Chinua Achebe and the ‘Bravery of Lions’

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer who has died at 82, spent his life thinking deeply about his home country, Nigeria. After moving to the United States in 1990, he still kept a close eye on Nigeria and offered strong opinions about its leadership and politics.

In 2010, he told the Guardian: “If we took just one of our political or military leaders, put them on trial in Nigeria, showed how much money they had taken and sentenced them to an adequate punishment, from that point corruption would begin to end.”

Some readers believed Mr. Achebe’s views became muddled by nostalgia in later years. Writing about Mr. Achebe’s memoir “There Was a Country” for The New York Times Book Review last year, Adam Nossiter said the book sounded a familiar theme: Mr. Achebe’s “bitterness over what Nigeria became after independence from Britain in 1960.” Mr. Nossiter called the writer’s outlook a “partially rose-tinted view of the colonial past.”

But Mr. Achebe’s work, especially the novel “Things Fall Apart,” a mainstay of high school and college reading lists, has opened many eyes to Africa’s history by telling stories removed from the frame of the colonial perspective.

During a 2008 tribute to Mr. Achebe organized by PEN, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who like Mr. Achebe grew up in southeastern Nigeria, recalled the books she first read as a child: “Mostly British children’s books,” she said, “in which all the characters were white and ate apples and played in the snow and had dogs called Socks.” When she first started writing her own stories, the people in them had similar characteristics. “I didn’t know that people like me could exist in books,” she said. “I had assumed that books, by their very nature, had to have English people in them. And then I read ‘Things Fall Apart.’ ”

In a 1994 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Achebe spoke of “the danger of not having your own stories”:

There is that great proverb â€" that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail â€" the bravery, even, of the lions.

More coverage of Mr. Achebe’s life and work:
Reviews:
Books of The Times: “The Education of a British-Protected Child”

Book Review: “The Education of a British-Protected Child”

Books of The Times: “Anthills of the Savannah”

News and Features:
Interview With Deborah Solomon

A Storyteller Far From Home

Conference Celebrating Mr. Achebe’s 70th Birthday

Mr. Achebe Wins the Man Booker International Prize