Google is celebrating revered Nigerian writer, Late Chinua Achebe who would have clocked 87 today, November 16.
The posthumous birthday of the ‘Things Fall Apart’ writer is being celebrated with a Google Doodle.
By creating a doodle for Achebe, the tech giant is celebrating a writer many consider to be father of modern African literature.
Below are key facts about Nigeria’s unarguably greatest writer;
1.) Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on this day in 1930 in Ogidi Anambra.
2.) The late writer excelled at school and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan).
3.) After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) before he moved to Lagos.
4.) Achebe’s novel, published in 1958, is widely regarded as the first major work of modern African fiction and inspired others to tell the continent’s story through the eyes of those who lived there. His later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a “language of colonisers”, in African literature.
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5.) He was a supporter of Biafra during the civil war. Achebe became a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. After the civil war, Achebe returned to Nigeria for two years before accepting faculty posts in the 1970s at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut. He returned home again in 1979 to teach English at the University of Nigeria.
6.) When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed.
7.) In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” featured a famous criticism of Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist”; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.
8.) He had used a wheelchair since a car accident in Nigeria in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist down.
9.) Achebe had lived and worked as a professor in the United States in recent years, most recently at Brown University in Rhode Island before he died March 21, 2013, at the age of 82.
10.) His book, ‘Things Fall Apart’ has sold more than ten million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages.
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