[30/05, 03:18] AFRICAN LADY: 1 Charlotte Brontë (/ˈʃɑːrlət ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /-teɪ/;[1] 21 April 1816 –
31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived
into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature.
Born
21 April 1816
Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Died
31 March 1855 (aged 38)
Haworth, Yorkshire, England
Resting place
St Michael and All Angels' Church
Haworth, England
Pen name
Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley
Currer Bell
Occupation: Novelist, poet, governess
Nationality: British
Genre: Fiction, poetry
Notable works: Jane Eyre, Valletta,
Spouse
Arthur Bell Nicholls
(m. 1854)
Signature
She enlisted in school at Roe Head in January 1831, aged 14 years. She left the year after to teach her
sisters, Emily and Anne, at home, returning in 1835 as a governess. In 1839 she undertook the role as
governess for the Sidgwick family but left after a few months to return to Haworth where the sisters
opened a school, but failed to attract pupils. Instead, they turned to writing and they each first
published in 1846 under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although her first novel, The
Professor, was rejected by publishers, her second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. The sisters
admitted to their Bell pseudonyms in 1848, and by the following year were celebrated in London literary
circles.
Brontë was the last to die of all her siblings. She became pregnant shortly after her marriage in June
1854 but died on 31 March 1855, almost certainly from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of
pregnancy which causes excessive nausea and vomiting.[a]
*Early years and education*
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 in Market Street, Thornton, west of Bradford in the West
Riding of Yorkshire, the third of the six children of Maria (née Branwell) and Patrick Brontë (formerly
surnamed Brunty), an Irish Anglican clergyman. In 1820 her family moved a few miles to the village of
Haworth, where her father had been appointed perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church.
Maria died of cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily
and Anne, and a son, Branwell, to be taken care of by her sister, Elizabeth Branwell.
In August 1824, Patrick sent Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth to the Clergy Daughters' School at
Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Charlotte maintained that the school's poor conditions permanently
affected her health and physical development, and hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and
Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died of tuberculosis in June 1825. After the deaths of his older
daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school.[2] Charlotte used the school as the
basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.
At home in Haworth Parsonage, Brontë acted as "the motherly friend and guardian of her younger
sisters".[3] Brontë wrote her first known poem at the age of 13 in 1829, and was to go on to write more
than 200 poems in the course of her life.[4] Many of her poems were "published" in their homemade
magazine Branwell's Blackwood's Magazine, and concerned the fictional Glass Town Confederacy.[4]
She and her surviving siblings – Branwell, Emily and Anne – created their own fictional worlds, and
began chronicling the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdoms. Charlotte and
Branwell wrote Byronic stories about their jointly imagined country, Angria, and Emily and Anne wrote
articles and poems about Gondal. The sagas they created were episodic and elaborate, and they exist in
incomplete manuscripts, some of which have been published as juvenilia. They provided them with an
obsessive interest during childhood and early adolescence, which prepared them for literary vocations in
adulthood.[5]
Roe Head School, in Mirfield
Between 1831 and 1832, Brontë continued her education at Roe Head in Mirfield, where she met her
lifelong friends and correspondents Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor.[2] In 1833 she wrote a novella, The
Green Dwarf, using the name Wellesley. Around about 1833, her stories shifted from tales of the
supernatural to more realistic stories.[6] She returned to Roe Head as a teacher from 1835 to 1838.
Unhappy and lonely as a teacher at Roe Head, Brontë took out her sorrows in poetry, writing a series of
melancholic poems.[7] In "We wove a Web in Childhood" written in December 1835, Brontë drew a
sharp contrast between her miserable life as a teacher and the vivid imaginary worlds she and her
siblings had created.[7] In another poem "Morning was its freshness still" written at the same time,
Brontë wrote "Tis bitter sometimes to recall/Illusions once deemed fair".[7] Many of her poems
concerned the imaginary world of Angria, often concerning Byronic heroes, and in December 1836 she
wrote to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey asking him for encouragement of her career as a poet.
Southey replied, famously, that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to
be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an
accomplishment and a recreation." This advice she respected but did not heed.
In 1839 she took up the first of many positions as governess to families in Yorkshire, a career she
pursued until 1841. In particular, from May to July 1839 she was employed by the Sidgwick family at
their summer residence, Stone Gappe, in Lothersdale, where one of her charges was John Benson
Sidgwick (1835–1927), an unruly child who on one occasion threw a Bible at Charlotte, an incident that
may have been the inspiration for a part of the opening chapter of Jane Eyre in which John Reed throws
a book at the young Jane.[8] Brontë did not enjoy her work as a governess, noting her employers treated
her almost as a slave, constantly humiliating her.[9]
Brontë was of slight build and was less than five feet tall.[10]
Brussels and Haworth
Plaque in Brussels, on the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
In 1842 Charlotte and Emily travelled to Brussels to enrol at the boarding school run by Constantin
Héger (1809–1896) and his wife Claire Zoé Parent Héger (1804–1887). During her time in Brussels,
Brontë, who favoured the Protestant ideal of an individual in direct contact with God, objected to the
stern Catholicism of Madame Héger, which she considered a tyrannical religion that enforced
conformity and submission to the Pope.[11] In return for board and tuition Charlotte taught English and
Emily taught music. Their time at the school was cut short when their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, who had
joined the family in Haworth to look after the children after their mother's death, died of internal
obstruction in October 1842. Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January 1843 to take up a teaching
post at the school. Her second stay was not happy: she was homesick and deeply attached to Constantin
Héger. She returned to Haworth in January 1844 and used the time spent in Brussels as the inspiration
for some of the events in The Professor and Villette.
After returning to Haworth, Charlotte and her sisters made headway with opening their own boarding
school in the family home. It was advertised as "The Misses Brontë's Establishment for the Board and
Education of a limited number of Young Ladies" and inquiries were made to prospective pupils and
sources of funding. But none were attracted and in October 1844, the project was abandoned.[12]
First publication
In May 1846 Charlotte, Emily, and Anne self-financed the publication of a joint collection of poems
under their assumed names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The pseudonyms veiled the sisters' sex while
preserving their initials; thus Charlotte was Currer Bell. "Bell" was the middle name of Haworth's curate,
Arthur Bell Nicholls whom Charlotte later married, and "Currer" was the surname of Frances Mary
Richardson Currer who had funded their school (and maybe their father).[13] Of the decision to use
noms de plume, Charlotte wrote:
Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the
ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names
positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time
suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called "feminine" – we had a vague
impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics
sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which
is not true praise.[14]
Although only two copies of the collection of poems were sold, the sisters continued writing for
publication and began their first novels, continuing to use their noms de plume when sending
manuscripts to potential publishers.
The Professor and Jane Eyre
Title page of the first edition of Jane Eyre
Brontë's first manuscript, 'The Professor', did not secure a publisher, although she was heartened by an
encouraging response from Smith, Elder & Co. of Cornhill, who expressed an interest in any longer works
Currer Bell might wish to send.[15] Brontë responded by finishing and sending a second manuscript in
August 1847. Six weeks later, Jane Eyre was published. It tells the story of a plain governess, Jane, who,
after difficulties in her early life, falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester. They marry, but only
after Rochester's insane first wife, of whom Jane initially has no knowledge, dies in a dramatic house fire.
The book's style was innovative, combining Romanticism, naturalism with gothic melodrama, and broke
new ground in being written from an intensely evoked first-person female perspective.[16] Brontë
believed art was most convincing when based on personal experience; in Jane Eyre she transformed the
experience into a novel with universal appeal.[17]
Jane Eyre had immediate commercial success and initially received favourable reviews. G. H. Lewes
wrote that it was "an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit", and
declared that it consisted of "suspiria de profundis!" (sighs from the depths).[17] Speculation about the
identity and gender of the mysterious Currer Bell heightened with the publication of Wuthering Heights
by Ellis Bell (Emily) and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Anne).[18] Accompanying the speculation was a
change in the critical reaction to Brontë's work, as accusations were made that the writing was
"coarse",[19] a judgement more readily made once it was suspected that Currer Bell was a woman.[20]
However, sales of Jane Eyre continued to be strong and may even have increased as a result of the novel
developing a reputation as an "improper" book.[21] A talented amateur artist, Brontë personally did the
drawings for the second edition of Jane Eyre and in the summer of 1834 two of her paintings were
shown at an exhibition by the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in
Leeds.[11]
Shirley and bereavements
In society
Villette
Marriage
This photo-portrait of Ellen Nussey has long been mistaken for one of her friend Charlotte Brontë. The
photo is a copy made circa 1918 by the photographer, Sir Emery Walker, from an original carte de visite
photo which was then privately owned.[29][30]
Before the publication of Villette, Brontë received an expected proposal of marriage from Arthur Bell
Nicholls, her father's curate, who had long been in love with her.[31] She initially turned down his
proposal and her father objected to the union at least partly because of Nicholls's poor financial status.
Elizabeth Gaskell, who believed that marriage provided "clear and defined duties" that were beneficial
for a woman,[32] encouraged Brontë to consider the positive aspects of such a union and tried to use
her contacts to engineer an improvement in Nicholls's finances. Brontë meanwhile was increasingly
attracted to Nicholls and by January 1854 she had accepted his proposal. They gained the approval of
her father by April and married in June.[33] Her father Patrick had intended to give Charlotte away, but
at the last minute decided he could not, and Charlotte had to make her way to the church without
him.[34] The married couple took their honeymoon in Banagher, County Offaly, Ireland.[35] By all
accounts, her marriage was a success and Brontë found herself very happy in a way that was new to
her.[31]
Death
Brontë became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly and, according to
Gaskell, she was attacked by "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness".[36] She
died, with her unborn fetus, on 31 March 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday. Her death
certificate gives the cause of death as tuberculosis, but biographers including Claire Harman and others
suggest that she died from dehydration and malnourishment due to vomiting caused by severe morning
sickness or hyperemesis gravidarum.[37] Brontë was buried in the family vault in the Church of St
Michael and All Angels at Haworth.
The Professor, the first novel Brontë had written, was published posthumously in 1857. The fragment of
a new novel she had been writing in her last years has been twice completed by recent authors, the
more famous version being Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë
by Clare Boylan in 2003. Most of her writings about the imaginary country Angria have also been
published since her death. In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.[38]
Religion
The daughter of an Irish Anglican clergyman, Brontë was herself an Anglican. In a letter to her publisher,
she claims to "love the Church of England. Her Ministers indeed, I do not regard as infallible personages,
I have seen too much of them for that – but to the Establishment, with all her faults – the profane
Athanasian Creed excluded – I am sincerely attached."[39]
In a letter to Ellen Nussey she wrote:
If I could always live with you, and "daily" read the [B]ible with you, if your lips and mine could at the
same time, drink the same draught from the same pure fountain of Mercy – I hope, I trust, I might one
day become better, far better, than my evil wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit, and
warm to the flesh will now permit me to be.[40]
2. The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Portrait by J. H. Thompson at the Brontë Parsonage Museum
Elizabeth Gaskell's biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857. It was an important
step for a leading female novelist to write a biography of another,[41] and Gaskell's approach was
unusual in that, rather than analysing her subject's achievements, she concentrated on private details of
Brontë's life, emphasising those aspects that countered the accusations of "coarseness" that had been
levelled at her writing.[41] The biography is frank in places, but omits details of Brontë's love for Héger,
a married man, as being too much of an affront to contemporary morals and a likely source of distress to
Brontë's father, widower, and friends.[42] Mrs Gaskell also provided doubtful and inaccurate
information about Patrick Brontë, claiming that he did not allow his children to eat meat. This is refuted
by one of Emily Brontë's diary papers, in which she describes preparing meat and potatoes for dinner at
the parsonage.[43] It has been argued that Gaskell's approach transferred the focus of attention away
from the 'difficult' novels, not just Brontë's, but all the sisters', and began a process of sanctification of
their private lives.[44]
3. There is something about the Brontë sisters that is enduringly fascinating, something about their
strange, gifted, and woefully abbreviated lives (none of them lived to forty) that reads like the stuff of
myth. Perhaps it’s the combination of great personal privation and great artistic willfulness, the mixture
of geographic isolation and literary renown, that lends their story an elemental note of warring forces
both within and without. To think of these three motherless and conspicuously inbred young women—
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—living off in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors together with an eccentric
curate father and an alcoholic brother, in a Victorian climate that was unconducive to the creative
aspirations of the female gender, and yet all the same producing a clutch of game-changing novels (Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey), is to wonder at the ways in which character and imaginative
vision can triumph over circumstance.
