Chinua Achebe
With his modern take on traditional culture, the African novelist recast the image of his continent
By WOLE SOYINKA
Things Fall Apart, A story about the incursion of Western missionaries into an Igbo community in 19th century Nigeria, has long gripped readers across the world. It's not an obvious subject to arouse
such wide interest, but Chinua Achebe's first novel is a work of extraordinary power and insight. It remains one of the best-known works by the Nigerian writer, whose career has spanned over 50 years and encompassed essays, poetry, the short story and the novel. Achebe's literary heights have been attained in spite of the demands of his career as the first director of external broadcasting at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, his university teaching that continues today, and his stint as unofficial roving ambassador for Biafra during the Nigerian civil war.
The cycle and rhythms of his Igbo community and its traditional life are meticulously delineated in Achebe's limpid prose, with its nuggets of timeless wisdom distilled through a treasury of proverbs. Six years ago, that precolonial reality caught up with fiction when Achebe, the modern sophisticate, was inducted into the responsibilities of a traditional chief in Oguta, his hometown. Though now obliged to live abroad because of decreased mobility, the result of a motor accident, Achebe is still regularly consulted from Oguta on matters that require the wisdom of his experience and the authority of his reputation, while his political interventions on the national scene remain trenchant. He constantly attacks the failure of leadership, showing the extent of his disgust when, in 2004, he declined to accept Nigeria's second highest honor.
Achebe's influence on writers of succeeding generations is too great to quantify. Above all, this griot of modern letters has left the authentic imprint of African cultures across the globe, with a succession of narratives that challenge the skewed view of the continent in European literary tradition. His confident narratives of the life that was destroyed under the colonial mandate serve as models both of historical restoration and of stylistic mastery.
Poet, playwright and human-rights activist Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986
 |
April 28, 2004 |
 |
October 11, 2004 |
|
October 10, 2005 |
|
