The tributes keep pouring in for the great man, Chinua Achebe (1930-2013).
Here are some pictures of the great writer and novelist over the years.
By Tidi Kwidini
Nigerian literature gem, Chinua Achebe, the founding father of African fiction has died.
Achebe who died aged 82, was Africa’s best-known novelist and the founding father of African fiction. The publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958 not only contested European narratives about Africans but also challenged traditional assumptions about the form and function of the novel.
The five novels and the short stories he published between 1958 and 1987 provide a chronicle of Nigeria’s troubled history since the beginning of British colonial rule. They also create a number of vivid characters who in different ways seek to take control of their history.Achebe who created what is dubbed by many as a hybrid, combined oral and literary modes of language that reformed the English language to convey Igbo voices and concepts, establishing a model and an inspiration for other novelists throughout the African continent.
Born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria almost 40 years after missionaries first arrived in the region, Achebe was christened Albert Chinualumogu by his parents who were christian converts. Later, in an autobiographical essay entitled: Named for Victoria, Queen of England, he told how, like Queen Victoria, he “lost his Albert”.
Having grown up in a Christian setting in the traditional Igbo village of Ogidi allowed Achebe to observe his world more clearly. He detailed in one of his books that the slight distance from each culture became “not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer might take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully.
At the local missionary school he attended the children were forbidden to speak Igbo, and were encouraged to disown all traditions that might be associated with a “pagan” way of life.Despite this Achebe absorbed and related with the folk tales told to him by his mother and older sister, stories he described as having “the immemorial quality of the sky, and the forests and the rivers”.
When he was 14, Achebe was sent to the prestigious colonial Government college at Umuahia. In 1948, he won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Ibadan. After his first year, however, he realised it was writing that most appealed to him, and he switched to a degree in English literature, religious studies and history.
Achebe was among several future literary stars,who, between 1948 and 1952, contributed stories and essays to student magazines with a nationalist orientation. It is in one of these stories that a favourite proverb of his makes its first appearance: “Let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” It is in these early pieces where one can identify with his style, characteristic qualities,his views of the educated elite, and his pleasure in mimicking various modes of discourse and an interest in rural Nigeria.
By the time he graduated in 1952, Achebe had decided to be a writer telling the story of Africans and the colonial encounter from an African point of view. One of his motivations was Cary’s Nigeria-set novel Mister Johnson, which, though much praised by English critics, seemed to him “a most superficial picture of Nigeria and the Nigerian character”.
One of his well-known novels- Things Fall Apart is a recreation of an oral culture and a consciousness “imbued with an agrarian” way of life.It demonstrates “that African peoples did not hear of civilisation for the first time from Europeans”,well at least according to him.Things Fall Apart has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Achebe was multi-talented. As head of the talks department at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), he was sent in 1956 on a short training course with the BBC in London. Back in Nigeria, he edited and produced discussion programmes and short stories for the NBS in Enugu, eastern Nigeria, and learned much about how good dialogue works. It is there that he met the love of his life Christie Chinwe Okoli who he married in 1961 and had four children.
While preparing a feature on the response of Nigerians to early colonial rule, Achebe investigated the story of an Igbo priest imprisoned for refusing to collaborate with the British. Fascinated by the tale and the priest’s proud character, he made it the focus of his third novel, Arrow of God (1964). Some critics regard this as Achebe’s greatest achievement, with its complex structure and characterisation, and its interrogation of the interstices between subjective desire and external forces in the making of history.
When the massacre of Igbos began in the north following the coup, Achebe was working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission in Lagos. Warned that he might be in danger Achebe took his family to eastern Nigeria.Prior to this, his cousin who was high up in the military had been assassinated. He became a strong advocate of Biafra’s independence, travelling the world to seek support. In his view, Biafra was not only a territory that could ensure the survival of Igbo peoples, but also an ideal.
