In memoriam: Chinua Achebe

When globally  renowned author, editor and scholar Chinua Achebe died March 21, 2013 at the age of 82, he left behind a commanding legacy.

Achebe is widely regarded as "the father of African literature'. He was known as one of the world's greatest writers who worked tirelessly to build a greater understanding of Africa, Nigerian politics, and the impact of the West on African society through his own novels, essays and poetry and the works of others. His 1958 classic, Things Fall Apart, has been translated into 50 languages and sold more than 12 million copies in English alone.

As editor of Heineman Education Book's African Writers series, he launched the careers of many African writers. While serving as professor at the University of Massachusetts in 1975, he delivered what is widely regarded as a landmark lecture deconstructing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Outstanding fiction in 2007, Achebe was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana studies at Brown University a the time of his death and was as highly regarded for his academic career as for his literary and political impact. 

In 2006, the University of Toronto awarded Achebe an honorary degree. The following is the text of his address to convocation.

The officials who quietly managed my presence here this afternoon were exceptionally efficient. They gave me and my wife all the help we needed to get here comfortably and for me to look like a credible doctor of the University of Toronto. They provided a crash program in a two-page document called Quick Facts which told me that the university was founded in 1827 which I didn’t know before. Strangely enough the next piece of information in Quick Facts – that the University of Toronto is Canada’s largest and most distinguished university – had been known to me in a curious, even magical way, for more than 60 years.

I was 10 or 11, in the elementary school in Ogidi, Onitsha Province, Eastern Nigeria, Nigeria, British West Africa, Africa, World.

Every end of year we staged a comical show which we called Concert.  Some of the program was in our mother-tongue, Igbo, but English was deemed to represent the future and so it featured more and more in our concert, in heavy and awkward recitations. On this particular occasion a performer came on the stage and began to recite the marvels of his unmatched erudition. He had MA London, Phd Toronto. (I assure you I’m not making this up!)

As soon as we heard the strange word Toronto a quick voice in the audience chimed in: Ntontoro. It was a brilliant call-and-response sequence and it brought the roof down. Such quick-fire improvisation of Igbo word-play, exploiting not meaning but tonality of Igbo speech, would have been exceptional even from an adult.

Toronto-Ntontoro has stayed with me from that day to this, when I can parade myself as an erudite doctor of letters from Toronto. Between that magical event in my elementary school so long ago and today’s convocation a good deal has happened. British colonial rule over Nigeria came under challenge and finally fell. Opportunities for education increased exponentially in Nigeria but the need remained for more. Some young Nigerian men and women left our villages and our shores for higher education overseas “in quest of the golden fleece” as our nationalists called it. Some actually came to Toronto and studied medicine. One of them was to build a splendid hospital in a strategic position near the eastern bank of the River Niger in Onitsha, six miles from my village, and name it Toronto Hospital. One member of that group, Dr. Agulefo, who studied at Dalhousie, is present here today.

Education comes in many shapes and styles. What was offered to me and my friends in our village school 60 years ago was so little and so rudimentary that it might be hard to see any link between it and the excellent fare that Toronto has given to those it will graduate today. But I urge you, heroes and heroines of this convocation, to stretch your imagination and grasp the essential link between you and us. That link is our humanity and the human spirit. That link is also the community of imaginative learners who are excited by knowledge for its own sake and for the opportunity it can give us to make our world better.

This ceremony belongs to you, graduating students. I salute you for bringing your struggle to this important and happy phase. Congratulations. We are happy for you, your parents, friends, teachers and relations who stood by you through this great endeavour. I have deliberately avoided describing your achievement as an end. It is a stage – an important stage, but only a stage – in your life and growth. The world you are inheriting has great achievements and even greater possibilities. But its flaws and defects are also staggering. You have your work cut out for you. May your excitement to learn what you need to know never cease, nor your faith in a better world.

And finally I wish to salute the institution that provided the motivation and the venue for your endeavour and success – the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I wish her another century of teaching excellence!

Chinua Achebe
Friday June 23, 2006