Before Chinua Achebe was world famous, he was a young broadcaster in Nigeria who fell in love with a student he had met at university. They married in 1961 and stayed married for 52 years.
Christie Chinwe Okoli was a student at University College Ibadan, where Achebe had also studied. Achebe had published Things Fall Apart in 1958 and was working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. They married in September 1961.
Family
The couple had four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi and Nwando. Nwando Achebe became a historian and professor in the United States. Christie Achebe herself became an academic, earning a doctorate and becoming a professor of education and psychology.
War
During the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970, the family lived in Biafra. Achebe served the Biafran government as a roving ambassador, and the family suffered the dangers and hardships of war. Achebe wrote later about the war in his memoir There Was a Country, published in 2012.
The accident
In 1990, Achebe was seriously injured in a car accident in Nigeria, which left him paralysed from the waist down. He used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. After treatment in Britain, the couple moved to the United States, where Achebe taught at Bard College and later at Brown University. Christie cared for him and continued her own career.
A partnership
Achebe spoke of his wife with deep respect. Christie was a partner in his work and life, with her own academic standing, and the couple shared an interest in education and in Igbo culture.
Death
Chinua Achebe died in Boston in March 2013, aged 82, and was buried in his hometown of Ogidi, Anambra State. Christie Achebe survived him, having shared more than half a century of his life, and his books remain in print across the world, taught in schools from Enugu to London.
What couples can learn
Marriage through hardship. The couple went through war, displacement and disability together.
Two careers. Christie built her own academic career alongside her husband’s fame.
Faith in each other’s work. Each supported the other’s writing, teaching and research, even when it meant moving countries.
Care. After the accident, the marriage adapted to new realities, with care becoming part of love.
Achebe wrote about a society falling apart. His own home held together for more than half a century.
