Do we like Chinua Achebe?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A lifetime of standing up to bad leaders and giving African writers a voice, held back only by a contested war memoir and no record on LGBTQ+ issues.
Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, in south-eastern Nigeria, to a father who worked at a local mission and was among the first in the village to convert to Christianity. He described his life as a bartering between conflicting cultures, mixing Igbo legends with Dickens. That tension fed Things Fall Apart (1958), which has sold more than eight million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages.
Politics found him early. After Nigeria's federal government blocked the 1967 secession of Biafra, he left his broadcasting job and returned to the south-east. There he became Biafra's international envoy, co-founded a publishing company and wrote a manifesto for the republic. After decades of near silence he told the story in his 2012 memoir, There Was a Country.
That memoir is where the fair criticism sits. Achebe argued the Igbo were victims of deliberate genocide rather than just casualties of war. One reviewer said his claim that Igbo exclusion holds Nigeria back could be read as supremacist, though she saw him mainly as a Nigerian patriot. The same review noted he explained away the exile of Biafra's leader, which had drawn charges of cowardice. It's a partisan book from a man who was there, and it divided readers.
The nice test is where he shines. In 2004 he refused a national honour from President Obasanjo in an open letter, saying Nigeria's condition was too dangerous for silence. He turned down the same honour again in 2011. Those were refusals made at a personal cost, since the government he was snubbing could make life hard for him. He was also paralysed from the waist down after a 1990 car accident, and kept teaching and writing, joining Brown University in 2009.
The honours he did accept were for the work itself: the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for a body of fiction. When he was buried in Ogidi in 2013, thousands filed past his coffin in Awka and Nigerian leaders and fellow writers were expected to pay tribute. Wole Soyinka wrote a poem for him. The record is thin on scandal, and that is honestly the whole list.