Professor Chinualumogu Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author who helped revive African Literature and gave literary birth to modern Africa with his book “Things Fall Apart” has died. He was aged 82.
Born on November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, a rural community located in present day Anambra, he started formal education at age 6 at St Philips Central School before proceeding to the prestigious Government Secondary School in Umuahia. He thereafter went to University College now known as University of Ibadan where he studied English, History and Theology.
Chinua Achebe caught the world’s attention with his first novel “Things Fall Apart” the best read African novel whose title was taken from William Butler Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming”. Published in 1958, the novel would become a classic of world literature and required reading for students selling more than 10 million copies in 45 languages. Time magazine placed it on its list of the 100 best English Language novels from 1923 to 2005.His other famous works include: No Longer at Ease(1960), Arrow of God (1964),A man of the people(1966) and Anthills of the Savannah.
As a Nigerian, Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary changes in Nigeria from the struggle for independence, to the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960’s. He had on several occasions fled Nigeria and returned. In 2004 he rejected the country’s second-highest award, the Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic, in protest of the alleged increase in corruption under the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration.
Achebe never did win the Nobel Prize which many believed he deserved but in 2007, he did receive the Man Booker International Price for lifetime achievement. Achebe who became paralyzed after an auto accident in 1990 spent the last two decades in the United States teaching at Bard College and then Brown University.
Late Professor Achebe was a mentor and role model to a generation of African writers and he is often referred to as the “Father of Modern African Writing”.
For a writer who has left so much of himself in his literary works and upon whose shoulders others will stand for generations to come can’t be said to be dead.
Achebe the man has died, yet Achebe the writer lives on.