Achebe: A Man Ahead Of His Generation - Prof Nnaji

Prof. Chinua Achebe had left the University of Massachusetts about a decade before I joined the same university in 1983 as Professor and Director of the Automation and Robotics Laboratory. At the time, Achebe’s reputation was still looming large at the UMass.
On realising that Achebe and I came from the same country and the same state in Nigeria (old Anambra State), students and professors as well as non-academic staff ceaselessly asked me questions about Achebe—about his health, his family, his books and, of course, about the legendary village of Umuofia in his epic novel, Things Fall Apart. Poor fellows! My only contact with Achebe then was only through his books which I thoroughly enjoyed reading while in secondary school.
The ceaseless questions about Achebe, speaking with the benefit of hindsight, often remind me of the story told by Michael Thelwell, a renowned Jamaican professor of literature at the W. E. B. Dubois Department of African American Studies at the UMass and an eminent authority on the Achebe oeuvre, that once “a person tells some Jamaicans that he or she lives in New York, they would reply, ‘you must know my cousin who lives in New York, too!’ ”.
As fate would have it, Achebe and I would meet in flesh and blood in the United States when he came once more to the UMass as a Visiting Professor; more importantly, we worked together on a critical Africa-centred project — the founding and publication of African Commentary. At the inception of the publication in the late 1980s, the investors and promoters of the monthly magazine had no difficulty making Achebe both the chairman and publisher, while I served as the president.
The magazine was a combination of intellectualism and journalism designed to bridge the communication divide between the African continent and the African Diaspora and offer a most rewarding black perspective on the global issues of the day. Well-received no sooner than it hit the newsstands, African Commentary deservedly won a lot of recognition in the US media.
It was also used in some universities for teaching African history and literature. Interestingly, almost all of us who invested in the magazine were academics with no practical experience of how to run a newspaper business. We consequently took certain steps, which, in retrospect, were pretty funny.
For instance, some board members used to attend meetings with their spouses who did not make any investments in the enterprise, yet, they actively participated in the board meetings and voted on fundamental issues! In spite of obvious governance and management issues and liquidity challenges, the monthly lasted a whole two years.
Achebe was an exceedingly wise man, not just an intellectual or writer. All of us always profited from Achebe’s sagacity. In fact, he was a born teacher. For instance, it is normal for people to state in conversations and meetings, “I do not know how to present this matter”, thus leaving the audience rather confused and sometimes embarrassed. Achebe would carefully guide any person who made such a statement to think through the subject, form his or her thoughts properly before rephrasing and presenting them in a logical manner. This would normally force the individual to be clear in stating issues, and not giving excuses. Achebe had a wonderful gift of clarity of thought and clarity of expression.

It is truly amazing that his first novel, Things Fall Apart, was published when he was merely 28 years of age. In other words, the classic was written when he was not more than 26 and conceived when he was even younger. How did someone of such callow or young age come up with this great novel, which has been translated into dozens of languages and sold over 12 million copies globally? This is a book of fiction, yet historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, literary stylists, among others. constantly cite it.