Biography

Chinua Achebe

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Chinua Achebe was born on November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria. He was a writer, known for Things Fall Apart (1971), Things Fall Apart and Things Fall Apart (1987). He was married to Christine Chinwe Okoli. He died on March 21, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

A car accident in 1990 paralyzed him from the waist down. Since then, he has lived in the US because his medical needs cannot be met in Nigeria.
Emeritus professor of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
In February 2009, he visited Nigeria for only the second time in 20 years, to speak at a festival of his ethnic group, the Igbo people. He received a hero's welcome, with huge throngs greeting him at the Abuja airport and following him around the country.
He began writing in the 1950s, at a time when many African nations were becoming independent of British and French colonial rule. He felt that Africa's stories were being written by outsiders.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war - ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery.
[on the impact of the literature he encountered when being educated in British-style schools] I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts. [But later I realized] these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe's boat steaming up the Congo in 'Heart of Darkness'. Rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.
Those who can do the work of extending the frontiers of English so as to accommodate African thought-patterns must do it through their mastery of English and not out of innocence.
We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.

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