Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist whose debut Things Fall Apart became the foundational text of modern African literature in English and one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century.

Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in 1930 in the town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, in what was then a British colony. He grew up in a household where traditional Igbo culture and the Christianity of his father — a catechist for the Church Missionary Society — existed in close and not always comfortable proximity, an experience that would give his fiction its characteristic doubleness: the ability to see two worlds clearly and to take the measure of both. He studied English literature at University College, Ibadan, where he encountered the Africa of European fiction — the Africa of Conrad and Cary — and began to understand that his task as a writer would be to replace that fiction with something truer.

Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, did what had not been done before: it entered an Igbo village in pre-colonial Nigeria and rendered its social, spiritual, and moral life with full literary seriousness, from inside. The novel sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into over sixty languages, and its influence on African writing in English has been genuinely foundational — it is the text against which every subsequent African novel in the tradition positions itself, whether explicitly or not. The three novels that follow it — No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, and A Man of the People — extend the project across time, moving from the pre-colonial through the colonial to the post-independence, and together they form the most sustained literary account of what colonialism did to Igbo Nigeria ever written.

After a twenty-year silence following the Nigerian Civil War — during which he was injured in a car accident in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed — Achebe published his final novel Anthills of the Savannah in 1987, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He spent his later years teaching in the United States, most notably at Bard College and then at Brown University, and remained an active essayist and critic until his death in 2013. His essay collection An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” remains one of the most important pieces of postcolonial literary criticism, and the terms of the debate it opened have not been closed.