Chinua Achebe: The lord of misrule

“It sounds quite appropriate to say, ‘Let’s not blame others, let’s take responsibility’, and I’m all for that, but I don’t go as far as to say the colonial experience had nothing to do with it, because that’s not the case. Just look at the history — it is both, it is one thing and another stands beside it.”

He knows Africa has to ask itself some hard questions, but he also knows Africans do not seem to want to do it.

In a flash of insight in his new collection of essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child, he sees that Nigeria is neither a motherland nor a fatherland, it is a childland.

Nigeria needs to be taught. “Nigeria,” he writes, “is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward... Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting.”

The essays, like his conversation and, indeed, his novels, are models of clarity, care and thoughtfulness.

They are the product of a western-educated mind, but are suffused with an Igbo sensibility.

Proverbs abound, as well as a sense of surrounding divinities.

He concludes with a Bantu saying: “A human is a human because of other humans.”

Achebe has just started a new novel, and he’s moving to Brown.

He bears his age and his handicap with astonishing lightness, perhaps because of the first thing he said to me — he has noticed, with age, that both the Igbo religion and language seem to be reasserting themselves.

It is a confusing consolation.

“Maybe as one grows older, or for some other reason, there are moments in one’s life when the things I liked, rejected or feared as a child come back and regain some of the energy they seemed to have lost between childhood and now, and my own position becomes a little confusing...”

He struggles to pull on an anorak as I go to look for the man who will wheel him away.

The man appears, then, haloed by divinities, Chinualumogu Achebe is gone. No story ever really ends.

The Sunday Times