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Chinua Achebe

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Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930.

He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centres of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.

His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad. For more than 15 years he was the Carles P. Stevenson Jr Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College; he then became the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.

Chinua Achebe wrote more than 20 books - novels, short stories, essays and collections of poetry - including Things Fall Apart (1958), which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 50 languages; Arrow of God (1964); Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (1971), winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; Anthills of the Savannah (1987), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (1988); and Home and Exile (2000).

Chinua Achebe received numerous honours from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honorary doctorates from more than 30 colleges and universities. He was also the recipient of Nigeria's highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize. He died on 22nd March 2013.

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After Empire

In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chuku, the supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which had been eavesdropping, reached Chuku first. Wanting to punish man, the toad reversed the request, and told Chuku that after death men did not want to return to the world. The god said that he would do as they wished, and when the dog arrived with the true message he refused to change his mind. Thus, men may be born again, but only in a different form.

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe recounts this myth, which exists in hundreds of versions throughout Africa, in one of his essays. Sometimes, Achebe writes, the messenger is a chameleon, a lizard, or another animal; sometimes the message is altered accidentally rather than maliciously. But the structure remains the same: men ask for immortality and the god is willing to grant it, but something goes wrong and the gift is lost forever. “It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose!” Achebe writes. “For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth . . . horrors can descend again on mankind.”

The myth holds another lesson as well—one that has been fundamental to the career of Achebe, who has been called “the patriarch of the African novel.” There is danger in relying on someone else to speak for you: you can trust that your message will be communicated accurately only if you speak with your own voice. With his masterpiece, “Things Fall Apart,” one of the first works of fiction to present African village life from an African perspective, Achebe began the literary reclamation of his country’s history from generations of colonial writers. Published fifty years ago—a new edition has just appeared, from Anchor ($10.95)—it has been translated into fifty languages and has sold more than ten million copies.

In the course of a writing life that has included five novels, collections of short stories and poetry, and numerous essays and lectures, Achebe has consistently argued for the right of Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and has attacked the representations of European writers. But he also did not reject European influence entirely, choosing to write not in his native Igbo but in English, a language that, as he once said, “history has forced down our throat.” In a country with several major languages and more than five hundred smaller ones, establishing a lingua franca was a practical and political necessity. For Achebe, it was also an artistic necessity—a way to give expression to the clash of civilizations that is his enduring theme.

Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in 1930, in the region of southeastern Nigeria known as Igboland. (He dropped his first name, a “tribute to Victorian England,” in college.) Ezenwa-Ohaeto, the author of the first comprehensive biography of Achebe, writes that the young Chinua was raised at a cultural “crossroads”: his parents were converts to Christianity, but other relatives practiced the traditional Igbo faith, in which people worship a panoply of gods, and are believed to have their own personal guiding spirit, called a chi . Achebe was fascinated by the “heathen” religion of his neighbors. “The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together, like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully,” he later observed.

At home, the family spoke Igbo (sometimes also spelled Ibo), but Achebe began to learn English in school at the age of about eight, and he soon won admission to a colonial-run boarding school. Since the students came from different regions, they had to “put away their different mother tongues and communicate in the language of their colonizers,” Achebe writes. There he had his first exposure to colonialist classics such as “Prester John,” John Buchan’s novel about a British adventurer in South Africa, which contains the famous line “That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility.” Achebe, in an essay called “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” has written, “I did not see myself as an African to begin with. . . . The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts.”

At University College, Ibadan, Achebe encountered the novel “Mister Johnson,” by the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary, who had spent time as a colonial officer in Nigeria. The book was lauded by Time as “the best novel ever written about Africa.” But Achebe, as he grew older, no longer identified with the imperialists; he was appalled by Cary’s depiction of his homeland and its people. In Cary’s portrait, the “jealous savages . . . live like mice or rats in a palace floor”; dancers are “grinning, shrieking, scowling, or with faces which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman, like twisted bags of lard.” It was the image of blacks as “unhuman,” a standard trope of colonial literature, that Achebe recognized as particularly dangerous. “It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity,” he wrote later. This belief in fiction’s moral power became integral to his vision for African literature.

“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.” From the first line of “Things Fall Apart”—Achebe’s first novel—we are in unfamiliar territory. Who is this Okonkwo whom everybody knows? Where are these nine villages? Achebe began to write “Things Fall Apart” during the mid-fifties, when he moved to Lagos to join the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. In 1958, when he submitted the manuscript to the publisher William Heinemann, no one knew what to make of it. Alan Hill, a director of the firm, recalled the initial reaction: “Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African? There are no precedents.” That was not entirely accurate—the Nigerian writers Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi had published novels earlier in the decade. But the novel as an African form was still very young, and “Things Fall Apart” represented a new approach, showing the collision of old and new ways of life to devastating effect.

Set in a fictional group of Igbo villages called Umuofia sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, “Things Fall Apart” begins with an episodic, almost dreamlike chronicle of village life through the family of Okonkwo. A boy named Ikemefuna has just come from outside Umuofia to live with them, and soon becomes like a brother to Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. (Ikemefuna’s father had killed a woman from Umuofia, and the villagers agreed to accept a virgin and a young man as compensation.) Over the next three years, the story follows Okonkwo’s family through harvest seasons, religious festivals, and domestic disputes. The language is rich with metaphors drawn from the villagers’ experience: Ikemefuna “grew rapidly like a yam tendril in the rainy season, and was full of the sap of life.” The dialogue, too, is aphoristic and allusive. “Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” the narrator explains. (As the reader has already seen, palm oil is used to flavor yams, the villagers’ staple food.)

Despite the pastoral setting, there is nothing idyllic about this portrayal of village life. If the yam harvest is bad, the villagers go hungry. Babies are not expected to live to adulthood. (Only after the age of six is a child said to have “come to stay.”) Some customs are cruel: newborn twins, thought to be inhabited by evil spirits, are “thrown away” in the bush. The Igbo are not presented as a museum exhibit—if their behavior is not always familiar, their emotions are. In a pivotal scene, a group of men, including Okonkwo, lead Ikemefuna out of the village after the local oracle determines that he must be killed. The boy thinks that he is at last returning home, and he worries that his mother will not be there to greet him. To calm himself, he resorts to a childhood game:

He sang [a song] in his mind, and walked to its beat. If the song ended on his right foot, his mother was alive. If it ended on his left, she was dead. No, not dead, but ill. It ended on the right. She was alive and well. He sang the song again, and it ended on the left. But the second time did not count. The first voice gets to Chukwu, or God’s house. That was a favorite saying of children.

Tradition holds the people together, but it also drives them apart. After Nwoye finds out that his father killed Ikemefuna, “something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow.” When the first missionaries arrive, those who have suffered most under the village culture are the first to join the church. To Okonkwo’s dismay, Nwoye is among them. The missionaries, though ignorant of local customs, are not all bad: one in particular treats the villagers with respect. But others show little interest in their way of life. “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” Okonkwo asks a friend in puzzlement. “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?” the other man responds. In the book’s final chapter, the colonizer’s voice takes over; the silence that surrounds it speaks for itself.

Western reviewers praised Achebe’s detailed portrayal of Igbo life, but they said little about the book’s literary qualities. The New York Times repeatedly misspelled Okonkwo’s name and lamented the disappearance of “primitive society.” The Listener complimented Achebe’s “clear and meaty style free of the dandyism often affected by Negro authors.” Others were openly hostile. “How would novelist Achebe like to go back to the mindless times of his grandfather instead of holding the modern job he has in broadcasting in Lagos?” the British journalist Honor Tracy asked. Reviewing Achebe’s third novel, “Arrow of God” (1964), which forms a thematic trilogy with “Things Fall Apart” and its successor, “No Longer at Ease” (1960), another critic disparaged the book’s language as “folk-patter.”

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This was a grotesque misreading. In a 1965 essay titled “The African Writer and the English Language,” Achebe explains that he had no desire to write English in the manner of a native speaker. Rather, an African writer “should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.” To demonstrate, he quotes several lines from “Arrow of God.” Ezeulu, the village’s chief priest, is curious to find out about the activities of the new missionaries in the village:

I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow. Achebe then rewrites the passage, preserving its content but stripping its style:

I am sending you as my representative among these people—just to be on the safe side in case the new religion develops. One has to move with the times or else one is left behind. I have a hunch that those who fail to come to terms with the white man may well regret their lack of foresight.

By deploying stock English phrases in unfamiliar ways, Achebe expresses his characters’ estrangement from that language. The phrases that Ezeulu uses—“be my eyes,” “bring home my share”—have no exact equivalents in Achebe’s “translation.” And how great the gap between “my spirit tells me” and “I have a hunch”! In the same essay, Achebe writes that carrying the full weight of African experience requires “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Or, as he later put it, “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”

Achebe’s views on English were not yet widely accepted. At a conference on African literature held in Uganda in 1962, attended by emerging figures such as the Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka and the Kenyan novelist James Ngugi, the writers tried and failed to define “African literature,” unable to decide whether it should be characterized by the nationalities of the writers or by its subject matter. Afterward, the critic Obi Wali published an article claiming that African literature had come to a “dead end,” which could be reopened only when “these writers and their western midwives accept the fact that true African literature must be written in African languages.” Ngugi came to agree: he wrote four novels in English, but in the nineteen-seventies he adopted his Gikuyu name of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and vowed to write only in Gikuyu, his native language, viewing English as a means of “spiritual subjugation.”

