Civil Peace

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was born in the Igbo town of Ogidi on November 16, 1930, four decades after the arrival of Christian missionaries. His parents converted to Christianity and christened their son Achebe Albert Chinualumogu.

His parents raised him as a Christian and sent him to the local missionary school where he was forbidden to speak Igbo and discouraged from holding onto pagan traditions. His mother taught him Igbo folk tales and stories, however. Achebe learned to bridge these two worlds saying that it was “not a separation but a bringing together like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer might take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully” (McTernan, Billie. “Chinua Achebe—An Appreciation.” The African Report, 23 Mar. 2013).

When Achebe turned 14, he entered the prestigious colonial government college at Umuahia. Although he won a scholarship in 1948 to study medicine at University College (now the University of Ibadan), he realized his passion was writing and literature and changed his degree to English literature, history, and religious studies.

Through his university years, he studied literature mainly from a Eurocentric point of view, reading writers like Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad, who portrayed a distorted picture of African life and people. In his novels and stories, Achebe explores the imposition of European values on traditional African culture and examines the conflicts that accompanied colonialism.

His first novel, Things Fall Apart, written as a response to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, explores the influence of Christian missionaries and the colonial government of Nigeria on Igbo culture. Between 1958 and 1987, Achebe penned five novels and several short stories chronicling the cultural wounds of British colonial rule.

As founding editor of the influential Heinemann African Writers series, Achebe inspired African writers and guided the publication of more than 100 African texts. He worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as director of external broadcasting from 1961 to 1966 and was working there when the massacre of Igbos began in the north following a coup. He became a strong advocate for Biafra’s independence. In a 1968 speech, Achebe declared: “Biafra stands for true independence in Africa, for an end to the 400 years of shame and humiliation which we have suffered in our association with Europe” (Achebe, Chinua. The African Writer and the Biafran Cause. American Historical Association).

Achebe’s collection of poems Beware Soul Brother (1971) and the volume of short stories Girls at War and Other Stories (1972), in which “Civil Peace” is included, capture the Igbo experience and perspective through war and decolonization. In his essay “The Truth of Fiction,” Achebe writes that literature begins “as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience” (Achebe, Chinua. “The Truth of Fiction.” Hopes and Impediments. Penguin, 1988, p. 153).

Achebe was a research fellow and English professor at the University of Nigeria from 1976 until 1981. After a car accident in 1990, he left Nigeria for the United States and taught at Bard College. In 2009, he joined Brown University’s faculty. Chinua Achebe died at age 82 on March 21, 2013.