Chinua Achebe: The lord of misrule

Carefully. He is one of the giants of our age.

In 1958, he produced Things Fall Apart, one of the great novels of the 20th century.

It tells the story of Okonkwo, a brilliant, brutal, fatally proud Igbo warrior who is brought down by his confrontation with white missionaries.

The book made Achebe, in Nadine Gordimer’s words, the “father of modern African literature.”

Here’s another, bigger shiver.

His father made one attempt to convert his own uncle from the polytheistic Igbo faith to Christianity.

The uncle was a man of immense authority, bearing three out of four of his clan’s most senior titles.

At his nephew’s approach, the uncle gestured at the elaborate regalia that went with the titles.

“Look at these regalia,” he said. “What would I do with them if I converted?”

His father was crushed and never tried again.

But the question burned in the imagination of his son.

“I have extended that question throughout my life. What do I do with my regalia, my history? What do I do with who I am?” No story ever really ends.

We are sitting in a “multi­purpose room” in snowbound Bard College, 90 miles north of New York, where Achebe has been teaching for 20 years.

Amazingly, he is in the process of moving to a new job at Brown University, in Rhode Island.

He is in a wheelchair, which is why he is in America and not Nigeria.