Chinua Achebe | ClassicMotivation.com

Before the Work

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in Ogidi, in what is now southeastern Nigeria, in 1930. His father was a Christian evangelist; his mother was a woman of considerable intelligence and dignity who navigated with characteristic grace the territory between Igbo traditional culture and the colonial Christianity her husband represented. Achebe grew up fluent in both worlds and became fascinated by the tension between them: what was lost when a civilization was dismissed, and what was the cost of that dismissal to the people dismissed.

He studied at Government College, Umuahia — one of the finest schools in West Africa — and then at University College, Ibadan, where he read the English literary canon and was struck, repeatedly and forcefully, by the way Africa appeared in British literature: as a backdrop for European psychological dramas, as darkness against which European light could be defined, as a place without history, without philosophy, without the kind of human complexity that literature was supposed to be about. He read Conrad's Heart of Darkness and understood that he was being asked to identify with the European narrator rather than with the Africans who appeared in the book as shadows and savages.

Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence. It has sold more than twenty million copies in more than fifty languages and is the most translated work by any African author. Achebe taught at universities in Nigeria, the United States, and Canada, and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. He died in Boston in 2013 at eighty-two.

The Philosophy

Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo leader in a village in southeastern Nigeria in the years around the arrival of British colonial missionaries and administrators. Okonkwo is not a simple hero — he is proud, sometimes brutal, shaped by his fear of resembling his weak and indebted father in ways that produce his own destruction. And his world is not a simple paradise — it has its own violence, its own injustices, its own internal conflicts. But it is a world with a coherent philosophy, a complex social structure, a sophisticated system of justice, and a rich tradition of art and storytelling. When the colonial system arrives and dismantles it, the loss is not the loss of ignorance and disorder. It is the loss of civilization.

This is Achebe's central argument: that the African story told honestly from the inside looks nothing like the African story told from the outside. The inside story requires African writers telling it, African characters living it, and African philosophical traditions informing it. The outside story — however beautifully written — is a form of dehumanization, and dehumanization, however inadvertent, has consequences.

His essay on Conrad — An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness — caused enormous controversy when it was published in 1977 and continues to be taught and argued over. His argument is not that Conrad was a bad person but that even intelligent, sensitive, literary people can fail to see the humanity of those they have been culturally trained not to see — and that literature that participates in that failure, however unwittingly, does harm.