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Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Rebecca Kessby,

and today we go back to 1958 and the publication of a book

that would change the world of literature. Chenua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

It was the first type of book that really told the story of African peoples from an African point of view.

Professor Nwando Acebe is the youngest of Chenua Ace Achebe's children.

She teaches African history at Michigan State University.

This is not to say that my father was the first writer to ever pen an African novel but things fall apart certainly was the first

book that began what we know know as the genre of African literature.

Chenua Achebe grew up in the Eboe culture

under British colonial rule in Nigeria.

He showed enormous academic potential

from a young age and won scholarships to the top schools, but it wasn't long

before he began questioning what he was being taught about his own continent, all from a purely

European perspective.

What they did was introduce them to the greats like Conrad's Heart of Darkness,

and my father talks about reading those books, but siding with the white man against the African

...