Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, essayist, and critic widely regarded as the founding figure of modern African literature in English. Born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe in 1930 in Ogidi, in what was then the British colony of Nigeria, he was the son of a Christian Igbo teacher and grew up between mission education and traditional village life.

He read English, history, and theology at University College, Ibadan, where he later dropped his English given name in favor of Chinua. After graduation he worked at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, eventually becoming director of external broadcasting, while writing fiction in his free time.

His first novel, Things Fall Apart, appeared in 1958. Set in an Igbo community at the moment of British colonial intrusion, it follows the warrior Okonkwo and has been translated into more than fifty languages. He continued the colonial story in No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, and turned to the post-independence state in A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah.

During the Biafran War he served as an envoy for the breakaway Republic of Biafra and later wrote about the conflict in There Was a Country. He taught at universities in Nigeria, the United States, and at Brown, and his 1975 essay An Image of Africa sharply criticized Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. After a 1990 car accident left him using a wheelchair, he continued to write and teach until his death in Boston in 2013.

The name Chinua is a shortened form of the Igbo name Chinụalụmọgụ, meaning may God fight on my behalf. He carried that protective Igbo meaning through a writing life that gave African voices a central place in world literature.