Me only heard of his name today when his death was reported in the news. After briefly reading his background, me know that this is one of the great man whose legacy should be looked into for all of us to learn something from him...
Below is an article on the great African author by Hillel Italie and Jon Gambrell of the Associated Press for us to share....
The opening sentence was as simple, declarative and
revolutionary as a line out of Hemingway:
"Okonkwo was
well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond," Chinua Achebe
wrote in "Things Fall Apart." Africans, the
Nigerian author announced more than 50 years ago, had their own history, their
own celebrities and reputations. Centuries of being defined by the West were
about to end, a transformation led by Achebe, who continued for decades to
rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country.
Achebe, the
internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident, died at
age 82 in Boston on Thursday 03/21/2013 after a brief illness. He lived through and helped
define traumatic change in Nigeria, from independence to dictatorship to the disastrous war between Nigeria and
the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960s. He spent much of his adult
life in the United States but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or
resisting literary honors from a government he refused to accept.
"What has
consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that
mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war -- ushering
in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery," wrote
Achebe, whose death was confirmed by Brown University, where he taught.
His eminence
worldwide was rivaled only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and a
handful of others. Achebe was a moral and literary model for countless Africans
and a profound influence on such American-based writers as Ha Jin, Junot Diaz
and Morrison, who once called Achebe's work an "education" for her
and "liberating in a way nothing had been before."
His public life
began in his mid-20s, when Nigeria was still under British rule. He was a
resident of London when he completed his handwritten manuscript for
"Things Fall Apart," a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman's
downfall at the hands of British colonialists.
Turned down by
several publishers, the book was finally accepted by Heinemann and released in
1958 with a first printing of 2,000. Its initial review in The New York Times
ran less than 500 words, but the novel soon became among the most important
books of the 20th century, a universally acknowledged starting point for
postcolonial, indigenous African fiction, the prophetic union of British
letters and African oral culture. "
"It would be
impossible to say how 'Things Fall Apart' influenced African writing," the
African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah observed. "It would be like asking
how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.
Achebe didn't only play the game, he invented it."
"Things Fall
Apart" has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and has been
translated into more than 50 languages. Achebe also was a forceful critic of
Western literature about Africa, especially Joseph Conrad's "Heart of
Darkness," standard reading for millions, but in Achebe's opinion, a
defining example of how even a great Western mind could reduce a foreign
civilization to barbarism.
"Now, I grew up
among very eloquent elders. In the village, or even in the church, which my
father made sure we attended, there were eloquent speakers. So if you reduce
that eloquence which I encountered to eight words ... it's going to be very
different," Achebe, who attacked the novel in a landmark lecture and essay
"An Image of Africa," told The Associated Press in 2008. "You
know that it's going to be a battle to turn it around, to say to people,
'That's not the way my people respond in this situation, by unintelligible
grunts, and so on; they would speak.' And it is that speech that I knew I
wanted to be written down."
His first novel was
intended as a trilogy and the author continued its story in "No Longer At
Ease" and "Arrow of God." He also wrote short stories, poems,
children's stories and a political satire, "The Anthills of
Savannah," a 1987 release that was the last full-length fiction to come
out in his lifetime. Achebe, who used a wheelchair in his later years, would
cite his physical problems and displacement from home as stifling to his
imaginative powers.
Achebe never did win
the Nobel Prize, which many believed he deserved, but in 2007 he did receive
the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honor for lifetime achievement.
Achebe, paralyzed from the waist down since a 1990 auto accident, lived for
years in a cottage built for him on the campus of Bard College, a leading
liberal arts school north of New York City where he was a faculty member. He
joined Brown in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature.
Achebe, a native of
Ogidi, Nigeria, regarded his life as a bartering between conflicting cultures.
He spoke of the "two types of music" running through his mind, Ibo
legends and the prose of Dickens. He was also exposed to different faiths. His father
worked in a local missionary and was among the first in their village to
convert to Christianity.
In Achebe's memoir "There Was a Country," he
wrote that his "whole artistic career was probably sparked by this tension
between the Christian religion" of his parents and the "retreating,
older religion" of his ancestors. He would observe the conflicts between
his father and great uncle and ponder "the essence, the meaning, the
worldview of both religions."
For much of his
life, he had a sense that he was a person of special gifts who was part of a
historic generation. Achebe was so avid a reader as a young man that his
nickname was "Dictionary." At Government College Umuahia, he read
Shakespeare, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jonathan Swift among others.
He placed his name alongside an extraordinary range of alumni - government and
artistic leaders from Jaja Wachukwa, a future ambassador to the United Nations;
to future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka; Achebe's future wife (and mother of
their four children) Christine Okoli; and the poet Christopher Okigbo, a close
friend of Achebe's who was killed during the Biafra war.
After graduating
from the University College of Ibadan, in 1953, Achebe was a radio producer at
the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp., then moved to London and worked at the British
Broadcasting Corp. He was writing stories in college and called "Things
Fall Apart" an act of "atonement" for what he says was the
abandonment of traditional culture. The book's title was taken from poet
William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming," which includes the widely
quoted line, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
His novel was nearly
lost before ever seen by the public. When Achebe finished his manuscript, he
sent it to a London typing service, which misplaced the package and left it
lying in an office for months. The proposed book was received coolly by London
publishers, who doubted the appeal of fiction from Africa. Finally, an
educational adviser at Heinemann who had recently traveled to west Africa had a
look and declared: "This is the best novel I have read since the
war."
In mockery of all
the Western books about Africa, Achebe ended "Things Fall Apart" with
a colonial official observing Okonkwo's fate and imagining the book he will
write: "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger."
Achebe's novel was the opening of a long argument on his country's behalf.
"Literature is
always badly served when an author's artistic insight yields to stereotype and
malice," Achebe said during a 1998 lecture at Harvard University that
cited Joyce Cary's "Mister Johnson" as a special offender. "And
it becomes doubly offensive when such a work is arrogantly proffered to you as
your story. Some people may wonder if, perhaps, we were not too touchy, if we were
not oversensitive. We really were not."
Achebe could be just
as critical of his own country. The novels "A Man of the People" and
"No Longer at Ease" were stories of corruption and collapse that
anticipated the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 and the years of mismanagement
that followed. He not only supported Biafra's independence, but was a
government envoy and a member of a committee that was to write up the new and
short-lived country's constitution. He would flee from Nigeria and return many
times and twice refused the country's second-highest award, the Commander of
the Order of the Federal Republic, over the lawlessness in his home state of
Anambra.
In 2011, Nigeria's
presidency said Achebe's refusal "clearly flies in the face of the reality
of Nigeria's current political situation." Achebe responded that "A
small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places,
seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom."
"I had a strong
belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to
uniting our diverse peoples," Achebe warned.
Besides his own
writing, Achebe served for years as editor of Heinemann's "African Writer
Series," which published works by Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Biko and others.
He also edited numerous anthologies of African stories, poems and essays. In
"There Was a Country," he considered the role of the modern African
writer.
"What I can say
is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary
renaissance was overdue," he wrote. "A major objective was to
challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and
to recast them through stories - prose, poetry, essays, and books for our
children. That was my overall goal."
