For many people all around the world, Chinua Achebe was their first African writer. Things Fall Apart has been read and loved (and studied) by millions. And among its many readers were a generation of other African writers for whom he blazed the trail.
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Of course, that wonderful 1958 book wasn't literally the first novel published by an African writer in a European language. But in Things Fall Apart — along with No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God, the two books that followed in his trilogy about life in Igboland — Achebe established, for those who wanted to write fiction in English about African life, the first great model of how it could be done. He found ways to render the life and the language of traditional Nigerian village people, in prose that seemed so spare and natural that it is hard to appreciate how magnificent an achievement it was.
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Achebe, who died Thursday at the age of 82, had absorbed a wide range of literature in English, both poetry and prose: the King James Bible and the English hymnal; realist and modernist novels; Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Buchan, Greene and, of course, Yeats, who gave him the title of his first book.
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And from this treasury he drew a variety of forms of diction: one, for example, to represent the voices of people speaking Igbo; another, for the language in which he described their world. From the traditions of oral literature that he heard growing up, in turn, he drew the proverbs with which the novel is peppered, the tales of gods and heroes and heroines that hover behind his narrative. The result was a way of talking about Africa in the colonial language that allowed his characters to live for us as richly specific human beings, located in a particular time and place, while at the same time resonating with readers across the planet and across generations.