“Biafra stands for true independence in Africa, for an end to the 400 years of shame and humiliation which we have suffered in our association with Europe.I believe our cause is right and just. And this is what literature should be about today – right and just causes,” Achebe said in 1968.
Although the war ended in defeat for the Biafran cause, Achebe was determined the Igbo presence and perspectives should continue within the Nigerian nation. His collection of poems Beware Soul Brother (1971) and the volume of short stories Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) drew on the experiences of the war.
In 1972, Achebe accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught African literature.During this time he did not retreat from controversy. In essays, lectures and interviews, he declared the need for committed writing in the African context, and derided writers and critics whose attitudes to Africans he found condescending or racist.
Achebe returned to Nigeria in 1976 to be professor of literature at the University of Nigeria, where he continued to teach, became chairman of the Association of Nigerian Writers and edited Uwa ndi Igbo, the Journal of Igbo Life and Culture. He was also elected deputy national president of the People’s Redemption party and published a political pamphlet, The Trouble With Nigeria, in 1983.
In 1990, Achebe was involved in a car accident that left him paralysed. Bard College, New York, offered him and his wife Christie the possibility of teaching there and provided the facilities he needed. Although using a wheelchair, he continued to travel and lecture in the US and occasionally abroad. His talks at Harvard in 1998 were published under the title Home and Exile.
His more recent lectures and autobiographical essays were published in The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009). In 2012 he published There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, which reenforced his belief in the ideals that had inspired the nationalism of his younger days.
Achebe received numerous awards and more than 30 honorary doctorates, but among the tributes he valued most was Nelson Mandela’s. “There was a writer named Chinua Achebe,in whose company the prison walls fell down,” Mandela wrote.
Achebe was a founding editor of the influential Heinemann African writers series, he oversaw the publication of more than 100 texts that made good writing by Africans available worldwide in affordable editions.
Achebe not only created a new kind of novel, but was also unwilling to repeat the same formula. Each novel set up a dialogue with its predecessor, technically and formally as well as with regard to character and “social milieu.”
He is survived by his wife Christie, their daughters, Chinelo and Nwando, and their sons, Ikechukwu and Chide.
Achebe who died aged 82, was Africa’s best-known novelist and the founding father of African fiction. The publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958 not only contested European narratives about Africans but also challenged traditional assumptions about the form and function of the novel.
The five novels and the short stories he published between 1958 and 1987 provide a chronicle of Nigeria’s troubled history since the beginning of British colonial rule. They also create a number of vivid characters who in different ways seek to take control of their history.Achebe who created what is dubbed by many as a hybrid, combined oral and literary modes of language that reformed the English language to convey Igbo voices and concepts, establishing a model and an inspiration for other novelists throughout the African continent.
Born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria almost 40 years after missionaries first arrived in the region, Achebe was christened Albert Chinualumogu by his parents who were christian converts. Later, in an autobiographical essay entitled: Named for Victoria, Queen of England, he told how, like Queen Victoria, he “lost his Albert”.
Having grown up in a Christian setting in the traditional Igbo village of Ogidi allowed Achebe to observe his world more clearly. He detailed in one of his books that the slight distance from each culture became “not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer might take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully.
At the local missionary school he attended the children were forbidden to speak Igbo, and were encouraged to disown all traditions that might be associated with a “pagan” way of life.Despite this Achebe absorbed and related with the folk tales told to him by his mother and older sister, stories he described as having “the immemorial quality of the sky, and the forests and the rivers”.
When he was 14, Achebe was sent to the prestigious colonial Government college at Umuahia. In 1948, he won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Ibadan. After his first year, however, he realised it was writing that most appealed to him, and he switched to a degree in English literature, religious studies and history.
Achebe was among several future literary stars,who, between 1948 and 1952, contributed stories and essays to student magazines with a nationalist orientation. It is in one of these stories that a favourite proverb of his makes its first appearance: “Let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” It is in these early pieces where one can identify with his style, characteristic qualities,his views of the educated elite, and his pleasure in mimicking various modes of discourse and an interest in rural Nigeria.
