isiting professor, notably at the universities of Connecticut and Massachusetts, as well as Dartmouth University. In the mid-1970s he returned to Nigeria, publishing criticism, political discourse, and poetry in books and journals and reentering government service in a limited way; however, in the aftermath of one of Nigeria's coups, he relocated to the United States permanently in 1987, the same year he published Anthills of the Savanna, his first novel since the 1960s.
In 1990, Achebe was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. Today he is a professor of languages at Bard College in New York.
Historical context for Things Fall Apart
The master historical narrative for the setting of Things Fall Apart is rather less the history of Africa than the history of Europe in Africa. That is because in the late 19th century, after some 50 years of more or less ignoring slave-trade-related outposts on the continent, the major European powers began to reassert their commercial and political presence in order to exploit a variety o
...