Master Storyteller Ages Wittily

By ADENRELE NIYI

In his headline making speech delivered (through video format) at the recent Guardian Newspaper 25th Anniversary lecture, professor Chinua Achebe enthralled guests with an abridged tale of his Nigerian life experience. Achebe's narrative may have set the mood for his soon to be released autobiography sardonically titled 'Reflections of a British Protected Child'. Achebe made allusions to this tongue-in-cheek book during his biting lecture when he said “The first passport I ever carried described me as a British protected person  an unexciting phrase that was likely no one would die for”. Last Sunday, the poet, novelist and social critic turned 78 years while his epoch-making first novel “Things Fall Apart”, which brought us strong-willed but lily-livered Okonkwo, marks its fiftieth year of publication. The novel is adjudged to be the most widely read novel in modern African literature.
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria, the son of a teacher in a missionary school. 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 Cole Omotso, he was also educated at the University College of Ibadan, where he studied English, history and theology. At the university Achebe rejected his British name and took his indigenous name Chinua. In 1953 he graduated from London University with a BA. Before joining the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos in 1954 he travelled in Africa and America, and worked for a short time as a teacher. In the 1960s he was the director of External Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria. He married Christie Chinwe Okoli, September 10, 1961, and now has four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi, and Nwando.  
Since the 1950's, Nigeria has witnessed "the flourishing of a new literature which has drawn sustenance from both traditional oral literature and from the present and rapidly changing society," writes Margaret Laurence in her book Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists. Thirty years ago Chinua Achebe was one of the founders of this new literature, and over the years many critics have come to consider him the finest of the Nigerian novelists. His achievement, however, has not been limited to his continent. He is considered by many to be one of the best novelists now writing in the English language.
Unlike some African writers struggling for acceptance among contemporary English-language novelists, Achebe has been able to avoid imitating the trends in English literature. Rejecting the European notion "that art should be accountable to no one, and [needs] to justify itself to nobody", as he puts it in his book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day, Achebe has embraced instead the idea at the heart of the African oral tradition: that "art is, and always was, at the service of man. Our ancestors created their myths and told their stories for a human purpose." For this reason, Achebe believes that "any good story, any good novel, should have a message, should have a purpose".
Achebe's feel for the African context has influenced his aesthetic of the novel as well as the technical aspects of his work. As Bruce King comments in Introduction to Nigerian Literature: "Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature".
During the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) he was in the Biafran government service, and then taught at US and Nigerian universities. In 1967 he cofounded a publishing company at Enugu with the poet Christopher Okigbo. Later he was appointed research fellow at the University of Nigeria, and then he became a professor of English, retiring in 1981. Achebe has been a professor emeritus since 1985. Since 1971 Achebe has edited Okike, the leading journal of Nigerian new writing. He has also held the post of Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There he met James Baldwin, also a faculty member, who was Professor of African studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Council at Anambra State University of Technology, Enugu. In the 1990s he has been a faculty member at Bard College, a liberal arts school, where he has taught literature to undergraduates.
Achebe has also written collections of short stories, poetry, and several books for juvenile readers. His essays include BEWARE, SOUL BROTHER (1971) on his experiences during the Civil War. He has received a Margaret Wrong Prize, the New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In 1983, upon the death of Mallam Aminu Kano, Achebe was elected deputy national president of the People's Redemption Party. As the director of Heineman Educational Books in Nigeria, he has encouraged and published the work of dozens of African writers. He founded in 1984 the bilingual magazine Uwa ndi Igbo, a valuable source for Igbo studies.
As an essayist Achebe has gained fame with his collections MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY (1975), HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS (1988) and his long essay THE TROUBLE WITH NIGERIA (1983). In 'An Image of Africa' (1975) Achebe criticises Conrad's racism in Heart of Darkness . He has defended the use of the English language in the production of African fiction, insisting that the African novelist has an obligation to educate, and has attacked European critics who have failed to understand African literature on its own terms. Achebe has defined himself as a cultural nationalist with a revolutionary mission "to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement". But Achebe has not stopped criticising postcolonial African leaders who have pillaged economies. During the military dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha he left Nigeria several times. When the 70th birthday of the patriarch of the modern African novel was celebrated at Bard College, on November 2000, Wole Soyinka said: "Achebe never hesitates to lay blame for the woes of the African continent squarely where it belongs".
In 1990, Achebe was paralyzed from the waist down in a ghastly car accident. When news of his car crash became public, Achebe gratuitously remembers, in the aforementioned speech, the outflow of affection from Nigerians at every level; "he is still dumbfounded by it".
Additionally at that same lecture event, Achebe reflected that despite the hard words he and Nigeria have shared if he re-incarnated, he would want to be a Nigerian.
Happy birthday Master storyteller and may a Nobel Prize for Literature come your way soon.