Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

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 years old.

In 1961 Achebe became director of external broadcasting, a post that he held until 1966, although in the early 1960s he traveled in the Americas and Europe on a UNESCO fellowship. He continued to write during this period, publishing No Longer at Ease in 1960, Arrow of God in 1964, which completed a trilogy of the Okonkwo family saga, plus A Man of the People in 1966.

Nigeria obtained independence from Britain in 1960 and was constituted as a republic in 1963 under UN ...

Page 1 of 42 Next >

More on Chinua Achebe...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Chinua Achebe. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:18, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689229.html