Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is the great man of letters from Nigeria. He is at the top of all American university reading lists of African literature. However, he has spent much of his career at American universities since Nigeria was not a healthy place to stay and be a writer. His mastery of essay, novels, and short stories in English made him accessible to European readers, and so his name and work got out of African and onto American and European bookshelves. This paved the way for so many other African writers to gain legitimacy outside their countries to a global audience, but it all had to be done in the colonial languages. Africa has begun to value its writers, but totalitarian governments, perhaps, recognize their power all too well. Thus, many African writers have suffered much for their art. Writing is as much an act of creativity as it is of courage for these writers.

Achebe has never won the Nobel Prize for literature. Wole Soylinka and Nadine Gordimer have both won it, and both have cited Achebe as one of their great colleagues. Achebe is quite philosophical about the Nobel Prize. In an interview he says, "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize. It's not an African prize.... Literature is not a heavyweight championship. Nigerians may think, you know, this man has been knocked out. It's nothing to do with that." One cannot disagree, and this view is consistent with the sentiments he so cuttingly expresses in "Image of Africa."

The essay and short stories we read for this session of our class are excellent examples of how racism is not limited to one people: everyone can suffer from it. In addition, the damaging world views that come from it re-create all parties into people they are not. Achebe champions seeing people as individuals first, and he urges us to be compassionate and just in our dealings with everyone. This is as true for Africa as it is for people of all cultures. It seems to me that even when Achebe is writing locally, he still has global themes that can inspire readers from any culture.