As university students in Nigeria, Achebe and his classmates read Joyce Cary's acclaimed novel Mister Johnson and spontaneously rejected its buffoonish African protagonist, recognizing their own humanity was absent from a book critics called the finest ever written about Africa. The incident marked the moment colonized readers discovered that praised literature could misrepresent them, and that their resentment was itself evidence worth trusting.
No single people should hold a monopoly on telling the story of humanity; justice requires that every group also tell its own account so that the self-serving distortions of the dominant teller can be checked. The remedy for being badly storied by others is not silence but adding your own story to the common stock.
Colonial domination operated not only through territory and administration but by seizing the right to narrate the colonized, who were written about rather than permitted to write themselves. Reclaiming the authority to tell one's own story is therefore a concrete act of undoing conquest, not merely a cultural flourish.
When critics demand that a writer transcend local particulars to achieve the universal, that supposed universal is usually the unmarked standard of the dominant culture, which never has to announce or defend its own locality. Reading this way exposes how the specific African or non-Western work is held to a bar that the Western work is silently exempted from.
A writer's homeland is not a limitation to escape but the legitimate source of material and standing from which to speak, a claim the exiled or dispossessed author must actively reassert. Owning one's place is the precondition for a literature that answers back to those who storied you from outside.