Among the bevy of books about this compelling family that have come out in recent years, there have
been Juliet Barker’s heroically researched 1997 biography, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, and Lucasta
Miller’s The Brontë Myth, published in 2004. Miller’s gracefully written and wonderfully entertaining
account—or “meta-biography,” as she calls it—reexamined the ways in which the Brontës’ “lonely
moorland lives” underwent a process of mythification even before Charlotte, the last sister, died in 1855.
This “beguiled infatuation,” as Henry James put it, began with Elizabeth Gaskell’s landmark Life of
Charlotte Brontë, which Miller describes as “arguably the most famous English biography of the
nineteenth century” and one that “set the agenda which would turn the Brontës into icons.” Gaskell’s
book was published in 1857 and became an immediate sensation; if not quite an authorized version,
Gaskell’s was close to hagiographic, playing up her subject’s “womanliness” and her noble penchant for
“self-denial,” rather than the more fiery romantic and intellectual passions that also ruled her life, and
that have been brought to light by later biographers.
Charlotte, of course, is the Brontë who energetically saw herself and her more reclusive sisters into print
(under male pseudonyms, originally) and about whom the most is known. The only one of the sisters to
marry, she was in the early months of pregnancy when she died just short of thirty-nine. Given the
complexity of her personality, especially its singular mix of abjectness and scrappiness, Charlotte is a
natural lure for life-writers and has been the subject of periodic biographies since Gaskell’s effort to
create a “woman made perfect by suffering”; these have included works by Winifred Gérin (1967),
Rebecca Fraser (1988), and Lyndall Gordon, whose eloquently fleshed out Charlotte Brontë: A
Passionate Life (1994) proposed to show how Charlotte’s habit of self-effacement was a role, one
“designed to obliterate, for public purposes, the woman of passion and the volume of her utterance.”
Now, more than twenty years later and timed to coincide with the bicentennial of her birth in April, we
have yet another retelling of Charlotte’s story in Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart. The
intervening years have seen the publication of all of Charlotte’s extant letters, which provide a gold
mine of insight into her state of mind at various times, perhaps never more revealingly than when she
wrote her friend Ellen Nussey (who, for all her timidness, refused to burn Charlotte’s letters, although
she was exhorted to by Charlotte’s husband, who described them as “dangerous as Lucifer matches”) a
few weeks into being married: “I know more of the realities of life than I once did. I think many false
ideas are propagated—perhaps unintentionally. I think those married women who indiscriminately urge
their acquaintance to marry—much to blame. . . . It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a
woman to become a wife. Man’s lot is far—far different.”
Harman, who has written biographies of Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sylvia Townsend
Warner, brings to her venture a lively style and an incisive mind. She comes without intellectual agenda
other than her own curiosity; her life of Charlotte doesn’t offer a brand-new perspective so much as a
subtle shift in our understanding of this “little woman,” as her contemporary William Thackeray called
her. In the process of conjuring up a Charlotte animated by a zeal to write as well as by intense feelings
of love and desire for Constantin Heger, the married professor she studied with in Brussels and
eventually fictionalized in both Shirley and Villette, Harman infuses her with an intriguingly modernist
spirit. She also contrives to understand how a woman so beset by anguish in life was able to deploy her
sorrow and rage to creative ends, spinning her own childhood and its “tragic losses” into gripping tales.
“Charlotte Brontë was essentially a poet of suffering,” Harman observes; “she understood every corner
of it, dwelt both on and in it. In life, this propensity was a chronic burden; in her art, she let it speak to
and comfort millions of others.”
Harman’s biography begins dramatically, almost cinematically, in medias res, with a brief prologue dated
September 1, 1843, in which a twenty-seven-year-old Charlotte is stranded during a vacation break at
the girls’ school in Brussels where she is “an unpaid student-teacher.” It is her second year at the
Pensionnat Heger—her first year there had been shared with Emily—and she is on the verge of
something akin to a breakdown, having just realized that her love for Heger, the headmistress’s husband,
is unrequited: “And now the man she considered her soul-mate is pretending that she is nothing special
to him at all.”
[
Charlotte Brontë Biography
At age twenty, Charlotte Brontë sent a sample of her poetry to England's Poet Laureate, Robert Southey.
His comments urged her to abandon all literary pursuits: "Literature cannot be the business of a
woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will
she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation." His response indicates the political
difficulties women faced as they tried to enter the literary arena in Victorian England; domestic
responsibilities were expected to require all their energy, leaving no time for creative pursuits. Despite a
lack of support from the outside world, Charlotte Brontë found sufficient internal motivation and
enthusiasm from her sisters to become a successful writer and balance her familial and creative needs.
Born at Thornton, Yorkshire on April 21, 1816, Charlotte was the third child of Patrick Brontë and Maria
Branwell. In 1820, her father received a curate post in Haworth, a remote town on the Yorkshire moors,
where Charlotte spent most of her life. In 1821, Mrs. Brontë died from what was thought to be cancer.
Charlotte and her four sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, Emily and Anne, and their brother, Branwell, were raised
primarily by their unpleasant, maiden aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who provided them with little
supervision. Not only were the children free to roam the moors, but their father allowed them to read
whatever interested them: Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, Pilgrim's Progress, and the poems of Byron
were some of their favorites.
When a school for the daughters of poor clergymen opened at Cowan Bridge in 1824, Mr. Brontë
decided to send his oldest four daughters there to receive a formal education. Most biographers argue
that Charlotte's description of Lowood School in Jane Eyre accurately reflects the dismal conditions at
this school. Charlotte's two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 1824 of tuberculosis they
contracted due to the poor management of the school. Following this tragedy, Patrick Brontë withdrew
Charlotte and Emily from Cowan Bridge.
Grieving over their sisters' deaths and searching for a way to alleviate their loneliness, the remaining
four siblings began writing a series of stories, The Glass-Town, stimulated by a set of toy soldiers their
father had given them. In these early writings, the children collaboratively created a complete imaginary
world, a fictional West African empire they called Angria. Charlotte explained their interest in writing
this way: "We were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the
enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had know
from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition." Through her early twenties, Charlotte
routinely revised and expanded pieces of the Angria story, developing several key characters and
settings. While this writing helped Charlotte improve her literary style, the Angria adventures are
fantastical, melodramatic, and repetitive, contrasting with Charlotte's more realistic adult fiction.
After her father had a dangerous lung disorder, he decided once again that his daughters should receive
an education so they would be assured of an income if he died. In 1831, Charlotte entered the Misses
Wooler's school at Roe Head. Shy and solitary, Charlotte was not happy at school, but she still managed
to win several academic awards and to make two lifelong friends: Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey.
Although she was offered a teaching job at Roe Head, Charlotte declined the position, choosing to
return to Haworth instead. Perhaps bored with the solitary life at Haworth and looking for an active
occupation in the world, Charlotte returned to Roe Head in 1835 as a governess. For her, governessing
was akin to "slavery," because she felt temperamentally unsuited for it, and finally, following a near
mental breakdown in 1838, she was forced to resign her position. Unfortunately, governessing was the
only real employment opportunity middle-class women had in Victorian England. Because the family
needed the money, Charlotte suffered through two more unhappy governess positions, feeling like an
unappreciated servant in wealthy families' homes; she didn't enjoy living in other people's houses
because it caused "estrangement from one's real character."
In an attempt to create a job that would allow her to maintain her independence, Charlotte formed the
idea of starting her own school at Haworth. To increase her teaching qualifications before beginning this
venture, she enrolled as a student, at the age of twenty-six, at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels so she
could increase her fluency in French and learn German. Charlotte loved the freedom and adventure of
living in a new culture, and formed an intense, though one-sided, passion for the married headmaster at
the school: Monsieur Heger. After two years in Brussels, suffering perhaps from her love for Heger,
Charlotte returned to England. The plan to open her own school was a failure, as she was unable to
attract a single student.
Instead, Charlotte began putting all of her energy into her writing. After discovering Emily's poems,
Charlotte decided that she, Anne, and Emily should try to publish a collection of poems at their own
expense. In 1846, they accomplished this goal, using the masculine pseudonyms of Currer, Acton, and
Ellis Bell because of the double standards against women authors. Although their book, Poems, was not
a financial success, the women continued their literary endeavors. Excited to be writing full-time, they
each began a novel. Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights both found publishers, but
Charlotte's somewhat autobiographical account of her experiences in Brussels, The Professor, was
rejected by several publishers. Again refusing to become discouraged, Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre
in 1846, while on a trip to Manchester with her father where he was undergoing cataract surgery. While
he convalesced, Charlotte wrote. The firm of Smith, Elder, and Company agreed to publish the resulting
novel, and the first edition of Jane Eyre was released on October 16, 1847. The novel was an instant
success, launching Charlotte into literary fame. It also netted her an impressive 500 pounds, twenty-five
times her salary as a governess.
But the pleasures of literary success were soon overshadowed by family tragedy. In 1848, after Anne
and Charlotte had revealed the true identity of the "Bells" to their publishers, their brother Branwell
died. Never living up to his family's high expectations for him, Branwell died an opium-addicted,
debauched, alcoholic failure. Emily and Anne died soon after. Although Charlotte completed her second
novel, Shirley in 1849, her sadness at the loss of her remaining siblings left her emotionally shattered.
She became a respected member of the literary community only when her sisters, her most enthusiastic
supporters, were no longer able to share her victory. Visiting London following the publication of this
book, Charlotte became acquainted with several important writers, including William Thackeray and
Elizabeth Gaskell, who was to write Charlotte's biography following her death.
In 1852, the Reverend Arthur B. Nicholls, Mr. Brontë's curate at Haworth beginning in 1845, proposed
marriage to Charlotte. Earlier in her life, Charlotte had rejected several marriage proposals because she
was hoping to discover true love, but loneliness following the death of her last three siblings may have
led her to accept Nicholls' proposal. Saying she had "esteem" but not love for Nicholls, Charlotte's
relationship with her husband was certainly not the overwhelming passion of Jane and Rochester. Her
father's jealous opposition to the marriage led Charlotte initially to reject Nicholls, who left Haworth in
1853, the year Villette was published. By 1854, Reverend Brontë's opposition to the union had abated
somewhat, and the ceremony was performed on June 29, 1854. After the marriage, Charlotte had little
time for writing, as she was forced to perform the duties expected of a minister's wife and take care of
her aging father. In 1854 Charlotte, in the early stages of pregnancy, caught pneumonia while on a long,
rain-drenched walk on the moors. She died on March 31, 1855, a month before her thirty-ninth birthday.
The Professor, written in 1846 and 1847, was posthumously published in 1857, along with Mrs. Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Charlotte BrontË Biography
Born: April 21, 1816
Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Died: March 31, 1855
Haworth, Yorkshire, England
English novelist
Charlotte Brontë was one of three English sisters who had books published in the mid-1800s. Her writing
described, with a dramatic force that was entirely new to English fiction, the conflict between love and
independence and the struggle of the individual to maintain his or her self-esteem.
Early life
Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton in Yorkshire, England, on April 21, 1816, the third of Patrick
Brontë and Maria Branwell's six children. Her father was an Anglican minister who moved the family to
Haworth, also in Yorkshire, in 1820 after finding work at a church there. Except for a brief and unhappy
period when she attended a religious school—later described in the opening chapters of Jane Eyre —
most of Charlotte's early education was provided at home by her father. After the early death of her
mother, followed by the passing of her two older sisters, Brontë, now nine years old, lived in isolation
with her father, aunt, sisters Anne and Emily, and brother Patrick Branwell.
With their father not communicating much with them, and having no real contact with the outside
world, the children spent their time reading and creating their own imaginary worlds. They recorded the
events occurring in these imaginary worlds in miniature writing on tiny sheets of paper. Anne and Emily
made up a kingdom called Gondal, while Charlotte and Patrick created the realm of Angria, which was
ruled by the Duke of Zamorna. Zamorna's romantic conquests make up the greater part of Charlotte's
contributions. He was a character who ruled by strength of will and feeling and easily conquered
women—they recognized the evil in him but could not fight their attraction to him.
The conflict between this dream world and her everyday life caused Brontë great suffering. Although her
life was outwardly calm, she lived out the struggles of her made-up characters in her head. At age
fifteen she began to work as a schoolteacher. She and both of her sisters later worked watching over the
children of wealthy families. While attending a language school in Brussels, Belgium, in 1843 and 1844,
she seems to have fallen in love with a married professor at the school, but she never fully admitted the
fact to herself.
