When was Things Fall Apart written?

Things Fall Apart was written to describe Nigerian culture and the effects of European colonization upon it. It was also a response to the Western beliefs that the Africans were uncivilized and barbaric.

Achebe got most of his view from his own culture through the writing of Europeans. At first he related to the European writings, but as time went on, he felt they were poor caricatures and stereotypes of the actual people, and he tried to show this through his writing.

1- Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, seen as a racist writing

2- The consequences of the European Colonization.

3- 'Things Fall Apart' was also said to be inspired / as a response to Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'.

The title comes from the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats which is about the demise of a society by colonisation:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those Words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

He wrote Things Fall Apart to give an example of man's inhumanity against man.