Chinua Achebe

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Lore & Background

Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe on 16 November 1930 in Saint Simon's Church, Nneobi, near the Igbo village of Ogidi, Colonial Nigeria. His father Isaiah Okafo Achebe was a teacher and evangelist, and his mother Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam was a vegetable farmer and leader among church women. His childhood was influenced by both Igbo traditional culture and colonial Christianity. He excelled in school and attended what is now the University of Ibadan, where he became fiercely critical of how Western literature depicted Africa. He abandoned medicine to study English, history, and theology, a switch which lost him his scholarship and required extra tuition fees. His debut as an author was in 1950 when he wrote a piece for the University Herald entitled 'Polar Undergraduate'. He served as the Herald's editor during the 1951–52 school year. After final examinations in 1953, he was awarded a second-class degree. He taught for four months at the Merchants of Light school at Oba, then moved to Lagos in 1954 to work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), assigned to the Talks Department to prepare scripts for oral delivery.

Reader's Guide

Achebe sought to escape the colonial perspective that framed African literature, drawing from Igbo traditions, Christian influences, and the clash of Western and African values to create a uniquely African voice. He wrote in and defended the use of English to reach a broad audience. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) garnered international attention, and he published four further novels in less than 10 years through Heinemann, with whom he began the Heinemann African Writers Series, galvanizing the careers of African writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Flora Nwapa. In 1975 he gave a controversial lecture, 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness', published in The Massachusetts Review, which featured criticism of Albert Schweitzer and Joseph Conrad, whom Achebe described as 'a thoroughgoing racist'. He supported Biafran independence when the region broke away from Nigeria in 1967 and acted as ambassador for the people of the movement. After the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon became disillusioned by his frustration over the continuous corruption and elitism he witnessed. A car crash in 1990 left him partially paralyzed, and he stayed in the US in a nineteen-year tenure at Bard College as a professor of Languages and Literature. After winning the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, from 2009 until his death he was professor of African studies at Brown University. His work has been extensively analyzed and covers themes of culture, colonialism, masculinity, femininity, politics, and history.

Did You Know?

• Achebe was baptised Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe; his father Isaiah was a teacher and evangelist, and his mother Janet was a vegetable farmer and leader among church women.
• He decided to become a writer after reading Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary, because of the book's portrayal of its Nigerian characters as either savages or buffoons.
• Achebe abandoned medicine to study English, history, and theology, a switch that lost him his scholarship and required extra tuition fees.
• In 1975 he gave a controversial lecture, 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness', in which he described Joseph Conrad as 'a thoroughgoing racist'.
• After a car crash in 1990 left him partially paralyzed, he spent nineteen years at Bard College as a professor of Languages and Literature.