London, 17 July 1958. Chinua Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart, bursts into the international literary scene. For many, this is the inaugural moment of modern African fiction. Indeed, a rich oral tradition had existed for eons, and African writers had published their work in the continent and beyond before that date. In Achebe's own Nigeria, Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi had recently received some degree of international attention. Their contemporaries, T.M. Aluko and Gabriel Okara had also published short stories and poems in the early to mid-fifties. Pita Nwana, D.O. Fagunwa, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, among others, had penned well-received novels in the country's major indigenous languages. The Onitsha market writers, so named after the bustling infrastructure that abetted their publishing efforts, were selling pamphlets on the seductions of modern life by the thousands, shaping popular literary tastes.

As we will see, the arrival of Things Fall Apart revolutionized Nigerian writing, and this was in part due to its unprecedented global impact. Today, Things Fall Apart is easily the most widely read African novel; it has been translated into more than 60 languages and has sold over 10 million copies. Throughout the world, it features as a set text in secondary schools and university courses in the humanities and social sciences. Most significantly, Things Fall Apart set its author off on the road of literary by wrenching open the doors of the literary establishment for African writers ‘without compromising that legitimacy with racial and cultural condescension which, for a long time in literary history, had been a constant, almost inevitable precondition for granting legitimacy for any intellectual or cultural production,’ as the Marxist critic Biodun Jeyifo put it in a recent tribute.

The global impact of Achebe's novel had less to do with his superior intellectual origins and choice of subject matter – the disintegrating effects of colonialism in a self-contained Igbo community and the epistemic violence of colonial discourse – than with his deft transposition of orature, indigenous language, and worldview into the Western medium of the novel to ‘explore in the once-colonial language of English the subtle, often fatal seductions of the colonial project; and to assert a specifically African voice and historical presence’, to use Elleke Boehmer's words.