Chinua Achebe Study Guide

© 2022 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage
retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher.

1
eNotes | TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHINUA ACHEBE STUDY GUIDE 1

BIOGRAPHY 3
Biography 3

ANALYSIS 6
Analysis: Other Literary Forms 6
Analysis: Achievements 6
Analysis: Other literary forms 6
Analysis: Achievements 7
Analysis: Other literary forms 8
Analysis: Achievements 8
Analysis: Discussion Topics 9
Bibliography 9

2
Biography

Biography
Article abstract: Achebe was one of the first African writers to achieve international literary success. His use of a
mixture of simple English and Ibo phrases reflected a uniquely African heritage and inspired many other African
writers to lend their voices to different types of Western literature.

Early Life

Chinualomagu (Albert) Achebe was born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, Nigeria, a large Ibo village in the
rainforest lands not far from the banks of the Niger River. He was the second youngest of six children born to Isaiah
Achebe, a teacher-catechist for the Church Missionary Society and one of the first people of his region to convert to
Christianity. Achebe’s family was distinguished, as his grandfather had acquired three of the four possible titles in the
village. Although as a boy he was educated as a Christian, learning to admire all things European and to reject
things that were African, Achebe was still able to find beauty in traditional African culture. Since his father did not
sever connections with his non-Christian relatives, Achebe established a relationship with his people’s traditional
world.

Achebe began his education in the Christian mission school of his birth-place. He then won a scholarship to
Government College Umahia and in 1948 was chosen to be one of the first students to study at University College,
Ibadan (later the University of Ibadan). While attending university, Achebe rejected his given English name (Albert)
and began to use the African Chinualomagu (shortened to Chinua), which implies the meaning “God will fight for
me.” He also dropped his planned study of medicine and instead chose to pursue a degree in literature, receiving his
B.A. in 1953. At this time, Achebe began to write short stories and essays, some of which centered on the conflict
between Christian and traditional African culture, a subject that would become the focal point for much of his later
works. After graduation, Achebe taught secondary school for less than a year before joining the Nigerian
Broadcasting Company as “talks producer” in 1954.

Life’s Work

In his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe focused on the Nigerian experience of European colonialism and
dominance, developing his major themes from an African viewpoint and portraying the many aspects of the
communal life of the Ibo people of Umuafia in the late nineteenth century at both the societal and individual levels.
The novel is short, utilizing a close-knit style that creates an effective picture of the clash between the Ibo and
European cultures at a time when white missionaries and officials were first penetrating Eastern Nigeria. The story
focuses on two closely intertwined tragedies—the public tragedy of the Ibo culture as it is eclipsed by the European
culture and the individual tragedy of Okonkwo, an important man of Umuafia who sees his traditional world changing
and collapsing and is powerless to stop it. Things Fall Apart was met with wide critical acclaim and has since been
translated into forty-five languages.

Achebe’s second novel, No Longer at Ease, was published in 1960. As in his first novel, Achebe took the novel’s title
from a poem by T. S. Eliot. This work examines African society in the era of independence and continues the saga of
3
the Okonkwo family with Ox’s grandson Obi, an educated Christian who has left his village for a position as a civil
servant in urban Lagos, Nigeria. The story deals with the tragedy of a new generation of Nigerians who, although
educated and Westernized, are nevertheless caught between the opposing cultures of traditional Africa and urban
Lagos.

In 1961, Achebe was appointed Director of External Broadcasting for Nigeria. This position required that Achebe
travel to Great Britain as well as other parts of the world. During this time, a collection of Achebe’s short stories
entitled The Sacrificial Egg and Other Short Stories (1962) was published. Two years later, Achebe completed Arrow
of God (1964). In this, his third novel, Achebe once again painted a picture of cultures in collision, and once again his
novel attracted much attention, which only added to the high esteem in which he was already held.

