Chinua achebe biography novelists malayalam youtube

Chinua Achebe — was an Igbo writer and one of the most important voices in what is now referred to as postcolonial literature. He was born in Ogidi, several kilometres from the Niger River in the south of the territory which would become Nigeria in , upon its independence from the British Empire. His parents were Protestant converts and he spent much of his childhood immersed in their Christian teachings, a background which plays out heavily in depictions of religion in his future writing.

An Igbo speaker at home, Achebe started learning English at eight years old. In , Achebe enrolled at University College affiliated with the University of London and now known as the University of Ibadan with a scholarship to read medicine. However, he swiftly changed the subject of his studies to English, losing the scholarship as a result.

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He sought to challenge the ways in which literature was complicit in promoting the British Empire through negative stereotypes of colonised and enslaved peoples. Influenced by the small number of Nigerian authors publishing in English, including Amos Tutuola and Wole Soykina who taught at his university, Achebe turned to writing as a means to change how stories about West Africans were being told.

The publishers reprinted it in as the very first volume in its African Writers Series which continued until the s. Set in the nineteenth century, the novel is a poignant tragedy based around a complex and deeply-afflicted protagonist, Okonkwo, who, among other personal issues, struggles with the advent of British imperialism in his Igbo village, Umuofia, which arrived through Christian missionary activity.

The novel ends by showing readers a glimpse of an English language report about Umuofia by a British District Commissioner, powerfully symbolising the dangerous ways in which West African settings, peoples, and history have long been inadequately and negatively depicted by ethnographers sympathetic to the British Empire.