Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel, set in the fictional Igbo village of Umuofia in late-nineteenth-century Nigeria, follows the warrior Okonkwo as British missionaries and colonial administrators destroy the world he has spent his life defending — the breakthrough modern African novel in English, and the work that changed the vantage point of the colonial story from conqueror to conquered.
In the last pages of Things Fall Apart, the British District Commissioner looks at Okonkwo's body and decides it would make an interesting paragraph in the book he plans to write. The title he has already chosen is The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. That sentence is the whole point. A man's life, a village's history, a civilization's order — reduced to a footnote in someone else's story. Chinua Achebe wrote his novel to make that reduction impossible.