In his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe observes: “Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered” \[1\]. Global health has likewise come to revere achievement—success stories, elimination targets, and aspirational end dates. But Achebe’s novel traces how a seemingly stable society disintegrates when its organising principles erode. The tragedy is not sudden; it is cumulative, and triggered by colonial forces outside of the local culture.
