#DiscoverEnuguHeroes: Celebrating Chinua Achebe

by Ese Okereka

Photo Credit: Craig Ruttle/Associated Press

Notably known by his abbreviated name, Chinua, the African literary giant Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on 16 November 1930 in the village of Ogidi, a part of the Igbo tribe in Eastern Nigeria. He would become a celebrated writer, poet, novelist, historian, professor, and critic.

His landmark first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) is widely considered his crowning achievement, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature.

Chinua Achebe helped foster conversation around identities and telling true narratives.

He inspired and gave voices to people willing to share their histories and stories.

His influence in the African literary space is solidified as part of the indigenous African canon.

We celebrate and remember Pa Achebe, the father of modern African writing, on his posthumous birthday with 25 quotes from his selected works.

1. “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever”. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
2. “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so”. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3. “A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone”. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
4. “Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity”. Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
5. “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place”. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
6. We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: “He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down. Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
7. “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” Chinua Achebe
8. You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
9. “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” Chinua Achebe, The Paris Review.
10. The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
11. The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace. Chinua Achebe
12. Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do — it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it’s a miracle. Chinua Achebe, The Atlantic Online
13. There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Chinua Achebe
14. It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind. Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
15. “When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.” Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
16. “While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
17. “Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am — and what I need — is something I have to find out myself.” Chinua Achebe
18. We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
19. “Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.” Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
20. “Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him”. Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
21. The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
22. We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
23. The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
24. Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
25. It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have — otherwise their surviving would have no meaning. Chinua Achebe

Rest on, our beloved literary hero!

Your words stay immortalized in our memories.