Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Nigeria as Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. He was very much a product of the British colonial culture that dominated Nigeria in the first half of the twentieth century, inasmuch as his parents were Christian teachers in a Protestant colonial mission school. Achebe had something of a privileged upbringing in Nigeria and attended two universities in the country--first the government college in Umuahia and afterward the more prestigious University College of Ibadan, followed by study at London University, where in 1953 he received a B.A. His education was entirely Anglophone, not in any indigenous language of Nigeria. While at university, Achebe discarded his English Christian name and adopted a truncated version of his middle name as his given name. In London in the mid-1950s, he was an intern at the BBC.

Achebe's principal career arc was in the area of media communications and publishing, but in the context of searching change in Africa. For example, in Africa in the early 1950s, the momentum and political ethos of the period were in general on the side of the European decolonization of Africa, with Nigeria a part of the discourse and process. Achebe worked briefly as a teacher until the late 1950s, when he landed a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in the capital of Lagos. It was while he was employed by NBC that Achebe published Things Fall Apart, in 1958, when Nigeria was on the cusp of independence; he was 28 y

lage. On the other hand, the personal distinction that Okonkwo has achieved is not entirely in keeping with the more diffuse and communal manner in which the Ibo take decisions and act. His personal distinction has tended to amplify an intense and unwavering nature. He does not suffer fools easily, which might be admirable, but he has little patience with opinions other than his own. That is why calling a fellow elder a woman in public is taken so seriously by the others. Nor is Okonkwo really willing to take emotional responsibility for himself. Instead, he attributes his fortune to chi, his personal god, and in a sense acquiesces in his obduracy, which is for him the mark of manliness. As the opening sentence of chapter 24 puts it, "There were many men and women in Umuofia who did not feel as strongly as Okonkwo about the new dispensation" (179). Although of course the people cannot anticipate the sea change that will arrive in their lives because of British colonialism, the fact is that Okonkwo would be opposed to any significant change in his experience. The fact that he will have to alter his way of life is experienced as an affront. The only emotions he is capable of experiencing are anger and hatred, and that limits his op