Chinua Achebe: The storyteller

What, Chinua Achebe once asked in an autobiographical essay, does he have in common with Queen Victoria? "They both lost their Albert!" Born in the village of Ogidi, in the Igbo region of eastern Nigeria, in 1930, Albert Chinualomugu Achebe did much more than merely lose the imperial monicker foisted on him by devoutly Christian parents (although his mother stuck to Albert "to the bitter end"). As novelist, poet, essayist and activist, he has for half a century written and edited and taught and organised a new version, and vision, of African culture.

The clichés of "post-colonial literature" now sound stale, shopworn from a thousand turgid tracts. So, as the literary world celebrates Achebe's receipt of the second Man Booker International Prize, we need to do what he has done all his life, and strip away dead language and dead thought from lived experience. The experience, for instance, of the little boy in Ogidi who waited every week for the arrival of the yellow Royal Mail truck and called it by a local children's name that captured their "mixture of admiration and fear". This innocent-seeming amenity had the "terrible alias" of "the killer that doesn't pay back"; "in other words, a representative of anarchy in the world".

Then came the experience of a student steeped in English literature at University College, Ibadan, in the early 1950s, who read a widely praised novel by Joyce Cary entitled Mr Johnson. The student found Cary's gormless loser of a Nigerian clerk somehow acclaimed as a valid account of people like him, in places like that. Cary's book opened Achebe's eyes to "the fact that my home was under attack and that my home was not merely a house or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story". He had soon decided that "the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else, no matter how gifted or well-intentioned".

Achebe went on to tell the story of a culture, a nation and (arguably) a continent. Things Fall Apart, his debut novel and one of the most influential literary works of its century, started winning prizes not long after its appearance in 1958. As Man Booker judge Nadine Gordimer this week lauded "the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature", his cupboard of international awards now looks even more crowded and glittering. Yet the cost of his ambition and achievement has been steep. Achebe has, over the decades, faced and overcome mortal danger, furious political vilification, exile and disability. And that dramatic life could so easily have ended in its early prime.

In 1967, Achebe, a supporter of the breakaway Igbo republic of Biafra, returned to his apartment in the rebel stronghold of Enugu to find it bombarded by the federal Nigerian air force. His family was safe, and in the chaos he caught a glimpse of his best friend, the hugely talented poet Christopher Okigbo, "then he was gone like a meteor, for ever". Within weeks, the dashing Major Okigbo had been killed in an early battle of the Biafran conflict. The fortunes of war decreed that Achebe survived, to become not a meteor but a fixed star.

In the manner of stars, observers can often take his position and his brilliance for granted. Too much lazy criticism converts his brave and bitter struggle to develop an African literary voice into a dull set of mantras about cultural decolonisation. If the Man Booker award has any effect, it ought to be to send new readers out to discover a body of fiction as gripping, moving and robust as - to take two obvious British comparisons - the work of Thomas Hardy or Graham Greene.

Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart while working as a BBC-trained broadcaster in Lagos, in the ferment of the years of expanding self-government that culminated with Nigerian independence in 1960. His debut, two years earlier, had declared the cultural independence of a people. Its first 100 pages, fierce and rich, conjure up the deep-rooted culture of the wrestler Okonkwo, and traces his tragic conflict with his community. Inch by inch, European missionaries and colonisers creep into this densely depicted world until the villagers grasp that the white man "has put a knife on the things that held us together".

Okonkwo is not a passive victim of imperialism but a fully fledged tragic hero, the equal to his predecessors in Hardy, Balzac or Tolstoy. But European control means that the rent in the moral fabric that he inflicts and endures cannot now be healed as before. With heavy irony, the novel ends with the district commissioner planning his anthropological study, "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger". This story has passed out of its subjects' hands.

In Anthills of the Savannah, the Booker-shortlisted novel with which Achebe returned to full-length fiction after a 20-year break in 1987, the poet and editor Ikem quotes an ancestors' proverb about the origin of evil: "If you want to get at the root of the murder, they said, you have to look for the blacksmith who made the matchet." For Achebe, European rule hammered out the lethal tools with which African nations would later destroy themselves and each other. Yet, in his hands, this is the opposite of a denial of responsibility. Over the past 40 years, no African public figure has denounced corruption, dictatorship and "the failure of leadership" more often or more vehemently. That surely gives him the right to trace this river of misgovernance back to its polluted source.

