Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
Colonialism through African eyes: Africa's defining novel
In 1958 Chinua Achebe, a 28-year-old at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, published a novel about Okonkwo, a proud Igbo strongman whose world collapses with the arrival of missionaries and British rule. He took the title from a poem by Yeats. The book has sold more than 20 million copies in dozens of languages and became the starting point of modern African literature.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 19 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 11 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 10 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 9 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 22 years later
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 25 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 22 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 17 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 5 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 1 year earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 17 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 16 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 13 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 1 year earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 10 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 21 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 22 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 13 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 5 years earlier
- 1955–1975 Vietnam War — 3 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — same year
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 17 years later
Americas
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — 1 year later
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 2 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 11 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 12 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 25 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 22 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 17 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 16 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 4 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 1 year later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 84)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 77)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 69)
- Mao Zedong (aged 65)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 40)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 29)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 28)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 24)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 74)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 69)