The brilliant light of a Nigerian master writer has gone out, and the world is poorer for it. Chinua Achebe, whose stunning novel Things Fall Apart opened the doorway to the voices of traditional, ancestral Africa, has returned to the essence after a long life of literature, politics, scholarship, and strife. His first novel told the searing tale of the entry of British colonial power into traditional village life, and how it destroyed, transformed, and deformed ways of living that it obtained for thousands of years. The title, Things Fall Apart, was taken from the Irish Nobel prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, who wrote in The Second Coming the following memorable phrase: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
That theme of the dissolution of African society, first by the violent impositions of British colonialism, and later by a succession of rapacious, corrupt, and brutal post-colonial governments, colored Achebe’s life and work. Born into an Igbo family in 1930, Achebe supported the Biafra secessionist movement and briefly served as a diplomat for the short-lived state, until the Nigerian military crushed the movement. In many ways, his life reflected not just political, but cultural and religious conflict. He was born to a Christian couple, but family elders and grandparents held tightly to their traditional beliefs. A young Achebe thus learned to listen to the battle between a multiplicity of worldviews, Christian and Igbo; British and Nigerian; Nigerian and Igbo. He wrote Things Fall Apart (1958), A Man of the People (1966) and the Anthills of the Savannah (1987), among others. He also wrote poetry, essays, and children’s stories. Achebe taught at Bard College in New York and later at Brown. Professor Achebe was 82. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
