Chinua Achebe Biography

Chinua Achebe was born into a modest family in 1930, in southern Nigeria. He attained a scholarship to study medicine but chose to study literature instead, as he was fascinated with world religions and African traditions, including his own Igbo traditions. Achebe always defended the use of English, the colonizers’ language, in writing his novels and controversially regarded Joseph Conrad as a “racist.”

Achebe attended the Government College in Umuahia during 1944–1947. He graduated from University College, Ibadan, in 1953. Achebe studied history and theology while in college. It was during this time that he developed an interest in indigenous Nigerian cultures and rejected his Christian name, Albert, for an indigenous one, Chinua. While in his thirties, Achebe became a prominent writer of realistic Nigerian literature by detailing the culture and customs of his native people. Achebe spent considerable time defending the rights of his people and their right to a separate nation, which was a fight they eventually lost to Nigeria. He withdrew from his political involvements, as he was tired of corruption, and moved to the USA for several years.

Achebe was left partially disabled in a car accident which forced him to return to the USA in the 1990s. Until his death, he taught as a professor of literature at Brown University.

Interestingly, Achebe titled his first novel Things Fall Apart after a line from a Yeats poem, “The Second Coming.”

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”