Died yesterday at 82.
Remembered as a novelist who wrote in English, one of the first black African novelists to be published. A good writer in my opinion.
All the obituaries will mention his first book Things Fall Apart, but herself thinks his later novel No Longer at Ease is better, and so do I. However I think his best work is the hilarious short story The Madman, published in the collection Girls at War. Read The Madman. It is a warning against the irascibility to which so many of us are given.
Although an Ibo Achebe was rational about the 'Biafra' war. His own politics he explained to me as a sort of rational democratic socialism (I did a lefty hack job interviewing him, but he was too good for that... I really took to the guy. He had proper intellectual class).
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Achebe once offered a glimpse of education during the colonial period in a TV programme . As a student, Joyce Cary's apallingly patronsing novel about an African, "Mister Johnson", was offered as an example of English literature. (The story later appeared as an apallingly patronising film.) In a similar way, children in French colonies were set to study France, a country that most of them would never visit, in detail, including the names of all the French rivers and all of their tributaries. In the then Malaya, I once tried to express a ringgit (dollar) amount in sterling to a local Chinese. I atruggled with the calculation but he smoothly interjected with the correct figure, in pounds, shillings and pence. I was astonished, as he had never been abroad, and asked him how he knew. He said that the only maths books provided by the British when he was a child used pounds, so pupils had to learn how to calculate in them.
I have only read "Things Fall Apart" by Achebe but will put the others you note on my list.
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Either Achebe himself, or more likely just his obiturist in today's Telegraph, appear to think that Joyce Cary was a woman.
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It was the obituarist obviously. I noticed that too.
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Chinua Achebe - Ambo
