A young Nigerian medical student on a prestigious scholarship read a European novel that depicted Africans as buffoons or savages, and walked away from medicine to become a writer. This episode traces Chinua Achebe from his 1930 birth in Ogidi, where his evangelist father and his traditionalist great-uncle gave him two ways of seeing the world, through Igbo folktales and masquerades, to the University of Ibadan and the decision that cost him his scholarship and required his brother’s help with tuition.

We look at how radio scriptwriting at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service gave him an ear for spoken rhythm, why he made his protagonist a yam farmer, and how the single handwritten manuscript of his 1958 debut nearly vanished in a London typing agency. The conversation covers his work championing other African writers as a series editor, the 1966 political satire that ended with a coup days before a real one, his flight with his family through hidden creeks, the Biafran war years spent writing poetry and serving as an ambassador, the 1975 lecture dismantling Joseph Conrad’s novella, the 1990 car crash that left him in a wheelchair, and his rejection of the title father of African literature.

• Growing up between Christian evangelism and Igbo tradition in colonial Nigeria
• The novel that drove him to forfeit a medical scholarship and pick up a pen
• How radio work and the yam farmer protagonist shaped his debut
• Prophecy, suspicion, and escape after his satire predicted a military coup
• The 1975 critique of Conrad that forced universities to rethink the Western canon