In 1966, his novel A Man of the People gave a stinging satirical account of the predators who had begun to gorge themselves on the fruits of Nigerian independence. The new regime is dominated by plausible opportunists such as minister Nanga, part of a greedy coterie of "the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best". This kleptocratic elite debauches the new state so that sound traditions lose their hold and "the laws of the village become powerless". A Man of the People shows off Achebe's muscular mischief-making at its best: sometimes more like an African Kingsley Amis than the solemn prophet-philosopher you meet in the critical encomiums.

That book turned Achebe into a public figure, and a threatened one. Its prescient scenes of a military coup led to suspicions of conspiracy when one happened, and failed, in 1966. His persecution by federal Nigeria led to a flight to his Igbo homeland and, after Biafra's bid for independence in 1967, key roles as a peace-seeking diplomat. Already, since 1962, the pioneering editor of the Heinemann African Writers series, he and Christopher Okigbo set up the Citadel Press in Enugu. However adverse his own circumstances, Achebe has always opened doors for other African writers and their work.

Biafra's defeat meant a time of troubles, and of travels. In the early 1970s he taught in Massachusetts but, after another coup, was able to return in 1976 as a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Potential novels shrank into stories as the public man took charge. His 1983 manifesto The Trouble with Nigeria denounced not only corruption but "indiscipline", and he entered politics as deputy president of the People's Redemption Party. Yet another military takeover dashed his hopes for civilian democracy. The long-delayed Anthills of the Savannah gives eloquent expression to the frustration of thinkers and activists in a country where "those who make plans make plans for themselves only". "Our present rulers in Africa are in every sense late-flowering medieval monarchs," reflects the resilient heroine, Beatrice, "even the Marxists among them."

The novel also signals Achebe's faith in the power of narrative art to outfox the brutalities of politics: "It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums." Devoted to the story, Achebe had sickened of those drums. He was paralysed from the waist down in a road accident, and has, from 1990, taught at Bard College in upstate New York. From this secure American vantage point, his voice still rings out loudly for reform.

He has also helped to shape a fiery global debate about African culture and its representations. Most controversially, his 1975 denunciation of the "thoroughgoing racist" Joseph Conrad and his novella Heart of Darkness still provokes passionate assent and dissent. To Achebe, Conrad's reduction of real Africans to an amorphous mass of savage sounds is the test case of European blindness and prejudice. And his shock at Conrad's view of the Congo as "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity" has withstood all efforts to defend the author's anti-colonialist stance. "Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation," he writes, "but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its tooth."

A few years ago, the black British writer Caryl Phillips - an admirer of Achebe, but also of Conrad - went to visit Achebe at Bard to try to resolve this quarrel. Achebe was adamant in his critique, but a glimpse of the young man raised at a "crossroads of cultures" did come through in his sense of disappointment: "We have so few who have the talent ... and to lose even one is a tragedy." The genius of Conrad, for Achebe, was tragically "lost" to a toxic prejudice that saw only an obscure mass and not varied individuals whose humanity matched his own.

Achebe has given enormous gifts to Africa, as he has shown its writers and readers how to "put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement". Yet he has something precious to offer non-Africans as well: a liberation from dehumanising fears and fantasies. And that emancipation comes via the medium of an always approachable fiction that, as he once wrote, "begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience".

A Life in Brief

BORN 16 November 1930, Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, the son of Protestant converts Isaiah Okafo and Janet N Iloegbunam Achebe.

EDUCATION The Government College in Umuahia. Read English, history and theology at the University of Ibadan, then known as the University of London.

CAREER He joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos in 1956, later becoming its director of external broadcasting. During the civil war in Nigeria he worked for the Biafran government service. After the war he was appointed senior research fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he is now professor of English. He has written more than 20 books including Things Fall Apart (1958), which has sold 10 million copies, and Anthills of the Savannah (1988).

HE SAYS "The West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilisation and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa."

THEY SAY "Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature." - Nadine Gordimer, Nobel laureate