text: Achebe was born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930. He went to the local
  public schools and was among the first students to graduate from
  the University of lbadan. After graduation, he worked for the
  Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer and Director
  of External Broadcasting, and it was during this period that he
  began his writing career.
  He is the author, co-author, or editor of some seventeen books,
  among them five novels: Things Fall
  Apart, 1958; No Longer at
  Ease, 1960; Arrow of God,
  1964; A Man of the People,
  1966; and Anthills of the Savannah,
  1987. He is the editor of several anthologies, including the essay
  collections Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and Impediments,
  and the collection of poetry Beware
  Soul Brother. He is the editor of the magazine, Okike,
  and founding editor of the Heinemann series on African literature,
  a list which now has more than three hundred titles. He is often
  called the father of modern African literature. He is the recipient,
  at last count, of some twenty-five honorary doctorates from universities
  throughout the world and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson
  Jr. Professor of English at Bard College.
  The interview took place on two very different occasions. The
  first meeting was before a live audience at the Unterberg Poetry
  Center of the Ninety-second Street Y on a bitterly cold and rainy
  January evening; the weather made the sidewalks and roads treacherous.
  We were all the more surprised at the very large and enthusiastic
  audience. The theater was almost packed. It was Martin Luther
  King Jr.'s birthday; Achebe paid gracious tribute to him and then
  answered questions from the interviewer and audience. The interviewer
  and Achebe sat on a stage with a table and a bouquet of flowers
  between them. Achebe was at ease and captured the audience with
  stories of his childhood and youth.
  The second session took place on an early fall day at Achebe's
  house on the beautiful grounds where he lives in upstate New York.
  He answered the door in his wheelchair and graciously ushered
  his guest through his large, neat living room to his study, a
  long, narrow room lined with many books on history, religion and
  literature. There is a small, slightly cluttered desk where he
  Achebe favors traditional Nigerian clothes and reminds one more
  of the priest in Arrow of God than Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart.
  His appearance is peaceful and his eyes wise. His demeanor is
  modest, but when he begins to talk about literature and Nigeria,
  he is transformed. His eyes light up; he is an assured, elegant
  and witty story teller.
  The year 1990 marked Achebe's sixtieth birthday. His colleagues
  at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, where he is a professor
  of English and chairman emeritus of the department, sponsored
  an international conference entitled Eagle on Iroko in his honor.
  Participants came from around the world to appraise the significance
  of his work for African and world literature. The conference opened
  on the day Nelson Mandela was liberated from prison, and the day
  was declared a national holiday. There was a festive mood
  during the week-long activities of scholarly papers, traditional
  drama, dancing and banquets. The iroko is the tallest tree in
  that part of Africa and the eagle soars to its height.
  a month later, while on his way to the airport in Lagos to resume
  a teaching post at Dartmouth, Achebe was severely injured in a
  car accident. He was flown to a London hospital where he underwent
  surgery and spent many months in painful recuperation. Although
  confined to a wheelchair, he has made a remarkable recovery in
  the past three years and, to the surprise of his family and many
  friends throughout the world, is beginning to look and sound like
  his old self.
  Would you tell us something about the Achebe family and growing
  up in an Igbo village, your early education, and whether there
  was anything there that pointed you that early in the direction
  I think the thing that
  clearly pointed me there was my interest in stories. Not necessarily
  writing stories, because at that point, writing stories was not
  really viable. So you didn't think of it. But I knew I loved stories,
  stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder
  sister -- such as the story of the tortoise -- whatever scraps
  of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging
  around, sitting around when my father had visitors. When I began
  going to school, I loved the stories I read. They were different,
  but I loved them too. My parents were early converts to Christianity
  in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father
  was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled
  for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading
  the gospel. I was the fifth of their six children. By the time
  I was growing up, my father had retired, and had returned with
  his family to his ancestral village.
  When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered
  stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays,
  I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things,
  even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to
  find a lamp . . . fascinating to me because they were about things
  remote, and almost ethereal. Then I grew older and began to read
  about adventures in which I didn't know that I was supposed to
  be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good
  white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They
  were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others
  were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was
  introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There
  is that great proverb, that until the lions have their own historians,
  the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did
  not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to
  be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job.
