“Who is now going to be our reference of pride?” she asked. “Something dreadful has happened,” novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in her essay Igbo Elegy on Hearing of the Passing of Professor Chinua Achebe.
Achebe’s spiritual heirs have charted astounding new literary territory and are receiving major recognition as among the most inventive writers working today.
“The popularity of Things Fall Apart in my own society can be explained simply,” Achebe once said, “because my people are seeing themselves virtually for the first time in the story… this was the first time we were seeing ourselves, as autonomous individuals, rather than half-people, or as Conrad would say, ‘rudimentary souls.’ We are not rudimentary at all, we are full-fledged souls.”įollowing Achebe’s death, Wole Soyinka (winner of Africa’s first Nobel Prize in literature) and John Pepper Clark – two of the ‘pioneer quartet of contemporary Nigerian literature’, along with Achebe and the late Christopher Okigbo – issued a joint statement honouring his works for “their enduring testimony to the domination of the human spirit over the forces of repression, bigotry and retrogression.” But, they wrote, “we take consolation in the young generation of writers to whom the baton has been passed.” If Achebe was the trail-blazer, his Nigerian-born literary descendants – the most notable among them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ben Okri and Chris Abani – are distinctive originals whose work is built upon the freedom to explore an infinite number of storytelling forms and invent a few of their own. It stripped away the colonial scrim, gave authority to a voice arising from centuries of cultural tradition that predated European contact and served as the catalyst for postcolonial literature the world over. His landmark novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 when he was 28, follows a traditional village patriarch in the 19Ĭentury, who experiences the arrival of Christian missionaries in what is now Nigeria. When the legendary Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe died aged 82 on 21 March 2013, tributes poured from around the globe.
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