Books published
After returning to Haworth in 1844, Charlotte Brontë became depressed. She was lonely and felt that
she lacked the ability to do any creative work. She discovered that both of her sisters had been writing
poetry, as she had. They decided to each write a novel and offer all of them together to publishers. Her
sisters' novels were accepted for publication, but Charlotte's The Professor, based upon her Brussels
experience, was rejected. (It was not published until after her death.) However, the publisher offered
her friendly criticism and encouraged her to try again.
Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. It became the most successful book
of the year. She hid at first
behind the pseudonym (pen, or assumed, writing name) Currer Bell, but later she revealed that she was
the author of the book. Of all Brontë's novels, Jane Eyre most clearly shows the traces of her earlier
stories about the imaginary Angria in the character of Rochester, with his mysterious ways and shady
past. However, the governess, Jane, who loves him, does not surrender to Rochester. Instead she
struggles to maintain her dignity and a balance between the opposing forces of passion and her religious
beliefs.
During 1848 and 1849, within eight months of each other, Brontë's remaining two sisters and brother
died. Despite her grief she managed to finish a new novel, Shirley (1849). It was set in her native
Yorkshire during the Luddite industrial riots of 1812, when textile workers whose jobs had been taken
over by machines banded together to destroy the machines. Shirley used social issues as a ground for a
study of the bold and active heroine and a friend who represents someone with more traditional
feminine qualities. In her last completed novel, Villette (1853), Brontë again turned to the Brussels affair,
treating it now more directly.
Despite her success as a writer, Charlotte Brontë continued to live a quiet life at home in Yorkshire. In
1854 she married Arthur Nicholls, a man who had once worked as an assistant to her father, but she
died within a year of their marriage on March 31, 1855.
5. Charlotte Brontë, the only one of three novelist Brontë sisters to live past age 31, is born.
Brontë, one of six siblings who grew up in a gloomy parsonage in the remote English village of Haworth,
surrounded by the marshy moors of Yorkshire. Her mother died when she was five, and Charlotte, her
two older sisters, and her younger sister Emily, were sent to Clergy Daughter’s School at Cowan Bridge
in Lancashire. The cheap school featured unpalatable food, cold halls and harsh discipline. Charlotte’s
two older sisters died of illness while at school, and the grim institution found its way into her
masterpiece Jane Eyre (1847).
After their sisters’ deaths, Charlotte and Emily were brought home, where they and their remaining
siblings, Anne and Branwell, amused themselves by making up elaborate stories about fantastical worlds.
When the girls grew older, they all took governess positions in private homes, and from 1835 to 1838
Charlotte taught in a girls’ school. Meanwhile, she and Emily formed a plan to open their own school,
and in 1842 the sisters went to Brussels to study languages and school administration. In Brussels,
Charlotte fell in love with the married headmaster, an experience she used as the basis for her last novel,
Villette (1853). Returning to the parsonage at Hawthorne, the sisters attempted to set up their own
school but could not attract pupils. Meanwhile, their adored brother Branwell had become a heavy
drinker and opium user. When Emily got him a job teaching with her at a wealthy manor, he lost both
their positions after a tryst with the mother of the house.
In 1846, Charlotte accidentally found some poems written by Emily—it turned out all three sisters had
secretly been writing verse. They published their own book, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell,
adopting a pseudonym because they believed women writers were judged too softly. Only two copies
sold, but publishers became interested in the sisters’ work. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was published in 1847
under the name Currer Bell. Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were published later that
year. Sadly, all three of Charlotte’s siblings died within the next two years. Left alone, Charlotte cared for
her ill father and married curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854. Charlotte died during pregnancy shortly
after the marriage.
Her Early Life
Charlotte Bronte was a great writer of the early 19th century. Charlotte was born on 21 April 1816 at the
parsonage in Market Street in Thornton near the rapidly growing town of Bradford. Her father was
Reverend Patrick Bronte. Her mother was Maria. They had 6 children. However two girls, Maria Bronte
and Elizabeth Bronte died when they were children.
In the early 19th century the Industrial Revolution was transforming life in Britain. In the north of
England industrial towns were booming. However in 1820 Charlotte Bronte's family moved to a
moorland village called Haworth. Her mother died in 1821. Her mother's sister Elizabeth moved to
Yorkshire to look after the children.
In 1824 Charlotte Bronte and her sister Emily were sent to join two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth at
the Clergy Daughters School in Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. However in 1825 Maria and Elizabeth Bronte
both died of tuberculosis. Charlotte and Emily Bronte returned home. Afterwards they were educated at
home for some years. In 1831-32 Charlotte Bronte went to Margaret Wooler's school near Dewsbury.
Meanwhile Charlotte loved writing and painting.
The Writer
In 1835 Charlotte Bronte went to work at Wooler's school as a teacher. She worked there till 1838. Then
in 1839 Charlotte began working as a governess. However in 1842 her aunt provided the money for her
and her sister Emily to study in Brussels. Charlotte Bronte returned to Yorkshire in 1844. Then in 1846
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte published some of their poems.
Charlotte Bronte wrote a story called Jane Eyre. It was published in 1847. Charlotte 's second work
Shirley was published in 1848. The third book by Charlotte Bronte was Villette published in 1853. In
1854 Charlotte Bronte married a man named Arthur Bell Nicholls. However Charlotte died on 31 March
1855. She was only 38. Charlotte Bronte was buried in Haworth.
[30/05, 08:33] AFRICAN LADY: Chinua Achebe, in full Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, was born in
November 16, 1930, at Ogidi, Nigeria and died in March 21, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.),. He
was a Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental depictions of the social and psychological
disorientation accompanying the imposition of Western customs and values upon traditional African
society. His particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of crisis; his novels range in
subject matter from the first contact of an African village with the white man to the educated African’s
attempt to create a firm moral order out of the changing values in a large city.
NOTABLE WORKS
“Things Fall Apart”
“Morning Yet on Creation Day”
“There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra”
“Home and Exile”
“Arrow of God”
“Anthills of the Savannah”
“A Man of the People”
“Hopes and Impediments”
“The Education of a British-Protected Child”
“No Longer at Ease”
AWARDS AND HONORS
Man Booker International Prize (2007)
Achebe grew up in the Igbo (Ibo) town of Ogidi, Nigeria. After studying English and literature at
University College (now the University of Ibadan), Achebe taught for a short time before joining the staff
of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Lagos, where he served as director of external broadcasting
in 1961–66. In 1967 he cofounded a publishing company at Enugu with the poet Christopher Okigbo,
who died shortly thereafter in the Nigerian civil war for Biafran independence, which Achebe openly
supported. In 1969 Achebe toured the United States with fellow writers Gabriel Okara and Cyprian
Ekwensi, lecturing at universities. Upon his return to Nigeria he was appointed research fellow at the
University of Nigeria and became professor of English, a position he held from 1976 until 1981
(professor emeritus from 1985). He was director (from 1970) of two Nigerian publishers, Heinemann
Educational Books Ltd. and Nwankwo-Ifejika Ltd. After an automobile accident in Nigeria in 1990 that
left him partially paralyzed, he moved to the United States, where he taught at Bard College in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. In 2009 Achebe left Bard to join the faculty of Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island.
TOP QUESTIONS
What was Chinua Achebe’s childhood like?
What did Chinua Achebe write?
What did Chinua Achebe’s writing concern?
Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe’s first novel, concerns traditional Igbo life at the time of the advent of
missionaries and colonial government in his homeland. His principal character cannot accept the new
order, even though the old has already collapsed. In the sequel No Longer at Ease (1960) he portrayed a
newly appointed civil servant, recently returned from university study in England, who is unable to
sustain the moral values he believes to be correct in the face of the obligations and temptations of his
new position.
In Arrow of God (1964), set in the 1920s in a village under British administration, the principal character,
the chief priest of the village, whose son becomes a zealous Christian, turns his resentment at the
position he is placed in by the white man against his own people. A Man of the People (1966) and
Anthills of the Savannah (1987) deal with corruption and other aspects of postcolonial African life.
Achebe also published several collections of short stories and children’s books, including How the
Leopard Got His Claws (1973; with John Iroaganachi). Beware, Soul-Brother (1971) and Christmas in
Biafra (1973) are collections of poetry. Another Africa (1998) combines an essay and poems by Achebe
with photographs by Robert Lyons. Achebe’s books of essays include Morning Yet on Creation Day
(1975), Hopes and Impediments (1988), Home and Exile (2000), The Education of a British-Protected
Child (2009), and the autobiographical There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012). In 2007
he won the Man Booker International Prize.
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe (/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbeɪ/; born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe, 16 November 1930 – 21 March
2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic[1] who is regarded as the most dominant figure in modern
African literature.[2] His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place
in African literature and remains the most widely studied, taught and read African novel.[3] A titled Igbo
chief himself, Achebe sought to escape the colonial perspective that predominated African literature,
and drew from the traditions of the Igbo people, Christian influences, and the clash of Western and
African values to create a uniquely African voice. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and
combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. Along
with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the so called
"African Trilogy"; later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In
addition to his seminal novels, Achebe's oeuvre includes numerous of short stories, poetry, essay
collections and children's books.
Chinua Achebe
Born
Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe
16 November 1930
Ogidi, British Nigeria
Died
21 March 2013 (aged 82)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Resting place
Ogidi, Anambra, Nigeria
Notable works
The African Trilogy:
— Things Fall Apart (1958)
— No Longer at Ease (1960)
— Arrow of God (1964)
A Man of the People (1966)
Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
List of works
Notable awards
Nigerian National Order of Merit Award 1979
St. Louis Literary Award 1999
Man Booker International Prize 2007
The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize 2010
Children 4, including Chidi and Nwando
Academic background
Education
University of Ibadan
Academic work/Discipline
African studies, language, literature
Institutions
Brown University (2009–2013)
Bard College (1990–2008)
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern British Nigeria, Achebe excelled at
Government College Umuahia and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to
English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan). He became fascinated with world
religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After
graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of
Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s which exerted a
significant influence on subsequent literature. Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use
of English, a "language of colonisers," in African literature. In 1975, his lecture "An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" featured a criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist;"
it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid controversy.
When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran
independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation.[4][5] The civil war that took
place over the territory, commonly known as the Nigerian Civil War, ravaged the populace, and as
starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid.
When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but
soon became disillusioned by his frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed.[6] He lived in
the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. in 1990, after a car crash left
him partially disabled. Upon Achebe's return to the United States in 1990, he began an nineteen-year
tenure at Bard College as the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature. From 2009
until his death, he served as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana
Studies at Brown University.
Achebe's work has been widely analyzed, and a massive body of scholarly work discussing it has arisen.
Some of the themes he touched are politics, history, culture and colonialism as well as masculinity and
femininity. To date, his total influence remains unmatched in African literature. His legacy is celebrated
annually at the Chinua Achebe Literary Festival.
3. Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe on 16 November 1930.[7] His father Isaiah
Okafo Achebe was a teacher and evangelist and his mother Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam was the
daughter of a blacksmith from Awka,[8] as well as a leader among church women and vegetable
farmer.[9][10] His birthplace was Saint Simon’s Church, Nneobi, which was near the Igbo village of Ogidi;
the area was part of British Colonial Nigeria at the time.[11] Isaiah was the nephew of Udoh Osinyi, a
leader in Ogidi with a "reputation for tolerance"; orphaned as a young man, Isaiah was an early Ogidi
convert to Christianity.[9] Both Isaiah and Janet stood at a crossroads of traditional culture and Christian
influence, which made a significant impact on the children, especially Chinua. His parents were converts
to the Protestant Church Mission Society (CMS) in Nigeria.[12] As such, Isaiah stopped practicing
Odinani, the religious practices of his ancestors, but continued to respect its traditions. Chinua's
unabbreviated name, Chinụalụmọgụ ("God is fighting on my behalf"),[7] was a prayer for divine
protection and stability.[7] The Achebe family had five other surviving children, named in a similar fusion
of traditional words relating to their new religion: Frank Okwuofu, John Chukwuemeka Ifeanyichukwu,
Zinobia Uzoma, Augustine Ndubisi, and Grace Nwanneka.[7] After the youngest daughter was born, the
family moved to Isaiah Achebe's ancestral town of Ogidi, in what is now the state of Anambra.[1]
Storytelling was a mainstay of the Igbo tradition and an integral part of the community. Achebe's
mother and sister Zinobia Uzoma told him many stories as a child, which he repeatedly requested. His
education was furthered by the collages his father hung on the walls of their home, as well as almanacs
and numerous books—including a prose adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
(c. 1590) and an Igbo version of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678).[13] Achebe also eagerly
anticipated traditional village events, like the frequent masquerade ceremonies, which he would later
recreate in his novels and stories.[14]
In 1936, Achebe entered St Philips' Central School, in the Akpakaogwe region of Ogidi.[15][9] Despite his
protests, he spent a week in the religious class for young children, but was quickly moved to a higher
class when the school's chaplain took note of his intelligence.[16] One teacher described him as the
student with the best handwriting in class, and the best reading skills.[17] He also attended Sunday
school every week and the special services held monthly, often carrying his father's bag. A controversy
erupted at one such session, when apostates from the new church challenged the catechist about the
tenets of Christianity. Achebe later included a scene based on this incident in Things Fall Apart
(1958).[18][A 1] Achebe enrolled in Nekede Central School, outside of Owerri, in 1942; he was
particularly studious and passed the entrance examinations for two colleges.[11]
University
In 1948, in preparation for independence, Nigeria's first university opened.[19] Known as University
College (now the University of Ibadan), it was an associate college of the University of London. Achebe
was admitted as a Major Scholar in the university's first intake and given a bursary to study medicine.[19]
It was during his studies at Ibadan that Achebe began to become critical of European literature about
Africa. After reading Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson (1939), about a cheerful Nigerian man who (among
other things) works for an abusive British storeowner, he was so disturbed by the book's portrayal of its
Nigerian characters as either savages or buffoons that he decided to become a writer.[20] Achebe
recognised his dislike for the African protagonist as a sign of the author's cultural ignorance.[21] He
abandoned the study of medicine and changed to English, history, and theology,[22] a switch which lost
him his scholarship and required extra tuition fees. To compensate, the government provided bursary,
and his family also donated money—his older brother Augustine gave up money for a trip home from
his job as a civil servant so Achebe could continue his studies.[23] From its inception, the university had
a strong Arts faculty; it included many famous writers amongst its alumni: Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka,
poet and playwright John Pepper Clark, and poet Christopher Okigbo.[24][25]
In 1950 Achebe wrote a piece for the University Herald entitled "Polar Undergraduate", his debut as an
author. It used irony and humour to celebrate the intellectual vigour of his classmates.[26] He followed
this with other essays and letters about philosophy and freedom in academia, some of which were
published in another campus magazine, The Bug.[27] He served as the Herald's editor during the 1951–
52 school year.[28] He wrote his first short story the following year, "In a Village Church" (1951), which
combines details of life in rural Nigeria with Christian institutions and icons, a style which appears in
many of his later works.[29] Other short stories he wrote during his time at Ibadan—including "The Old
Order in Conflict with the New" (1952) and "Dead Men's Path" (1953)—examine conflicts between
tradition and modernity, with an eye toward dialogue and understanding on both sides.[30] When a
professor named Geoffrey Parrinder arrived at the university to teach comparative religion, Achebe
began to explore the fields of Christian history and African traditional religions.[31]
After the final examinations at Ibadan in 1953, Achebe was awarded a second-class degree.[32] Rattled
by not receiving the highest level, he was uncertain how to proceed after graduation. He returned to his
hometown of Ogidi to sort through his options.[33]
Teaching and producing
While he meditated on his possible career paths, Achebe was visited by a friend from the university,
who convinced him to apply for an English teaching position at the Merchants of Light school at Oba. It
was a ramshackle institution with a crumbling infrastructure and a meagre library; the school was built
on what the residents called "bad bush"—a section of land thought to be tainted by unfriendly
spirits.[34] Later, in Things Fall Apart, Achebe describes a similar area called the "evil forest", where the
Christian missionaries are given a place to build their church.[a]
As a teacher he urged his students to read extensively and be original in their work.[35] The students did
not have access to the newspapers he had read as a student, so Achebe made his own available in the
classroom. He taught in Oba for four months, but when an opportunity arose in 1954 to work for the
Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), he left the school and moved to Lagos.[36] The NBS, a radio
network started in 1933 by the colonial government,[37] assigned Achebe to the Talks Department,
preparing scripts for oral delivery. This helped him master the subtle nuances between written and
spoken language, a skill that helped him later to write realistic dialogue.[38]
The city of Lagos also made a significant impression on him. A huge conurbation, the city teemed with
recent migrants from the rural villages. Achebe revelled in the social and political activity around him
and later drew upon his experiences when describing the city in his 1960 novel No Longer at Ease.[39]
While in Lagos, Achebe started work on a novel. This was challenging, since very little African fiction had
been written in English, although Amos Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and Cyprian Ekwensi's
People of the City (1954) were notable exceptions. While appreciating Ekwensi's work, Achebe worked
hard to develop his own style, even as he pioneered the creation of the Nigerian novel itself.[40] A visit
to Nigeria by Queen Elizabeth II in 1956 brought issues of colonialism and politics to the surface, and
was a significant moment for Achebe.[41]
Also in 1956 he was selected at the Staff School run by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).[42]
His first trip outside Nigeria was an opportunity to advance his technical production skills, and to solicit
feedback on his novel (which was laterf split into two books). In London, he met a novelist named
Gilbert Phelps, to whom he offered the manuscript. Phelps responded with great enthusiasm, asking
Achebe if he could show it to his editor and publishers. Achebe declined, insisting that it needed more
work.[40]
Things Fall Apart
Back in Nigeria, Achebe set to work revising and editing his novel (now titled Things Fall Apart, after a
line in the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats). He cut away the second and third sections of the
book, leaving only the story of a yam farmer named Okonkwo who lives during the colonization of
Nigeria. He added sections, improved various chapters, and restructured the prose.[43] In the book,
Okonkwo, the protagonist, struggles with the legacy of his father—a shiftless debtor fond of playing the
flute—as well as the complications and contradictions that arise when white missionaries arrive in his
village of Umuofia.[A 3]
By 1957, he had sculpted it to his liking, and took advantage of an advertisement offering a typing
service. He sent his only copy of his handwritten manuscript (along with the £22 fee) to the London
company. After he waited several months without receiving any communication from the typing service,
Achebe began to worry. His boss at the NBS, Angela Beattie, was going to London for her annual leave;
he asked her to visit the company. She did, and angrily demanded to know why the manuscript was lying
ignored in the corner of the office. The company quickly sent a typed copy to Achebe. Beattie's
intervention was crucial for his ability to continue as a writer. Had the novel been lost, he later said, "I
would have been so discouraged that I would probably have given up altogether."[43] The next year
Achebe sent his novel to the agent recommended by Gilbert Phelps in London.[44][45] It was sent to
several publishing houses; some rejected it immediately, claiming that fiction from African writers had
no market potential.[46] Finally it reached the office of Heinemann, where executives hesitated until an
educational adviser, Donald MacRae, just back in England after a trip through West Africa, read the book
and forced the company's hand with his succinct report: "This is the best novel I have read since the
war".[47] Heinemann published 2,000 hardcover copies of Things Fall Apart on 17 June 1958.[48][49]
According to Alan Hill, employed by the publisher at the time, the company did not "touch a word of it"
in preparation for release.[50]
The book was received well by the British press, and received positive reviews from critic Walter Allen
and novelist Angus Wilson. Three days after publication, The Times Literary Supplement wrote that the
book "genuinely succeeds in presenting tribal life from the inside". The Observer called it "an excellent
novel", and the literary magazine Time and Tide said that "Mr. Achebe's style is a model for
aspirants".[51] Initial reception in Nigeria was mixed. When Hill tried to promote the book in West Africa,
he was met with scepticism and ridicule. The faculty at the University of Ibadan was amused at the
thought of a worthwhile novel being written by an alumnus.[52] Others were more supportive; one
review in the magazine Black Orpheus said: "The book as a whole creates for the reader such a vivid
picture of Igbo life that the plot and characters are little more than symbols representing a way of life
lost irrevocably within living memory."[53]
Marriage and family
In the same year Things Fall Apart was published, Achebe was promoted at the NBS and put in charge of
the network's eastern region coverage. He moved to Enugu and began to work on his administrative
duties. There he met a woman named Christiana Chinwe (Christie) Okoli, who had grown up in the area
and joined the NBS staff when he arrived. They first conversed when she brought to his attention a pay
discrepancy; a friend of hers found that, although they had been hired simultaneously, Christie had been
rated lower and offered a lower wage. Sent to the hospital for an appendectomy soon after, she was
pleasantly surprised when Achebe visited her with gifts and magazines.[54]
Achebe and Okoli grew closer in the following years, and on 10 September 1961 they were married in
the Chapel of Resurrection on the campus of the University of Ibadan.[55] Christie Achebe has described
their marriage as one of trust and mutual understanding; some tension arose early in their union, due to
conflicts about attention and communication. However, as their relationship matured, husband and wife
made efforts to adapt to one another.[56]
Their first child, a daughter named Chinelo, was born on 11 July 1962. They had a son, Ikechukwu, on 3
December 1964, and another boy named Chidi, on 24 May 1967. When the children began attending
school in Lagos, their parents became worried about the world view—especially with regard to race—
expressed at the school, especially through the mostly white teachers and books that presented a
prejudiced view of African life.[57] In 1966, Achebe published his first children's book, Chike and the
River, to address some of these concerns.[58] After the Biafran War, the Achebes had another daughter
on 7 March 1970, named Nwando.[59][60][61][62]
No Longer at Ease and fellowship travels
In 1960, while they were still dating, Achebe dedicated to Christie Okoli his second novel, No Longer at
Ease, about a civil servant who is embroiled in the corruption of Lagos. The protagonist is Obi, grandson
of Things Fall Apart's main character, Okonkwo.[63] Drawing on his time in the city, Achebe writes about
Obi's experiences in Lagos to reflect the challenges facing a new generation on the threshold of Nigerian
independence. Obi is trapped between the expectations of his family, its clan, his home village, and
larger society. He is crushed by these forces (like his grandfather before him) and finds himself
imprisoned for bribery. Having shown his acumen for portraying traditional Igbo culture, Achebe
demonstrated in his second novel an ability to depict modern Nigerian life.[64]
Later that year, Achebe was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship for six months of travel, which he called
"the first important perk of my writing career";[65] Achebe set out for a tour of East Africa. One month
after Nigeria achieved its independence, he travelled to Kenya, where he was required to complete an
immigration form by checking a box indicating his ethnicity: European, Asiatic, Arab, or Other. Shocked
and dismayed at being forced into an "Other" identity, he found the situation "almost funny" and took
an extra form as a souvenir.[66] Continuing to Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now united in Tanzania), he was
frustrated by the paternalistic attitude he observed among non-African hotel clerks and social elites.[67]
Achebe also found in his travels that Swahili was gaining prominence as a major African language. Radio
programs were broadcast in Swahili, and its use was widespread in the countries he visited.
Nevertheless, he also found an "apathy" among the people toward literature written in Swahili.[68] He
met the poet Sheikh Shaaban Robert, who complained of the difficulty he had faced in trying to publish
his Swahili-language work.[69]
In Northern Rhodesia (now called Zambia), Achebe found himself sitting in a whites-only section of a bus
to Victoria Falls. Interrogated by the ticket taker as to why he was sitting in the front, he replied, "if you
must know I come from Nigeria, and there we sit where we like in the bus."[70] Upon reaching the
waterfall, he was cheered by the black travellers from the bus, but he was saddened by their being
unable to resist the policy of segregation at the time.[71]
Two years later, Achebe again left Nigeria, this time as part of a Fellowship for Creative Artists awarded
by UNESCO. He travelled to the United States and Brazil. He met with a number of writers from the US,
including novelists Ralph Ellison and Arthur Miller.[72] In Brazil, he met with several other authors, with
whom he discussed the complications of writing in Portuguese. Achebe worried that the vibrant
literature of the nation would be lost if left untranslated into a more widely spoken language.[73]
Voice of Nigeria and African Writers Series
Once he returned to Nigeria, Achebe was promoted at the NBS to the position of Director of External
Broadcasting. One of his first duties was to help create the Voice of Nigeria network. The station
broadcast its first transmission on New Year's Day 1962, and worked to maintain an objective
perspective during the turbulent era immediately following independence.[74] This objectivity was put
to the test when Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa declared a state of emergency in the
Western Region, responding to a series of conflicts between officials of varying parties. Achebe became
saddened by the evidence of corruption and silencing of political opposition.[75]
In 1962 he attended an executive conference of African writers in English at the Makerere University
College in Kampala, Uganda. He met with important literary figures from around the continent and the
world, including Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka, and US poetauthor Langston Hughes. Among the topics of discussion was an attempt to determine whether the
term African literature ought to include work from the diaspora, or solely that writing composed by
people living within the continent itself. Achebe indicated that it was not "a very significant
question",[76] and that scholars would do well to wait until a body of work were large enough to judge.
