Photo: Chinua Achebe shot by Eliot Elisofon in Enugu months after the release of Things Fall Apart (1958), 1959. Smithsonian. Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s most influential literary voices, highlighted the deep-seated psychological and cultural challenges that countries like Nigeria faced post-independence. In a 1972 interview, Achebe described what he called a “crisis in the soul,”…