The great man, Chinua Achebe, died last Friday at the age of 82. This doyen of Nigerian and African literature left a trail longer than any African writer probably ever will in modern times.

His book, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, and thought to be the most widely read book in African literature, sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 50 languages worldwide.

However, Achebe was no longer Africa’s. He was also the world’s, and among its most influential writers.

At the time of his death, Achebe was a professor at Brown University in the USA. I still encounter many Achebe admirers who don’t know that he was wheelchair-bound, following a car accident in Nigeria in 1990 that left him partially paralysed, a fact that came to assume significance later.

It is as if Achebe chose to die at 82 so he could be among his eminent equals. I can count Leo Tolstoy, G. Lees, Christa Wolf, feminist writer Adrienne Rich, to name a few among the eminent writers who passed on at the same age.

One could write about Achebe’s many wonderful books, including Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah, and A Man of the People; or his influential short stories and essays (especially The Trouble With Nigeria), poetry, or children’s books. But that would be to start down a journey that would need a whole lifetime.

So I will speak about three events: About Nuruddin Farah, an African writer who held Achebe in deep regard; about a big African writer’s conference at which he didn’t show; and about the manner of his departure.

My first encounter with someone who was close to Achebe was Somali author Nuruddin Farah, he of Sweet and Sour Milk fame.

Nuruddin lived and wrote out of Kampala in the late 1980s as he took time to work on a Somalia peace effort. There are few men as delightfully stubborn and indignant as Nuruddin.

One afternoon we were walking to a coffee shop in Kampala, and the subject of critics who were making noise about his book Maps came up.

I asked him if he had read the critiques. He said no. Why? Because, he explained, he wasn’t interested in people who couldn’t write, but put themselves about as experts on other people’s writing. The only critics he took seriously were writers, he said.

Even then, not too many of them. The one whom he had all the time for in the world, and he would take what he had to say to heart, Nuruddin said, was Achebe.

You have to know Nuruddin to appreciate the import of that. He always spoke warmly of Achebe, and was devastated when Achebe had the accident in 1990. Two years later, when I was a fellow at Harvard University, Nuruddin was in the US — at Brown University.

After a hiatus of several years, he and other scholars organised an African Writers Conference. He insisted I attend. The highlight of one of the evenings was to be a presentation by Achebe.

A special plank had been built so he could be wheeled onto the stage.

The hour arrived, we waited, waited and waited. At every movement at the entrance the audience would turn and crane their necks, hoping he was the one making an entrance. After a wait of about 30 minutes, the announcement was made. He was not able to make it.

A deep sense of disappointment swept the hall. But also of fear… that the accident might have broken him. Would he ever be The Achebe again?

To me, it didn’t matter because Anthills of the Savannah, published in 1987, was enough. It remains my favourite Achebe book, trumping No Longer At Ease and Arrow of God. Part of it is for selfish reasons — it had a brave journalist, Ikem Osodi, as one of the protagonists.

Part of the uniqueness and influence of Achebe is that he is the author most Africans quote, without having read some of the books from which the ideas are derived. Expressions like a “man of the people” and most famously “things fall apart” have become standard usage.

READ: Give us a real ‘man of the people’ at the helm

Today, I suspect, it is likely that the people who tell you stuff like, “As Achebe would say, ‘things fall apart,’” have not read the book.

His work became part of African cultural and political furniture, assuming a life of its own outside his books. Few authors have that kind of influence on people who haven’t read them.

Maybe we should have known that Achebe was about to leave us last year with the publication of his book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, in which he returned to the horrific Biafra war of the late 1960s.

Achebe always excelled at making the old seem new. In There Was A Country, he made the new (Nigeria) seem old. The book kicked off a storm. Coming in the digital age, it set off an angry debate on Nigerian blogs and among Nigerians on social media. Ibo-bashing is never too far beneath the surface of Nigerian public life, and his book aroused the ghosts.

If Achebe had planned to go out loudly, he succeeded. For the joys he gave us, for the lessons he taught, for the inspiration he was, for the best of Africa that he represented, it is only fitting that he left with a bang.

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