I was blessed to meet Professor Achebe on several occasions, twice at conferences where he was the keynote speaker. First at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, at the Conference Across Languages and Cultures: Creative Writing in English by non-Native Speakers in 1996.
But it was in 1998, at the Inaugural World Conference-Black Expressive Culture Studies Association at Kent State University, in Cleveland, that I was able to secure a personal interview for my dissertation.
I would later travel from Philadelphia—where at the time I was an unknown Temple University doctoral student in African American Studies—to Achebe’s home in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, for an hour-long interview. He could have very easily been very arrogant and aloof, but, from my experience, he was an extremely accessible and humble man.
He could also have been bitter, as some might have been after another monumental event that happened almost exactly 23 years previously, on March 22, 1990: the tragic auto accident in his beloved Nigeria, which left him a paraplegic, wheelchair bound for the remainder of his life.
Instead, on every occasion—even when I called his home unexpectedly about my research—I found Achebe to be exceedingly warm and quick to smile, the epitome of grace.
As such, he welcomed me into his home office, at the rear of the quaint cottage built and equipped for his special needs by Bard College, where he was then the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature.
We spent the next hour engaged in a wide-ranging chat about everything from my dissertation topic, portrayals of polygamy in the African novel, to the role that Christianity played in traditional Africa “falling apart,” as it were, with the coming of the White man, as well as the politics of language in African literature.
