Quote by Chinua Achebe: “Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”

Creativity is how humans refuse to accept the world exactly as they found it. Making art is a way of insisting that things could be otherwise — that imagination is a form of power over reality.

Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958, just two years before Nigerian independence. Africa was in a decisive moment of decolonization, and African writers were reclaiming the right to tell their own stories on their own terms, against a dominant European literary tradition.

Nigerian novelist and critic widely regarded as the father of modern African literature. His 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is one of the most widely read works of African fiction, translated into over fifty languages. He taught for decades at Bard College in the United States.