From G. D. Killam, "Chinua Achebe," in International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, ed. Robert L. Ross (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 99-109.

Novels: Things Fall Apart (1958); No Longer at Ease (1960); Arrow of God (1964); A Man of the People (1966); Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

Chinua Achebe, b. 16 November 1930, in village of Ogidi, Eastern Nigeria; father a catechist for Church Missionary Society, in whose village school Achebe was first educated; Government College at Unuahia; University College at Ibadan, 1948-1953.  1957 attended British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School.  Talks Producer for Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. When Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria in 1967 (and with outbreak of Civil War), Achebe traveled widely in quest for help for Biafran cause.

quoted from Achebe, "The Novelist as Teacher," 1958:

 “[A]s far as I am concerned the fundamental theme must first be disposed of.  This theme--put quite simply--is that African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.  It is this dignity that African people all but lost during the colonial period, and it is this that they must now regain.”

Killam on Things Fall Apart:

The novel tells the tragic story of the rise and fall of Okonkwo and the equally tragic story of the disintegration of Igbo culture, symbolized by the agrarian society of Umuofia under the relentless encroachments of British Christian Imperialism.  Okonkwo embodies the qualities most valued by his people (even if in an exaggerated form)--energy, a strong sense of purpose, a sense of communal cooperativeness, which at the same time are marked by a strong sense of individuality.  Both Okonkwo and his society also display a degree of rigidity and inflexibility that ultimately account for their destruction.  In portraying the complexities of the psychological makeup of Okonkwo and of the mores of the clan, Achebe shows the civility, dignity, and orderliness of the society and the rigidity that made it impossible for the clan to adapt to the inevitable changes wrought by the more powerful and imported culture.  Things Fall Apart is therefore both an apostrophe to and a lament for the past and a fictional evocation of the inevitability of historical change.