Life
Nigerian literary giant, Chinua Achebe dies at 82
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, and statesman who gave literary birth to modern Africa with Things Fall Apart and continued for decades to rewrite and reclaim the history of his native country, has died. He was 82.
Achebe died following a brief illness, said his agent, Andrew Wylie.
“He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him,” Wylie said.
Achebe’s eminence worldwide was rivaled only by Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a handful of others. He was a moral and literary model for countless Africans and a profound influence on such American writers as Morrison, Ha Jin and Junot Diaz.
As a Nigerian, Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary change in his country, 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 never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honors from past governments he refused to accept.
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 man’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 post-colonial, 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.”