At the conference, Achebe read the manuscript of Ngugi’s first novel, “Weep Not, Child,” which he recommended to Heinemann for publication. The publisher soon asked him to sign on as general editor of its African Writers Series, a post he held, without pay, for ten years. Among the writers whose novels were published during his tenure were Flora Nwapa, John Munonye, and Ayi Kwei Armah—all of whom became important figures in the emerging African literature. Heinemann’s Alan Hill later said that the “fantastic sales” of Achebe’s books had supported the series. But the appeal of English was not purely commercial. A great novel, Achebe later argued, “alters the situation in the world.” Igbo, Gikuyu, or Fante could not claim a global influence; English could.

Political imperatives were not hypothetical in Nigeria, which, having achieved independence in 1960, entered a prolonged period of upheaval. In 1967, following two coups that had led to genocidal violence against the Igbo, Igboland declared independence as the Republic of Biafra. Achebe himself became a target of the violence: his novel “A Man of the People” (1966), a political satire, had forecast the coup so accurately that some believed him to have been in on the plot. He devoted himself fully to the Biafran cause. For a time, he stopped writing fiction, taking up poetry—“something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood.” Achebe travelled to London to promote awareness of the war, and in 1969 he helped write the official declaration of the “Principles of the Biafran Revolution.”

But the fledgling nation starved, its roads and ports blockaded by the British-backed Nigerian Army. By the time Biafra was finally forced to surrender, in 1970, the number of Igbo dead was estimated at between one million and three million. At the height of the famine, Conor Cruise O’Brien reported in The New York Review of Books , five thousand to six thousand people—“mainly children”—died each day. The sufferers could be recognized by the distinctive signs of protein deficiency, known as kwashiorkor: bloated bellies, pale skin, and reddish hair. Achebe’s poem “A Mother in a Refugee Camp” describes a woman’s efforts to care for her child:

She took from their bundle of possessions A broken comb and combed The rust-colored hair left on his skull And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it. In their former life this was perhaps A little daily act of no consequence Before his breakfast and school; now she did it Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

The heartbreak of Biafra shook the foundations of Nigerian society and led to decades of political turmoil. Achebe took the opportunity to distance himself temporarily, spending part of the early nineteen-seventies teaching in the United States. During these years, as the independence era’s potential for brutality became clear, he set out to correct the colonial record with even greater vigor. In essays and lectures, he railed against what he called “colonialist criticism”—the conscious or unconscious dehumanization of African characters, the vision of the African writer as an “unfinished European who with patient guidance will grow up one day,” the assumption that economic underdevelopment corresponds to a lack of intellectual sophistication (“Show me a people’s plumbing, you say, and I can tell you their art”). He was infuriated to find how widespread these attitudes remained. One student, learning that Achebe taught African literature, remarked casually that “he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff.”

Achebe recounts this anecdote in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ ” (1977). Examining Conrad’s descriptions of the “savages,” Achebe shows that the novel, far from subverting imperialist constructions, falls victim to them. Marlow, the story’s narrator, describes the Africans as “not inhuman,” and continues, “Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.” And yet the blacks in the novel are nameless and faceless, their language barely more than grunts; they are assumed to be cannibals.The only explanation for this, Achebe concludes, is “obvious racism.” Many have responded that Achebe oversimplifies Conrad’s narrative: “Heart of Darkness” is a story within a story, told in the highly unreliable voice of Marlow, and the novel is, to say the least, ambivalent about imperialism. The writer Caryl Phillips has asked, “Is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he was living and the larger purpose of his novel?” But, even if Conrad’s methods can be justified, the significance of Achebe’s essay was that justification now became necessary: he made the ugliness latent in Conrad’s vision impossible to ignore.

In contrast to European modernism, with its embrace of “art for art’s sake” (a concept that Achebe, with characteristic bluntness, once called “just another piece of deodorized dog shit”), Achebe has always advocated a socially and politically motivated literature. Since literature was complicit in colonialism, he says, let it also work to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. “Literature is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair because we are fashioning a new man,” he declared in a 1980 interview. His most recent novel, “Anthills of the Savannah” (1987), functions clearly in this mold, following a group of friends who serve in the government of the West African country of Kangan, obviously a stand-in for Nigeria. Sam, who took power in a coup, is steering the nation rapidly toward dictatorship. When Chris, the minister of information, refuses to take Sam’s side against Ikem, the editor of the government-controlled newspaper, the full wrath of the government turns against both of them. The book does not match the artistic achievement of “Things Fall Apart” or “Arrow of God,” but it gets to the heart of the corruption and the idealism of African politics.

Achebe insists that in its form and content the African novel must be an indigenous creation. This stance has led him to criticize other writers whom he regards as insufficiently politically committed, particularly Ayi Kwei Armah, whose novel “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” (1968) presents a dire vision of postcolonial Ghana. The novel begins with the image of a man sleeping on a bus with his eyes open. Streets and buildings are caked with garbage, phlegm, and excrement. Beneath the filthy surfaces, structures are rotten to the core. Armah’s novel has been acclaimed as a vivid rendering of disillusionment with the country’s new politics under Kwame Nkrumah. But Achebe finds Armah’s “alienated stance” no better than Joyce Cary’s, and particularly objects to Armah’s existentialism, which he calls a “foreign metaphor” for the sickness of Ghana. Even worse, Armah has said that he is “not an African writer but just a writer,” which Achebe calls “a statement of defeat.”

Is it too utopian to imagine that the African novel could exist simply as a novel, absolved of its social and pedagogical mission? Achebe has been fiercely critical of those who search for “universality” in African fiction, arguing that such a standard is never applied to Western fiction. But there is something reductive about Achebe’s insistence on defining writers by their ethnicity. To say that a work of literature transcends national boundaries is not to deny its moral or political value.

In 1990, Achebe was paralyzed after a serious car accident. Doctors advised him to come to the United States for treatment, and he has taught at Bard College ever since. “Home and Exile,” a short collection of essays, is the only book he has published during this period, though he is said to be at work on a new novel. But, if Achebe is largely retired, another generation of writers has taken up his call for a new African literature, and the majority have followed his lead: they embrace the English language despite its colonial connotations, but they also seek to establish an African literary identity outside the colonial framework. And the achievements of African writers are increasingly recognized: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun,” an excruciating and remarkable novel about the Biafran war, won Britain’s Orange Prize last year.

The “situation in the world,” fifty years after “Things Fall Apart,” is not as altered as one might wish. As Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? , demonstrated in a satiric piece called “How to Write About Africa,” racist stereotypes are still prevalent: “Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. . . . Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat.” But the power of Achebe’s legacy cannot be discounted. Adichie has recalled discovering his work at the age of about ten. Until then, she said, “I didn’t think it was possible for people like me to be in books.” ♦

Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe and the languages of African literature

PhD Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

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“One of the most infuriating habits of these people was their love of superfluous words,” thinks the colonial district commissioner to himself in the final chapter of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart . It is from the only section of this groundbreaking novel that is not written from the perspective of Africans. Telling of the colonisation of the Igbo from their point of view, the line foreshadows much: how colonisation will attempt to write African perspectives, deemed “superfluous”, out of their own histories, but also that, “infuriatingly” enough for an oppressor, the colonised Africans wield words of their own.

Published 60 years ago this year by Heinemann in London, Things Fall Apart has sold more than 10m copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. It follows Okonkwo, a renowned warrior from a fictional Igbo village in early 20th-century eastern Nigeria. In straightforward and evocative prose, Achebe depicts how a culturally rich and well-governed society is destabilised by the arrival of Christian missionaries and British colonialists. Okonkwo is a flawed hero, but his attempts to confront the forces transforming his village speak to a long history of anti-colonial resistance.

Now considered essential reading in many African Studies and English Literature courses, Things Fall Apart can hardly be dissociated from the emergence of the African novel and modern African writing in general. However, Achebe’s debut also sparked a formative debate on language and African literatures. With English so intimately entwined with colonial history, the fact that the novel hailed as inaugurating a modern, independent Africa’s literature was also written in English became a point of contention. Was Things Fall Apart upholding a Western model, or confronting and subverting it?

Language is power

Language is never ahistorical or apolitical, but it carries an especial charge in post-colonial contexts. Educational, administrative and religious institutions had conducted life in the colonies in the language of the coloniser. Speaking it would often mean access to privileges, while speaking only African languages could mean economic disadvantage at best, physical punishment at worst. With this history in mind, Achebe and his contemporaries had to ask: did reaching global audiences to challenge their perceptions about Africa matter more than enriching their own languages by helping African readerships flourish?

The debate extended beyond the question of use and reach: it was also about post-colonial identities. Language provides the names, value systems and and discourses by which we “know” our world and ourselves. A dominant language dominates the terms by which your reality is constituted. To prioritise reading and writing in European languages could perpetuate colonial structures after independence, once again delineating who could speak, on what terms, and by what criteria African writers would be judged.

Forging identity

Whether to foster post-independence African literary cultures in European or African languages fuelled the historic 1962 African Writers Conference at Makerere University in Uganda. Many of its participants went on to become well-known literary voices from the continent. These included the first African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka , a Nigerian poet and playwright; Grace Ogot , one of the first Anglophone female Kenyan writers to be published; and Christopher Okigbo , who together with Achebe established Citadel Press. Also prominent were Kofi Awoonor , a Ghanaian poet and diplomat who was among those killed in the 2013 attack in Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, and Lewis Nkosi , whose literary career in exile from South Africa spanned nearly every genre.

