Chinua Achebe, the legendary Nigerian novelist, died on March 21, placing a bookend on a life that witnessed enormous political, cultural and social upheaval. As a writer who journeyed fluidly across boundaries of language, nation, ethnicity and culture, he inscribed revolution into the consciousness of generations of young people across Africa as they wrestled with the legacy of colonialism, war, and oppression. His voice became an emancipatory organ for his countrymen and his diaspora, and his literary perspective sweeping enough to capture a beautiful spectrum of human experience. And it happened on a continent that had historically been demonized, stereotyped and written off as hopeless by its colonial masters.
Achebe was also a fearless crosser of borders, with a dynamic grasp of the power of migration–of people as well as words. Things Fall Apart was translated into dozens of languages and broke through countless barriers in the literary world. The author himself spent much of his life in England and the United States, drawing richly from the social interfaces he encountered as an African writer and teacher in a cultural realm that would forever brand him as other.