A Man of the People, which would be Achebe’s last novel for more than two decades, was published in 1966. With
this novel, Achebe continued to develop the urban themes that he had presented in No Longer at Ease, but this time
with a satirical edge, examining corrupt politicians who used to their own advantage the political system that they
had inherited from the departed imperial power.

After a massacre of Ibos took place in Northern Nigeria in 1966, Achebe resigned his position with the Nigerian
Broadcasting Service and moved to the Eastern Region of Nigeria, where he intended to go into publishing. When
the region declared its independence as the separate state of Biafra, however, Achebe became personally involved
with the ensuing civil war, serving the Biafran government from 1967 to 1970. During this period of his life, Achebe
produced only one piece of work, a children’s book entitled Chike and the River (1966).

In the years following the war, Achebe produced three collections of poetry: Beware, Soul-Brother and Other Poems
(1971, 1972), Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems (1973), and Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial
Poems for Christopher Okigbo (1978). In addition, Achebe was a coeditor of Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry
(1982). With this turn to poetry as a medium for his creative talents, Achebe was able to distinguish himself as both a
great novelist and a fine poet. During this period, Achebe also wrote a collection of short stories entitled Girls at War
(1983) and coedited another collection entitled African Short Stories (1984). In addition, he produced three works of
juvenile literature as well as a number of essays. In the 1980’s, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was adapted for stage,
radio, and television.

In 1971, Achebe accepted a post at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. The following year, Achebe and his family
moved temporarily to the United States, where he took a position with the University of Massachusetts as a
professor in its Department of Afro-American Studies. In addition, during this period, he taught at several American
institutions as a visiting professor. While in the United States, he was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree
from Dartmouth College. Additionally, Achebe shared, with a Canadian, the 1972 Commonwealth Prize for the best
book of poetry in his Beware, Soul-Brother and Other Poems. In 1976, he returned to Nsukka, where he held the
rank of professor and edited Okike, a literary journal.

The year 1988 saw Achebe return to the novel as an expression of his now world-renowned talents. His work Anthills
of the Savannah was very well received and earned a nomination for the Booker Prize. According to Charles R.
Larson, writing for the Chicago Tribune, “no other novel in many years has bitten to the core, swallowed and
regurgitated contemporary Africa’s miseries and expectations as profoundly as Anthills of the Savannah.”

In 1990 a serious car accident left Achebe confined to a wheelchair. Shortly thereafter he accepted a teaching

4
position at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Summary

Chinua Achebe can be counted among the founders of the new literature of Nigeria, which has flourished since the
1950’s; it is a literature that draws upon traditional oral history as well as a modern, rapidly changing African society.
As a founder of this movement, Achebe has paved the way for other notable African writers such as Elechie Amadie
and Cyprian Ekwensi. In addition, he has influenced an entire second generation of African writers. Achebe has also
helped shape and set into place the now characteristic features of the African novel, especially the effective use of
very simple language, peppered with African words and proverbs and highly reminiscent of traditional African speech
patterns. As Bruce King comments in Introduction to Nigerian Literature: “Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to
successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature.”

Achebe’s novels, which comment strongly on the stages of change that have affected the entire African continent in
the past one hundred years, not only are chronicles of events and trends in African history but also are extremely
artistic expressions that contain a definite purpose. Unlike many novelists, Achebe rejects the notion that the writer is
an individual who writes for his own personal pleasure or merely for the purpose of artistic expression. Instead, he
sees the novelist as an educator. For example, in an interview with Bernth Lindfors, Achebe states: “One big
message of the many that I try to put across, is that Africa was not a vacuum, before the coming of Europe, that
culture was not unknown in Africa, that culture was not brought to Africa by the white world.” Through his novels, his
poetry, his short stories, his career as an educator, and his extension into editing the African Writers series for
Heinemann Educational Books, Achebe has succeeded in founding and nurturing a major literary movement of the
twentieth century.

