ABSTRACT

Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi in eastern Nigeria on November 16, 1930, to Isaiah Okafor Achebe and Janet Achebe. His parents, though they instilled in him many of the values of their traditional Igbo culture, were devout evangelical Protestants; his childhood, therefore, was marked by the rich ambivalence of a complex inheritance. He attended mission schools, for example, but remained emotionally close to many of his relatives who were not Christians. These early negotiations of cultural duality would later enable him to develop a necessary distance from the competing and conflicting forces that had shaped his sense of self and formed his worldview—a distance that he now affirms as a prerequisite to see the totality of life “steadily and fully” (Morning Yet on Creation Day, 68).