There was division on the issue. Kenyan playwright and academic, Ngugi wa Thiong’o – then a student at Makerere – believed that the restoration of cultural memory rested on rehabilitating mother tongues. Now a major voice in African letters who writes mostly in Gĩkũyũ , Ngugi argued that, without this “decolonisation of the mind”, they would otherwise be forever living by moral, ethical and aesthetic values not their own.

Born into a family of Christian converts in eastern Nigeria in 1930, Achebe was educated in local Anglican schools and went onto become one the first graduates of the University of Ibadan . So English was indeed a part of his identity in ways not every Nigerian would have shared. But Achebe was therefore all the more aware that education and religion were complex facets of colonialism. Things Fall Apart dramatises this with nuance in the character of Nwoye, who rebels after his brother’s death by converting to Christianity.

Achebe advocated a “both” rather than an “either/or” approach in his 1965 essay The African Writer and the English Language . He argued that the African writer, in “fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience”, would bring about a far more subtle rejection of the historical dominance standard English represented.

Clearing ground

Ultimately, English was one factor that helped Things Fall Apart, as it did other works of African literature, to transcend national boundaries for six decades. But these probing political and cultural questions were carried right along with it – and they informed a legacy of African thought on the meaning and purpose of literature, which the continent’s contemporary voices can stand on today.

When African writers choose to contribute to literatures in their mother tongues, this can only be positive. But when they chose to reach the world’s Anglophone readers, it is as Achebe envisioned it : with “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings”.

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Literary great chinua achebe on prose and politics.

Acclaimed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (L) and former South African President Nelson Mandela chat prior to Achebe receiving an honorary degree at the University of Cape Town in 2002. Anna Zieminski, AFP / Getty Images hide caption

Distinguished Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe last week won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for fiction. The award, which honors an author's body of work, is given only once every two years. Achebe, 76, edged out such well-known nominees as Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie.

Achebe's win raises Africa's profile in the literary world and beyond.

Things Fall Apart , his debut novel published in 1958, won him global acclaim and is widely considered a masterpiece. The book has been translated into 50 languages and sold more than 10 million copies.

In a recent interview with Farai Chideya, Achebe shared his thoughts on the book's protagonist — Okonkwo — a prosperous farmer, husband and father in Nigeria during the early 1900s.

"The reason he thinks he's a strong man is that his father had been the opposite," Achebe said. "[He] had been a man of peace, a man of few words and he was not a success. He was not prosperous. And it is this fact — the fact of a man who didn't satisfy the expectations of his son — that is the crux of this story."

Achebe, now a professor at Bard College in upstate New York, did not write any novels between 1966 and 1988. Instead, he focused on the struggle for independence in Nigeria's Biafra region. Achebe points out that descriptions of him as the Biafran Minister of Information are incorrect.

"I was never a minister of anything anywhere," he said. "I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days ... All this time I was just depressed ... It was in this situation that I became a spokesman of sorts. I did this because I was persuaded that the nation of Nigeria had doomed itself by its action."

Nigeria has spawned a series of world-renowned novelists, including the recent winner of Britain's highly regarded Orange Prize for Fiction — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.

But Achebe is the forerunner of them all, and his experiences with Nigeria's fractured political past still shape the way he envisions Africa's future.

"What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens — whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender," said Achebe. "This is something we need to practice."

Achebe offers a simple solution for the problems that plague parts of the continent:

"One concept: 'I am my brother's keeper,'" he said. "The leader is appointed to lead a people and he should see these as 'my people.' That's not happening yet. It's not happening in Nigeria, for example. I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us."

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Chinua Achebe

(1930-2013)

Who Was Chinua Achebe?

Chinua Achebe made a splash with the publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart , in 1958. Renowned as one of the seminal works of African literature, it has since sold more than 20 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. Achebe followed with novels such as No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) , and served as a faculty member at renowned universities in the U.S. and Nigeria. He died on March 21, 2013, at age 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Early Years and Career

Famed writer and educator Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in the Igbo town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria. After becoming educated in English at University College (now the University of Ibadan) and a subsequent teaching stint, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1961 as director of external broadcasting. He would serve in that role until 1966.

'Things Fall Apart'

In 1958, Achebe published his first novel: Things Fall Apart . The groundbreaking novel centers on the clash between native African culture and the influence of white Christian missionaries and the colonial government in Nigeria. An unflinching look at the discord, the book was a startling success and became required reading in many schools across the world.

'No Longer at Ease' and Teaching Positions

The 1960s proved to be a productive period for Achebe. In 1961, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, with whom he would go on to have four children, and it was during this decade he wrote the follow-up novels to Things Fall Apart : No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), as well as A Man of the People (1966). All address the issue of traditional ways of life coming into conflict with new, often colonial, points of view.

In 1967, Achebe and poet Christopher Okigbo co-founded the Citadel Press, intended to serve as an outlet for a new kind of African-oriented children's books. Okigbo was killed shortly afterward in the Nigerian civil war, and two years later, Achebe toured the United States with fellow writers Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi to raise awareness of the conflict back home, giving lectures at various universities.

Through the 1970s, Achebe served in faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Connecticut and the University of Nigeria. During this time, he also served as director of two Nigerian publishing houses, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. and Nwankwo-Ifejika Ltd.

On the writing front, Achebe remained highly productive in the early part of the decade, publishing several collections of short stories and a children's book: How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972). Also released around this time were the poetry collection Beware, Soul Brother (1971) and Achebe's first book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975).

In 1975, Achebe delivered a lecture at UMass titled "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ," in which he asserted that Joseph Conrad's famous novel dehumanizes Africans. When published in essay form, it went on to become a seminal postcolonial African work.

Later Work and Accolades

The year 1987 brought the release of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah. His first novel in more than 20 years, it was shortlisted for the Booker McConnell Prize. The following year, he published Hopes and Impediments .

The 1990s began with tragedy: Achebe was in a car accident in Nigeria that left him paralyzed from the waist down and would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Soon after, he moved to the United States and taught at Bard College, just north of New York City, where he remained for 15 years. In 2009, Achebe left Bard to join the faculty of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, as the David and Marianna Fisher University professor and professor of Africana studies.

Achebe won several awards over the course of his writing career, including the Man Booker International Prize (2007) and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010). Additionally, he received honorary degrees from more than 30 universities around the world.

Achebe died on March 21, 2013, at the age of 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Chinua Achebe
• Birth Year: 1930
• Birth date: November 16, 1930
• Birth City: Ogidi, Anambra
• Birth Country: Nigeria
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist and author of 'Things Fall Apart,' a work that in part led to his being called the 'patriarch of the African novel.'
• Education and Academia
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
• University of Ibadan
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 2013
• Death date: March 21, 2013
• Death State: Massachusetts
• Death City: Boston
• Death Country: United States

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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: January 19, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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Home › Literature › Analysis of Chinua Achebe’s Novels

Analysis of Chinua Achebe’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 24, 2019 • ( 1 )

Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) is probably both the most widely known and the most representative African novelist. He may very well have written the first African novel of real literary merit—such at least is the opinion of Charles Larson—and he deals with what one can call the classic issue that preoccupies his fellow novelists, the clash between the indigenous cultures of black Africa and a white, European civilization. He avoids the emotionally charged subject of slavery and concentrates his attention on political and cultural confrontation. His five novels offer, in a sense, a paradigm of this clash. He begins in Things Fall Apart with the first incursion of the British into the Igbo region of what became the Eastern Region of Nigeria, and his subsequent novels trace (with some gaps) the spread of British influence into the 1950’s and beyond that into the postindependence period of the 1960’s. The one period he slights, as he himself admits, is the generation in transition from traditional village life to the new Westernized Africa. He had difficulty imagining the psychological conflict of the African caught between two cultures. There is no example in Achebe of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s “ambiguous adventure.” Achebe does, however, share with Kane and with most other African novelists the idea that his function as a writer is a social one.

Achebe insists repeatedly on this social function in response to Western critics who tend to give priority to aesthetic values. He seems to suggest, in fact, that the communal responsibility and the communal tie are more fundamental than artistic merit for any writer, but certainly for the African writer and for himself personally at the present stage in African affairs. He describes himself specifically as a teacher. His purpose is to dispel the colonial myth of the primitive African and to establish a true image of the people and their culture. This message is intended, to some extent, for a Western audience, but especially for the Africans themselves, since they have come to believe the myth and have internalized the feeling of inferiority. Achebe’s aim is to help them regain their self-respect, recognize the beauty of their own cultural past, and deal capably with the dilemmas of contemporary society.

It is important, however, that Achebe is not fulfilling this role as an outsider. He returns to the traditional Igbo concept of the master craftsman and to the Mbare ceremony to explain the functional role of art in traditional society. He insists that creativity itself derives from a spiritual bond, the inspiration of a shared past and a shared destiny with a particular people: Alienated writers, such as Ayi Kwei Armah , cannot be in tune with themselves and are therefore likely to be imitative rather than truly creative. It would appear, then, that Achebe values originality and freshness in the management of literary form but considers these attributes dependent on the sensitivity of writers to their native settings.