Bibliography

Cartney, Wilfred. Whispers from a Continent: The Literature of Contemporary Black Africa. New York: Random
House, 1969. A survey of black African writers. Contains critical analyses of Arrow of God, A Man of the People, and
No Longer at Ease as well as a discussion of how each ties into a relationship with African culture and European
colonialism. Includes discussion on other writers of the Nigerian literature movement.

Githae-Mugo, Micere. Visions of Africa. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978. Provides original interpretations of
the works of Achebe as well as four other writers and examines their various works of fiction against a sociopolitical
background. Also examines Achebe’s personal experiences and how they affected his writings.

Heywood, Christopher. A Critical View on Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” London: The British Council, 1985. A
critical analysis of Achebe’s first novel. Contains information on Achebe’s life and work as well as his personal
experiences and views on books and writing in general. Also includes selected writings from some of Achebe’s
critics.

Owomoyela, Oyekan. African Literatures: An Introduction. Waltham, Mass.: Crossroads Press, 1979. A survey of
African novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. Introduces major works and their authors. Contains critical and
biographical information on Achebe and his first four novels. This book is for the general reader interested in African
literature.

5
Ravenscroft, Arthur. Chinua Achebe. New York: Longmans, Green, 1969. A full discussion of Achebe’s first four
novels, including critical and literary analysis and a brief summary of each of the four novels. Also contains
biographical information on the author.

Wren, Robert M. Chinua Achebe, “Things Fall Apart.” New York: Longman, 1980. A guide to Achebe’s first novel.
Each chapter in Things Fall Apart is summarized with questions at the end of each section. Provides a brief
introduction to Achebe’s life. Contains background information on the novel, the characters, and the time period
covered.

Analysis

Analysis: Other Literary Forms

In addition to his short-story collections, Chinua Achebe is known for essays, poetry collections, and children’s
literature. He is best known, however, for his novel No Longer at Ease (1960), which became a modern African
classic. The book is the second in a trilogy about change, conflict, and personal struggle to find the “New Africa.” The
first is Things Fall Apart (1958) and the third is Arrow of God (1964). Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People
(1966), was followed twenty-one years later by Anthills of the Savannah (1987), his fifth novel. In 1984 he became
the founder and publisher of Uwa Ndi Igbo: A Bilingual Journal of Igbo Life and Arts. Achebe edited volumes of
African short fiction, including African Short Stories (1985) and The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short
Fiction (1992), both with C. L. Innes.

Analysis: Achievements
Chinua Achebe received awards or award nominations for each of his novelistic works, from the Margaret Wrong
Memorial Prize for Things Fall Apart to a Booker McConnell Prize nomination for Anthills of the Savannah. He was
also awarded a Rockefeller travel fellowship in 1960 and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) Fellowship for creative artists in 1963. In 1979 he received the Nigerian National Merit
Award and was named to the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Achebe received honorary doctorates from
universities around the world, including Dartmouth College in 1972 and Harvard University in 1996.

Analysis: Other literary forms

The short stories of Chinua Achebe (ah-CHAY-bay), written over a period of twenty years, were first published in
England by Heinemann under the title Girls at War, and Other Stories (1972), although most of them had already
appeared in various periodicals and in a Nigerian publication, The Sacrificial Egg, and Other Short Stories (1962).
Achebe’s poems, most of them written during the Biafran crisis (1967-1970), came out soon after the war as Beware:

6
Soul Brother, and Other Poems (1971) and a year later in an enlarged edition. Doubleday then published this
Heinemann collection in the United States as Christmas in Biafra, and Other Poems (1973). Additional poems and
an essay by Achebe were combined with photographs by Robert Lyons in a full-color coffee-table book, Another
Africa (1998), which provided an overview of the beauty and complexity of modern Africa. Achebe has gathered
together various autobiographical, political, literary, and cultural essays under the intriguingly optimistic title Morning
Yet on Creation Day (1975), published by both Doubleday and Heinemann. In 1983, Heinemann published his short
book The Trouble with Nigeria, which challenged his contemporaries to overcome their growing resignation. Hopes
and Impediments (1988) brings together some fifteen essays, mainly on literature and the writer’s role and covering
a twenty-three-year period, some of them previously published, including five from Morning Yet on Creation Day.
Achebe has also written the children’s stories Chike and the River (1966) and, jointly with John Iroaganachi, How the
Leopard Got His Claws (1972). Achebe has also collaborated in editing several volumes of poetry and short stories.

