Chinua Achebe, the author of "Things Fall Apart" (1959) in English in order to reach a greater audience, especially the English audience who were the colonial rulers of Nigeria, his homeland. With his book, he tried to write African literature and portray the history of his nation in a different way, from an African point of view but in English for Europeans to understand it. Writing this story in English was sort of writing back at the center of the British Empire, contesting the previous books of African themes but writen from a white perspective, like Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".
On the other hand, it showed that Africans were not the backward people that European stereotypes portrayed. They had their own culture and histories and they could express them in English for the European colonizers to understand.