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Heavy security was in place throughout the small south-eastern town of Ogidi, with President Goodluck Jonathan along with foreign dignitaries attending the service at the local Anglican church. Access inside the church was being granted only by invitation, but tents with loudspeakers were set up outside.
Groups of admirers could be seen dancing and singing in the Igbo language spoken throughout the region in the streets of the town in praise of the writer.
Achebe, who died in the United States in March aged 82, is viewed as an iconic figure in Nigeria and abroad, and his death led to tributes worldwide.
Ogidi, located in Nigeria’s Anambra state, was decorated with posters of Achebe, while police were stationed throughout the town. A wake was held inside the family compound on Wednesday evening as crowds gathered in the streets. His private burial on the family compound will follow the service at a local Anglican church.
Achebe had lived and worked as a professor in the US in recent years, most recently at Brown University in Rhode Island.
A 1990 car accident left him in a wheelchair and limited his travel.
Tributes continued to pour in ahead of the burial. On Wednesday, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper dedicated an entire page to a poem written for Achebe by Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer and Nobel literature laureate. Some 2 000 people packed a stadium in the Anambra state capital Awka on Wednesday where Achebe’s coffin was put on display.
His work earned him praise from some of the world’s most respected leaders, including Nelson Mandela, who described him as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down”.
South African writer and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer called Achebe the “father of modern African literature” in 2007, when she was among the judges to award him the Man Booker International prize for fiction.
As well as criticising misrule in Nigeria, Achebe also strongly backed his native Biafra, which declared independence from Nigeria in 1967. — AFP.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter