Chinua Achebe, Teacher of Light: A Biography (review)

This volume is a fitting tribute to a renowned African writer whose works have elicited worldwide critical praise. It is written in prose that flows with an ease and fluidity that almost resemble Achebe's own. In the book we meet a gifted and sensitive writer-activist who is deeply rooted in African and Igbo values and sensibilities. It is these values that enabled the young Achebe to navigate the African and Western/Christian worlds, both to transcend and ultimately to contest the absence of a positive and balanced view of Africa and Africans in the stories he so loved to read. By giving Africa and Africans a voice in world literature, Achebe has made a definitive statement that Africa and Africans matter. It is a role he has come to be identified with and one he performs repeatedly in his native Nigeria and elsewhere.

The first eight chapters detail Achebe's early childhood and education in Ogidi and then at University College, Ibadan. It was at Ibadan that Achebe realized that all the writers he had read growing up, including Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad, had in a sense deceived him. The important discovery that there was something dehumanizing in the way stories about Africa were told led him to conclude that Africans had to break their silence and begin to narrate their own stories. This was the inspiration for Things Fall Apart, Achebe's first novel.

The authors also recount the story of how he met his wife, Christie, while both worked at the Nigeria Broadcasting Service (NBS), he as controller and she as a student-intern for the summer. It is clear that their relationship is a loving and trusting one, based on mutual respect, caring, and understanding. These qualities served them in good stead with the eruption of the Nigerian Civil War and the tragedy that followed in Biafra, eloquently discussed in chapters 10 and 11. These were trying times for Nigerians generally, and for Igbos and the Achebe family in particular, as the brutal war tore at the very core of the country. The Achebes lost not only dear friends, including the poet Christopher Okigbo, but also perhaps hope in a unified and stable Nigeria. Thus, like his protagonist Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, Achebe went into exile, albeit self-imposed, which "gave him time to reflect and heal somewhat" (96).

Chapter 12 provides a lucid overview of Achebe's major novels, five of them in all. The single most important elements that unify Achebe's novels, the authors argue, are the deceptively simple and accessible style, so richly interlaced with Igbo proverbs that they have the rare classical elegance of biblical parables. Also, all of them reveal a continuing engagement with the evolution of Nigerian society and a deep concern for its unstable politics. Achebe has been unrelenting in letting it be known that he is unhappy with the state of affairs in Nigeria, most explicitly in The Trouble with Nigeria. As a writer-activist and teacher he does not shy away from controversy, yet he chooses his battles carefully. His refusal in October 2004 to accept Nigeria's highest honor characterizes his way of speaking "truth to power," just as did his earlier decision not to participate in a Swedish conference on the future of African literature. This is the path Achebe has chosen to take: not to avoid controversy but to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that limit humans' thought and action. On occasion he has also accepted invitations, as he did from the OECD and World Bank. In these venues he has remained critical of structural adjustment, as well as of development theories and abstractions that gloss over the havoc they inflict daily on the poor. His refusal to attend the Stockholm literary conference may have cost him the Nobel Prize for Literature. No regrets here, however, as he has received numerous international awards and accolades and...