Educator, Publisher, Author (1930–2013)
quotes
“Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”
Chinua Achebe (/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbɛ/,)born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe; 16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic.His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958)
was considered his magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" featured a famous criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist"; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.
When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The war ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. in 1990 after a car accident left him partially disabled.
A titled Igbo chieftain himself,[5] Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He also published a number of short stories, children's books, and essay collections. From 2009 until his death, he served as a professor at Brown University in the United States.
Synopsis
Born in Nigeria in 1930, Chinua Achebe attended the University of Ibadan. In 1958, his groundbreaking novel Things Fall Apart was published. It went on to sell more than 12 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. Achebe later served as the David and Marianna Fisher University professor and professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He died on March 21, 2013, at age 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.Early Years
Famed writer and educator Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in the Igbo town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria. After becoming educated in English at the University of Ibadan and a subsequent teaching stint, in 1961, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as director of external broadcasting. He would serve in that position until 1966.Prior to joining NBC, in 1958, Achebe published his first novel: Things Fall Apart. The groundbreaking novel centers on the cultural clash between native African culture and the traditional white culture of missionaries and the colonial government in place in Nigeria. An unflinching look at the discord, the book was a startling success and has become required reading in many schools across the world.
1960s and 1970s
The 1960s proved to be a creatively fertile period for Achebe. It was during this decade that he wrote the novels No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) and A Man of the People (1966), all of which address the issue of traditional ways of life coming into conflict with new, often colonial, points of view. (Anthills of the Savannah [1987] took on a similar theme.)In a related endeavor, in 1967, Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo, a renowned poet, co-founded a publishing company, the Citadel Press, which they intended to run as an outlet for a new kind of African-oriented children's books. Okigbo was soon killed, however, in the Nigerian civil war. Two years later, Achebe toured the United States with Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi, fellow writers, giving lectures at various universities. The 1960s also marked Achebe's wedding to Christie Chinwe Okoli in 1961, and they went on to have four children.
When he returned to Nigeria from the United States, Achebe became a research fellow and later a professor of English (1976–81) at the University of Nigeria. During this time, he also served as director of two Nigerian publishing houses, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. and Nwankwo-Ifejika Ltd.
On the writing front, the 1970s proved equally productive, and Achebe published several collections of short stories and a children's book: How the Leopard Got His Claws (1973). Also released around this time were the poetry collections Beware, Soul-Brother (1971) and Christmas in Biafra (1973), and Achebe's first book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975).
While back in the United States in 1975, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Achebe gave a lecture called "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," in which he asserted that Joseph Conrad's famous novel dehumanizes Africans. The work referred to Conrad as a "thoroughgoing racist," and, when published in essay form, it went on to become a seminal postcolonial African work. Achebe joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut that same year, returning to the University of Nigeria in 1976.
No comments:
Post a Comment