Whereas Achebe’s motivation in writing may be the restoration of pride in the African world, his theme—or, rather, the specific advice that he offers, albeit indirectly— is much more pragmatic. He does not advocate a return to the past or a rejection of Western culture. Like other African writers, he decries the destructive consequences of colonial rule: alienation, frustration, and a loss of cohesiveness and a clear code of behavior. He recognizes as well, however, that certain undesirable customs and superstitions have been exposed by the foreign challenge. His practical advice is that Africans should learn to cope with a changing world. He teaches the necessity of compromise: a loyalty to traditional wisdom and values, if not to tribal politics and outmoded customs, along with a suspicion of Western materialism but an openness to Western thought. He notes that in some cases the two cultures are not so far apart: Igbo republicanism goes even beyond the British-American concept of democracy, a view that the Ghanaian novelist Armah has developed as well. Unlike the negritude writers of francophone Africa, Achebe, in his attempt to reinterpret the African past, does not paint an idyllic picture. He regrets the loss of mystery surrounding that past, but he chooses knowledge because he considers judgment, clarity of vision, and tolerance—virtues that he locates in his traditional society—to be the way out of the present confusion and corruption.

This key idea of tolerance pervades Achebe’s work. One of his favorite stories (Yoruba, not Igbo) illustrates the danger in dogmatism. The god Echu, who represents fate or confusion, mischievously decides to provoke a quarrel between two farmers who live on either side of a road. Echu paints himself black on one side and white on the other, then walks up the road between the two farmers. The argument that ensues concerns whether the stranger is black or white. When Echu turns around and walks back down the road, each farmer tries to outdo the other in apologizing for his mistake. Achebe’s most pervasive vehicle for this idea of tolerance, however, is in the concept of the chi, which is central to Igbo cosmology. Achebe interprets it as the ultimate expression of individualism, the basic worth and independence of every person. Politically it means the rejection of any authoritarian rule. Morally it means the responsibility of every person for his or her own fate. The chi is one’s other self, one’s spiritual identity responsible for one’s birth and one’s future. Thus, while one’s chi defines one’s uniqueness, it also defines one’s limitations. As Achebe frequently notes in his novels, no one can defeat his or her own chi, and the acceptance of one’s limitations is the beginning of tolerance.

It is the social purpose, this “message” of tolerance, in Achebe’s novels that dictates the form. His plots tend to be analytic, static, or “situational,” as Larson argues, rather than dynamic. Instead of narrative movement, there is juxtaposition of past and present, of the traditional and the modern. Achebe achieves balance through comparison and contrast. He uses exposition more than drama. His main characters tend to be representational. Their conflicts are the crucial ones of the society. The protagonists of the two novels set in the past, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God , are strong men who lack wisdom, practical sense, an ability to accept change, and a tolerance for opposing views. The protagonists of No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People are weak and vacillating. They accept change but are blinded by vanity and have no satisfactory code of conduct to resist the unreasonable pressures of traditional ties or the corruption and attractions of the new age. The two male protagonists of Anthills of the Savannah , also hindered by vanity, prove inadequate idealists in a power-hungry environment and wake up too late to their lack of control over events.

An even more predominant feature of the five novels is their style. Achebe makes the necessary compromise and writes in English, a foreign tongue, but manipulates it to capture the flavor of the native Igbo expression. He does this through dialect, idiom, and figurative language as well as through proverbs that reflect traditional Igbo wisdom, comment ironically on the inadequacies of the characters, and state the central themes.

Achebe thus manages, through the authorial voice, to establish a steady control over every novel. To some extent, one senses the voice in the proverbs. They represent the assessments of the elders in the clan, yet the wisdom of the proverbs is itself sometimes called into question, and the reader is invited to make the judgment. In general, it is Achebe’s juxtaposing of character, incident, proverb, and tone that creates the total assessment. Against this background voice one measures the pride, vanity, or prejudice of the individuals who, caught in the stressful times of colonial or postcolonial Nigeria, fail to respond adequately. The voice does not judge or condemn; it describes. It reminds the Nigerian of the danger of self-deception. It also recognizes the danger of failing to communicate with others. Achebe keeps ever in mind the tale (found in numerous versions all over Africa) of humankind whose message to Chukwa (the supreme deity) requesting immortality is distorted by the messenger and thus fails in its purpose. The voice he adopts to avoid the distortion is one of self-knowledge, practical sense, pragmatism, and detachment but also of faith, conviction, and humor. The voice is, in a sense, the message itself, moderating the confrontation between Africa and the West.

Things Fall Apart

Significantly, Achebe takes the title of his first novel, Things Fall Apart , from William Butler Yeats’s 1920 apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming,” which prophesies the end of the present era and the entrance on the world’s stage of another that is radically different. Things Fall Apart treats the early moments of that transition in an Igbo village. For the people of the village, the intrusion of the British is as revolutionary as the coming of a second Messiah, Yeats’s terrible “rough beast.”

To some extent, Achebe creates a mythic village whose history stretches back to a legendary past. Chapters are devoted to the daily routines of the people, their family lives, their customs, their games and rituals, their ancient wisdom, their social order, and their legal practices. Achebe remains a realist, however, as he identifies also certain flaws in the customs and in the people. Superstition leads them to unnecessary cruelties. The protagonist, Okonkwo, reflects a basic conflict within the society. He is, on one hand, a respected member of the society who has risen through hard work to a position of wealth and authority. He conscientiously accepts the responsibilities that the elders lay on him. At the same time, he is such an individualist that his behavior runs counter to the spirit of traditional wisdom. His shame over his father’s weak character provokes him to be excessive in proving his own manhood. A defensiveness and uncertainty lie behind his outward assertiveness. It is true that the clan has its mechanisms to reprimand and punish Okonkwo for errant behavior. Nevertheless, even before the British influence begins to disturb the region, the cohesiveness of the clan is already in question.

One particular chink in Okonkwo’s armor, which identifies a weakness also in the clan as it faces the foreign threat, is his inflexibility, his inability to adapt or to accept human limitations. Since he, in his youth, overcame adversity (familial disadvantages, natural forces such as drought and excessive rains, challenges of strength as a wrestler), he has come to believe that he has the individual strength to resist all challenges to his personal ambition. He cannot accept the presence of forces beyond his control, including the forces of his own personal destiny. It is this and the other aspects of Okonkwo’s character that Achebe develops in the first section of the novel against the background of the tribe to which he belongs.

Part 1 ends with the symbolic act of Okonkwo’s accidentally killing a young man during a funeral ceremony. Like death, the act is beyond his control and unexplainable, yet it is punishable. The elders exile him for seven years to the village of his mother’s family. This separation from his village is itself symbolic, since in a way Okonkwo has never belonged to the village. While he is away, the village changes. With the coming of the missionaries, traditional religious practices begin to lose their sanction, their absoluteness. In part 3, Okonkwo returns from exile but finds that his exile continues. Nothing is as it was. Open hostility exists between the new religion and the traditional one. The British government has begun to take over authority from the elders. The novel ends with Okonkwo’s irrational killing of a messenger from the British district officer and with his subsequent suicide. Okonkwo rightly assumes, it would seem, that no authority now exists to judge him: The old sanctions are dead, and he refuses to accept the new ones. He must be his own judge.

There is, however, if not a judge, a voice of reason and compassion, detached from the action but controlling its effects, that assures Okonkwo of a fair hearing. The voice is heard in the proverbs, warning Okonkwo not to challenge his own chi (his own spiritual identity and destiny), even though another proverb insists that if he says yes his chi will say yes too. It is heard in the decisions of the elders, the complaints of the wives, and the rebellion of Okonkwo’s own son, Noye, who turns to Christianity in defiance against his father’s unreasonableness. It is found in the tragic sense of life of Okonkwo’s uncle, Uchendu, who advises this man in exile to bear his punishment stoically, for his sufferings are mild in comparison with those of many others.

Achebe locates his voice in one particular character, Obierika, Okonkwo’s closest friend and a man of thought rather than, like his friend, a man of action. In the important eighth chapter, Achebe measures his protagonist against this man of moderation, reflection, and humor, who can observe the white invader with tolerance, his own society’s laws with skepticism, and, at the end of the novel, his dead friend with respect and compassion. Achebe’s voice can even be seen in the ironically insensitive judgment of the district commissioner as the novel closes. As superficial and uninformed as that voice might be in itself, Achebe recognizes that the voice nevertheless exists, is therefore real, and must be acknowledged. The final view of Okonkwo and of the village that he both reflects and rejects is a composite of all these voices. It is the composite also of Okonkwo’s own complex and unpredictable behavior, and of his fate, which is the result of his own reckless acts and of forces that he does not comprehend. Amid the growing chaos one senses still the stable influence of the calm authorial voice, controlling and balancing everything.

No Longer at Ease

From the early twentieth century setting of Things Fall Apart, Achebe turns in his second novel, No Longer at Ease, to the mid-1950’s, just before independence. The protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, grandson of the tragic victim who lashed out against British insolence in his first novel, resembles to some extent his grandfather in his inadequacy to deal with the pressures of his society, but he has far different loyalties. The novel begins after things have already fallen apart; Nigeria is between societies.

