Just wanted to back McDuck and say I read this book in college for a class on "modern, post-modern, and post-colonial" literature -- the book fits squarely in the third category. It's the first, or one of the first, books in English to look at life in a small African village from an insider's (positive) perspective. We read the book right after Heart of Darkness for the contrast.

It might also help in appreciating the book to know that the title comes from a line in Yeats' "Second Coming" (my edition may have had the poem as an epigraph....can't remember now...). The end of the world in Things Fall Apart is the coming of the white man.

....and that's all I remember from my class. There are a number of sites that contain essays about the book. Google's list