Achebe freed me to tell my own story

He demonstrated the importance of finding your own voice.

Chinua Achebe, who has died aged 82, writes of his protagonist in Things Fall Apart: “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievement.” At the age of 27, Achebe most likely had no idea just how much of his own life that opening sentence of his debut novel was prophesying. Things Fall Apart has since sold more than 12 million copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

The book’s publication in 1958 was deservedly a huge cultural event. Published two years before Nigeria gained independence, at a time when questions of identity and nationhood preoccupied colonised nations throughout the continent, it firmly moved Africans from the margins of their own narrative to the centre.

It tells the story of the colonial intervention from the African point of view and eloquently challenges the notion of the “discovery” of a people who already existed, and whose well-established civilisation has come under attack by the “discoverers”. “The white man is very clever,” Achebe writes. “He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

Like everyone else I know, I remember the first time I read Things Fall Apart. I could not have been more than ten when I read an older sibling’s copy. I was struck even then by the simplicity and beauty of the prose, and how the village it described seemed very much like mine. It captivated me and opened up for me a world of expansive possibilities. In it, I – who had been fed on the stories of Enid Blyton, and instructed at school on the history of post-colonial Nigeria – found a space where I could exist, one in which my forefathers existed as people worthy of respect. They were not pagans, running around wildly in the dark, cursed by God for not being Christians, as a pamphlet I had discovered around the same period asserted.

That revelation was a liberating and refreshing experience. Nelson Mandela has been quoted as saying that Achebe was the one writer in whose company his prison walls came down. For me, it was in his company that my world opened. And it would be many years before I would describe it as “coming home”.

Achebe became my idol and I sought him out diligently. I read him carefully, savouring his wisdom. His later works continued the interrogation of the tension between old and new, but also became increasingly critical of the Nigerian government. His last book, There Was a Country: a Personal History of Biafra (2012), traces the trajectory of the country’s leadership problems and offers an honest and biting criticism of contemporary Nigeria.

No matter what his subject, Achebe wrote with an unflinching honesty and with elegance. From Things Fall Apart to There Was a Country, he has reminded me of the importance of not only owning my own story, but also articulating it, transcribing it, and, more importantly, of finding my voice. That is his enduring legacy, for which I – and many others – are immensely grateful. Achebe is gone, yet he lives not only in his works, but in those of generations of writers all over the world for whom he continues to be an influence.