Analysis: Achievements
From the beginning of his literary career, with the publication of Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe recognized and
accepted his role as that of a spokesman for black Africa. The primary function of that role was to reinterpret the
African past from an African’s point of view. This he successfully does in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, which
correct the imperialist myth of African primitivism and savagery by re-creating the Igbo culture of the Eastern Region
of Nigeria, its daily routines, its rituals, its customs, and especially its people, dealing with one another in a highly
civilized fashion within a complex society. The reinterpretation necessitated, as well, a look at the invading culture;
Achebe tilted the balance in the Africans’ favor by depicting individuals in the British administration as prejudiced,
imperceptive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and emotionally impotent. As his main subject was the African crisis, he
did not go to great pains to explore the private lives of the British or to mollify the British public. He needed to show
that white civilization and white people were not intrinsically superior, and to restore to Africans a respect for their
own culture and their own lives.

Achebe did not conceive his role as that of a mere propagandist, however, as any reader of the novels would
acknowledge. His interpretation paid due respect to Western civilization and seriously criticized aspects of his own.
In spite of certain fictional shortcuts—which some critics regard as crucial flaws—Achebe’s attempt was to arrive at
an objective appraisal of the conflict between Africa and the West. In fact, the central focus of his three other novels
—No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah—set in contemporary times, is on the
failure of Africans to meet challenges in the modern world. Of these, the first two are satirical attacks; the third is a
subtle blend of irony, compassion, traditional wisdom, and a sane perspective on the chaotic Nigerian scene.

Achebe’s importance as a spokesman for and to his own people has drawn criticism from some Western readers
who are more interested in the quality of a novel than in its social function. Achebe has had several angry words to
say to such aesthetically minded critics. His defense is that literature is a human and humane endeavor, not
primarily a formal one. Still, one can easily defend his novels on aesthetic grounds, even arguing, as Charles Larson
has done, that Achebe is actually an innovative writer who has transformed the novel to suit the African setting.
Certainly, the most remarkable thing that Achebe has done, especially in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, is to
transform the English language itself into an African idiom. Bernth Lindfors and others have noted the skill with which
Achebe uses imagery, allusions, figures of speech, proverbs, sentence patterns, Standard English, and various
forms of non-Standard English to capture a particular historical moment as well as the African mentality and—just as
important—to unify the novels around major motifs and themes. Achebe has not written mere social documents or
7
social manifestos, but creditable works of literature that can stand the test of critical analysis; his contribution to the
African world goes far beyond his five novels, but they are his major literary achievement.

As a consequence of his achievement as a novelist, Achebe was named chairman of the Society of Nigerian Authors
and became a Member of Council at the University of Lagos. He also received the New Statesman Award for his
third novel, Arrow of God. Among other honors were a Rockefeller Travel Fellowship to East and Central Africa
(1960) and a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Travel Fellowship to the
United States and Brazil (1963). In 1989, Achebe was elected the first president of the Nigerian chapter of the
International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), although he was living in the
United States at the time.

Some twenty American, European, and African institutions, including Dartmouth College, Stanford University, the
Open University of Great Britain, and the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, have granted Achebe honorary
degrees. He holds the influential position of founding editor of the African Writers Series, which, more than any other
publisher, is responsible for the worldwide recognition of literary talent from Africa. The Times of London included
Achebe among its 1993 list of one thousand “Makers of the Twentieth Century,” and in 1996 he received the
Campion Award, which is presented by the Catholic Book Club to honor a “Christian person of letters” who combines
faith and literary talent. In 2007, he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his body of work. Things Fall
Apart has been translated into more than forty-five languages and has sold millions of copies, making it one of the
most widely read and influential African novels ever written.

