children.

Honors

Achebe is the recipient of over 30 honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States, including Dartmouth, Harvard, Brown, Southampton, Guelph, University of Toronto, University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Ife. Achebe has received numerous awards for his work, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; the New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize; the Margaret Wrong Prize; the Nigerian National Trophy in 1961; and the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2002 he was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

In 2004, Professor Achebe declined to accept the Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) - Nigeria's second highest honor - in protest of the state of affairs in his native country.

Bibliography

Works by Achebe

• Things Fall Apart, 1958
• No Longer at Ease, 1960
• The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, 1962
• Arrow of God, 1964
• A Man of the People, 1966
• Chike and the River, 1966
• Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems, 1971
• Dead Men's Path, 1972
• How the Leopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi), 1972
• Marriage Is A Private Affair
• Girls at War and Other Stories, 1973
• Christmas at Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973
• Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975
• The Flute, 1975
• The Drum, 1978
• The Trouble With Nigeria, 1984
• African Short Stories (editor, with C.L. Innes), 1985
• Anthills of the Savannah, 1988
• Hopes and Impediments, 1988
• Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (editor, with C.L. Innes), 1992
• Another Africa, 1998
• Home and Exile, 2000
• Collected Poems, 2004

References

Works about Achebe

• Agetua, John (ed.). Critics on Chinua Achebe, 1970-76 (Benin City, Nigeria: Bendel Newspapers Corp., 1977).
• Egar, Emmanuel Edame. The Rhetorical Implications of Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2000). ISBN 0-7618-1721-2
• Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe (Dakar: African Renaissance, 2001). ISBN 1-903625-10-6
• Emenyonu, Ernest N. (ed.). Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2004). ISBN 0-86543-876-5 (v. 1), ISBN 0-86543-878-1 (v. 2)
• Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biogrspenencer is cool kidaphy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). ISBN 0-253-33342-3
• Gikandi, Simon. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London : J. Currey, 1991). ISBN 0-85255-527-X
• Innes, Catherine Lynette. Chinua Achebe (Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Innes, C. L. and Bernth Lindfors (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1978). ISBN 0-914478-45-1
• Jaya Lakshmi, Rao V. Culture and Anarchy in the Novels of Chinua Achebe (Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 2003).
• Killam, G. D. The Writings of Chinua Achebe (London: Heinemann Educational, 1977). ISBN 0-435-91665-3
• Njoku, Benedict Chiaka. The Four Novels of Chinua Achebe: A Critical Study (New York: P. Lang, 1984). ISBN 0-8204-0154-4
• Ogede, Ode. Achebe and the Politics of Representation: Form Against Itself, From Colonial Conquest and Occupation to Post-Independence Disillusionment (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2001). ISBN 0-86543-774-2
• Ojinmah, Umelo. Chinua Achebe: New Perspectives (Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited, 1991). ISBN 978-2461-16-4
• Okpewho, Isidore, (ed.). Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart': A Casebook (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003). ISBN 0-19-514763-4
• Peterson, Kirsten Holst and Anna Rutherford (eds.). Chinua Achebe: A Celebration (Oxford, England: Dangeroo Press, 1991). ISBN 0-435-08060-1
• Sallah, Tijan M. and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Chinua Achebe, Teacher of Light: A Biography (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2003). ISBN 1-59221-031-7
• Yankson, Kofi E. Chinua Achebe's Novels: A Sociolinguistic Perspective (Uruowulu-Obosi, Nigeria: Pacific Publishers, 1990). ISBN 978-2347-79-5

See also

• List of African writers
• Politics in fiction

External links

• Chinua Achebe at the Internet Book List
• Chinua Achebe at the Internet Book Database of Fiction
• Chinua Achebe at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Achebe reading his poetry
• Text of a speech introducing Achebe in 1999