Writing about the conference in several journals, Achebe hailed it as a milestone for the literature of
Africa, and highlighted the importance of community among isolated voices on the continent and
beyond.[77]
Achebe selected the novel Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as one of the first titles of
Heinemann's African Writers Series.
While at Makerere, Achebe was asked to read a novel written by a student (James Ngugi, later known as
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o) called Weep Not, Child. Impressed, he sent it to Alan Hill at Heinemann, which
published it two years later to coincide with its paperback line of books from African writers. Hill
indicated this was to remedy a situation where British publishers "regarded West Africa only as a place
where you sold books." Achebe was chosen to be General Editor of the African Writers Series, which
became a significant force in bringing postcolonial literature from Africa to the rest of the world,[78] and
he continued in that role until 1972.[79]
As these works became more widely available, reviews and essays about African literature—especially
from Europe—began to flourish. Bristling against the commentary flooding his home country, Achebe
published an essay entitled "Where Angels Fear to Tread" in the December 1962 issue of Nigeria
Magazine.[80] In it, he distinguished between the hostile critic (entirely negative), the amazed critic
(entirely positive), and the conscious critic (who seeks a balance). He lashed out at those who critiqued
African writers from the outside, saying: "no man can understand another whose language he does not
speak (and 'language' here does not mean simply words, but a man's entire world view)."[80] In
September 1964 he attended the Commonwealth Literature conference at the University of Leeds,
presenting his essay "The Novelist as Teacher".[81]
Arrow of God
Achebe's third book, Arrow of God, was published in 1964.[73] Like its predecessors, it explores the
intersections of Igbo tradition and European Christianity. Set in the village of Umuaro at the start of the
twentieth century, the novel tells the story of Ezeulu, a Chief Priest of Ulu. Shocked by the power of
British intervention in the area, he orders his son to learn the foreigners' secret. Ezeulu is consumed by
the resulting tragedy.[82]
The idea for the novel came in 1959, when Achebe heard the story of a Chief Priest being imprisoned by
a District Officer.[83] He drew further inspiration a year later when he viewed a collection of Igbo
objects excavated from the area by archaeologist Thurstan Shaw; Achebe was startled by the cultural
sophistication of the artifacts. When an acquaintance showed him a series of papers from colonial
officers (not unlike the fictional Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger referenced at the
end of Things Fall Apart), Achebe combined these strands of history and began work on Arrow of God in
earnest.[84] Like Achebe's previous works, Arrow was roundly praised by critics.[85] A revised edition
was published in 1974 to correct what Achebe called "certain structural weaknesses".[86]
In a letter written to Achebe, the US writer John Updike expressed his surprised admiration for the
sudden downfall of Arrow of God's protagonist. He praised the author's courage to write "an ending few
Western novelists would have contrived".[87] Achebe responded by suggesting that the individualistic
hero was rare in African literature, given its roots in communal living and the degree to which characters
are "subject to non-human forces in the universe".[88]
A Man of the People
A Man of the People was published in 1966.[89] A bleak satire set in an unnamed African state which
has just attained independence, the novel follows a teacher named Odili Samalu from the village of
Anata who opposes a corrupt Minister of Culture named Nanga for his Parliament seat. Upon reading an
advance copy of the novel, Achebe's friend John Pepper Clark declared: "Chinua, I know you are a
prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a military coup!"[90]
Soon afterward, Nigerian Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu seized control of the northern region of
the country as part of a larger coup attempt. Commanders in other areas failed, and the plot was
answered by a military crackdown. A massacre of three thousand people from the eastern region living
in the north occurred soon afterwards, and stories of other attacks on Igbo Nigerians began to filter into
Lagos.[89]
The ending of his novel had brought Achebe to the attention of military personnel, who suspected him
of having foreknowledge of the coup. When he received word of the pursuit, he sent his wife (who was
pregnant) and children on a squalid boat through a series of unseen creeks to the Eastern stronghold of
Port Harcourt. They arrived safely, but Christie suffered a miscarriage at the journey's end. Chinua
rejoined them soon afterwards in Ogidi. These cities were safe from military incursion because they
were in the southeast, part of the region which would later secede.[91]
Once the family had resettled in Enugu, Achebe and his friend Christopher Okigbo started a publishing
house called Citadel Press, to improve the quality and increase the quantity of literature available to
younger readers. One of its first submissions was a story called How the Dog was Domesticated, which
Achebe revised and rewrote, turning it into a complex allegory for the country's political tumult. Its final
title was How the Leopard Got His Claws.[92] Years later a Nigerian intelligence officer told Achebe, "of
all the things that came out of Biafra, that book was most important."[93]
Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970)
In May 1967, the southeastern region of Nigeria broke away to form the Republic of Biafra; in July the
Nigerian military attacked to suppress what it considered an unlawful rebellion. Achebe's colleague,
Christopher Okigbo, who had become a close friend of the family (especially of Achebe's son, young
Ikechukwu), volunteered to join the secessionist army while simultaneously working at the press.[94]
Achebe's house was bombed one afternoon; Christie had taken the children to visit her sick mother, so
the only victims were his books and papers. The Achebe family narrowly escaped disaster several times
during the war. Five days later, Christopher Okigbo was killed on the war's front line.[95] Achebe was
shaken considerably by the loss; in 1971 he wrote "Dirge for Okigbo", originally in the Igbo language but
later translated to English.[96]
As the war intensified, the Achebe family was forced to leave Enugu for the Biafran capital of Aba. As the
turmoil closed in, he continued to write, but most of his creative work during the war took the form of
poetry. The shorter format was a consequence of living in a war zone. "I can write poetry," he said,
"something short, intense more in keeping with my mood ... All this is creating in the context of our
struggle."[97] Many of these poems were collected in his 1971 book Beware, Soul Brother. One of his
most famous, "Refugee Mother and Child", spoke to the suffering and loss that surrounded him.
Dedicated to the promise of Biafra, he accepted a request to serve as foreign ambassador, refusing an
invitation from the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University in the US. Achebe traveled to
many cities in Europe, including London, where he continued his work with the African Writers Series
project at Heinemann.[98]
During the war, relations between writers in Nigeria and Biafra were strained. Achebe and John Pepper
Clark had a tense confrontation in London over their respective support for opposing sides of the
conflict. Achebe demanded that the publisher withdraw the dedication of A Man of the People he had
given to Clark. Years later, their friendship healed and the dedication was restored.[99] Meanwhile, their
contemporary Wole Soyinka was imprisoned for meeting with Biafran officials, and spent two years in
jail. Speaking in 1968, Achebe said: "I find the Nigerian situation untenable. If I had been a Nigerian, I
think I would have been in the same situation as Wole Soyinka is—in prison."[100]
The Nigerian government, under the leadership of General Yakubu Gowon, was backed by the British
government; the two nations enjoyed a vigorous trade partnership.[101] Addressing the causes of the
war in 1968, Achebe lashed out at the Nigerian political and military forces that had forced Biafra to
secede.[4] He framed the conflict in terms of the country's colonial past. The writer in Nigeria, he said,
"found that the independence his country was supposed to have won was totally without content ... The
old white master was still in power. He had got himself a bunch of black stooges to do his dirty work for
a commission."[100]
Conditions in Biafra worsened as the war continued. In September 1968, the city of Aba fell to the
Nigerian military and Achebe once again moved his family, this time to Umuahia, where the Biafran
government had also relocated.[102] He was chosen to chair the newly formed National Guidance
Committee, charged with the task of drafting principles and ideas for the post-war era.[103] In 1969, the
group completed a document entitled The Principles of the Biafran Revolution, later released as The
Ahiara Declaration.[104]
In October of the same year, Achebe joined writers Cyprian Ekwensi and Gabriel Okara for a tour of the
United States to raise awareness about the dire situation in Biafra. They visited thirty college campuses
and conducted countless interviews. While in the southern US, Achebe learned for the first time of the
Igbo Landing, a true story of a group of Igbo captives who drowned themselves in 1803—rather than
endure the brutality of slavery—after surviving through the Middle Passage.[105][106] Although the
group was well received by students and faculty, Achebe was "shocked" by the harsh racist attitude
toward Africa he saw in the US. At the end of the tour, he said that "world policy is absolutely ruthless
and unfeeling".[107]
The beginning of 1970 saw the end of the state of Biafra. On 12 January, the military surrendered to
Nigeria, and Achebe returned with his family to Ogidi, where their home had been destroyed.[108] He
took a job at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka and immersed himself once again in academia. He was
unable to accept invitations to other countries, however, because the Nigerian government revoked his
passport due to his support for Biafra.[109]
Postwar academia (1971–1975)
After the war, Achebe helped start two magazines in 1971: the literary journal Okike, a forum for African
art, fiction, and poetry;[110] and Nsukkascope, an internal publication of the University.[111][112]
Achebe and the Okike committee later established another cultural magazine, Uwa Ndi Igbo, to
showcase the indigenous stories and oral traditions of the Igbo community.[113] In February 1972 he
released Girls at War, a collection of short stories ranging in time from his undergraduate days to the
recent bloodshed. It was the 100th book in Heinemann's African Writers Series.[114]
The University of Massachusetts Amherst offered Achebe a professorship in September 1972, and the
family moved to the United States. Their youngest daughter was displeased with her nursery school, and
the family soon learned that her frustration involved language. Achebe helped her face the "alien
experience"—as he called it—by telling her stories during the car trips to and from school.[115] As he
presented his lessons to a wide variety of students (he taught only one class, to a large audience), he
began to study the perceptions of Africa in Western scholarship: "Africa is not like anywhere else they
know ... there are no real people in the Dark Continent, only forces operating; and people don't speak
any language you can understand, they just grunt, too busy jumping up and down in a frenzy".[116]
Further criticism of Conrad (1975)
Achebe expanded this criticism when he presented a Chancellor's Lecture at Amherst on 18 February
1975, 'An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"'. Decrying Joseph Conrad as "a bloody
racist",[A 4] Achebe asserted that Conrad's famous novel dehumanises Africans, rendering Africa as "a
metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters
at his peril."[A 5]
Achebe also discussed a quotation from Albert Schweitzer, a 1952 Nobel Peace Prize laureate: "That
extraordinary missionary, Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in music and theology in
Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the
ambivalence. In a comment which has often been quoted Schweitzer says: 'The African is indeed my
brother but my junior brother.' And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of
junior brothers with standards of hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the germ
theory of disease came into being."[A 6] Some were surprised that Achebe would challenge a man
honoured in the West for his "reverence for life".[117]
The lecture caused a storm of controversy, even at the reception immediately following his talk. Many
English professors in attendance were upset by his remarks; one elderly professor reportedly
approached him, said: "How dare you!",[118] and stormed away. Another suggested that Achebe had
"no sense of humour",[118] but several days later Achebe was approached by a third professor, who
told him: "I now realize that I had never really read Heart of Darkness although I have taught it for
years."[A 7] Although the lecture angered many of his colleagues, he was nevertheless presented later in
1975 with an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling and the Lotus Prize for Afro-Asian
Writers.[119]
The first comprehensive rebuttal of Achebe's critique was published in 1983 by British critic Cedric Watts.
His essay "A Bloody Racist: About Achebe's View of Conrad" defends Heart of Darkness as an antiimperialist novel, suggesting that "part of its greatness lies in the power of its criticisms of racial
prejudice."[120] Palestinian–American theorist Edward Said agreed in his book Culture and Imperialism
that Conrad criticised imperialism, but added: "As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the
natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them".[121] Building
on Watts and Said, Nidesh Lawtoo argued that "underneath the first layer of straightforward
opposition ... we find an underlying mimetic continuity between Conrad's colonial image of Africa [in
Heart of Darkness] and Achebe's postcolonial representation" in Things Fall Apart.[122]
Imperialism that Conrad criticised imperialism, but added: "As a creature of his time, Conrad could not
grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them".[121]
Building on Watts and Said, Nidesh Lawtoo argued that "underneath the first layer of straightforward
opposition ... we find an underlying mimetic continuity between Conrad's colonial image of Africa [in
Heart of Darkness] and Achebe's postcolonial representation" in Things Fall Apart.[122]
Achebe's criticism has become a mainstream perspective on Conrad's work. The essay was included in
the 1988 Norton critical edition of Conrad's novel. Editor Robert Kimbrough called it one of "the three
most important events in Heart of Darkness criticism since the second edition of his book ..."[123] Critic
Nicolas Tredell divides Conrad criticism "into two epochal phases: before and after Achebe."[124] Asked
frequently about his essay, Achebe once explained that he never meant for the work to be abandoned:
"It's not in my nature to talk about banning books. I am saying, read it—with the kind of understanding
and with the knowledge I talk about. And read it beside African works."[123] Interviewed on National
Public Radio with Robert Siegel, in October 2009, Achebe remains consistent, although tempering this
criticism in a discussion entitled "'Heart of Darkness' is inappropriate": "Conrad was a seductive writer.
