Things Fall Apart (1958)
Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

In his influential first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe re-tells the story of European colonialist intervention in Nigeria in the 1890s from an African point of view. Inventing a solemn, heightened English to represent Nigerian dialect, he portrays the dignity and beauty of Ibo civilisation, quotes its proverbs and sets out its religious parables.

Achebe's protagonist, the "strong man" Okonkwo, is a tragic hero whose death represents the destruction of Ibo culture through the coming of Christian missionaries and British law. But what makes Things Fall Apart aesthetically and intellectually memorable, as well as politically important, is Achebe's refusal to simplify or romanticise Ibo culture. He shows its superstitions and cruelties and makes Okonkwo a complex human being, not a saintly martyr. As Achebe said in an interview, he was determined not to "make this story look nicer than it was. I went out of my way to gather all the negative things, to describe them as I think they were - good and bad ..."

Moreover, despite writing to protest racist portraits of Africa as the heart of darkness, Achebe always placed himself as an artist, as an inheritor of the great traditions of western modernism. He was inspired by Joyce, took his title from Yeats's The Second Coming and alluded to Conrad in the ironic conclusion to Things Fall Apart, when the British district commissioner thinks about writing his own account of bringing civilisation to Africa: "He had already chosen the title of the book . . . The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger."

Anthills of the Savannah is set in a fictional African country called Kangan, after its liberation in the 1960s. Through the alternating voices of a group of young African intellectuals, journalists and writers, Achebe dramatises the cycles of idealism, disillusion and corruption that often come with the aftermath of revolution. Yet in his title he also suggests that there is reason to struggle and to hope.

The anthills of the savannahs are the "structures of indestructible earth" that survive the fires of the dry season. While in Things Fall Apart women are silent and powerless, in Anthills of the Savannah they too have been freed to lead the union of different groups and faiths. Beatrice Okoh, a London-educated intellectual, takes over when the men have failed. Change is slow but "fundamentally", Achebe has written, "art is on the side of life".

Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English at Princeton University