Chinua Achebe, 1930–2013

Chinua Achebe’s first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, almost wasn’t published at all. The Nigerian author sent his only, handwritten manuscript to an English typing agency in the late 1950s, then heard nothing for months. The typists, Achebe later said, had simply not taken this assignment from Nigeria seriously. It was only when an English colleague intervened that they knew “it was no longer a joke.”

Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, said The Guardian (U.K.), named after Queen Victoria’s consort. He was raised by Christian parents in the Igbo region of southern Nigeria, where schoolmates at the local missionary school nicknamed him “Dictionary” for his love of literature. After winning a scholarship to a prestigious colonial high school, he went to university in Ibadan, Nigeria, to study medicine, but soon switched to English literature. Achebe left college with plans to “tell the story of Africans and the colonial encounter from an African point of view.” He also dropped the name “Albert.”

Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Service as a radio producer after graduating, said The Washington Post, and “started to contemplate a novel about the collision of Europe and Africa.” That idea eventually became Things Fall Apart, the 1958 story of Okonkwo, a Nigerian tribesman who works his way up from poverty to become a wealthy farmer. He struggles to adapt to colonialism, and commits suicide after killing a fellow African for working for the British. The British publisher originally printed only 2,000 copies, but the book slowly gained a following in African literary circles. It has since sold more than 10 million copies, and its influence on African writing cannot be overstated, said scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.”

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Achebe published two novels in the early 1960s, said The New York Times, but it was his fourth novel, A Man of the People, that changed his life. The work, published in 1966, told the story of a military coup by Igbo insurgents—a tale that eerily mirrored the real-life coup that sparked Nigeria’s civil war that same year. The government figured that was evidence enough that Achebe was a conspirator against the state and sent armed soldiers to arrest him. “They said they want to see which is stronger, your pen or their guns,” he recalled being told. He evaded capture and fled to Britain with his family until the war ended in 1970. The trauma gave him a severe case of writer’s block, and it would be 20 years before he published another novel.

Even when he was not writing fiction, said CSMonitor.com, Achebe published volumes of literary criticism, teaching at schools in Africa and the U.S.He wrote a famous post-colonial critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, calling the author a “bloody racist” and saying his novella “deprived Africans of their humanity and language.” He was paralyzed from the waist down in a serious car accident in 1990, and stayed in the U.S. thereafter—but remained a “frank and outspoken critic of corruption and abuse” in Nigeria. “Sometimes I do feel maybe I’ve said everything I need to say, but I don’t think so,” he said in 2007. “I will keep attempting to speak in the hope that if the first time it didn’t work, maybe the second time, it will.”