Achebe's fiction, poetry and essays respond to a series of critical periods in Nigerian history since 1890 – the introduction and imposition of European culture and law in Eastern Nigeria; the unforeseen consequences of the attempt by Igbos to adapt that culture and its technology to their own needs and to keep ‘the best of both worlds’; the period just preceding Independence; the end of the First Republic; the civil war; the series of military coups and the struggle to understand and resist dictatorship. Throughout all his works, his continuing concern has been ‘the trouble with Nigeria’. His point of departure as a writer was the fiction of Joyce Cary who also sought to expose ‘the trouble with Nigeria’. In confronting Cary and the tradition he belonged to, Achebe was aware that he was confronting a culture, a system of values, a complex of power-relations which produced and was produced by colonialism. Drawing upon the model of his own Igbo political and cultural system and its oral traditions, Achebe reconstructed a picture and narrative of Africa and Africans caught in particular moments of history. He also recreated the form and technique of the novel ‘to carry the full weight of [his] African experience’ with particular respect to the relation between author, subject and reader.

For Cary, historical change was by definition a consequence of the European encounter with Africa. Achebe disagrees with the definition, but in many of his works he does focus his attention on the interaction between Europeans and Africans and/or their cultures.