Obi no longer belongs to the old society. His father is the rebellious son of Okonkwo who left home for the Christian church and was educated in mission schools. Obi received a similar education and was selected by his community to study in England. The financial and personal obligation this creates plagues Obi throughout the novel, for after he receives his Western education he no longer shares the old customs and the old sense of loyalty. He considers himself an independent young man of the city, with a Western concept of government and administration. After his return from England he receives a civil service job and has visions of reforming the bureaucracy. The story is thus about the practical difficulties (it is not really a psychological study) of an ordinary individual separating himself cleanly from the past while adapting to the glitter and temptations of the new.

Obi faces two particular problems. He has chosen to marry a woman, Clara, who belongs to a family considered taboo by the traditional community. He attempts to resist family and community pressure, but he eventually succumbs. Meanwhile, Clara has become pregnant and must go through a costly and embarrassing abortion. Obi essentially abandons his responsibility toward her in his weak, halfhearted respect for his family’s wishes. He likewise fails at his job, as he resists self-righteously various bribes until his financial situation and morals finally collapse. Unfortunately, he is as clumsy here as in his personal relations. He is arrested and sentenced to prison.

As in Achebe’s first novel, the subject of No Longer at Ease is the individual (and the society) inadequate to the changing times. The author’s main concern is again a balanced appraisal of Nigerian society at a crucial stage in its recent history, because the greatest danger, as Achebe himself observes, is self-deception. He presents a careful selection of characters whose vanity, prejudice, or misplaced values allow them only a partial view of reality. Obi is, of course, the main example. He leaves his home village as a hero, is one of the few Nigerians to receive a foreign education, and, as a civil servant and proud possessor of a car, becomes a member of the elite. His vanity blinds him to such an extent that he cannot assess his proper relationship to his family, to Clara, or to his social role. His father, caught between his Christian faith and tribal customs, cannot allow Obi his independence. Mr. Green, Obi’s British superior at the office, is trapped by stereotypical prejudices against Africans. There is no one individual—such as Obierika in Things Fall Apart —within the novel to provide a reasonable interpretation of events.

One nevertheless feels the constant presence of Achebe as he balances these various voices against one another. Achebe also assures perspective by maintaining a detached tone through irony, wit, and humor. The narrator possesses the maturity and the wisdom that the characters lack. This novel also shows Achebe experimenting with structure as a means of expressing the authorial voice. NoLonger at Ease opens—like Leo Tolstoy’s Smert’ Ivana Il’icha (1886; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 1887)—with the final act, the trial and judgment of Obi for accepting a bribe. Achebe thus invites the reader to take a critical view of Obi from the very beginning. There is no question of the reader’s becoming romantically involved in his young life and career.

This distancing continues in the first three chapters as Achebe juxtaposes present and past, scenes of reality and scenes of expectation. The real Lagos is juxtaposed directly against the idyllic one in Obi’s mind. A picture of the later, strained relationship between Obi and Clara precedes the romantic scenes after they meet on board ship returning from England. Through this kind of plotting by juxtaposition, Achebe turns what might have been a melodramatic story of young love, abortion, betrayal, and corruption into a realistic commentary on Nigerian society in transition. In Things Fall Apart he rejects a paradisiacal view of the African past; in No Longer at Ease he warns against selfish, irresponsible, and naïve expectations in the present.

Arrow of God

In his third novel, Arrow of God, Achebe returns to the past, taking up the era of British colonization a few years after the events of Things Fall Apart . The old society is still intact, but the Christian religion and the British administration are more firmly entrenched than before. Achebe again tries to re-create the former Igbo environment, with an even more elaborate account of daily life, customs, and rituals, and with the scattering throughout of traditional idioms and proverbs. The foreigners, too, receive more detailed attention, though even the two main personalities, Winterbottom and Clarke, achieve hardly more than stereotyped status. Rather than work them late into the story, this time Achebe runs the two opposing forces alongside each other almost from the beginning in order to emphasize the British presence. Now it is the political, not the religious, power that is in the foreground, suggesting historically the second stage of foreign conquest, but the Christian church also takes full advantage of local political and religious controversy to increase its control over the people.

Achebe continues to be realistic in his treatment of traditional society. It is not an idyllic Eden corrupted by satanic foreign power. In spite of the attractive pictures of local customs, the six villages of Umuaro are divided and belligerent, and, in two instances at least, it is ironically the British government or the church that ensures peace and continuity in the communal life. By this stage in the colonization, of course, it is difficult (and Achebe does not try) to untangle the causes of internal disorder among the Igbo.

Like Okonkwo, the protagonist in Arrow of God, Ezeulu, is representative of the social disorder. In him Achebe represents the confidence in traditional roles and beliefs challenged not only by the new British worldview but also by forces within. Personal pride, egotism, and intolerance sometimes obscure his obligation to the welfare of the community. Whereas Okonkwo is one among several wealthy members of the clan, Ezeulu occupies a key position as the priest of Ulu, chief god of the six villages. The central cohesive force in the society is thus localized in this one man. Ezeulu differs from Okonkwo in another way as well: Whereas Okonkwo stubbornly resists the new Western culture, Ezeulu makes such gestures of accommodation that his clan actually accuses him of being the white man’s friend. Instead of disowning his son for adopting Christianity, he sends Oduche to the mission school to be his spy in the Western camp.

Ezeulu’s personality, however, is complex, as are his motives. Accommodation is his pragmatic way of preserving the clan and his own power. When the opportunity arises for him to become the political representative of his people to the British government, he refuses out of a sense of loyalty to his local god. This complexity is, however, contradictory and confusing, thus reflecting again the transitional state of affairs during the early colonial period. Ezeulu does not always seem to know what his motives are as he jockeys for power with Winterbottom and with the priest Idemili. In trying to save the community, he sets up himself and his god as the sole sources of wisdom. As priest—and thus considered half man and half spirit—he may, as Achebe seems to suggest, confuse his sacred role with his human vanity.

It is in the midst of this confusion that Achebe again questions the existence of absolutes and advises tolerance. The central concept of the chi reappears. Does it say yes if humanity says yes? If so, humankind controls its own destiny. If not, it is severely limited. In any case, the concept itself suggests duality rather than absoluteness. Even Ezeulu, while challenging the new power, advises his son that one “must dance the dance prevalent in his time.” Chapter 16, in which this statement appears, contains the key thematic passages of the novel. In it, one of Ezeulu’s wives tells her children a traditional tale about a people’s relation with the spirit world. The story turns on the importance of character—the proper attitude one must have toward oneself and toward the gods. Aboy accidentally leaves his flute in the field where he and his family had been farming. He persuades his parents to let him return to fetch it, and he has an encounter with the spirits during which he demonstrates his good manners, temperance, and reverence; this encounter leads to material reward. The envious senior wife in the family sends her son on a similar mission, but he exhibits rudeness and greed, leading only to the visitation of evils on human society. The intended message is obvious, but the implied one, in the context of this novel, is that traditional values appear to be childhood fancies in the face of contemporary realities.

At the end of the chapter, Ezeulu puts those realities into focus. He describes himself as an arrow of god whose very defense of religious forms threatens the survival of his religion, but he goes on to suggest the (for him) terrifying speculation that Oduche, his Christian son, and also Christianity and the whites themselves, are arrows of god. At the end of his career, Ezeulu is opening his mind to a wide range of possibilities. This tolerance, however, is double-edged, for, as Achebe seems to suggest, humanity must be not only receptive to unfamiliar conceptions but also tough enough to “tolerate” the pain of ambiguity and alienation. Ezeulu is too old and too exhausted to endure that pain. The final blow is his son’s death, which occurs while he is performing a ritual dance. Ezeulu interprets this as a sign that Ulu has deserted him.

Indeed, the voice in Arrow of God is even more ambiguous than that in the first two novels. There is no Obierika to correct Ezeulu’s aberrations. Akueke, Ezeulu’s friend and adviser, is not a sure guide to the truth. Achebe works through dialogue in this novel even more than in Things Fall Apart , and the debates between these two men do not lead to a clear answer. Akueke cannot decipher the priest’s motives or anticipate his actions. Ezeulu, as a strange compound of spirit and man, is to him “unknowable.” Nor does Achebe make the task any easier for the reader. Ezeulu does not seem to understand his own motives. He considers himself under the spiritual influence of his god. His sudden, final decision not to seek a reconciliation with his people he imagines as the voice of Ulu. He thus sacrifices himself and his people (as well as the god himself) to the will of the god. Achebe remains silent on the issue of whether the voice is the god’s or Ezeulu’s. One can only speculate that since the society created the god in the first place (or so the legend went), it could also destroy him.

A Man of the People

Like No Longer at Ease, Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People , seems rather lightweight in comparison with the two historical novels. It takes place not in Nigeria but in an imaginary African country, a few years after independence. Achebe seems to be playing with some of the popular situations in contemporary African literature, as though he were parodying them. The main character, Odili, has relationships with three different women: Elsie, a friend from the university who functions as a sort of mistress but remains a shadowy figure in the background; Jean, a white American with whom he has a brief sexual relationship; and Edna, a beautiful and innocent youngwomanwithwhomhe “falls in love” in a rather conventional Western sense. There is also the typical estrangement of the university-educated son from his traditionally oriented father. Achebe contrives a somewhat romantic reconciliation during the last third of the novel. Finally, while all of Achebe’s novels are essentially political, this one pits two candidates for public office against each other, with all the paraphernalia of personal grudges, dirty tricks, campaign rhetoric, and even a military coup at the end that ironically makes the election meaningless. (In fact, it was already meaningless because the incumbent, Nanga, had arranged that Odili’s name not be officially registered.) Furthermore, the contest is a stock romantic confrontation between the idealism of youth and the corrupt opportunism of an older generation. While the story might at first glance appear to be a melodramatic rendering of the romantic world of love and politics, it so exaggerates situations that one must assume Achebe is writing rather in the comic mode.

