Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After ‘Things Fall Apart’

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• JEFFREY BROWN:

  For a long time, the story of Africa was told almost exclusively through the words of European writers. That began to change in the 1950s, as African countries achieved independence and African writers began to tell their own stories.

  One book in particular, "Things Fall Apart," published in 1958, has become a classic of world literature, translated into some 50 languages, selling 11 million copies.

  It was set in a village in what is now Nigeria, just as the Ibo people there had their first encounters with European Christian missionaries.

  Chinua Achebe was just 28 when he wrote the book, his first novel. He's since written numerous other works of fiction, mostly set in post-colonial Africa, as well as nonfiction and poetry, and last year was named winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.

  Achebe was partly paralyzed in a car accident in Nigeria in 1990. For most of the years since then, he's lived and taught at Bard College in New York.

  In Washington recently, I asked him what he'd set out to do 50 years ago.

  CHINUA ACHEBE, Author, "Things Fall Apart": I knew that something needed to be done.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Something needed to be done?

• CHINUA ACHEBE:

  Yes.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  And what was that?

• CHINUA ACHEBE:

  That was my place in the world, my story, the story of myself, the story of my people. I was already familiar with stories of different people.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Because you grew up reading English literature…

• CHINUA ACHEBE:

  Yes, and having an English education and encountering accounts of events of people. And, at some point, I began to miss my own. Think of it in terms of a gap in the bookshelf, you know, where a book has been taken out and the gap is there.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  And so you set this story, "Things Fall Apart," at that moment in the 19th century, sort of the end of one time and the beginning of another?

• CHINUA ACHEBE:

  Yes, yes.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  And why then?

• CHINUA ACHEBE:

  I wanted that moment of change, in which one culture was in contact, in conflict, in conversation with another culture, and something was going to happen.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Certainly, in the portrait of village life before the Europeans come, you don't paint an idealized vision there. The main character, Okonkwo, is thoughtful, but violent.