What Chinua Achebe Meant To Me

Me, receiving the English prize in Grade 1

I have always enjoyed reading. At boarding school in grade six, we would have competitions to see who could read the most books in the least amount of time.  Every week we were allowed to pick  a book from the school’s one room library which was filled with secondhand books from the UK and America. Maybe it was because cellphones were not as widely available then, but everyone read so much. At night after lights-out, the braver ones would go into the bathroom and read there while the rest of us would hope the light streaming in from outside would be enough to help us see the words on the pages of our books. What were we reading? Well, personally I could not get enough of Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High and the Baby Sitters Club. Even though there was never anything I could relate to, never any descriptions of places I had been to or people who looked like me, I loved those books. I could not get enough of them and I never wondered what authors in Zimbabwe were writing about or if they wrote at all. I get the feeling that if he knew me, Chinua Achebe would have scolded me for that.

I knew how important Things Fall Apart was before I ever laid eyes on it. I remember my mother mentioning Okonkwo as though he was an actual historical figure, as if he had been alive and died at some point. She is a historian, she talks about so many events and characters so this was not unusual. What made this different was that she was not alone; it seemed like everyone talked about Okonkwo and Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart. So, I knew they were important.

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