Along with this choice of mode, Achebe also creates a more conventional plot line. The rising action deals with the first meeting after sixteen years between Odili, a grammar school teacher, and Nanga, the “man of the people,” Odili’s former teacher, local representative to parliament, and minister of culture. In spite of his skepticism toward national politics, Odili succumbs to Nanga’s charm and accepts an invitation to stay at his home in the city. The turning point comes when Odili’s girlfriend, Elsie, shamelessly spends the night with Nanga. Odili sees this as a betrayal by Elsie, even though he himself feels no special commitment to her. More important, Odili feels betrayed and humiliated by Nanga, who does not take such incidents with women at all seriously. His vanity touched by this rather trivial incident, Odili suddenly reactivates his conscience over political corruption and vows to seek revenge. The attack is twofold: to steal Edna, Nanga’s young fiancé, who is to be his second wife, and to defeat Nanga in the next elections. Odili’s motives are obviously suspect. The rest of the novel recounts his gradual initiation into love and politics. The revenge motive drops as the relationship with Edna becomes serious. The political campaign fails, and Odili ends up in the hospital after a pointless attempt to spy on one of Nanga’s campaign rallies. Again, it is tempting to treat this as a conventional initiation story, except that Odili’s experiences do not really cure him of his romantic notions of love and politics.

For the first time, Achebe elects to use the first-person point of view: Odili tells his own story. This may be the reason that the balancing of effects through juxtaposition of scenes and characters does not operate as in the earlier works. The tone is obviously affected as well: Odili is vain and pompous, blind to his own flaws while critical of others. Hence, Achebe has to manipulate a subjective narrative to express the objective authorial voice, as Mark Twain does in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or (to use an African example) as Mongo Betidoes in Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba (1956; The Poor Christ of Bomba, 1971). The primary means is through Odili’s own partial vision. Odili frequently makes criticisms of contemporary politics that appear to be just and therefore do represent the judgment of Achebe as well. At the same time, Odili’s affected tone invites criticism and provides Achebe with an occasion to satirize the self-deception of the young intellectuals whom Odili represents. Achebe also expresses himself through the plot, in which he parodies romantic perceptions of the contemporary world. In addition, he continues to include proverbs in the mouths of provincial characters as guides to moral evaluation.

Achebe emphasizes one proverb in particular to describe the political corruption in which Nanga participates. After a local merchant, Josiah, steals a blind beggar’s stick to make his customers (according to a figurative twist of reasoning) blindly purchase whatever he sells, the public reacts indignantly with the proverb: “He has taken away enough for the owner to notice.” Unlike Achebe’s narrator in the first three novels, Odili cannot allow the proverb to do its own work. He must, as an academic, analyze it and proudly expand on its meaning. He had done this before when he became the “hero” of Jean’s party as the resident expert on African behavior and African art. He may very well be correct about the political implications of the proverb, that the people (the owners of the country) are now being blatantly robbed by the politicians, but he fails to identify emotionally with the local situation. Nor is he objective enough to admit fully to himself his own immoral, hypocritical behavior, which he has maintained throughout the novel. He is an egotist, more enchanted with his own cleverness than concerned about the society he has pretended to serve.

In like manner, at the close of the story Odili turns the real death of his political colleague, Max, into a romantic fantasy of the ideal sacrifice. Totally pessimistic about the reliability of the people, he returns once again to the proverb to illustrate their fickle behavior as the melodramatic villains: They always return the Josiahs to power. Achebe may to some extent share Odili’s view of the public and the national leadership it chooses, but he is skeptical of the Odilis as well, and hence he positions the reader outside both the political structure and Odili as an observer of the society. Achebe, then, even in this firstperson narrative, does not abandon his authorial voice, nor does he abandon the role of social spokesman that he had maintained in all his other novels.

Anthills of the Savannah

Achebe’s fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah , written twenty-one years after his fourth, shares some of the preceding novel’s interests. Achebe once again makes the situation political and the setting contemporary. As in AMan of the People, the country, Kangan, is fictitious (though the resemblance to Nigeria is again hardly disguised), but the time is somewhat later in the independence period, perhaps in the 1970’s or the early 1980’s. Also, once again, the main actors in the drama knew one another under different circumstances in the past. Whereas the former relationship between Nanga and Odili was teacher and student, the three male protagonists of Anthills of the Savannah are of the same generation and first knew one another as fellow students at Lord Lugard College when they were thirteen years old. The novel deals with their lives during a period of twentyseven years, including their experiences in England at the University of London, their adventures in love, and their choices of careers. These years are shown only through flashbacks, however, for the focus is on a twoweek period in the present, on the edge of a political crisis, when the characters are forty years old.

Achebe does not present his narrative in a straight chronological line; in addition to flashbacks, even during the two-week present he recounts, or has his characters recount, events out of chronological order—a technique he used in his other novels as well to control reader response. The events of this two-week period begin, as the novel does, on a Thursday morning as Sam, now president of Kangan, presides over his weekly cabinet meeting. Sam had decided long before, following the advice of his headmaster at Lord Lugard College, to choose the army over a medical career because it would turn him into a “gentleman.” His choice proved to be a good one when, after a military coup two years earlier, he was named president of the new government. A fellow student at Lord Lugard, Christopher Oriko, became his minister of information. Chris used his influence over Sam to name five of the twelve cabinet members and to appoint another old school friend, Ikem Osodi, editor of the National Gazette. The political conflict in the novel focuses on these three men, although Sam as a character remains largely in the background.

The relationship between Chris and Sam has become increasingly strained over the two-year period, as Sam has expanded his drive for status into an ambition to be president for life with total authority. He is now highly suspicious of Chris and has appointed the tough, ruthless Major Johnson Ossai as his chief of staff and head of intelligence. Chris, meanwhile, as he himself admits in the opening chapter, has become an amused spectator and recorder of events, almost indifferent to the official drama before him. Such an attitude has also driven a wedge between him and Ikem, who, as a crusading journalist, has continued to attack government incompetence and to represent and fight for the hapless public, while Chris has counseled patience and diplomacy in dealing with Sam.

The inciting force on this Thursday is a delegation from Abazon—the northern province of Kangan devastated, like Nigeria’s own northern regions, by drought— that has come to the capital city of Bassa to seek relief. Ikem has only recently written an editorial, his allegorical “Hymn to the Sun” that dries up the savannah, accusing the president (the sun) of responsibility and promoting the delegation’s cause. Sam at first feels threatened by the loud demonstrations outside his office, but when he learns that the delegation consists of only six elders and that the rest of the demonstrators are Bassa locals, he decides to use the situation to rid himself of his old school buddies and to entrench himself in power surrounded by loyal henchmen such as Ossai.

Chris and Ikem do not realize what is going on behind the scenes—nor does the reader—until events get beyond their control. Within hours, Sam has Ikem arrested and murdered (though the official version is that he was shot while resisting arrest for plotting “regicide”), the Abazon delegation put in prison, and Chris declared an accomplice of both. Chris himself has managed to escape; he hides out with friends and sympathizers and eventually, in disguise, travels by bus past roadblocks to the Abazon province. There he learns that a military coup has toppled Sam from his throne and that Sam has mysteriously disappeared. Ironically, at this very moment, in the midst of riotous celebration at a roadblock, Chris is shot by a police sergeant while trying to prevent the man from abducting and raping a girl. The novel leaves no hope that the next regime will offer Kangan any better leadership.

Themenin this modern African state consistently fail to bring the persistent political incompetence under control. Sam is a variation on the Nanga type, the amoral, self-interested servant of power who does not foresee the consequences of his ruthless treatment of others. This naïveté of the tyrant is matched by the naïve idealism of the moral crusader, Ikem, and the naïve detachment of the philosophical observer, Chris. While most of the novel is an omniscient third-person narrative, with Achebe providing a clear, balanced perspective, five of the first seven chapters are told in first person, with Chris and Ikem being two of the three narrators. Inside their minds, the reader sees a false self-confidence that Achebe eventually parlays into a chauvinism, apparently characteristic of the African male. For the first time in his novels, Achebe takes up the feminist theme, stating flatly that women need to be a major part of the solution to Africa’s woes. Sam, as perceived by the third character-narrator, Beatrice, Chris’s fiancé, treats women as sex objects, as he invites Beatrice to a dinner party at his lake retreat, assuming that she will be honored to serve her president. The two male protagonists, Ikem and Chris, innocent carriers of long-held assumptions, treat the women they love too lightly, and neither understands until only days before his death the wisdom and spiritual power of Beatrice, the central female character in the novel.