Analysis: Other literary forms

Chinua Achebe (ah-CHAY-bay) is a writer who has made important contributions in every literary genre. He is known
primarily for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1959). His other novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of
God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe’s short stories are collected in
The Sacrificial Egg, and Other Stories (1962) and Girls at War, and Other Stories (1972). He has also published
collections of essays: Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), An Image of Africa (1977), The Trouble with Nigeria
(1983), Hopes and Impediments (1988), Home and Exile (2000), and Education of a British-Protected Child (2009).
In addition to his contributions as a poet, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, Ache has written books for
children: Chike and the River (1966), How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972; with John Iroaganachi), The Flute
(1977), and The Drum (1977). He has also edited numerous works, including Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of
Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo, 1937-1967 (1978; with Dubem Okafor).

Analysis: Achievements
Chinua Achebe is known as the founder of modern African writing. His many awards include the Margaret Wrong
Memorial Prize (1959) for Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian National Trophy for Literature (1961), the Jock
Campbell-New Statesman Award for Literature for Arrow of God (1966), the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1972, joint
winner), the Afro-Asian Writers Association’s Lotus Award (1975), the Nigerian National Merit Award (1979), the
Triple Eminence Award from the Association of Nigerian Authors (1990), the Langston Hughes Award (1993), the
Campion Medal and Order of Kilimanjaro Award (both 1996), the German Booksellers Peace Prize (2002), and the
8
Man Booker International Prize (2007). He was named Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (Nigeria) in 1979,
a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981, an honorary foreign fellow of the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters in 1982, and an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2002. In 1998,
he was the McMillan-Steward Lecturer at Harvard University and the Presidential Fellow Lecturer at the World Bank.

Analysis: Discussion Topics

Examine Chinua Achebe’s ideas about conflict, violence, and war in at least two of his works. What do humans do to
other humans, and why? Who or what do people blame for things going wrong? Provide examples to support your
assertions.

According to Achebe, the traditional African way of life fell apart and Africa is now a corrupt imitation of European
systems, religions, and manners. What things “fell apart” with the coming of the Europeans? What valuable aspects
of African culture have been lost?

Examine the nature of Achebe’s heroes. For example, what makes Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart or Ezeulu in Arrow
of God tragic heroes? Are they heroes in the Western tradition?

How does Achebe depict the role of women in Igbo culture? What is the significance of the proverb “Mother is
supreme”? Consider how Okonkwo’s attitudes toward women help bring about his fall or their invention of a new kind
of storytelling in Anthills of the Savannah.

Outline the structure of one of Achebe’s novels or chapters. Is it loose or tight? What role does repetition play? Can
topic ideas be readily identified or are they buried in the text? How does the structure relate to his message and/or
goals?

What parallels do you find between the fictional state of Kangan in Anthills of the Savannah and Idi Amin’s Uganda?
Why would Achebe create a fictional African state rather than write directly about Nigeria or Biafra?

In stories like “Dead Man’s Path,” Achebe pits traditional ways and beliefs against European ways and attitudes.
Provide examples of such conflicts from his works.

Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. “The Art of Fiction: Chinua Achebe.” Interview by Jerome Brooks. The Paris Review 36 (Winter,
1994): 142-166. In this interview, Achebe discusses his schooling, work as a broadcaster, and views on other writers
as well as the nature of his writing process and the political situation in Nigeria.

Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. An exploration, based on Achebe’s own
experiences as a reader and a writer, of contemporary African literature and the Western literature that both
influenced and misrepresented it.
9
Bolland, John. Language and the Quest for Political and Social Identity in the African Novel. Accra, Ghana: Woeli,
1996. This volume examines Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah, among others, but it is valuable for its
examination of African fiction and history, touching on themes found in Achebe’s short stories.

