Today we discuss literary giant and legendary writer of Africa, Chinua Achebe. Professor Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe, 16 November 1930 -21 March 2013.
He was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), considered his masterpiece is the most widely read book in modern African literature. He wrote Things Fall Apart at age 28.
Things Fall Apart is one of the most important books in African literature, selling over 20 million copies around the world, it was translated into 57 languages, making Chinua Achebe the most translated African writer of all time.
Things Fall Apart, in recognition of its universality, appears in the Bokklubben World Library collection “proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club.
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This list endeavors to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods. Things Fall Apart is also included in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s list of “12 Novels considered to be the ‘Greatest Book Ever Written.
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in south-eastern Nigeria, Chinua Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan). He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures and began writing stories as a university student.
After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987).
Storytelling is a mainstay of the Igbo tradition and an integral part of the community. As such, the style of Professor Achebe’s fictional stories draws heavily on the oral tradition of the Igbo people. He weaves folk tales into the fabric of his stories, illuminating community values in both the content and the form of the storytelling.
The tale about the Earth and Sky in Things Fall Apart, for example, emphasizes the interdependency of the masculine and the feminine. Another trademark of Achebe’s style is the use of proverbs, which often illustrate the values of the Igbo tradition, he sprinkles them throughout the narratives, emphasizing points made in the conversations.
Professor Chinua Achebe is referred to as “the father of modern African writing and Africa’s greatest storyteller. Many books and essays have been written about his works over the past fifty years. In 1992, he became the first living writer to be represented in the Everyman’s Library collection published by Alfred A. Knopf. Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.
Chinua Achebe provided a “blueprint” for African writers of succeeding generations. In 1982, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Kent. At the ceremony, professor Robert Gibson said that the Nigerian writer “is now revered as Master by the younger generation of African writers and it is to him, they regularly turn for counsel and inspiration. Outside of Africa, his impact resonates strongly in literary circles.
Novelist Margaret Atwood called him “a magical writer one of the greatest of the twentieth century”. Poet Maya Angelou lauded Things Fall Apart as a book wherein “all readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents and friends and themselves along Nigerian roads”.
Nelson Mandela, recalling his time as a political prisoner, once referred to Achebe as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down”, and that his work Things Fall Apart inspired him to continue the struggle to end apartheid. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has noted that Achebe’s work inspired her to become a writer and “sparked her love affair with African literature”.
Chinua Achebe was the recipient of over 30 honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United States, including Dartmouth College, Harvard, and Brown University.
He was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, an Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982), a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the Nigerian National Order of Merit (Nigeria’s highest honor for academic work), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Man Booker International Prize 2007 and the 2010 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. He was appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations Population Fund in 1999.
We are deeply inspired.