Chinua Achebe's 1958 debut novel Things Fall Apart​ has sold 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into 50 languages. The book provided a unique picture of late 19th century Igbo culture in Nigeria, focusing on a single village and its leader to illustrate the country's early experience of colonialism and British rule. Achebe followed Things Fall Apart with three more novels before abandoning the form when the Biafran War began in the 1960s. He returned to fiction in 1987 with his dark, political work Anthills of the Savannah, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Achebe became involved in politics in the early 1980s, serving as deputy national president of the People's Redemption Party, then as president of the municipal union in his hometown, Ogidi. In 1990, after a car accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, he moved to the United States, where he continued to teach and write.

In this 1994 interview, Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Chinua Achebe from his home in Annendale-on-Hudson in New York. Achebe died in 2013, at the age of 82.

I encountered [Irish writer Joyce Cary's 1939 novel Mister Johnson] in college, as an undergraduate in the English department at the University of Ibadan. Not just my response, but the response of the whole class was quite definite. We didn't like what Joyce Cary was doing. I remember that it was interesting because our teachers were all English, and we were all Nigerian. Our teachers thought it was a marvellous book. It is still called the greatest African novel by some people in the West. One of my colleagues shocked the teacher by saying that the only moment he enjoyed in the book was when Johnson was shot. That was a very drastic response, but it conveys the exasperation that we, that Africans, feel when they encounter this kind of mindless racism.

The history of Africa is such that our business should be to restore what was lost. To take on the task of redefining ourselves. And that is what I try to do in my writing. I see that as a kind of service which is demanded of us by Africa because we betrayed her. My father, for instance, became a first-generation Christian. He abandoned the faith of his fathers. I'm putting it rather strongly, so that what I'm trying to say will be clear. In actual fact, one's life doesn't stop because you become a Christian. There are even some advantages in getting acquainted with another culture — I'm not saying that there aren't. But basically, we were led into accepting that what our forefathers, our ancestors, have done through the millennia was somehow misguided and that somebody else, who's come from afar, can straighten us out. That he has the way, the truth and the life and that we had been sunk in blindness. That's an outrageous thing to accept. And so, in redefining ourselves, we were making amends for this betrayal.