Chinua Achebe

Biography

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, in what is now Anambra State, Nigeria. His father was a Christian catechist, and Achebe grew up in a household that straddled both traditional Igbo culture and Christian mission education — a duality that would define his literary vision. He attended Government College, Umuahia, one of Nigeria's finest secondary schools, and then University College, Ibadan — Nigeria's first university — graduating with a degree in English in 1953. Achebe burst onto the world literary scene in 1958 with Things Fall Apart, a novel told from the perspective of an Igbo village confronting British colonialism. The book became one of the best-selling African novels in history, translated into over fifty languages, and established Achebe as perhaps Africa's most important literary voice. Its title — drawn from W.B. Yeats — announced the literary ambition: this was an author wrestling with the largest questions of culture, identity, and destruction. When Biafra declared independence, Achebe was already a figure of international stature. He chose to stand with Biafra, traveling to Europe and North America as a cultural ambassador, speaking to audiences about the humanitarian crisis and the legitimacy of the Igbo cause. He witnessed the starvation at first hand and was haunted by it for the rest of his life. The question of whether Nigeria had deliberately used hunger as a weapon — and whether the world had looked away — became the central preoccupation of his later life. After the war, Achebe found himself unable to write fiction for decades. He remained in Nigeria, teaching and writing essays, but the trauma of Biafra had done something to his creative imagination. His 1983 essay The Trouble with Nigeria was a scathing indictment of post-war Nigerian political failure. Only at the very end of his life did he publish There Was a Country (2012), his memoir of the Biafran war — a book that caused tremendous controversy in Nigeria by arguing that Biafra was deliberately starved and that Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba political leader who served as Gowon's Finance Minister, had been the architect of the starvation policy. Achebe died on March 21, 2013, in Boston, just months after the memoir's publication.

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