Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe was born in Ogidi, in southeastern Nigeria, on the sixteenth of November 1930, the son of a Christian mission teacher and a former adherent of the Igbo religious tradition. He took his undergraduate degree at the University College of Ibadan and worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service through the 1950s and 1960s.

His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), is the foundational work of modern African literature in English. The book — set in an Igbo village at the moment of European colonial contact — broke open the colonial-fiction tradition of writers like Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary, which had treated Africa as an undifferentiated backdrop for European moral struggles. Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than fifty languages, has sold over twenty million copies, and has been on the secondary-school and university curriculum in every English-speaking African country, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada for fifty years.

His subsequent novels — No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) — extended the analysis through Nigerian independence, the post-independence governing classes, and the recurring African coup.

His 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" — delivered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — restored that work to the canon as a flawed text rather than a universally celebrated one, and reshaped the way English departments worldwide taught colonial literature.

He died in Boston on the twenty-first of March 2013, age eighty-two.

He is honored here as the novelist who broke open the colonial-fiction tradition and founded modern African literature in English.