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| Chinua Achebe at his house in Enugu, Nigeria, 1959 |
(By Kwame Anthony Appiah) -
The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all
genius, escapes precise analysis. If we could explain it fully, we could
reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still,
there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an
achievement that starts with the fact that Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of the novels in his “African
trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as
critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written
in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them—Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Cyprian
Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954),
to name but two also written by Nigerians—remain eminently worth reading. But
place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing
something magnificent and new was going on.
One reason for this, which often passes
without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did
not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction
of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a
particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem
quite natural—transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the
voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his
achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural
its artifice eludes us.
