CHINUA ACHEBE DIES AT 82

 Chinua Achebe

Tributes are pouring in from around the world following the passing on of perhaps Nigeria's greatest ever writer. Chinualumogu Albert Achebe died last night in Boston, aged 82. Why was Chinua Achebe so readable and Wole Soyinka almost inscrutable? The former was a writer, a storyteller – the latter is a poet.

Achebe's telling of stories and his command of the English language was such that the moment you picked up a Chinua Achebe book, putting it down became almost an impossibility. His understanding of the culture of his Igbo people, was also virtually unrivalled. A lot of the Igbo proverbs I learned, I learned from his magnum opus, Things Fall Apart. However, when talking of such a giant of literature, it is plain wrong to use the phrase magnum opus to describe his work.

An author of more than 20 books, his honors included the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.

He is a major part of African literature, and is popular all over the continent for his novels, especially "Anthills of the Savannah," which was itself shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987, and "Things Fall Apart."

His craftsmanship as a story teller was such that he had a plethora of work that made up his magna opera.
As compared to a lot of people, Achebe was a man of character, who refused not one, but two national honours because he was not at peace with the way Nigeria is being run. Only if our government(s) had been reading. Many writers would prefer to carry that badge of universality, but Achebe—who has gone to his grave without ever receiving the Nobel Prize he deserved as much as any novelist of his era—has said that to be called simply a writer, rather than an African writer, is “a statement of defeat.” Why? Because his project has always been to emphatically resist the notion that African identity must be erased as a prerequisite to being called civilized. Growing up as what he called a “British-protected child” in the colonial order, the young writer came to see that the Empire’s claim that Africans had no history was a violent, if at times ignorant or unconscious, counter-factual effort to annihilate the history of his continent’s peoples.

Achebe made his case in many forms—essays and lectures, interviews and acts of protest, and as an ideologue and propagandist for the failed Igbo-nationalist secessionist state of Biafra—but he made it most cogently on the final page of “Things Fall Apart.” With the reader in the full emotional grip of the many dimensions of Okonkwo’s epic fate.
Having, with his first effort, created a permanent place for the African novel in the world literary canon, Achebe continued to be a prolific imaginative writer, producing novels and stories that evoked, in a range of voices, the trials of Nigeria’s pre-colonial and colonial history, and the traumas of its post-independence ordeals: from “No Longer at Ease” and “A Man of the People” in the sixties to “Girls at War” and “Anthills of the Savannah” in the aftermath of the Biafran war. But the fact that he must be remembered as not only the father but the godfather of modern African literature owes at least as much to the decades he spent as the editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. In that capacity, Achebe served as the discoverer, mentor, patron, and presenter-to-the-world of so many of the now-classic African authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. The series’s orange-spined, generously inexpensive paperbacks carried a stamp of excellence that drew readers everywhere to essential works by writers as varied as Kenneth Kaunda, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dennis Brutus, Tayeb Salih, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer, to name but a few: it is an extraordinary legacy.

No Longer At Ease, his second novel, and in many ways more poignant than Things Fall Apart, is a book that peers deep into the Nigerian psyche and foretells in more ways than one, the emergence and eventual proliferation of Nigeria's current national malaise, corruption.

 In Arrow of God, Ezeulu, given the power to make decisions on behalf of the god Ulu, Ezeulu would not dare test that power. But his people were quick to abandon him on his return from prison, because of the "small issue" of being unable to harvest their yams. The conversion of the people of Umuaro to Christianity because Ezeulu did not perform the New Yam Festival foretold our inability to weather storms as a people, together. A failing talked about by another Nigerian great, Fela Kuti, in his Sorrows, Tears and Blood.
But Achebe was not just a writer about culture, tradition and the contemporary. One of the first books I recall reading was Chike and the River. Being ethnically from that region but hailing from another part of the country, I began, at that young age, to appreciate the vital importance of the River Niger to commerce in our environment.
Achebe, as he grew older – and especially after Nigeria's devastating civil war – became more introspective, and tried to, in his own literary manner, warn us about the road we had taken. A warning that as a people we have failed to heed.
In yet another seminal piece, The Trouble With Nigeria, he said, "In spite of conventional opinion, Nigeria has been less than fortunate in its leadership. A basic element of this misfortune is the seminal absence of intellectual rigour in the political thought of our founding fathers – a tendency to pious materialistic woolliness and self-centred pedestrianism."
There you have it. He was probably the first to identify something that a few Nigerians are beginning to come to terms with, that our founding fathers were not all that great. Such was his genuine insight into the character of this country that he called home.
In his last book, There Was A Country, one cannot fault what he wrote because he clearly stated from the beginning that the book was a personal history. That personal history was perhaps his greatest gift to Nigeria. Mistakes were made in those dark years between 1966 and 1970. Those mistakes are finally being documented by some of the people who went through those days. We must learn from it.

As a storyteller, as a voice of his nation, as a cultural impresario, an intellectual combatant and provocateur, Achebe gained with age the status in Nigeria of a bard and a sage that the modern world rarely affords to writers. After suffering terrible injuries in a car crash, he spent much of his time in the last decades of his life in America, where he settled into long-term professorships at Bard College and Brown University. But when he returned to Nigeria he was received as a national hero. Crowds of thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—gathered to pay tribute to him. The adoration hardly softened him, though. He was, in his old age, as much a scold to his compatriots as he had ever been in his youth. The tributes and obituaries that have poured in from various parts of the world should be a pointer to the younger generation of Nigerians. Achebe was by no means a wealthy man. He was not a pauper either. But by using his God-given talents, he achieved global recognition. Now that the curtains have been drawn on his life, we can all sit back and see how the world treats a genuine icon. He lived to a grand old age. He was also an achiever. And the world has now shown, it is not only among ndi Igbo that achievement is revered. In publishing Things Fall Apart at age 28, Achebe washed his hands early. And kings invited him to the table, giving him the luxury of choosing what banquets to attend and which to reject.
 It is simply impossible for an iroko tree to fall and the forest to remain quiet. 
 REST IN PEACE