Colonial literature often portrayed Africans as primitive people awaiting “enlightenment”. Chinua Achebe answered with Things Fall Apart (1958), set in the 1890s in the fictional village of Umuofia. Its protagonist, Okonkwo, is a proud yam farmer and wrestling champion who strives to escape the shadow of his easy-going father, Unoka.
The novel shows a complex society — proverbs, courts, assemblies, a deep theology — and then the trauma of missionaries and administrators, the estrangement of Okonkwo’s son Nwoye and Okonkwo’s own suicide, an abomination in Igbo culture. A line from the book says the colonizers “put a knife” on what held the community together.
Things Fall Apart became a cornerstone of world literature and changed how Africa is written and read.