Things Fall Apart: Africa’s literary grandmaster Achebe dies at 82
23 March 2013 7:16 AM IST
Chinua Achebe, Africa’s jewel and the globally venerated Nigerian writer, statesman and dissident, who birthed modern African writing with his luminous Things Fall Apart, has died. He breathed last on 22 March, in a Boston hospital. Achebe died following a brief illness, said his agent, Andrew Wylie. ‘He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him,’ Wylie said.
It can be said that Achebe’s own life reflected the trajectory of the transformation of contemporary literature emanating from Africa. Achebe penned novels, stories and essays to lay claim on and repossess the history of his native country. His international reputation was matched only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, who have been credited with changing the face of literature.
Achebe was a formidable moral force for innumerable Africans who had a profound influence on generations of writers worldwide, including those from India.
Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary change in Nigeria, from sovereignty to dictatorship to the catastrophic war between his country and the seceding Biafra in the late 1960s. Although, he spent much of his adult life in the United States, he always advocated the reinstitution of democracy in Nigeria.
His public life as an author started when he was a resident of London in his mid-20s and finished Things Fall Apart, a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman’s downfall at the hands of British colonialists, now universally acknowledged as the first signpost for postcolonial, indigenous African fiction.
‘It would be impossible to say how Things Fall Apart influenced African writing,’ the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed. ‘It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn’t only play the game, he invented it.’
Achebe had a love-hate relationship with much of Western literature about Africa, and he locked horns with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darknes,s which in Achebe’s opinion, was the ultimate example of how deep the waters of racism runs and how even a great Western mind could diminish a different culture to mere barbarism and menace, only a backdrop for the corruption of the European soul.
Achebe continued his Africa trilogy with A Man of the People and Arrow of God, other than penning short stories, poems, children’s stories and a political satire, The Anthills of Savannah, a 1987 release that was the last full-length fiction to come out in his lifetime.
In a glaring omission on the part of the global literary fraternity, Achebe never was conferred the Nobel Prize, but in 2007 he received the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honour for lifetime achievement.
He was a native of Ogidi, Nigeria, and regarded his life as a confluence of conflicting cultures, much like ‘two types of music’ running through his mind, those of Ibo legends and literary musings of Charles Dickens.
It can be said that Achebe’s own life reflected the trajectory of the transformation of contemporary literature emanating from Africa. Achebe penned novels, stories and essays to lay claim on and repossess the history of his native country. His international reputation was matched only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, who have been credited with changing the face of literature.
Achebe was a formidable moral force for innumerable Africans who had a profound influence on generations of writers worldwide, including those from India.
Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary change in Nigeria, from sovereignty to dictatorship to the catastrophic war between his country and the seceding Biafra in the late 1960s. Although, he spent much of his adult life in the United States, he always advocated the reinstitution of democracy in Nigeria.
His public life as an author started when he was a resident of London in his mid-20s and finished Things Fall Apart, a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman’s downfall at the hands of British colonialists, now universally acknowledged as the first signpost for postcolonial, indigenous African fiction.
‘It would be impossible to say how Things Fall Apart influenced African writing,’ the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed. ‘It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn’t only play the game, he invented it.’
Achebe had a love-hate relationship with much of Western literature about Africa, and he locked horns with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darknes,s which in Achebe’s opinion, was the ultimate example of how deep the waters of racism runs and how even a great Western mind could diminish a different culture to mere barbarism and menace, only a backdrop for the corruption of the European soul.
Achebe continued his Africa trilogy with A Man of the People and Arrow of God, other than penning short stories, poems, children’s stories and a political satire, The Anthills of Savannah, a 1987 release that was the last full-length fiction to come out in his lifetime.
In a glaring omission on the part of the global literary fraternity, Achebe never was conferred the Nobel Prize, but in 2007 he received the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honour for lifetime achievement.
He was a native of Ogidi, Nigeria, and regarded his life as a confluence of conflicting cultures, much like ‘two types of music’ running through his mind, those of Ibo legends and literary musings of Charles Dickens.
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