It all came as one of those rumuors that always dance in the market place of the Nigeria space, Chinua Achebe picture was a popular display Pictures in the Blackberry messenger,with many saying RIP. Suddenly I remembered the popular "Things fall Apart" by this great man that have over the years refused to destroy the beautiful name he has built with an award from the Government of the day because of bad governance.
Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas
in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel
Anthills of the Savannah,
and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges
on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern
African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel
laureate
Nadine Gordimer,
said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel,
the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of
sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".
Nelson Mandela, meanwhile, has said that Achebe "brought
Africa to the rest of the world" and called him "the writer in whose company the prison walls came down".
The
author is also known for the influential essay An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1975), a hard-hitting critique of
Conrad in which he says the author turned the African continent into "a
metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which
the wandering European enters at his peril", asking: "Can nobody see
the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the
role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"
According
to Brown University, where Achebe held the position of David and
Marianna Fisher university professor and professor of Africana studies
until his death, this essay "is recognised as one of the most generative
interventions on Conrad; and one that opened the social study of
literary texts, particularly the impact of power relations on
20th-century literary imagination".
Born in 1930 in Ogidi, in the south-east of
Nigeria,
the author won a scholarship to the University of Ibadan, and later
worked as a scriptwriter for the Nigeria Broadcasting Service. He chose
to write Things Fall Apart in English – something for which he has
received criticism from authors including Ngugi wa Thiong'o – but Achebe
said he felt "that the English language will be able to carry the
weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English,
still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its
new African surroundings".
His fourth novel, 1966's
A Man of the People,
anticipated a coup that took place in Nigeria just before the book was
first published. "I'd ended the book with a coup," Achebe told the
Guardian, "which was ridiculous because Nigeria was much too big a
country to have a coup, but it was right for the novel. That night we
had a coup. And any confidence we had that things could be put right
were smashed. That night is something we have never really got over."
His most recent work was last year's mix of memoir and history
There Was a Country, an account of the Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970.
Achebe
was a supporter of Biafran secession, but after the end of the civil
war in 1970 he took what he described as a "sojourn" in politics. There
he found that "the majority of people … were there for their own
personal advancement", deciding instead to devote himself to academia.
In 1990 a car accident in Nigeria
left him paralysed from the waist down, and forced his move to the US.
"I miss Nigeria very much. My injury means I need to know I am near a
good hospital and close to my doctor. I need to know that if I went to a
pharmacist, the medicine there would be the drug that the bottle says
it is,"
he said in 2007.
Achebe
has twice rejected the Nigerian government's attempt to name him a
Commander of the Federal Republic – a national honour – first in 2004,
and second in 2011. In 2004 he wrote that "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 … 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 honour
awarded me in the 2004 honours list."
The Easter Sunday service also had in attendance, former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon.
