Who Is Chinua Achebe? Google Doodle Honors Nigerian Novelist

Thursday’s Google Doodle features the famous Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, for what would have been his 87th birthday. Achebe might be best known for his book “Things Fall Apart” that was published in 1958 about the pre and post colonization in his home country.

Achebe died in 2013 when he was 82 after a long career spent showing the world his country from the perspective of its own people. He started writing in the 1950s in English but drawing from his experiences and the traditional storytelling of the Igbo people, according to Google.

What set his writing apart was that the characters he wrote were often the everyday relatable people and he was able to paint a picture of his country through their eyes. The way they saw the country and the changes it was going through.

In 2007, just six years before his death, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his works over the years. He was a highly educated man who taught in addition to writing and won several awards over his lifetime.

The doodle honoring him appears on Google homepages in the United States as well as in Nigeria Thursday. Google’s doodler’s went through several drafts of the doodle before coming to a winning doodle.

Google introduced doodles to the site back in 1998 when the founders of the site added a small drawing to the logo to indicate that they’d be away at the Burning Man festival. The original doodle was meant to be a joke but soon thereafter turned into a regular tradition. Everyone at Google started choosing notable days or anniversaries to represent with the company’s logo on the home page. Now more than 2000 doodles have been on the Google homepage worldwide in just under 20 years of doodling.

There are a group of doodles who work together to choose the relevant events and days to create doodles for and once a year they get some help from students as well. Every year Google hosts a “Doodle 4 Google” competition where students from around the country can submit doodles centered around a specific theme. The winning doodle’s creator is awarded a number of prizes including scholarship money and a trip to Google.

All of the past doodles are kept on the Google doodle website in an archive. So if you ever want to jump back in time and see a doodle again, you can. Some are even games or videos that teach viewers more about the doodle or let them interact with it.