Purple Hibiscus Research: Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 to Isiah and Janet Achebe in Ogidi, Nigeria: an Igbo village. With his father being the first Christian convert in the village, and his schools teaching him exclusively books from British authors, Achebe was subjected to Western Christian influences from early on in his life. In 1950, he started attending the University of Ibadan to become a doctor. However, after reading Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary, a book that depicted Africans as savages but was praised as a great work about Africa, Achebe decided to pursue writing instead, feeling it was necessary to give Africans proper literary representation.

In a matter of years the excitement of Nigerian independence for Achebe had run out. In 1966, he wrote Man of the People, expressing his anger and frustration with the corrupt Nigerian government through the medium of an imaginary African country and a corrupt politician. In this book, Achebe foresaw the fall of the civilian government in Nigeria, which happened mere days after the book was published. When the Nigerian Civil War started, Achebe became a Biafran diplomat and fundraiser to support the Igbo people from which he came. During the war, Achebe stopped writing novels, producing exclusively short stories, poems, and children’s books. One of his poems, Christmas in Biafra, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972. After the war, Achebe started a publishing career in 1971 and a teaching career in 1972.

After Achebe graduated in 1953, he started a career as a writer for the Nigerian broadcasting service, composing his first novel while he was working for the company. The novel, Things Fall Apart (1959), is considered by most to be his magnum opus, receiving international appeal and providing a deep social analysis of colonial Nigeria. It tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo farmer, and his struggle to maintain his traditions when British colonizers and missionaries come into his land. The theme of clash of cultures and expressing that theme through gender roles appears in Things Fall Apart and his next two novels: No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). During this time, he married Cristie Okoli. They would have four children together.

In his middle and later years, Achebe continued his career as an author, a teacher, and a publisher. Achebe had become very influential at this point, as his criticism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness dropped the sale of all of Conrad’s novels soon after it was published in 1975. In 1987, he wrote his fifth and final novel, Anthills of the Savannah, telling of a coup in an imaginary African nation. In 1990, Achebe became confined to a wheelchair after the car he was in overturned. In 2012, Achebe published his last work: There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, telling of his experience in the Nigerian Civil War. Achebe died on March 21, 2013, with tributes coming from people such as Nelson Mandela and Goodluck Johnathan.