  It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do,
  so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony,
  the travail, the bravery, even, of the lions.
  You were among the first graduates of the great University of
  Ibadan. What was it like in the early years of that university,
  and what did you study there? Has it stuck with you in your writing?
  Ibadan was, in retrospect, a great institution. In a way, it revealed
  the paradox of the colonial situation, because this university
  college was founded towards the end of British colonial rule in
  Nigeria. If they did any good things, Ibadan was one of them.
  It began as a college of London University, because under the
  British, you don't rush into doing any of those things like universities
  just like that. You start off as an appendage of somebody else.
  You go through a period of tutelage. We were the University College
  of Ibadan of London. So I took a degree from London University.
  That was the way it was organized in those days. One of the signs
  of independence, when it came, was for Ibadan to become a full-fledged
  university. I began with science, then English, history and religion.
  I found these subjects exciting and very useful. Studying religion
  was new to me and interesting because it wasn't only Christian
  theology; we also studied West African religions.
  My teacher there, Dr. Parrinder, now an
  emeritus professor of London University, was a
  pioneer in the area. He had done extensive research in West Africa,
  in Dahomey. For the first time, I was able to see the systems
  -- including my own -- compared and placed side by side, which
  was really exciting. I also encountered a professor, James Welch,
  in that department, an extraordinary man, who had been chaplain
  to King George VI, chaplain to the BBC, and all kinds of high
  powered things before he came to us. He was a very eloquent preacher.
  On one occasion, he said to me, "We may not be able to teach
  you what you need, or what you want. We can only teach you what
  we know." I thought that was wonderful. That was really the
  best education I had. I didn't learn anything there that I really
  needed, except this kind of attitude. I have had to go out on
  my own. The English department was a very good example of what
  I mean. The people there would have laughed at the idea that any
  of us would become a writer. That didn't really cross their minds.
  I remember on one occasion a departmental prize was offered. They
  put up a notice: Write a short story over the long vacation for
  the departmental prize. I'd never written a short story before,
  but when I got home, I thought, Well, why not. So I wrote one
  and submitted it. Months passed; then finally one day there was
  a notice on the board announcing the result. It said that no prize
  was awarded because no entry was up to the standard. They named
  me and said that my story deserved mention. Ibadan in those days
  was not a dance you danced with snuff in one palm. It was a dance
  you danced with all your body. So when Ibadan said you deserved
  mention, that was very high praise.
  I went to the lecturer who had organized the prize and said, "You
  said my story wasn't really good enough, but it was interesting.
  Now what was wrong with it?" She said, "Well, it's the
  form. It's the wrong form." So I said, "Ah. Can you
  tell me about this?" She said, "Yes, but not now. I'm
  going to play tennis; we'll talk about it. Remind me later, and
  I'll tell you." This went on for a whole term. Every day
  when I saw her, I'd say, "Can we talk about form?" She'd
  say, "No, not now. We'll talk about it later." Then
  at the very end she saw me and said, "You know, I looked
  at your story again, and actually there's nothing wrong with it."
  So that was it! That was all I learned from the English department
  about writing short stories. You really have to go out on your
  own and do it.
  When you finished university, one of the first careers you embarked
  upon was broadcasting with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.
  I got into it through the intervention of Professor Welch. He
  had tried to get me a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge,
  and it didn't work out. So the next thing was the broadcasting
  department, which was newly started in Nigeria, with a lot of
  BBC people. So that's how I got into it. It wasn't because I was
  thinking of broadcasting. I really had no idea what I was going
  to do when I left college. I'm amazed when I think about students
  today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't.
  We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out. Fortunately,
  things did work out. There were not too many of us. You couldn't
  do that today and survive. So I got into broadcasting and then
  discovered that the section of it where I worked, the Spoken Word
  department, the Talks department, as it's called, was really congenial.
  It was just the thing I wanted. You edited scripts. People's speeches.
  Then short stories. I really got into editing and commissioning
  short stories. Things were happening very fast in our newly independent
  country, and I was soon promoted out of this excitement into management.
  Note: First published in The Paris Review,
  Issue no. 133 in 1995.]