--- title: Why Google Is Celebrating Chinua Achebe With a Doodle description: Today's Google Doodle honors the legacy of the renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe on what would be his 87th birthday canonical: https://time.com/5026942/chinua-achebe-google-doodle/ author: Casey Quackenbush article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-11-16T10:19:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-13T00:16:17.000Z og:title: Google Doodle Celebrates Nigerian Novelist Chinua Achebe og:description: The illustration celebrates his legacy on what would be his 87th birthday og:url: https://time.com/5026942/chinua-achebe-google-doodle/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte6978c3810138965/6988e615656a3f0cbebd27e3/chinua-achebes-87th-birthday-5104396332433408-2x.jpg?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 711 og:image:height: 400 og:image:alt: Google Images og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Celebrates Nigerian Novelist Chinua Achebe twitter:description: The illustration celebrates his legacy on what would be his 87th birthday twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte6978c3810138965/6988e615656a3f0cbebd27e3/chinua-achebes-87th-birthday-5104396332433408-2x.jpg?branch=production&width=711&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Google Is Celebrating Chinua Achebe With a Doodle > Sponsored content. 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It curates the day's top headlines with TIME's reporting and analysis across politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. It is free to join at time.com/newsletters. #### How do I sign up for The Brief? The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Updated: Dec 13, 2023 12:16 AM UTCPublished: Nov 16, 2017 10:19 AM UTC  Illustration of Chinua Achebe for Google Images by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Updated: Dec 13, 2023 12:16 AM UTCPublished: Nov 16, 2017 10:19 AM UTC Surrounded by symbols, donning his signature cap and spectacles, [Chinua Achebe is pictured](https://www.google.com/doodles/chinua-achebes-87th-birthday) in front of a green banner decorated with icons of his most famous literary works in Thursday’s Google Doodle. The illustration honors the legacy of the renowned Nigerian writer on what would be his 87th birthday. Widely regarded as the father of modern African literature, Achebe was an illustrious author whose work sought to reclaim Africa’s literary voice from Western control. Achebe rose to international prominence when he published _Things Fall Apart_ at 28 years-old. Based on his own family heritage and upbringing, the story recounts the demise of an Ibo man in southeastern Nigeria under the oppression of 19th century British colonial rule. The book is now a classic and required reading for students, selling more than 20 million copies and translated into 57 different languages. “In the end, I began to understand,” Achebe once wrote. “There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.” Achebe went on to publish several more works — ultimately winning the Man Booker Prize in 2007 — and then later became a professor at Bard College and Brown University. In 1990, a car accident in Nigeria paralyzed Achebe from the waist down. The writer passed away from illness nearly five years ago. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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