Some Things Never Fall Apart – Remembering Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

Last month on 21st March 2018, it was exactly five years since renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe passed on. Isaac Makashinyi, a thriving writer and pastor wrote the following reflections. Please read on. 

21st March, 2018, marks exactly five years since renowned Nigerian and African novelist, poet and professor Chinua Achebe died. I can’t explain why this date has remained embedded on my mind since his passing on. Somehow, the name of Chinua Achebe emerges from my subconscious around the time he died. It’s a memory that has been effortlessly kept like the birthday of a loved one.

Chinua Achebe is the famed author of Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 when he was only 28. It was his first novel that in part led to his being called the “Patriarch of the African novel.” I was in Grade 9 when I read Things Fall Apart. It was the second novel in the African Writers’ Series that I read. The first one was by our own Dominic Mulaisho, The Tongue of the Dumb. Reading has been one of my passionate hobbies from childhood. My father was a primary school teacher and he bought many books on various topics. Mulaisho’s novel was one of them. When I took it to school one day, little did I know that it would open the door for me to read many other novels by African writers. It was a common practice among students then to lend each other novels. You borrowed the novels you didn’t have from friends using the ones you had as collateral.

So, Things Fall Apart became the second novel I read in the African Writers’ Series. I had no idea who Chinua Achebe really was and what he represented to Nigerians and readers worldwide. But I later came to know that he was a celebrated writer and controversial figure, and that his book, Things Fall Apart is renowned as one of the seminal works of African literature. The book has since sold more than 20 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. In much of English speaking Africa, Things Fall Apart became the first novel by an African writer to be adopted as a required text for the African secondary school students in English Literature.  

Achebe later wrote novels such as No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), and served as a faculty member at renowned universities in the U.S. and Nigeria.

Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in the Igbo town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria. After becoming educated in English at University College (now the University of Ibadan) and a subsequent teaching stint, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1961 as director of external broadcasting. He would serve in that role until 1966. 

In 1967, Chinua Achebe and poet Christopher Okigbo co-founded the Citadel Press, intended to serve as an outlet for a new kind of African-oriented children’s books. Okigbo was killed shortly afterward in the Nigerian civil war, and two years later, Achebe toured the United States with fellow writers Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi to raise awareness of the conflict back home, giving lectures at various universities.

Through the 1970s, Achebe served in faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Connecticut and the University of Nigeria. During this time, he also served as director of two Nigerian publishing houses, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. and Nwankwo-Ifejika Ltd. 

On the writing front, Achebe remained highly productive in the early part of the decade, publishing several collections of short stories and a children's book: How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972). Also released around this time were the poetry collection Beware, Soul Brother (1971) and Achebe’s first book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975). In 1975, Achebe delivered a lecture at UMass titled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,” in which he asserted that Joseph Conrad’s famous novel dehumanizes Africans. When published in essay form, it went on to become a seminal postcolonial African work.

The year 1987 brought the release of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah. His first novel in more than 20 years. The following year, he published Hopes and Impediments. The 1990s began with tragedy: Achebe was in a car accident in Nigeria that left him paralyzed from the waist down and would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Soon after, he moved to the United States and taught at Bard College, just north of New York City, where he remained for 15 years. In 2009, Achebe left Bard to join the faculty of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, as the David and Marianna Fisher University professor and professor of Africana studies. 

Chinua Achebe won several awards over the course of his writing career, including the Man Booker International Prize (2007) and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2010). Additionally, he received honorary degrees from more than 30 universities around the world.  

He died on March 21, 2013, at age 82, in Boston, Massachusetts, and was buried in his home state of Anambra, Nigeria.

While we know that we will never again read anything new from this master of his craft, we also know that his literary legacy shall remain with us forever. His contribution to African Literature through his novels, has been phenomenal. From Things Fall Apart, down to his last, and most controversial one, There Was A Country, would remain an enduring legacy that would put him, as someone has contended, at par with other literary icons like William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway, at least on African literature written in English language. Perhaps, no other writer on this continent has inspired many African story tellers than him.

His proverbs, metaphors and speech rhythm in his novels are an eloquent testimony to the richness of our African languages and the word pictures they paint. He tossed out images in his writings that lodged in your memory like dreams. Achebe was combative and interrogative in his writing. Politically, he has left a trail of his paradox and ambiguities at different stages of his life. He was an early pan Africanist and a committed supporter of One Nigeria who later ended up an ardent advocate of a secession bid in his country.  

All in all, Achebe will remain a literary enigma whose writings will always have their place when we talk about African literature. Indeed, some things never fall apart!