By Hillel Italie And Jon Gambrell/AP
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Chinua
Achebe
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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.
Achebe,
the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident, who
died at age 82 after a brief illness, continued for decades to rewrite and
reclaim the history of his native country. Achebe lived through and helped
define revolutionary change in Nigeria, from independence to dictatorship to
the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the
late 1960s.
He
knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of
being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the
United States, but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting
literary honours from a government he refused to accept.
Even
in traffic today in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, hawkers sell pirated copies
of his recent civil war memoir.
"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 Friday by his literary agent, Andrew
Wylie.
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 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."
Helped define revolutionary
change
His
public life began in his mid-20s. 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 once observed. "It
would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin
influenced Russians. Achebe didn't only play the game, he invented it."
"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 and menace.
"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 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."
Conflicting
cultures
His
first novel was intended as a trilogy and the author continued its story in
"A Man of the People" 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 honour 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 University 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 an 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.
'Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold'
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 travelled 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."
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