Since last Thursday when his passage to the great beyond threw the literati into sudden mourning, I have been searching for the right words, right expression to honour the man of letters. Even as I was writing, I still do not have the best literary confetti to give him. Could it be that Albert Chinualumugo Achebe has taken with him the literary prowess?

Even if he did, I still owe him a tribute as a literature student who tapped  from the fountain of his knowledge during my secondary school and undergraduate days. After two decades of reading his first three novels, Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease and Arrow of God, I can still imagine Achebe’s fertile, imaginative mind which he translated into creative writings that earned him the grandeur of a papal awe.

His diminutive figure contrasted his tall intellectual poise and literary genius that lit the candle of African literature. From the confines of a wheelchair, which a ghastly motor accident eternally confined him to for 30 years, Achebe kept his readers and audience dumbstruck with his pen. This, he did, not once, not twice, but for appreciable decades. He was a writer and a good talker. He also gave a good account of himself as an irrepressible social crusader who evangelised African culture and resisted  Western imperialism as well as local enslavement.

Born on November 15, 1930, at Ogidi in Eastern Nigeria, Achebe was educated at the Government College, Umuahia and the University College, Ibadan. While working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), he composed his first book, Things Fall Apart at  the age of 28.  Since then, Achebe remained the Igbo’s tallest intellectual masquerade and one of Nigeria nay Africa’s finest literary minds.

His Things Fall Apart  (1958) which was more of a rejoinder to Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and John Buchan’s (1875-1940) corrosive narratives about Africa, has continued to arrest curious minds. The novel which has lived for five and half decades, translated into at least 45 languages and sold eight million copies worldwide, promoted  African virtues and as well engraved African narratives in the wall of fame. The most tragic hero of the novel, Okonkwo, just like Achebe, would not allow any Western irredentist to harrass him or thumb his nose at his cultural mores.

His second novel, No Longer At Ease (1960) encapsulates the last phase of the colonial regime in Nigeria, and the drama of a bungled destiny in a bewildering time of rapid cultural change. His next novel, Arrow of God reverted to the past once more. The novel is concerned with the clash of cultures which is an all-pervading theme in the African novel.

But by the mid-1960s when Northern Nigeria orchestrated a genocide against his Igbo kinsmen, Achebe turned his creative insight into an imaginative critique of public mores under independence. The result was A Man Of The People (1966), which was a bitter portrayal of  a corrupt Nigerian politician. The novel was published at the very moment a military coup swept away the old political order and its abuses. That coincidence implicated Achebe in the country’s first military coup, even though there was never an evidence to back the claim.

His last book, There Was a Country however, revealed an ethnic personality behind the man many people would quickly describe as unassuming. The novel pitched a battle agaisnt the Yoruba political deity, Late Obafemi Awolowo for his role in the Biafran civil war. The book turned out to be the most controversial.

Irrespective of whatever criticisms his novels attracted, Achebe was a literary pathfinder and one of Nigeria’s best exports to the world. He, alongside Professor Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark, were able to establish the vehicle of African literature as worldly component of intellectual and academic study. As Professor Ade Adefuye noted in his tribute to him, Achebe was not only a literary icon, he was a fountain from which other literary icons emerged. Many professors of literature in Nigeria and other parts of Afica, according to Adefuye, attained their intellectual prominence by studying and retracting Achebe’s works.

An immitable wordsmith of priceless values, Achebe shaped African literature and gave it a standing in the world. Even if his novels are primarily directed at an African audience, their psychological insights have gained universal acceptance. Things Fall Apart earned him the Booker Prize as well as doctorates across the globe. It was adapted as a play by Biyi Bandele in 1997 and presented as part of Kennedy Centre’s African Odyssey series in 1999.

Even though the literary experts made up of probably four or five balding ‘wise men’ in Sweden didn’t consider him good enough for a Nobel Prize, Achebe made his mark on the firmament of world literature. He succeeded in bringing literature to every home. To now say such a man is dead is a mere metaphor. A writer doesn’t die.

Achebe was also a moral compass for Nigeria and Africa. He personified the hero of his Things Fall Apart, Okwonkwo in terms of insistence on principle. The denial of a Sweden’s Nobel Prize could not frustrate him from challenging the orthodoxy of the white world, especially the Euro-American mindset and the racist and supremacist thinking of the white writers. Neither was his anger with Nigerian nation tamed by the offer of a national award. On two different occasions, he rejected national awards, one by former President Olusegun Obasanjo and the other by President Goodluck Jonathan.

Till he breathed his last, he was not at peace with the Nigerian nation that killed thousands of his kinsmen and reduced his Enugu home to an harmlet. He was not pretentious about this. He agonised this much in his last book.Now that he is no more,  I only hope Achebe would have a   peace of mind  to forgive his country for denying him a peace of mind when he was alive.

Boye Salau