Civil Peace

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was born in the Igbo town of Ogidi on November 16, 1930, four decades after the arrival of Christian missionaries. His parents converted to Christianity and christened their son Achebe Albert Chinualumogu.

His parents raised him as a Christian and sent him to the local missionary school where he was forbidden to speak Igbo and discouraged from holding onto pagan traditions. His mother taught him Igbo folk tales and stories, however. Achebe learned to bridge these two worlds saying that it was “not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer might take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully” (McTernan, Billie. “Chinua Achebe—An Appreciation.” The African Report, 23 Mar. 2013).

When Achebe turned 14, he entered the prestigious colonial government college at Umuahia. Although he won a scholarship in 1948 to study medicine at University College (now the University of Ibadan), he realized his passion was writing and literature and changed his degree to English literature, history, and religious studies.

Through his university years, he studied literature mainly from a Eurocentric point of view, reading writers like Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad, who portrayed a distorted picture of African life and people.