Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author, has been considered by critics as one of the most impor-tant founders of African literature, in reaction to the literature that until then had been produced on Africa. In the sequence of the most diverse colonial literary texts and the arguments that validated colonialism in Africa, always in a dimension of affirmation of white superiority and black savagery, and in which any value, history, or notion of culture was denied to African peoples, Achebe begins a mission to show the western world that pre-colonial Igbo culture had beauty, philosophy, dignity and viable social, political and judicial structures, and that it was by no means an example of the «blank slate» that many Europeans wanted people to believe. In this sense, Achebe publishes his first novel, Things Fall Apart, still in a colonial context (1958), to make his culture known, realistically and based on internal knowledge, in a counterpoint to this prejudiced and racist European devaluation.