This study examines the role of African novelists as major sources of historiography of Africa, and the socio-cultural experience of its people. Although many African novelists have over the years reflected issues of social and political significance in their works, only a few scholarly works seem to have addressed this phenomenon adequately. A major objective of this dissertation then is to help fill this gap by explicating these issues in the fiction of Chinua Achebe, a great iconic figure in African Literature. Utilizing the conceptual and analytical framework suggested in C.T. Keto's, Africa-Centered Perspective on History (1989), the contexts, themes, structures and techniques of the following five novels were examined: Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). The novels were shown to be replete with cogent social and political insights which provide an accurate portraiture of African/ Nigerian history of the 19th and 20th Century. The study seeks to make a modest contribution to the steadily mounting body of Africa centered criticism of the African novel/fiction within the context of African social and political history. / African American Studies