By the time he graduated in 1952, Achebe had decided to be a writer telling the story of Africans and the colonial encounter from an African point of view. One of his motivations was Cary’s Nigeria-set novel Mister Johnson, which, though much praised by English critics, seemed to him “a most superficial picture of Nigeria and the Nigerian character”.
One of his well-known novels- Things Fall Apart is a recreation of an oral culture and a consciousness “imbued with an agrarian” way of life.It demonstrates “that African peoples did not hear of civilisation for the first time from Europeans”,well at least according to him.Things Fall Apart has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Achebe was multi-talented. As head of the talks department at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), he was sent in 1956 on a short training course with the BBC in London. Back in Nigeria, he edited and produced discussion programmes and short stories for the NBS in Enugu, eastern Nigeria, and learned much about how good dialogue works. It is there that he met the love of his life Christie Chinwe Okoli who he married in 1961 and had four children.
While preparing a feature on the response of Nigerians to early colonial rule, Achebe investigated the story of an Igbo priest imprisoned for refusing to collaborate with the British. Fascinated by the tale and the priest’s proud character, he made it the focus of his third novel, Arrow of God (1964). Some critics regard this as Achebe’s greatest achievement, with its complex structure and characterisation, and its interrogation of the interstices between subjective desire and external forces in the making of history.
When the massacre of Igbos began in the north following the coup, Achebe was working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission in Lagos. Warned that he might be in danger Achebe took his family to eastern Nigeria.Prior to this, his cousin who was high up in the military had been assassinated. He became a strong advocate of Biafra’s independence, travelling the world to seek support. In his view, Biafra was not only a territory that could ensure the survival of Igbo peoples, but also an ideal.
“Biafra stands for true independence in Africa, for an end to the 400 years of shame and humiliation which we have suffered in our association with Europe.I believe our cause is right and just. And this is what literature should be about today – right and just causes,” Achebe said in 1968.
Although the war ended in defeat for the Biafran cause, Achebe was determined the Igbo presence and perspectives should continue within the Nigerian nation. His collection of poems Beware Soul Brother (1971) and the volume of short stories Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) drew on the experiences of the war.
In 1972, Achebe accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught African literature.During this time he did not retreat from controversy. In essays, lectures and interviews, he declared the need for committed writing in the African context, and derided writers and critics whose attitudes to Africans he found condescending or racist.
Achebe returned to Nigeria in 1976 to be professor of literature at the University of Nigeria, where he continued to teach, became chairman of the Association of Nigerian Writers and edited Uwa ndi Igbo, the Journal of Igbo Life and Culture. He was also elected deputy national president of the People’s Redemption party and published a political pamphlet, The Trouble With Nigeria, in 1983.
In 1990, Achebe was involved in a car accident that left him paralysed. Bard College, New York, offered him and his wife Christie the possibility of teaching there and provided the facilities he needed. Although using a wheelchair, he continued to travel and lecture in the US and occasionally abroad. His talks at Harvard in 1998 were published under the title Home and Exile.
His more recent lectures and autobiographical essays were published in The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009). In 2012 he published There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, which reenforced his belief in the ideals that had inspired the nationalism of his younger days.
Achebe received numerous awards and more than 30 honorary doctorates, but among the tributes he valued most was Nelson Mandela’s. “There was a writer named Chinua Achebe,in whose company the prison walls fell down,” Mandela wrote.
Achebe was a founding editor of the influential Heinemann African writers series, he oversaw the publication of more than 100 texts that made good writing by Africans available worldwide in affordable editions.
Achebe not only created a new kind of novel, but was also unwilling to repeat the same formula. Each novel set up a dialogue with its predecessor, technically and formally as well as with regard to character and “social milieu.”
He is survived by his wife Christie, their daughters, Chinelo and Nwando, and their sons, Ikechukwu and Chide.
No comments:
Post a Comment