Chinua Achebe Biography
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe is generally considered to be the most widely read African writer. When he started college, he started calling himself Chinua Achebe. He grew up during a time when the more traditional Igbo way of life and the way of life of those who had become Christians coexisted. Both of these lifestyles have influenced his writing.
While the stories of his native past are all over his writing, the fact that his family was Christian allowed him to go to one of Nigeria’s most prestigious colleges during colonial times. Later, he went to Ibadan University to continue his education. He started out as a medical student but quickly moved to literature. Achebe’s desire to be a writer began when he read Mister Johnson (1939) by Joyce Cary while he was in college.
Achebe found the portrayal of Africa in a book by a person with limited knowledge of African languages and cultures to be completely unacceptable. The success of that book astounded Achebe, but it also motivated him to begin writing what would eventually become a series of books about how Igbo communities changed when they came into contact with European traditions.
There have been many times when Achebe talked about why he wrote these books. He says that his goal is to give African readers works that show that Africa’s history “was not one long night of savagery” (p. 45) in “The Novelist As Teacher,” which is part of Hopes and Impediments. Achebe asserts that oral traditions, such as proverbs, transmit profound knowledge, enabling African societies to take pride in their historical achievements.
In a different piece in the same book, Achebe harshly attacks the underlying racism in Joseph Conrad’s writing, especially in Heart of Darkness (1902). While Achebe has written essays, it is mostly his fiction, especially his first three books, that has made him famous. One common theme in Achebe’s writing is the connection between old and new traditions.
nstead of throwing out all practices, Achebe wants the best parts of both old and new to come together. This is why he says an incorporation is better than a revolution. In 1958, he published his first book, Things Fall Apart, which chronicles life in an Igbo town where traditions persist.
Missionaries’ entrance, on the other hand, changes everything. Some people in the community support them because they are concerned about leaving twins behind. The village quickly falls into a state of chaos. No Longer at Ease (1960) is about modern-day Nigeria and the problems people face when they come back to Nigeria after learning abroad.
After Nigeria gained its independence, they picked up Western habits and ideals that don’t work for life. A young man from the town paid for him to study in Britain, then returns and gets a job in an office. The main character in the tragic story is under too much stress. His town wants him to repay the money he spent on his education, and his parents dislike his choice of wife because she is untouchable.
Chinua Achebe receives a payoff and loses his job as a result. In Arrow of God (1964), nestled between the first two books of Achebe’s “African Trilogy,” a village chief-priest strives to fuse his personal beliefs with the innovative concepts of British colonialism. Even though he tries hard, the main character also fails terribly.
Chinua Achebe’s fourth book, A Man of the People (1966), got a lot of attention because it predicted the military coup that happened at the same time it came out. The play is a bitter spoof on the moral decay of the people who run Africa’s new countries. Another theme that runs through Achebe’s writings is the refusal to think and fight in terms of two or more options. He says that claims to absolute facts, which are common in Europe, are mostly pointless.
This way of thinking might also explain why, after being interested in the new idea at first, Chinua Achebe joined many other Anglophone writers in attacking the mostly Francophone Négritude movement, which put too much emphasis on African culture and not enough on foreign elements. In this case too, Chinua Achebe sees himself as the go-between. When Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Chinua Achebe became involved in the political future of the Igbo people, whom he backed in their fight for freedom from Nigeria.
After Biafra gave up without conditions in 1970, Achebe left Nigeria for the US, where he taught at different colleges from 1972 to 1976. While these troubled years were going on, Achebe couldn’t work on longer pieces of writing, so he focused on shorter ones. He wrote many essays on politics, education, and literature. He also wrote short stories, poems, and books for kids.
As the editor of Heinemann Publishers’ “African Writers Series” from 1962 to 1972, Chinua Achebe played a key role in the development of African writing, which was still a new genre at the time. Together with the artist Christopher Okigbo, who passed away in August 1967, Achebe published the magazine Okike, which showcased new African writing. Chinua Achebe thinks that the writer’s main job in modern African cultures is to teach. As a result, he was against the idea that art is only a beautiful medium.
Chinua Achebe continued involvement with Nigeria’s problems is a big part of both “The Trouble with Nigeria” (1983), which tried to tell voters about the state of their country and government, and “Home and Exile,” his intellectual biography that came out in 2000 and has a lot of information about Achebe’s early experiences with literature.
The question of whether writing truly African literature in African languages is appropriate is currently under debate. Chinua Achebe thinks that the colonial languages can help bring the newly independent African nations together by providing a single language in a country with many languages.
Also Read: W. E. B Du Bois And the Pan Africanism Movement You Should Know