In fact, Beatrice herself seems only half aware of her strength until the crisis in Kangan puts it to the test. In chapters 6 and 7, which she narrates, she reveals the change that takes place in her. Chapter 6 is her account of the visit to Sam’s retreat, where her defensiveness and vanity obscure her actual superiority over the other guests, including a young American female reporter who uses her sexuality to gain access to Sam. Beatrice sees herself, rather vaingloriously at this point, as a sacrificial shield to protect Sam—a symbol for her of the African leader—from the white temptress. Still, she rebuffs Sam’s sexual advances, and he, insulted and humiliated, sends her home in ignominy. Beatrice sees dimly, however, the role that she must play. In chapter 7, she receives help from Ikem, who visits her for the last time before his death. With her help he has made a great discovery, for she had long accused him of male chauvinism, and he reads to her the “love letter” that she has inspired. It is a feminist recantation of his chauvinism, a rejection of the two traditional images of women found in both biblical and African sources: the woman as scapegoat, the cause of evil and men’s suffering, and the woman idealized as the mother of the male god, called upon to save the world when men fail. His final word on the insight she had given him, however, is that the women themselves must decide their role; men cannot know. Beatrice tells this story of Ikem’s last visit in her journal, written months after Ikem has died. Only then is she able to put the pieces of the tragedy together in her mind.

Chris, too, begins to see a special power in Beatrice during the weeks of crisis. She becomes for him a priestess of sexual and spiritual resources who could, as a prophetess, tell the future. Indeed, it is Beatrice (a literary allusion to Dante’s Beatrice, only one of several whimsical allusions in the novel) who warns Chris and Ikem that they must mend their relationship, that tragedy is in store not only for them but also for Sam. They do not take her seriously enough, however, as they soon discover. Achebe, however, does not allow the elevation of Beatrice into the traditional Igbo role of half woman, half spirit (the Chielo of Things Fall Apart , as Beatrice herself notes), to be the work of the characters alone. In chapter 8, Achebe himself, as omniscient narrator, recounts the Igbo legend of the sun-god who sent his daughter to earth as a harbinger of peace. This legend suggests that henceforth women must stand as mediators between men and their desires, but this too is not Achebe’s final word on the subject. As Ikem says in his confession to Beatrice in chapter 7, “All certitude must now be suspect.”

In the last chapter, Achebe tries to bring together his thoughts on women and numerous other themes throughout the novel. The scene is Beatrice’s apartment, and the time is nine months after the tragedy. Those present are a family of friends, including Elewa, Ikem’s fiancé; Agatha, Beatrice’s housekeeper; and Abdul Medani, the army captain who secretly helped Chris escape from Bassa. The occasion is the naming ceremony for Elewa and Ikem’s twenty-eight-day-old daughter. The women, along with the men present, are trying to put their lives and, symbolically, the lives of their countrymen in order. Beatrice fears, however, that they are all fated pawns of “an alienated history.” They acknowledge the value of people and the living ideas that they leave behind, the importance of humor and the need to laugh at oneself, the “unbearable beauty” even of death, and the community of all religions that can dance the same dance. They learn that women can perform tasks usually reserved for men; since Ikem is not present, Beatrice, the priestess, names the child: Amaechina, the path of Ikem, a boy’s name for a baby girl. Elewa’s uncle, a male representative of traditional thinking, arrives to preside over the naming but instead pays homage to the young people in the room. “That is how to handle this world,” he says, “give the girl a boy’s name,” make her “the daughter of all of us.”

It is important not to take oneself too seriously. Sam, Ikem, and Chris forgot, as Beatrice had to remind them, that their story is not “the story of this country,” that “our story is only one of twenty million stories.” That reminder may be the main message of Anthills of the Savannah , that the other millions of people are not ants caught in a drought, retreating from the sun into their holes, but people with their own stories. As the elder in the Abazon delegation reminds Ikem, the story is the nation’s most valued treasure, the storyteller possessed by Agwu, the god of healers and the source of truth. Beatrice, like Ikem and Chris, is a writer, a teller of stories. Uchendu, in Things Fall Apart , warns that all stories are true; this fifth novel, itself full of proverbs, stories, legends, and political allegory of the sun shining on the anthills of the savannah, is an ambitious exposé and a compassionate vision of the future.

Major Works Long fiction, Things Fall Apart, 1958. No Longer at Ease, 1960. Arrow of God, 1964. A Man of the People, 1966 Anthills of the Savannah, 1987 Short fiction: “Dead Men’s Path,” 1953; The Sacrificial Egg, and Other Stories, 1962; Girls at War, and Other Stories, 1972. Poetry: Beware: Soul Brother, and Other Poems, 1971, 1972; Christmas in Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973; Collected Poems, 2004. Nonfiction: Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975; The Trouble with Nigeria, 1983; Hopes and Impediments, 1988; Conversations with Chinua Achebe, 1997 (Bernth Lindfors, editor); Home and Exile, 2000. Children’s literature: Chike and the River, 1966; How the Leopard Got His Claws, 1972 (with John Iroaganachi); The Drum, 1977; The Flute, 1977. edited texts: Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo, 1932-1967, 1978 (with Dubem Okafor); Aka weta: Egwu aguluagu egwu edeluede, 1982 (with Obiora Udechukwu); African Short Stories, 1985 (with C. L. Innes); Beyond Hunger in Africa, 1990 (with others); The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories, 1992 (with Innes). Miscellaneous: Another Africa, 1998 (poems and essay; photographs by Robert Lyons). Source : Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction. 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010

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Awesome analysis here. Very informative and deep. An incisive journey and critique on the father of African Literature.

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Things Fall Apart

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Things Fall Apart , first novel by Chinua Achebe , written in English and published in 1958. Things Fall Apart helped create the Nigerian literary renaissance of the 1960s.

The novel chronicles the life of Okonkwo, the leader of an Igbo community , from the events leading up to his banishment from the community for accidentally killing a clansman, through the seven years of his exile, to his return, and it addresses a particular problem of emergent Africa—the intrusion in the 1890s of white missionaries and colonial government into tribal Igbo society. Traditionally structured, and peppered with Igbo proverbs, it describes the simultaneous disintegration of its protagonist Okonkwo and of his village. The novel was praised for its intelligent and realistic treatment of tribal beliefs and of psychological disintegration coincident with social unraveling.

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Chinua Achebe’s Encounters With Many Hearts of Darkness

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By Dwight Garner

• Dec. 15, 2009

The first novel and masterpiece from the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, “Things Fall Apart,” is such an economical and lucid depiction of a tribal society cracking under the weight of colonialism that it has become required reading in many American high schools. It’s the stinging “To Kill a Mockingbird” of modern African literature.

First published in 1958, “Things Fall Apart” turned 50 last year, to wide acclaim. In 2007 Mr. Achebe won the Man Booker International Prize, a lifetime achievement award. But if Mr. Achebe has been much in the news, he’s been silent on the page. His new volume of essays, “The Education of a British-Protected Child,” is his first book since he was paralyzed from the waist down, in 1990, in a car accident in Nigeria.

It’s a welcome return. Those who have closely followed Mr. Achebe’s career won’t find much that’s new in “The Education of a British-Protected Child.” He deals only glancingly with subjects his readers might be curious about in 2009, like how the aftershocks of his accident have affected his life and work.

But in this book he tangles further, and profitably, with the obsessions that have defined his career: colonialism, identity, family, the uses and abuses of language. And he returns to some of the still smoldering controversies that have shaped his reputation. These include his groundbreaking 1975 analysis of the racism lurking in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and his defense against critics who have attacked him for writing African literature in the colonizer’s language, English.

Mr. Achebe grew up in British colonial Nigeria, and this book takes its title from the designation on his passport when he traveled out of his country for the first time, in 1957, to attend BBC Staff School in London. The passport read, “British Protected Person.” It was, Mr. Achebe slyly writes, “rather arbitrary protection.”

In Nigeria Mr. Achebe attended schools modeled on British public schools. He read classic English novels, plenty of them about Africa. He writes firmly and vividly about his first experience of these novels, and how the blinders eventually fell from around his eyes. It’s worth quoting his recollections at length:

“I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.

“But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

Mr. Achebe is sickened by what he reads in “Heart of Darkness.” Conrad speaks of Africans as “rudimentary souls” and savages, and compares one mechanically adept African man to “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs.”

Mr. Achebe calls this “poisonous writing,” and he has no patience for anyone who argues that Conrad’s racism was the norm for its time. He quotes earlier writers (one a hero of Conrad’s) who were far less backward.

Albert Schweitzer also comes under his disapproving gaze. “A saint like Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than a King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother,” Mr. Achebe writes.

In the essay “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature,” Mr. Achebe describes the criticism he has received, from the writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, for writing in English, the oppressor’s language. (Mr. Achebe’s native tongue is Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major languages.)

Mr. Achebe replies that because much of his country’s daily business is conducted in English, and because about 200 languages are spoken in Nigeria, English is the only way to reach a wide audience there. He also argues that English was not forced “down the throats of unwilling natives,” but that it was seen even by progressive politicians as a way to achieve a unified discourse.

There are other essays in “The Education of a British-Protected Child”: about Mr. Achebe’s boyhood and his father, who was a Christian evangelist; about raising his daughters and protecting them from the racism in far too many children’s books; about Nigerian politics; about teaching his own writing.

A few are slack and talky (many began as lectures), and Mr. Achebe is not wrong to describe several as rambling. But at its best, this collection will put you in mind of lines spoken by the poet Ikem in Mr. Achebe’s 1987 novel, “Anthills of the Savannah”: “Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches!”

We are likely to hear more from Mr. Achebe. In an interview with The Village Voice last year, he said he is at work on two novels. One is a work most of us will never get to read, but it sounds like pressing work to its author. That book, Mr. Achebe said, is a translation of “Things Fall Apart” “back into the Igbo language from which it came.”

THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD

By Chinua Achebe

172 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

Chinua Achebe

Some important facts of his life, writing career, chinua achebe’s famous works, chinua achebe’s impact on future literature, famous quotes, related posts:, post navigation.

Biography of Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist and poet, considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his debut novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read novel in modern African literature.

Achebe was raised by evangelical Christian parents in the village Ogidi in Igboland, Nigeria. He received an early education in English, but grew up surrounded by a complex fusion of Igbo traditions and colonial legacy. Achebe studied at the University College, a British-style university, originally intending to study medicine, but eventually changing his major to English, history, and theology.

After graduating, Achebe worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos and later studied at the British Broadcasting Corporation staff school in London. During this time, Achebe was developing work as a writer. Having been taught that Igbo values and culture were inferior to those of Europeans, and finding in Western literature only caricatured stereotypes of Africans, he wanted to conceive of an African literature that would present African characters and society in their full richness and complexity. Starting in the 1950s, he helped to found a new Nigerian literary movement that drew on the oral traditions of Nigeria's indigenous tribes. Although Achebe wrote in English, he attempted to incorporate Igbo vocabulary and narratives. Many of his novels dealt with the social and political problems facing his country, including the difficulties of its postcolonial legacy.

Achebe last lived in the United States, where he held a teaching position at Bard College until 2009, when he joined Brown University as a professor of African Studies. He continued writing throughout his life, producing both fiction and non-fiction, and winning awards such as the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. Achebe died in 2013 of an undisclosed illness while living and teaching in Boston, Massachusetts.

Study Guides on Works by Chinua Achebe

Anthills of the savannah chinua achebe.

A 1987 novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah is considered one of the most significant postcolonial novels in recent times. This is his fifth novel and one of the prominent works to have emerged in his canon. It was...

• Study Guide
• Lesson Plan

Arrow of God Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God was published in 1964. This is Achebe’s third novel after his books No Longer At Ease and Things Fall Apart . Together these three books are often referred to as the African Trilogy. This book was published as...

Civil Peace Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe penned "Civil Peace" in 1971, depicting through it the effects of the Nigerian Civil War on a man and his family. The War, which began in 1967 with the secession of several Southeastern provinces from Nigeria, led to an intensive...

A Man of the People Chinua Achebe

First published in 1966, A Man of the People offers a critical perspective on the nature of politics, power, and greed. In his novel, author Chinua Achebe assumes an "outside" perspective in order to illustrate the profound effects of governmental...

Marriage is a Private Affair Chinua Achebe

Written in 1952, Chinua Achebe's short story "Marriage is a Private Affair" is about a Nigerian father who rejects his son's decision to marry for love instead of accepting an arranged marriage. While arranged marriages are traditional in the...

No Longer at Ease Chinua Achebe

No Longer at Ease is Chinua Achebe's second book and part of what is commonly referred to as the African Trilogy ; this includes Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God . The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi . Some critics discern...

The Short Fiction of Chinua Achebe Chinua Achebe

The Short Fiction of Chinua Achebe is a collection of short stories by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe published between 1953 and 1972. It is an essential read for anyone looking to receive great insight on the African people who to this day remain...

There Was a Country Chinua Achebe

There Was a Country was written by Chinua Achebe, one of Nigeria’s most famous authors. It was published in 2012, after Achebe had remained in silence on the events of the Nigerian Civil War for over forty years. There Was a Country is an account...

Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe's college work sharpened his interest in indigenous Nigerian cultures. He had grown up in Ogidi, a large village in Nigeria. His father taught at the missionary school, and Achebe witnessed firsthand the complex mix of benefit and...

Chinua Achebe

A short biography of chinua achebe.

In 1960, Achebe came up with his second novel, No Longer at Ease. He dedicated his second novel to his wife Christiana. The novel reflected the various hardships and challenges about the independence of Nigeria.

Chinua Achebe’s Writing Style

Oral tradition.

Achebe’s short stories are not as generally concentrated as his books, and Achebe himself didn’t think of them as a significant piece of his work. In the introduction for Girls at War and Other Stories, he states that twelve pieces in twenty years must be an entirely lean reap by any reckoning. Like his books, the short stories are intensely affected by the oral convention. Also, similar to the folktales they follow, the accounts frequently have ethics stressing the significance of social traditions.

Use of Proverbs

Use of english, simple diction.

In his novel, Achebe utilizes direct language and straightforward sentence structures. His style makes a feeling of convention befitting a verifiable story told from a third-individual omniscient perspective. In keeping his language direct and to the point, Achebe contributes his composition with the sentiment of nonpartisan reportage.

Use of Images

Major themes, cultural and tradition, gender roles, works of chinua achebe, short stories.

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Writing Between Worlds: Navigating My African and American Identities on the Page

Itoro bassey on the gift of being understood.

If you had known me when I was much younger, and asked how I identified, I would have told you that I was Black. This would have been my way to acknowledge my Blackness in America, being that I was born and raised in this country, while simultaneously acknowledging that I was born to Nigerian immigrants, which usually meant that my particular experience as a Black person in America was markedly different from most of my African American peers. I was not from one of those families that traveled back home every year like some cousins I knew, which further solidified my distance from my parents’ homeland and cultural practices.

Though I couldn’t fully claim the experience of African Americans whose people had been enslaved and brought to this country, their collective struggles and triumphs had taught me a lot about how I wanted to show up in the world. I had a great respect for what they had been through as a collective, and the beauty they had produced in the face of such odds, and, for me, the particular reality of navigating the US while Black was more resonant in my consciousness than my Nigerian identity.

In high school I was introduced to authors like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright. I read Jazz in a literature class as the token BIPOC book that had made its way into the syllabus, and Native Son in an Intro to Law class, where the teacher used the character of Bigger Thomas as a case study into the mind of a criminal. It would be years later, when I was training to become a teacher myself, that it would hit me how cruel this particular teacher had been in her final assessment of the main character. I’d break down in tears over this revelation, and say a word of gratitude for the struggles fought to make it possible for me to have access to authors like Morrison and Wright, even if in such a limited manner.

I suspect the teacher’s hope was to plant a seed that would make me criminalize Blackness, but instead, I developed a curiosity about my personal connection to a larger Black experience within an interconnected—and at times fraught—tapestry of understandings. Perhaps I could not fully claim the experiences of African Americans who had produced prolific writers like Morrison and Wright; and neither could I fully claim the stories told by Nigerian writers like Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie. But at the very least I could be in conversation with these writers from my particular vantage point.

I’ve been asked quite a few times: Who do you write for? Usually I’m asked this question in reference to identifying who in the marketplace would be interested in reading my work. It’s become a complex question to answer, because usually, I’m mining decades of absence, dispersion and grief within characters who are trying to find the language to say the unsayable across space and time. And sometimes, if they could say that which could be said, they may choose to not say it at all, because the people they’re speaking to already have the scaffolding to understand their experience. If the scaffolding doesn’t exist, then this gap becomes a part of the story, a tension within the relationship.

When I lived in Nigeria for three years, there was a saying many people would use to convey this sentiment of what is intrinsically understood because one has been steeped in a particular experience shared among those who have lived it.

We know ourselves.

I was speaking to a friend about the teacher who introduced me to Native Son in high school. I’ll call this friend Naimah. She was born in the US to an immigrant Nigerian mother and an African American father.

“This teacher asked every Black kid in that class—and you know there were only two of us—did we ever feel bad about being Black.” I said, enraged. “And of course we say yes, because we think she cares about what’s happening to us. And then the next day she draws a Venn diagram on the chalkboard breaking down Bigger Thomas’ mind, making the case that he was primed to become a criminal. And then she wanted a fifteen-hundred-word essay on how one becomes a criminal using Bigger Thomas as the example. That was the only Black book we ever read in her class! Can you believe?”

Naimah, who usually had an answer for everything, shook her head and said,

“Girl, I know. These people… God will deal with them.”

“God will deal with them,” is what many Nigerians said to express powerlessness in the face of an impossible situation. They simply give it over to a higher power and move on.

From Naimah’s response, it was clear she had her own set of grievances that she had moved on from. I felt great relief in knowing that I was understood in this friendship. The type of pain I was still holding was known, and it didn’t require further explanation.

What steers my writing, is a quest to find the we . My experience straddling both Blackness in America and alienation from my parents’ homeland has made me crave literature where those of us living within the African Diaspora, and those on the outside, can learn about and from each other. It isn’t about writing in a way that only humanizes Black people to white people and non-Black people eager to learn about different experiences—it’s also about telling stories where Black people, no matter where we find ourselves, can be witnessed by each other.

It’s my hope to show the intimacy of how one shifts between worlds and different understandings. This is the experience for those of us who exist in that place Chicana feminist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa called the third space. Anzaldúa was describing the growing consciousness emerging within Latinx communities finding themselves between two homelands; grappling with being from neither here, nor there.

“I am participating in the creation of yet another culture,” she writes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , “a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and the planet.”

Anzaldúa’s tremendous groundwork has helped me become a writer unafraid of writing worlds within worlds while recognizing how I exist in all of them.

When someone reads my work, the most exciting thing a reader can tell me suggests understanding, and being understood: “Say less.”

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Itoro Bassey

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