Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe was born on the sixteenth of November 1930 in the Igbo town of Ogidi, in southeastern Nigeria. His father, Isaiah Okafo Achebe, was a teacher and evangelist for the Church Missionary Society, among the first of his region to embrace Christianity, yet a man who continued to honor the traditions of his ancestors. From this meeting of two worlds, the Christian and the Igbo, Achebe drew the lifelong tension that would animate his art.

Selected at fourteen for the distinguished Government College at Umuahia, he went on in 1948 to University College, Ibadan, where he set aside an early path toward medicine to study English, history, and religion, taking his degree in 1953. He then joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. In 1958 he published Things Fall Apart, the story of Okonkwo and the coming of the colonizer, a novel that would sell more than twenty million copies and be translated into over fifty languages, becoming the most widely read work of modern African literature.

With No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, Things Fall Apart formed his celebrated African Trilogy. Achebe wrote to reclaim the African story from those who had told it falsely, giving his people a language of their own dignity. He taught for years in Nigeria and, after a 1990 automobile accident left him partially paralyzed, at Bard College and later Brown University in the United States, all the while championing the writers who followed him.

He died on the twenty-first of March 2013 in Boston, mourned across the world as the father of modern African literature. He gave a continent the courage to narrate itself, and in doing so, made the whole world listen.