Booker, M. Keith, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. A helpful
reference in an encyclopedia format featuring several hundred alphabetically arranged entries. Some of the entries
are summary discussions of Achebe’s major works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe: Novelist, Poet, Critic. Rev. 2d ed. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1990. Includes
historical details concerning Africa, colonialism, and twentieth century Nigerian political history. Contains a sizable
bibliography and an index.

Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Full-length biography
benefits from its author’s insights as a former student of Achebe, a native of Nigeria, and a speaker of Igbo.
Examines Achebe’s life and literary contributions and places them within their social, historical, and cultural contexts.
Written with the cooperation of Achebe and his family, the book includes several rare and revealing photographs.
Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Gikandi, Simon. Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991.
Analyzes Achebe’s short stories and novels.

Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gives a detailed analysis of each of
Achebe’s novels, showing how Achebe adapted what he found in Western fiction to create a new literary form—the
Africanized novel. Includes a chapter on Achebe’s critical and political writings, demonstrating how the Nigerian civil
war changed his politics and his fiction.

Innes, C. L., and Bernth Lindfors, eds. Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents
Press, 1978. This collection of essays by twenty different critics offers a comprehensive overview of Achebe’s work.
Contains a brief introduction to Achebe’s life and background, five general assessments of his fiction, commentaries
on his first four novels and his poetry, and an extensive bibliography.

Iyasere, Solomon O., ed. Understanding “Things Fall Apart”: Selected Essays and Criticism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston,
1998. Nine essays demonstrate the breadth of approaches taken by critics. They include a reading of Okonkwo as a
tragic hero, a discussion of the rhythm of the novel’s prose as it echoes African oral tradition, and a discussion of
how Achebe successfully transformed the colonizers’ language to tell the story of the colonized.

Joseph, Michael Scott. “A Pre-modernist Reading of ‘The Drum’: Chinua Achebe and the Theme of the Eternal
Return.” Ariel 28 (January, 1997): 149-166. In this special issue on colonialism, postcolonialism, and children’s
literature, Achebe’s “The Drum” is discussed as a satirical attack on European colonial values and a text dominated
by nostalgia for a lost Golden Age.

Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. In twenty
interviews, Achebe discusses African oral tradition, the need for political commitment, the relationship between his
novels and his short stories, his use of myth and fable, and other issues concerning being a writer.

10
Mezu, Rose Ure. Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works. London: Adonis & Abbey, 2006. Mezu, a Nigerian-born
scholar and literary critic, analyzes Achebe’s novels and other writings, comparing them with other works of literature
by African and African American authors, including Olaudah Equiano and Zora Neale Hurston.

Morrison, Jago. The Fiction of Chinua Achebe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Analyzes Achebe’s major
novels, focusing on Things Fall Apart, as well as his short fiction, outlining areas of critical debate, influential
approaches to his work, and the controversies his work has engendered.

Muoneke, Romanus Okey. Art, Rebellion, and Redemption: A Reading of the Novels of Chinua Achebe. New York:
Peter Lang, 1994. Examines Achebe’s role as a public chronicler of Nigeria’s social, economic, and political
problems in order to explore the larger issues of the writer’s redemptive role in society. Argues that Achebe’s novels
challenge colonialism and negritude, two forces that have distorted the African image.

Petersen, Kirsten Holst, and Anna Rutherford, eds. Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann,
1991. A compilation of essays analyzing Achebe’s work to honor his sixtieth birthday.

Wren, Robert M. Achebe’s World: The Historical and Cultural Context of the Novels of Chinua Achebe. Washington,
D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980. A seemingly authoritative, well-documented presentation that clarifies issues
for readers not familiar with the Nigerian context. Claims that Achebe’s first four novels form an essentially truthful
and reliable guide to the historical Nigeria. Includes an extensive glossary and a helpful bibliography.

11