For a long time, the story of Africa was told almost exclusively through the words of European writers. That began to change in the 1950s, as African countries achieved independence and African writers began to tell their own stories.
One book in particular, "Things Fall Apart," published in 1958, has become a classic of world literature, translated into some 50 languages, selling 11 million copies.
It was set in a village in what is now Nigeria, just as the Ibo people there had their first encounters with European Christian missionaries.
Chinua Achebe was just 28 when he wrote the book, his first novel. He's since written numerous other works of fiction, mostly set in post-colonial Africa, as well as nonfiction and poetry, and last year was named winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.
Achebe was partly paralyzed in a car accident in Nigeria in 1990. For most of the years since then, he's lived and taught at Bard College in New York.
In Washington recently, I asked him what he'd set out to do 50 years ago.