Achebe’s entry into the turf of creative writing was fortitous. It marked a very great tradition by the fact that , that singular effort changed perception about Africa.
Born in Ogidi, Nigeria, the son of Isaiah Okafor Achebe, a teacher in a missionary school, and Janet Ileogbunam. His parents, though they installed in him many of the values of their traditional Igbo culture, were devout evangelical Protestants and christened him Albert after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria.
In 1944 Achebe attended Government College in Umuahia. Like other major Nigerian writers including Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, John Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, and Kole Omotoso, he was also educated at the University College of Ibadan, where he studied English, History and Theology.
At the university Achebe contributed several stories and essays to its magazine, University Herald. Rejecting his British name Achebe took his indigenous name Chinua. In 1953 he graduated with a BA. Before joining the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), later changed to Nigerian Broadcasting Corporarion, or NBC in Lagos in 1954 he travelled in Africa and America, and worked for a short time as a teacher at a local school in Oba.
For a period in the 1960s he was the director of External Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria. In 1961 he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, who came from Umuokpu village in Awka. They had four children. Christie Achebe, a psychologist, took her degree in London, and was a visiting professor of psychology at Bard College.
Chinua Achebe (L) and former South African President Nelson Mandela chat on September 12, 2002 prior to Achebe receiving an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature and delivering the third Steve Biko Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town. AFP PHOTO
Okigbo joined the army and was killed in action in August 1967 and the operation of the press was terminated. Achebe’s writings from this period reflect his deep personal disappointment with what Nigeria became since independence. His pregnant wife suffered a miscarriage, and Achebe himself narrowly escaped death.
Many of his poems written during the war were collected in Beware, Soul Brother (1971), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012) Achebe returned to the war years and their effect on his work and identity.
Achebe was a celebrated writer but he did not win the Nobel Prize, which many believed he deserved, but in 2007 he did receive the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honor for lifetime achievement. Achebe, paralyzed from the waist down since a 1990 auto accident, lived for years in a cottage built for him on the campus of Bard College, a leading liberal arts school north of New York City where he was a faculty member. He joined Brown University in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature.
Achebe, a native of Ogidi, Nigeria, regarded his life as a bartering between conflicting cultures. He spoke of the “two types of music” running through his mind — Ibo legends and the prose of Dickens. He was also exposed to different faiths. His father worked in a local missionary and was among the first in their village to convert to Christianity.
In Achebe’s memoir “There Was a Country,” he wrote that his “whole artistic career was probably sparked by this tension between the Christian religion” of his parents and the “retreating, older religion” of his ancestors.
He would observe the conflicts between his father and great uncle and ponder “the essence, the meaning, the worldview of both religions.”
For much of his life, he had a sense that he was a person of special gifts who was part of an historic generation. Achebe was so avid a reader as a young man that his nickname was “Dictionary.”
As the world mourns the departure of this great literary icon , late Professor Achebe will be fondly remembered for his hard stance against corruption and elitism in Nigerian politics.
He was the first Nigerian to win a National Merit Award in October 1979. Perhaps his greatest legacy is Things fall Apart, the best read African Novel (over 8 million copies sold and translated to over 50 languages) which not only earned him world wide acclaim as one of the world’s most gifted novelist but a literary scholar who portrayed African tribal life accurately to a western audience.
As a Nigerian, Achebe lived through and helped define revolutionary change in his country, from independence to dictatorship to the disastrous war between Nigeria and the breakaway country of Biafra in the late 1960s. He knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the United States, but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honors from a government he refused to accept.
It is also on record that Achebe was one of the few Nigerians who rejected the National honour (Commander of the Federal Republic)for two good times. First was when he was nominated for the award of National Honor by the Nigerian government in 2004 by the Obasanjo led government and the second seven years after when President Jonathan gave him an offer of a National Honor and again he rejected it.
Professor Achebe, globally recognized as one of the world’s most outstanding novelists and intellectuals in rejecting the honour for the award of National Honor by the Nigerian government in 2004 by the Obasanjo led government wrote a letter which read: “I write this letter with a very heavy heart.
For some time now I have watched events in Nigeria with alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the Presidency.
“Forty three years ago, at the first anniversary of Nigeria’s independence I was given the first Nigerian National Trophy for Literature. In 1979, I received two further honors – the Nigerian National Order of Merit and the Order of the Federal Republic – and in 1999 the first National Creativity Award.
“I accepted all these honors fully aware that Nigeria was not perfect; but I had a strong belief that we would outgrow our shortcomings under leaders committed to uniting our diverse peoples. Nigeria’s condition today under your watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honor awarded me in the 2004 Honors List”.
In 2011, Goodluck Jonathan led government again awarded him the “national honor” of the Commander of the Federal Republic And for the second time, the celebrated novelists rejected it. In a terse statement for the rejection, Achebe said:
“The reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed let alone solved. It is inappropriate to offer it again to me. I must therefore regretfully decline the offer again.”
Again ,after the Biafran defeat Achebe entered party politics with the leftist People’s Redemption Party(PRP) The People’s Redemption Party was a political party in Nigeria often considered the Second Republic incarnation of the Norther Elements Progressive Union, the party was created by the late Mallam Amino Kano.
The PRP was highly regarded as a progressive left of center political party. Some well known members of the party included Governors Abubakar Rimi, Balarabe Musa, Dr Edward Ikem Okeke and Chinua Achebe who served briefly as Deputy National President in the early 1980s.
But his romance with the party was marked by frustration and disappointment. And in characteristic way of looking for the best, he left them and went into academia, from where he has conducted his career ever since both as a teacher and writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment