Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is widely regarded as the father of African literature. However, Achebe, who died at age 82 two weeks ago, was a literary icon of global stature.
His first novel, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, has sold more than ten million copies and has been translated into 50 languages. The novel got its title from the William Butler Yeats poem The Second Coming.
Set in the late 19th Century, Things Fall Apart tells the story of an Igbo warrior, Okonkwo, and the effect of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his community.
Although Achebe may not have had a direct influence on Caribbean writers, he was widely admired throughout the Caribbean according to Prof Kenneth Ramchand. Ramchand was one of the first to introduce African literature to the University of the West Indies' St Augustine campus and Things Fall Apart was a foundational text of the course.
In a telephone interview, Ramchand explained: "When African literature in English was first introduced to the St Augustine campus in about 1976, I was delighted by the responses of students of all ethnicities to the books on the course."
He said students were able to connect with the "civilisation of Okonkwo's society."
Achebe is widely credited with humanising African culture and was a critic of dehumanising depictions of Africa and its people. One of his most famous essays, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, critiqued Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. Achebe questioned the novel's merit as a member of the literary canon. He called Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist" and said a novel which "celebrates (this) dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race" could not be called a great work of art.
Students could also connect to the story of the advance of colonialism, Ramchand said.
"They and Achebe saw Okonkwo's weaknesses but unlike many Western critics, we knew what collapse Okonkwo wanted to prevent and we felt what division, strife, confusion and alarms Achebe's great first novel prophesied."
Jamaican poet and writer Lorna Goodison told the T&T Guardian via email that the opening chapter of Things Fall Apart was one of her "absolute favourite pieces of writing in all English literature." She added that she read the novel in the early 1970s and was "taken with the acuity and brightness of his prose and authenticity of his voice."
Goodison said she owns all of Achebe's works, which include the sequels to Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). Achebe received wide acclaim for his later works, such as the poetry collection Christmas in Biafra (1973), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), which was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize. In 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. His other works include A Man of the People (1966), Girls at War and Other Stories, and most recently, a memoir, There Was A Country (2012).
Reading Achebe encouraged Goodison to write honestly about her own country.
"I am sure that his writings have helped to shape my own worldview and given me confidence to write about Jamaican people in a way that honours us while questioning those things about us that are unworthy," Goodison told the T&T Guardian in her email.
She pointed out that A Man of the People could easily have been set in the Caribbean, as many of the characters remind her of Jamaican politicians.
Although Goodison met Achebe only once, she said the meeting left a lasting impression.
"I had the good fortune to be introduced to Mr Achebe in London some years ago. His was a powerful presence that left you without any doubt that you were meeting someone who, as the late Philip Sherlock would say, was not a 'usual' man. A great light has gone out in the world with his passing."
Achebe also left a lasting impression on Ramchand when he attended a conference at UWI St Augustine in the early 1980s. Ramchand described him as modest, sincere and lacking pretention. The most outstanding element of Achebe's novels, according to Ramchand, was the attention to storytelling. Ramchand also admired Achebe's "acceptance of the role of the novelist as teacher."
"His novels teach critically about the past, analyse the violent and dysfunctional present, and still dare to dream about a new world for our progeny. Not only in his practice as a novelist but also in his essays, he takes on 'colonialist critics' and their native clones who subscribe to the doctrine of art for art's sake."
At the time of his death, Achebe was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island. A 1990 vehicular accident forced him to move to the US and left him paralysed from the waist down.
Although Achebe would eventually spend more than a decade in the US, he continued to write about his native Nigeria, where he was born in 1930 in the Igbo village of Ogidi. In his 2001 essay collection, he wrote: "People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America, since I have now been living here some years..." He concluded "that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few."