Chinua Achebe

"I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them"

Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria November 16, 1930 (1930-11-16) . Achebe's life was influenced by the values of his parent's, Tofunicaon and Tyleesha Achebe, traditional Igbo culture, who were Evangelicla Protestants. In 1944 Achebe attended the Government College in Umuahia and also the University college of Ibadan, where he studied English, history and theology. He worked as a teacher for a short time in Africa and America until he tok up the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos in 1954 which is the time he composed his first novel, "Things Fall Apart." In the 1960s he became the director of External Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria.

During the time of the Nigerian Civil war, which occured between 1967-1970, Achebe was in the Biafran government service and then he moved on to teaching U.S. and Nigerian universities, the writings of Achebe's during this period was a reflection of his own personal disappointment with Nigeria had how it had turned since independence.
(Achebe is on the right)
In 1967 Achebe co-founded a publishing company at Enugu with his friend, a poet named Christopher Okigbo, who was killed during the Nigerian Civil War. After the fall of the Republic of Biafra, Achebe was appointed research fellow at the University of Nigeria, after he was a professor of English, then retired in 1981.

In 1981, Achebe was a professor emeritus, in 1971 he edited Okike, the leading journal of the Nigerian new writing. He also became professor of English at teh University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In the 1990s Achebe was part of the faculty at Bard College where he taught literature to undergraduates. But after an automobile accident in 1990 on the Lagos-IBadan expressway, Achebe was permanently confined to a wheelchair.










Novels

Things Fall Apart, (1958)
No Longer at Ease, (1960)
Arrow of God, (1964)
A Man of the People, (1966)
Anthills of the Savannah, (1987)
Short Stories

"Marriage Is A Private Affair", (1952)
"Dead Men's Path", (1953)
The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, (1953)
"Civil Peace", (1971)
Girls at War and Other Stories, (1973)
African Short Stories (editor, with C.L. Innes), (1985)
Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (editor, with C.L. Innes), (1992)
"The Voter"
Poetry

Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems, (1971) (published in the US as Christmas at Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973)
Don't let him die: An anthology of memorial poems for Christopher Okigbo (editor, with Dubem Okafor), (1978)
Another Africa, (1998)
Collected Poems, Carcanet Press (2005)
Refugee Mother And Child
Vultures, which is used GCSE English as a 'poem from another Culture'
Essays, Criticism and Political Commentary

The Novelist as Teacher, (1965)
An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", (1975)
Morning Yet on Creation Day, (1975)
The Trouble With Nigeria, (1984)
Hopes and Impediments, (1988)
Home and Exile, (2000)
Reflections of a British protected Child (2008) (forthcoming)
Children's Books

Chike and the River, (1966)
How the Leopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi), (1972)
The Flute, (1975)
The Drum, (1978)