Igbo storytelling turned into Africa's most read novel
Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe made Things Fall Apart (1958) the most studied African novel worldwide, then built an African Trilogy while broadcasting in Lagos and later teaching at Brown. He defended writing in English, drew on Igbo oral forms, and famously challenged Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 near the Igbo village of Ogidi, then part of the British colony of Nigeria, and was baptised Albert Chinụalụmọgụ. His father Isaiah worked as a teacher and evangelist; his mother Janet, a blacksmith's daughter from Awka, grew vegetables and led the women of the church. At home the tales told by his mother and his sister Zinobia sat alongside his father's books, among them an Igbo rendering of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. He started primary school at St Philips' in 1936 and moved on to Government College Umuahia.
In 1948 he entered the first intake of University College, Ibadan, the country's first university, on a bursary to study medicine. Reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson turned him against the way Western fiction portrayed Africa, and he resolved to write instead. His debut, a 1950 piece called Polar Undergraduate, ran in the University Herald, which he went on to edit. A second-class degree in 1953 rattled him; after four months teaching at a run-down school in Oba he left for Lagos in 1954 to prepare radio talks for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.
The teeming city, full of newcomers from the villages, pushed him to begin a novel when African fiction in English was scarce, with Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi the notable exceptions. On a 1956 BBC training trip to London, the novelist Gilbert Phelps asked to pass the manuscript to his publishers, but Achebe refused because he felt it needed more work. Back home he trimmed it to the story of Okonkwo, a yam farmer weighed down by his father's debts as colonial rule arrives, and borrowed its title from a Yeats poem.
Things Fall Apart came out in 1958 and became the most read, taught and translated African novel, later joined in the African Trilogy by No Longer at Ease, from 1960, and Arrow of God, from 1964. Achebe argued that English let him reach a wide readership, and his 1975 lecture on racism in Conrad's novella caused a storm. A titled Igbo chief whose prose draws on oral tradition, he won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize and taught African studies at Brown University from 2009 until he died on 21 March 2013.
Source: Chinua Achebe