He could pull his reader into the fray. And if it were not for what he said about me and my people, I
would probably be thinking only of that seduction."[125]
Retirement and politics (1976–1986)
Edit
After his service at UMass Amherst and a visiting professorship at the University of Connecticut, Achebe
returned to the University of Nigeria in 1976, where he held a chair in English until his retirement in
1981.[11] When he returned to the University of Nigeria, he hoped to accomplish three goals: finish the
novel he had been writing, renew the native publication of Okike, and further his study of Igbo culture.
He also showed that he would not restrict his criticism to European targets. In an August 1976 interview,
he lashed out at the archetypal Nigerian intellectual, who is divorced from the intellect "but for two
things: status and stomach. And if there's any danger that he might suffer official displeasure or lose his
job, he would prefer to turn a blind eye to what is happening around him."[126] In October 1979,
Achebe was awarded the first-ever Nigerian National Merit Award.[127]
In 1980 he met James Baldwin at a conference held by the African Literature Association in Gainesville,
Florida, USA.[128] The writers—with similar political perspectives, beliefs about language, and faith in
the liberating potential of literature—were eager to meet one another. Baldwin said: "It's very
important that we should meet each other, finally, if I must say so, after something like 400 years."[129]
After his 1981 retirement,[11] he devoted more time to editing Okike and became active with the leftleaning People's Redemption Party (PRP). In 1983, he became the party's deputy national vice-president.
He published a book called The Trouble with Nigeria to coincide with the upcoming elections. On the
first page, Achebe says bluntly: "the Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to
rise to the responsibility and to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true
leadership."[130]
The elections that followed were marked by violence and charges of fraud. Asked whether he thought
Nigerian politics had changed since A Man of the People, Achebe replied: "I think, if anything, the
Nigerian politician has deteriorated."[131] After the elections, he engaged in a heated argument—which
almost became a fistfight—with Sabo Bakin Zuwo, the newly elected governor of Kano State. He left the
PRP and afterwards kept his distance from political parties, expressing his sadness at the dishonesty and
weakness of the people involved.[132]
He spent most of the 1980s delivering speeches, attending conferences, and working on his sixth novel.
He also continued winning awards and collecting honorary degrees.[133] In 1986 he was elected
president-general of the Ogidi Town Union; he reluctantly accepted and began a three-year term. In the
same year, he stepped down as editor of Okike.[134]
Anthills and paralysis (1987–1999)
In 1987 Achebe released his fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah, about a military coup in the fictional
West African nation of Kangan.[135] A finalist for the Booker Prize, the novel was hailed in the Financial
Times: "in a powerful fusion of myth, legend and modern styles, Achebe has written a book which is
wise, exciting and essential, a powerful antidote to the cynical commentators from 'overseas' who see
nothing ever new out of Africa."[136] An opinion piece in the magazine West Africa said the book
deserved to win the Booker Prize, and that Achebe was "a writer who has long deserved the recognition
that has already been accorded him by his sales figures."[136] The prize went instead to Penelope
Lively's novel Moon Tiger.[137]
On 22 March 1990, Achebe was riding in a car to Lagos when an axle collapsed and the car flipped.[138]
His son Ikechukwu and the driver suffered minor injuries, but the weight of the vehicle fell on Achebe
and his spine was severely damaged. He was flown to the Paddocks Hospital in Buckinghamshire,
England, and treated for his injuries. In July doctors announced that although he was recuperating well,
he was paralyzed from the waist down and would require the use of a wheelchair for the rest of his
life.[139] Soon afterwards, Achebe became the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and
Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; he held the position for more than
fifteen years.[140] Following the accident and his new position in the United States, throughout the
1990s, Achebe spent little time in Nigera.[11] However, he remained actively involved in Nigerian
politics, and denounced the usurpation of power by General Sani Abacha.[11]
He won the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates in 1999.[141][142]
Later years and death (2000–2013)
For his seventieth birthday in 2000, a sizable celebration took place Bard College and was attended by
writers and critics from around the world.[11] That same year he published Home and Exile, a semibiographical collection on both his thoughts on life away from Nigeria[11] and discussion of the
emerging school of Native American literature.[143][b] In October 2005, the London Financial Times
reported that Achebe was planning to write a novella for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of short
novels in which ancient myths from myriad cultures are reimagined and rewritten by contemporary
authors.[144][143]
Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in June 2007.[145] The judging panel included
US critic Elaine Showalter, who said he "illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new
words and forms for new realities and societies";[146] and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who
said Achebe has achieved "what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer's purpose: 'a newfound utterance' for the capture of life's complexity".[146] The award helped correct what "many
perceived as a great injustice to African literature, that the founding father of African literature had not
won some of the key international prizes."[11] For the International Festival of Igbo culture, Achebe
briefly returned to Nigeria to give the Ahajioku Lecture. Later than year he published the The Education
of A British-Protected Child, a collection of essays.[11] In autumn he joined the Brown University faculty
as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies.[147] In 2010, Achebe was
awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for $300,000, one of the richest prizes for the arts.[148]
In 2012, Achebe's publishers, Penguin Books, released There Was a Country: A Personal History of
Biafra.[149] Publication immediately caused a stir and re-opened the discussion about the Nigerian Civil
War. It would prove to be the last publication during his lifetime.[150]
Fondly called the "father of African literature",[151] Achebe died after a short illness on 21 March 2013
in Boston, United States.[152] An unidentified source close to the family said that he was ill for a while
and had been hospitalised in the city.[153][154] Penguin publishing director said: "... we are all desolate
to hear of his death."[155] The New York Times described him in his obituary as "one of Africa's most
widely read novelists and one of the continent's towering men of letters".[152] The BBC wrote that he
was "revered throughout the world for his depiction of life in Africa".[156] He was laid to rest in his
hometown in Ogidi, Anambra State
Style
Oral tradition
The style of Achebe's fiction draws heavily on the oral tradition of the Igbo people.[158] He weaves folk
tales into the fabric of his stories, exposing community values in both the content and the form of the
storytelling. The tale about the Earth and Sky in Things Fall Apart, for example, emphasises the
interdependency of the masculine and the feminine. Although Nwoye enjoys hearing his mother tell the
tale, Okonkwo's dislike for it is evidence of his imbalance.[159] Later, Nwoye avoids beatings from his
father by pretending to dislike such "women's stories".[A 8]
Another hallmark of Achebe's style is the use of proverbs, which often illustrate the values of the rural
Igbo tradition. He sprinkles them throughout the narratives, repeating points made in conversation.
Critic Anjali Gera notes that the use of proverbs in Arrow of God "serves to create through an echo
effect the judgement of a community upon an individual violation."[160] The use of such repetition in
Achebe's urban novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, is less pronounced.[160]
For Achebe, however, proverbs and folk stories are not the sum total of the oral Igbo tradition. In
combining philosophical thought and public performance into the use of oratory ("Okwu Oka"—"speech
artistry"—in the Igbo phrase), his characters exhibit what he called "a matter of individual excellence ...
part of Igbo culture."[161] In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo's friend Obierika voices the most impassioned
oratory, crystallising the events and their significance for the village. Nwaka in Arrow of God also
exhibits a mastery of oratory, albeit for malicious ends.[162]
Achebe frequently includes folk songs and descriptions of dancing in his work. Obi, the protagonist of No
Longer at Ease, is at one point met by women singing a "Song of the Heart", which Achebe gives in both
Igbo and English: "Is everyone here? / (Hele ee he ee he)"[163] In Things Fall Apart, ceremonial dancing
and the singing of folk songs reflect the realities of Igbo tradition. The elderly Uchendu, attempting to
shake Okonkwo out of his self-pity, refers to a song sung after the death of a woman: "For whom is it
well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well."[A 9] This song contrasts with the "gay and
rollicking tunes of evangelism" sung later by the white missionaries.[A 10]
Achebe's short stories are not as widely studied as his novels, and Achebe himself did not consider them
a major part of his work. In the preface for Girls at War and Other Stories, he writes: "A dozen pieces in
twenty years must be accounted a pretty lean harvest by any reckoning."[164] Like his novels, the short
stories are heavily influenced by the oral tradition. And like the folktales they follow, the stories often
have morals emphasising the importance of cultural traditions.[165]
Use of English
As the decolonisation process unfolded in the 1950s, a debate about choice of language erupted and
pursued authors around the world; Achebe was no exception. Indeed, because of his subject matter and
insistence on a non-colonial narrative, he found his novels and decisions interrogated with extreme
scrutiny—particularly with regard to his use of English. One school of thought, championed by Kenyan
writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, urged the use of indigenous African languages. English and other European
languages, he said in 1986, were "part of the neo-colonial structures that repress progressive
ideas".[166]
Achebe chose to write in English. In his essay "The African Writer and the English Language", he
discusses how the process of colonialism—for all its ills—provided colonised people from varying
linguistic backgrounds "a language with which to talk to one another". As his purpose is to communicate
with readers across Nigeria, he uses "the one central language enjoying nationwide currency".[A 11]
Using English also allowed his books to be read in the colonial ruling nations.[167]
Still, Achebe recognises the shortcomings of what Audre Lorde called "the master's tools". In another
essay he notes:
For an African writing in English is not without its serious setbacks. He often finds himself describing
situations or modes of thought which have no direct equivalent in the English way of life. Caught in that
situation he can do one of two things. He can try and contain what he wants to say within the limits of
conventional English or he can try to push back those limits to accommodate his ideas ... I submit that
those who can do the work of extending the frontiers of English so as to accommodate African thoughtpatterns must do it through their mastery of English and not out of innocence.[168]
In another essay, he refers to James Baldwin's struggle to use the English language to accurately
represent his experience, and his realisation that he needed to take control of the language and expand
it.[169] The Nigerian poet and novelist Gabriel Okara likens the process of language-expansion to the
evolution of jazz music in the United States.[170]
Achebe's novels laid a formidable groundwork for this process. By altering syntax, usage, and idiom, he
transforms the language into a distinctly African style.[171] In some spots this takes the form of
repetition of an Igbo idea in standard English parlance; elsewhere it appears as narrative asides
integrated into descriptive sentences.[172]
Themes
Achebe's novels approach a variety of themes. In his early writing, a depiction of the Igbo culture itself is
paramount. Critic Nahem Yousaf highlights the importance of these depictions: "Around the tragic
stories of Okonkwo and Ezeulu, Achebe sets about textualising Igbo cultural identity".[173] The
portrayal of indigenous life is not simply a matter of literary background, he adds: "Achebe seeks to
produce the effect of a precolonial reality as an Igbo-centric response to a Eurocentrically constructed
imperial 'reality' ".[174] Certain elements of Achebe's depiction of Igbo life in Things Fall Apart match
those in Olaudah Equiano's autobiographical Narrative. Responding to charges that Equiano was not
actually born in Africa, Achebe wrote in 1975: "Equiano was an Igbo, I believe, from the village of Iseke
in the Orlu division of Nigeria".[175]
Culture and colonialism
A prevalent theme in Achebe's novels is the intersection of African tradition (particularly Igbo varieties)
and modernity, especially as embodied by European colonialism. The village of Umuofia in Things Fall
Apart, for example, is violently shaken with internal divisions when the white Christian missionaries
arrive. Nigerian English professor Ernest N. Emenyonu describes the colonial experience in the novel as
"the systematic emasculation of the entire culture".[176] Achebe later embodied this tension between
African tradition and Western influence in the figure of Sam Okoli, the president of Kangan in Anthills of
the Savannah. Distanced from the myths and tales of the community by his Westernised education, he
does not have the capacity for reconnection shown by the character Beatrice.[177]
The colonial impact on the Igbo in Achebe's novels is often affected by individuals from Europe, but
institutions and urban offices frequently serve a similar purpose. The character of Obi in No Longer at
Ease succumbs to colonial-era corruption in the city; the temptations of his position overwhelm his
identity and fortitude.[178] The courts and the position of District Commissioner in Things Fall Apart
likewise clash with the traditions of the Igbo, and remove their ability to participate in structures of
decision-making.[179]
The standard Achebean ending results in the destruction of an individual and, by synecdoche, the
downfall of the community. Odili's descent into the luxury of corruption and hedonism in A Man of the
