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“Something dreadful has happened,” novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in her essay Igbo Elegy on Hearing of the Passing of Professor Chinua Achebe. Achebe’s spiritual heirs have charted astounding new literary territory and are receiving major recognition as among the most inventive writers working today. “The popularity of Things Fall Apart in my own society can be explained simply,” Achebe once said, “because my people are seeing themselves virtually for the first time in the story… this was the first time we were seeing ourselves, as autonomous individuals, rather than half-people, or as Conrad would say, ‘rudimentary souls.’ We are not rudimentary at all, we are full-fledged souls.”įollowing Achebe’s death, Wole Soyinka (winner of Africa’s first Nobel Prize in literature) and John Pepper Clark – two of the ‘pioneer quartet of contemporary Nigerian literature’, along with Achebe and the late Christopher Okigbo – issued a joint statement honouring his works for “their enduring testimony to the domination of the human spirit over the forces of repression, bigotry and retrogression.” But, they wrote, “we take consolation in the young generation of writers to whom the baton has been passed.” If Achebe was the trail-blazer, his Nigerian-born literary descendants – the most notable among them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ben Okri and Chris Abani – are distinctive originals whose work is built upon the freedom to explore an infinite number of storytelling forms and invent a few of their own. It stripped away the colonial scrim, gave authority to a voice arising from centuries of cultural tradition that predated European contact and served as the catalyst for postcolonial literature the world over. His landmark novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 when he was 28, follows a traditional village patriarch in the 19Ĭentury, who experiences the arrival of Christian missionaries in what is now Nigeria.

Achebe said at first he was seduced by the book, but then "realized how terribly terribly wrong it was to portray my people - any people - from that attitude." Things Fall Apart presents colonialism from the perspective of Africans.When the legendary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe died aged 82 on 21 March 2013, tributes poured from around the globe. In a 2009 interview with All Things Considered, Achebe talked about his book in relation to Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, which looked at colonialism through the eyes of an Englishman. Many of his fans feel that the award-winning writer was passed over for and should have won a Nobel prize. He passed up national honors in protest.Īchebe taught Africana Studies at Brown University and before that at Bard College in New York. It is often cited as the most read book in modern African literature and has sold more than 12 million copies.Īchebe also was an essayist and an outspoken critic of successive Nigerian governments, poor leadership and institutionalised corruption. Achebe's masterpiece has graced countless school and college syllabuses and is translated into fifty languages worldwide. How?Īchebe, 82, played a critical role in establishing post-colonial African literature and is known to students all over the continent for his seminal novel, Things Fall Apart. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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