“For many people all around the world, Chinua Achebe is and still is their first African writer.”
There are reports that Prof. Wole Soyinka has reiterated his stance that Achebe is not “the father of African literature.” We recall that a few weeks after Achebe’s demise, Soyinka remarked: “Chinua himself repudiated such a tag—he did study literature after all and earned a degree in the subject… Those who seriously believe or promote this must be asked: have you the sheerest acquaintance with the literatures of other African nations, in both indigenous and adopted colonial languages? What must the francophone, lusophone, Zulu, Xhosa, Ewe literary scholars and consumers think of those who persist in such a historic absurdity?”
He might be right. That’s his opinion, just as everyone else has their own. Of course, I have my opinion on this issue, but I will mostly cite the opinions of great minds and institutions on Achebe’s place in African literature.
I believe it was Nadine Gordimer, the South African author, who first called Achebe “the father of African literature” when he won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. Writing on this issue, Kwame Appiah stated: “It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing. It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or how Pushkin influenced Russians.”
Ainehi Edoro, a Nigerian from Akure and a professor of Global Black Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in Brittle Paper, an online literary magazine for readers of African literature: “The first mistake that Soyinka makes is taking the idea of ‘the father’ or ‘the inventor’ way too literally. Achebe is the father of African literature only in a metaphorical sense. No one is saying that Achebe was physically present when African literature came into being—like he was some kind of god who stood before the expanse of Africa’s literary nothingness and said, ‘let there be African literature,’ and then there was African literature.” She continued: “Before Achebe, if you were black and African, the world most likely did not see your work as literary. They would evaluate your work as folklore, myth, or things that should interest an anthropologist, but not literature. This affected the way African writing was circulated globally. Instead of African fiction being reviewed by the New York Times or shelved alongside Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, it was published by religious presses and reviewed in anthropological journals. Things began to change in a big way after the global success of ‘Things Fall Apart.’ It took a novel like ‘Things Fall Apart’ for the global literary market, readership, and literary institutions to see African writers the same way they saw Virginia Woolf or James Joyce or William Shakespeare—as people writing things called literature and not myth, folklore, historical documents, or anthropological texts.”
Simon Gikandi, a Kenyan and Chair of the Department of English at Princeton University, has said: “Achebe is the man who invented African literature because he was able to show that the future of African writing did not lie in the simple imitation of European forms but in the fusion of such forms with the oral tradition.”
As the founding editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series from 1958, Achebe managed editorial operations and the refinement of books published under this label. Under Achebe’s editorship, many great literary works by African minds and leaders went through him, including those by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenneth Kaunda, T.M. Aluko, Léopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Flora Nwapa, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ferdinand Léopold Oyono, Alex La Guma, and John Munonye, among many others. After Achebe left Heinemann in 1972, works by people like Nelson Mandela, Soyinka, and Olusegun Obasanjo also came to Heinemann.
Achebe is not called “the father of African literature” just for his great books but also for his overall contribution to the development of African literature. Philip Gourevitch, an American author and journalist, wrote in The New Yorker: “The fact that [Achebe] must be remembered as not only the father but the godfather of modern African literature owed at least as much to the decades he spent as the editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has said: “There’s hardly any African writer of my generation who has not been mistaken for Chinua Achebe. Every African novel became ‘Things Fall Apart,’ and every writer some sort of Chinua Achebe. He never bragged about it, even refusing the unofficial title of father of African literature.” In his tribute to Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ also mentioned that Soyinka agreed that he had often been mistaken for Achebe in many countries.
It certainly made sense when Nelson Mandela told Achebe what his novels brought to him among all the African literature he had while in prison: “There was a writer named Chinua Achebe in whose company the prison walls fell.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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