People, for example, is symbolic of the post-colonial crisis in Nigeria and elsewhere.[180] Even with the
emphasis on colonialism, however, Achebe's tragic endings embody the traditional confluence of fate,
individual and society, as represented by Sophocles and Shakespeare.[181]
Still, Achebe seeks to portray neither moral absolutes nor a fatalistic inevitability. In 1972, he said: "I
never will take the stand that the Old must win or that the New must win. The point is that no single
truth satisfied me—and this is well founded in the Igbo world view. No single man can be correct all the
time, no single idea can be totally correct."[182] His perspective is reflected in the words of Ikem, a
character in Anthills of the Savannah: "whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept
something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of
righteousness and extremism."[183] And in a 1996 interview, Achebe said: "Belief in either radicalism or
orthodoxy is too simplified a way of viewing things ... Evil is never all evil; goodness on the other hand is
often tainted with selfishness."[184]
Masculinity and femininity
The gender roles of men and women, as well as societies' conceptions of the associated concepts, are
frequent themes in Achebe's writing. He has been criticised as a sexist author, in response to what many
call the uncritical depiction of traditionally patriarchal Igbo society, where the most masculine men take
numerous wives, and women are beaten regularly.[185] Paradoxically, Igbo society immensely values
individual achievement but also sees the ownership over or acquisition of women as a signifier of
success.[186] As seen in Things Fall Apart, Igbo society condemns violence but Okonkwo's ability to
control 'his' women is inextricably connected to his dignity.[186] Thus, women are automatically
disenfranchised in terms of achieving high status related to personal achievement. Others suggest that
Achebe is merely representing the limited gendered vision of the characters, or that he purposefully
created exaggerated gender binaries to render Igbo history recognizable to international readers.[187]
Still others suggest that reading Achebe through the lens of womanism, "an afrocentric concept forged
out of global feminism to analyze the condition of Black African women" that acknowledges the
patriarchal oppression of women, but also highlights the resistance and dignity of African women,
enables an understanding of Igbo conceptions of gender complementarity.[188]
In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo's furious manhood overpowers everything "feminine" in his life, including
his own conscience; nevertheless, Achebe's depiction of the chi, or personal god, has been called the
"mother within".[189] Okonkwo's father was considered an agbala—a word that refers to a man
without title, but is also synonymous with 'woman'. Okonkwo's feminization of his father's laziness and
cowardice is typical of treatment of any lack of success of power.[190] His obsession with maleness is
fueled by an intense fear of femaleness, which he expresses through physical and verbal abuse of his
wives, his violence towards his community, his constant worry that his son Nwoye is not manly enough,
and his wish that his daughter Ezinma had been born a boy. The women in the novel, meanwhile, are
obedient, quiet, and absent from positions of authority—despite the fact that Igbo women were
traditionally involved in village leadership.[191] Nevertheless, the need for feminine balance is
highlighted by Ani, the earth goddess, and the extended discussion of "Nneka" ("Mother is supreme") in
chapter fourteen.[192] Ekwefi's perseverance and love for Ezinma, despite her many miscarriages, is
seen as a tribute to Igbo womanhood, which is typically defined by motherhood.[193] Okonkwo's defeat
is seen by some as a vindication of the need for a balancing feminine ethos.[190][194] Some have also
argued that all of Okonkwo's failures are tied to his contempt and fear of women and his inability to
form quality personal relationships with the women in his life—his wives, his children, and his own
mother.[189] Achebe has expressed frustration at frequently being misunderstood on this point, saying
that "I want to sort of scream that Things Fall Apart is on the side of women ... And that Okonkwo is
paying the penalty for his treatment of women; that all his problems, all the things he did wrong, can be
seen as offenses against the feminine."[195] Indeed, it is argued that Okonkwo's violent and vehement
anti-women position is the exception, not the norm, within his community of Umuofia and the wider
Igbo society.[196] Still, post-colonial African writing is intensely male-centred, a phenomenon that is not
alleviated by the frequent trope of the African woman as the "embodiment of the male writer's vision
for the new Africa".[197]
Achebe's first central female character in a novel is Beatrice Nwanyibuife in Anthills of the Savannah. As
an independent woman in the city, Beatrice strives for the balance that Okonkwo lacked so severely. She
refutes the notion that she needs a man, and slowly learns about Idemili, a goddess balancing the
aggression of male power.[198] Although the final stages of the novel show her functioning in a
nurturing mother-type role, Beatrice remains firm in her conviction that women should not be limited to
such capacities.[199]
[30/05, 08:42] AFRICAN LADY: Mariama Ba
Mariama Ba was a renowned feminist, author, and advocate for women’s rights in her home country of
Senegal, Africa, and globally. After attending and thriving at the French École Normale postsecondary
school for girls, Ba became a teacher and education inspector for many years. Ba went on to write two
novels: So Long a Letter, originally published in 1979, and Scarlet Song, published in 1981. Both novels
are critical of polygamy in African life and examine the various ways in which women deal with similar
situations, celebrate sisterhood, and demonstrate that there is no right or wrong way to be a feminist.
Mariama Ba’s texts demonstrate clear criticism of the polygamous society she grew up in and the abuse
of religion by some men to further their agenda. Ba’s essay, “The Political Functions of Written African
Literatures,” describes her belief that a writer should be political and serve as a critic of surrounding
society and misogynist practices.
Mariama Ba’s personal life clearly influenced her written works, a topic that has been thoroughly
examined in much of the scholarly literature that has been written about her. Ba did not try to define
feminism. Rather, she understood that it is different for every woman and is a reflection of background,
culture, history, and religion. Ba believed it was her mission as a writer to be a voice for the most
vulnerable members of society. Ba was a leader in emerging global feminism and created written works
that discussed topics that cross cultural barriers and demonstrate the unity of humanity.
[
Ba, Mariama 1929–1981
The Senegalese novelist Mariama Ba was considered one of the most important African writers of the
twentieth century. A crusader for the rights of women in the strongly patriarchal world of Islamic West
Africa, she wrote two widely acclaimed novels that explored the psychological damage done to African
women traditional misogynistic practices, such as polygamy. In a wider sense, Ba captured the conflicts
that arose in many African societies as Africans struggled to reconcile their traditional cultures with
influences brought by their European former colonizers.
Senegal is a small country on Africa’s Atlantic coast. When Mariama Ba was born in its capital city of
Dakar in 1929, Senegal had been under French domination for several centuries; it was one of the areas
from which African slaves were shipped to the Western Hemisphere. Ba’s family was a powerful one.
Her father was a government official, and she enjoyed the best education available to an African woman
of the day, attending and excelling in French-language schools. But Ba was mostly raised by her strict,
traditional maternal grandparents, her mother having died when she was young. Her father, who in
1956 became the first health minister of newly independent Senegal, continued to take an interest in
her welfare and to stress the benefits of a European-style education.
So Ba enjoyed, in a sense, the best of two worlds. In her writing career she would combined a talent for
expression in the European forms of the novel and the essay with a moral strength and certainty rooted
in her traditional belief system. When she was 14 she placed first in a West Africa wide competition for
admission to a select French secondary school, and she became a published essayist before she
graduated. In 1947 she became a teacher. She married the Senegalese politician Obeye Diop and had
nine children by him; the rigors of raising such a large family took their toll on her health, and she was
forced to give up her teaching post. Later divorced from Diop, she worked as a secretary and as a school
inspector.
Many of Ba’s experiences found their way into her two novels, which appeared in the last years of her
life. Prior to becoming a fiction writer, though, Ba became more and more involved in women’s issues in
general. Joining several international women’s organizations that were establishing fledgling chapters in
Africa, she became a noted essayist and lecturer. “We do not have time to waste if we are going to bring
something better to African women,” she was quoted as saying in The Feminist Companion to Literature
in English. Ba spoke out on women’s legal rights, on education, on polygamy, and, anticipating by many
years an issue that became hotly debated at the century’s end, on female genital mutilation.
Ba’s first novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), was published in 1980, when Ba was 51 years old.
Ba wrote in French, which was used in much of West Africa to bridge the divide between the area’s
various indigenous languages. Une si longue lettre was immediately successful and was quickly
translated into English and other languages. Ba cast her story in the form of an epic letter written by a
recently widowed
At A Glance…
Born Mariama Ba in Dakar, Senegal, in 1929; died in Senegal in 1981; father a politician and government
health minister. Married Obeye Diop (Senegalese Minister of Information); later divorced; nine children.
Education: Graduated from the French-language Ecole Normale secondary school, Senegal. Religion:
Islam.
Career: Senegalese novelist. Became a schoolteacher after graduating from secondary school, 1947;
worked as secretary and school inspector; joined international women’s organizations and became
essayist and lecturer, 1960s and 1970s; worked to end female genital mutilation; first novel, Une si
longue lettre (So Long a Letter), published 1980; second novel, Un chant éclarate (Scarlet Song),
published 1981.
Awards: First-ever Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, 1980.
Senegalese woman named Ramatoulaye during a days-long period of mourning prescribed by Islamic
law. In writing to a childhood friend, the widow has the chance to reflect on her own life and those of
several other women she knows.
Ramatoulaye is the mother of 12 children, and like Ba herself, she lives a traditional life that nonetheless
includes European-style schooling. When her life comes apart, she is forced to question many practices
of the society in which she lives. The letter recounts the circumstances under which Ramatoulaye’s
husband left her five years earlier and took a seventeen-year-old woman as his second wife. After his
death, the husband’s brother, again according to tradition, offers to make Ramatoulaye one of his own
wives. His motivation is to gain control over the modest amount of money and property Ramatoulaye
has acquired. She refuses his proposal.
Une si longue lettre also introduces the reader to two other women, one more Westernized than
Ramatoulaye and the other less so. First, the letter is addressed to her friend Aissatou, a divorced
woman who has been working at the Senegalese embassy in the United States. Although divorce was
rare in Islamic Senegal, Aissatou took that step after her husband, too, married a second woman.
Ramatoulaye’s second friend, Jacqueline experiences an identity crisis after her marriage dissolves. As
the widow sorts out her own future with these examples before her, Ramatoulaye resolves to develop
an independent existence, and when her unmarried daughter returns home pregnant, a major mark of
shame in her traditional belief system, Ramatoulaye suspends her anger and indignation and decides to
support her.
Ba’s novel won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and plans were made for the publication of
her second book, Un chant éclarate (Scarlet Song). However, long in poor health, Ba died in 1981 before
the novel’s publication. Un chant éclarate takes up the theme of interracial and intercultural partnership.
Its central figure, a white French woman and diplomat’s daughter, Mireille, falls in love with and marries
a black Senegalese classmate at the university in Dakar where she is studying, thus severing her ties with
her disapproving family. After the husband, Ousmane, takes a second wife, a traditional Senegalese
woman, Mireille begins a long descent into mental instability, finally killing the couple’s only child.
Mariama Ba did not live long enough to witness and reap the rewards of her own expanding literary
reputation. A strong voice for the growing self-consciousness of African women and a keen observer of
changes in the society of her native country, Ba became the focus of numerous studies in American and
European journals and book-length studies of African literature soon after her death. By the turn of the
century, Un si longue lettre, especially, was widely taught in college literature, women’s studies, black
studies, and French-language classes in the United States and around the world.
Selected Writings
Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), novel, 1980; Eng. trans., 1981.
Un chant éclarate (Scarlet Song), novel, 1981; Eng. trans., 1986.
Sources
Books
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English,
Yale University Press, 1990.
Blair, Dorothy S., Senegalese Literature: A Critical History, Twayne, 1984.
Brown, Anne E., and Marjanne E. Gooze, International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity,
Greenwood, 1995.
Buck, Claire, ed., The Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature, Prentice Hall, 1992.
Wordworks, Manitou, ed., Modern Black Writers, 2nd ed., St. James Press, 2000.
Online
Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2000; reproduced in Biography Resource Center, The
Gale Group, 2001.
—James M. Manheim
Mariama Bâ
Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) was catapulted to international prominence with the
publication of her first novel, Un si longue lettre, which appeared in 1980 when the author was 51 years
old. At the time, the novel was a rarity in that it had been written by an African woman, and it was
especially noteworthy because of Bâ's origins in the predominantly Islamic country of Senegal.
