Chinua Achebe grew up loving stories. He was born in southeastern Nigeria in 1930 in the village of Ogidi. His parents converted to Christianity and traveled as evangelists. He attended a prestigious secondary school and studied English literature at University College in Ibadan.
Along the way, he had an epiphany: If an English village populated by Jane Austen could be the setting for universal stories, why couldn’t a Nigerian village? His debut novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), set in an Igbo community on the cusp of colonization, became a worldwide best seller. “There is that great proverb,” Achebe told the Paris Review in 1994, “that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Achebe spoke for the lions.
He was called the father of African literature, not just symbolically: as the founding editor of the Heinemann series on African literature, he helped bring hundreds of novels by African writers to a global audience. He taught at universities in Africa and the West, assigning Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and challenging students to see the humanity in the black men Conrad depicted as savages. He collected virtually every honor except the Nobel Prize, an omission that his death on March 21 at 82 seals into permanence. But his stories will be loved as long as people love stories–the true mark of civilization, as he knew.
This text originally appeared in the April 8 issue of TIME magazine.
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