Viewed from a wider perspective, Bâ was a writer who made valuable explorations of the terrain where
African traditional cultures met influences brought by European colonialism. As a so-called
"postcolonial" writer with a feminist orientation, Bâ gained wide attention from Western critics and
students of literature, and the influence of her work increased following her death. Bâ wrote only two
novels, but they stand as vivid portraits of the difficult situations faced by women in African societies,
and they remain relevant beyond a purely Senegalese context.
Descended From Civil Servants
Mariama Bâ was born in 1929 in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, on Africa's Atlantic coast. Senegal at
the time was a department of French West Africa; it had been under French control for several centuries,
and the area in which Dakar now stands was a major port for the shipment of slaves to the Western
hemisphere. Bâ's family had been well placed in French colonial circles for several generations; her
father's father, named Sarakholé, worked as an interpreter for French officials in the colonial city of
Saint-Louis and then came to Dakar. Bâ's father was also employed by the colonial government; he was
a treasury teller in the French West African government. As the French set up independent Senegalese
institutions prior to pulling out of the country, he became the first Senegalese minister of health in 1956.
Bâ's mother died when Bâ was very young, and she was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents.
Her upbringing was in many ways a traditional one. She grew up surrounded by the members of a large
extended family, with cousins, aunts, uncles, and the spouses of all of these living at various times in the
family compound overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The generosity of Bâ's grandfather meant that the
blind and the handicapped often took refuge in Bâ's yard, and Bâ's house was one of a group that
surrounded a neighborhood mosque. One aspect of her traditional family life was that Bâ's grandparents
did not believe that, as a girl, she should receive a formal education. Bâ's father, however, continued to
take an interest in her welfare and became her advocate. He taught her to read, gave her books and
asked her to recite in French, and took her with him when he worked for a time in the neighboring
country of Dahomey (now Benin). He had the power to see to it that Bâ received the best education
available in Senegal at the time. She was enrolled in a French-language school in Dakar to study with a
woman named Berthe Maubert, after whom the school was later named.
At the same time, Bâ had to do the work expected of a young Senegalese woman. "The fact that I went
to school didn't dispense me from the domestic duties little girls had to do," she told the African Book
Publishing Record (ABPR). "I had my turn at cooking and washing up. I learned to do my own laundry
and to wield the pestle because, it was feared, 'you never know what the future might bring!'" She also
studied the Koran with one of Dakar's leading Islamic clerics. Even with these conflicting demands, Bâ
managed to notch the highest score in all of West Africa in a competition that won her admission to a
top French language teacher-training school, the Ecole Normale de Rufisque. Since her father was out of
town, it was left to Bâ's schoolmistress Berthe Maubert to take her side against the wishes of her family,
who, she told the ABPR, "had had enough of 'all this coming and going on the road to nowhere.'"
At this new school, Bâ encountered another helpful teacher, a Mrs. Germaine Le Goff, who "taught me
about myself, taught me to know myself," Bâ told the APBR. At the time, much French language
education in Africa was devoted to training students to assimilate into European ways, but, Bâ said, "She
preached for planting roots into the land and maintaining its value…. A fervent patriot herself, she
developed our love for Africa and made available to us the means to seek enrichment. I cherish the
memory of rich communions with her…. Her discourse outlined the new Africa." Bâ began to write. She
credited, in addition to her teachers, the moral strength of her grandmother as an influence on her
writing, and as a writer she would combine mastery of the European forms of the novel and the essay
with a moral fortitude that had roots in her traditional belief system.
Taught High School
Bâ wrote a book about the colonial educational system and a widely discussed nationalist essay while
she was still in school. She received her teaching certificate in 1947 and worked as a teacher, starting at
a medical high school in Dakar, for 12 years. Bâ married Senegalese politician Obeye Diop, and the two
had nine children. Life became difficult for Bâ after she and Diop divorced and she had to raise her large
family alone. She began to suffer from health problems that would plague her for the rest of her life,
and she had to resign from her teaching job. Later she became a regional school inspector and worked
as a secretary.
Bâ's experiences provided her with raw material for two novels, which she wrote at the very end of her
life. The international feminist movement added another layer to her writer's consciousness. As her
children grew, Bâ joined international women's organizations that were forming African chapters, and
she began to write op-ed columns for African newspapers and to lecture on such subjects as education.
One of her central concerns was the institution of polygamy, which often left married women with few
legal rights. Well ahead of other feminist activists, she also took on the issue of female genital mutilation,
a subject that gained in prominence only toward the end of the twentieth century.
Bâ worked for some time on her first novel, Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter). After it was issued in
late 1979 by the Editions Nouvelles Africaines publishing house in Dakar, it quickly gained acclaim from
African and French critics. Bâ wrote in French, and translations of the book into English, Dutch, German,
Japanese, Russian, and Swedish soon appeared. Une si longue lettre won the inaugural Noma Award for
Publishing in Africa, a prize funded by a Japanese publisher. As the title indicated, the book was written
in the form of a long letter—a medium that allowed Bâ to bridge the gap between African forms of
spoken storytelling and the traditional structure of a novel. The central figure in the novel is
Ramatoulaye, a woman whose husband, Moudou Fall, has died of a heart attack. She reflects in her
letter on her own life, that of the letter's recipient, and those of other women in her circle.
Addressed Polygamy Issue
Ramatoulaye's story includes elements of Bâ's own. She is a teacher, she has 12 children, and she has
combined European-style education with a traditional life. The letter recounts a crisis in Ramatoulaye's
life that develops after her husband takes a second wife, a 17-year-old friend of one of his daughters. At
the young woman's insistence, Ramatoulaye's husband deserts his first family. Ramatoulaye decides to
stay married, but she introduces the reader to another woman, Aissatou, who has chosen the difficult
path of divorce in the same situation and has begun working for the Senegalese embassy in the United
States. Aissatou is the addressee of Ramatoulaye's long letter, and her situation is somewhat different
from her friend's; she has married for love, but her husband has been forced by family pressures to take
a second wife.
Bâ's novel also focuses on several polygamous male characters and their various motivations. Une si
longue lettre is a keen portrait of a society in transition, several strands of which comes together at
Moudou Fall's funeral. Ramatoulaye's letter recounts the funeral's aftermath, as well as the events
leading up to her husband's departure and his death. One of his brothers, according to tradition, offers
to make her part of his own contingent of wives, but Ramatoulaye feels that his intention is to take
control of her money and property and to bring another wage-earning wife into the family, and she
refuses his proposal. Ramatoulaye's own daughter, representing another stage in the development of
African women's consciousness, enters the novel at the end.
Reaction to Une si longue lettre was not uniformly positive; some Islamic critics charged that Bâ had
unfairly implied that Islam as a religion endorsed polygamy. Nevertheless, Bâ's second novel, Un chant
éclarate (A Scarlet Song), was quickly readied for publication by Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines. Un
chant éclarate deals with the theme of interracial marriage and again touches on polygamy and the
deeper distortions of African tradition that have resulted from European colonialism. At the novel's
center is a white French woman, Mireille, the daughter of a French diplomat serving in Dakar. Mireille
falls in love with and marries a black Senegalese student, Ousmane, while both are studying at a
university in Dakar. Her family cuts off ties with her as a result of her decision. Ousmane takes a second
wife, a traditional Senegalese woman, and Mireille begins to suffer symptoms of mental illness; she
finally kills the couple's only child.
In poor health for many years, Bâ died in 1981, before Un chant éclarate could be published. She did not
live to enjoy the rewards of her own growing reputation. Her two novels were seen as representative of
the growing social consciousness of African women, and Bâ became the focus of numerous studies in
American and European journals. By the late 1990s Un si longue lettre, especially, frequently showed up
around the world in college and university curricula in the fields of literature, women's studies, black
studies, and the French language.
Books
Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka, Emerging Perspectives on Mariama Bâ: Postcolonialism, Feminism,
Postmodernism, Africa World, 2003.
Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 30, Gale, 2002.
Kempen, Laura Charlotte, Mariama Bâ, Rigoberto Menchú, and Postcolonial Feminism, Peter Lang, 2002.
Literature of Developing Nations for Students, vol. 2, Gale, 2000.
Parekh, Pushpa Naidu, and Siga Fatima Jagne, Postcolonial African Writers, Greenwood, 1998.
Periodicals
African Book Publishing Record, 1980, issue 3.
Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 22, 1982.
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Thomson Gale,
2006, http://www.galenet.galegrou.com/servlet/BioRC (February 13, 2006).
"Mariama Bâ (1929–1981)," Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mba.htm (February 13, 2006).
"Mariama Bâ (1929–1981), Senegal," http://www.web.uflib./ufl.edu/cm/africana/ba.htm (February 13,
2006).
Mariama Bâ
Writer and political activist Mariama Bâ was born in 1929 in Dakar, Senegal to a well-to-do family. Her
father worked in the French colonial administration and in 1956 became the Minister of Health of
Senegal. Her mother died when she was young. Bâ was raised by her maternal grandparents who
emphasized conservative Muslim values. She attended a religious school, but was also educated in the
French tradition. Due to the intervention of her father, she was enrolled in 1943 in the Ecole Normale
(Teacher Training School) at Rufisque, a town some 25 miles away from Dakar where she received her
diploma in 1947. Bâ worked as a teacher from 1947 to 1959, before becoming an academic inspector.
During this period, Bâ had nine children with her husband, Obeye Diop. The couple separated and Bâ
was forced to raise her children as a single parent.
By the late 1970s, after most of her children were adult, Bâ turned to political activity. She became a
vocal activist for women’s rights in Africa and a critic of the neocolonial system that had evolved in most
of the newly independent African nations. She was also concerned with and wrote about a number of
feminist issues such as polygamy, mistreatment of women in Senegalese society, ostracism of the castes,
the exploitation of women, violence against women, and lack of educational opportunities for girls.
Her first and most significant novel, Une Si Longue Lettre (So Long a Letter) was published in 1979. It
stands as a landmark of African and Francophone literature which received widespread critical acclaim
as well as the Noma Prize for African Literature. Her novel has been translated into numerous languages
and is a staple of francophone literature courses worldwide. So Long a Letter is an epistolary novel,
written in the form of a letter from a widow to a friend who lives in the United States following the
death of her husband. The widow grapples with her polygamous situation as well as the rise of
modernity and Westernization. She recounts that, despite the fact that her husband has taken another
wife after 25 years of marriage, she remained faithful to her values and religion. Her quiet strength,
common sense, and courage are a direct contrast to the depiction of males in the story, including the
husband.
Her second novel, Scarlet Song, published posthumously in 1986, also received international attention.
The book deals with an interracial relationship in Senegal and the struggle of women to overcome the
traditional system of polygamy and gender discrimination.
Bâ advocated a greater voice for African women, a sense of emancipation and the changing of laws and
traditions which served to subjugate women. She was also an advocate for African cultural revival. In
her 1981 work, La Fonction politique des littératures africaines écrites, she argued that Africans should
embrace and feel pride in their culture and achievements.
Mariama Bâ died in Dakar, Senegal in 1981 after a long battle with cancer. A prestigious boarding school
on nearby Goree Island is named in her honor.
Turner, M. (2009, December 01). Mariama Bâ (1929-1981). BlackPast.org.
https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/ba-mariama-1929-1981/
Mariama Ba biography | Women
Mariama Ba was one of the pioneers of Senegalese literature.
Biography
Mariama Ba was one of the pioneers of Senegalese literature. Born in Dakar in 1929, she lost her mother
soon after, and was raised by her maternal grandmother, who was of Muslim confession and strongly
attached to traditional culture. Through the insistence of her father, an open-minded politician, the
young Mariama attended French school, obtained her school-leaving certificate, and won admission to
the École Normale for girls in Rufisque, from where she graduated as a schoolteacher in 1947.
Service to her country through education was not Mariama Ba’s sole vocation, however. From a Muslim
Lebou family from Dakar, she also threw herself into the women’s movement to fight for greater
recognition of women’s issues. Throughout her life, she tried to reconcile her grounding in her culture,
her Muslim faith, and her openness to other cultural horizons. As such, rootedness and openness
constituted the two sometimes conflicting poles along her exacting journey. Towards the end of her life,
her literary genius achieved full expression in So long a letter, a novel which directly confronted
polygamy and the caste-system in Senegal – a predominantly Muslim country, firmly attached to its
traditions, yet traversed by profound transformations, and confronted by the challenge of new models
of society.