4 ideas
In 'The Novelist as Teacher,' Achebe recalls a Nigerian student who wrote about 'winter' when he meant the harmattan, the dry dust-laden season that actually shapes Nigerian life. The boy did so because classmates would mock him as a 'bushman' for naming his own climate. Achebe offers the episode as evidence that colonial education had taught Africans that their own experience was unfit for serious writing.
Achebe argues that after colonialism the African writer's first job is to help society regain belief in itself. The writer does this by showing that African peoples had cultures, philosophy, and dignity before Europeans arrived. On this view art is inseparable from social purpose, and Achebe dismisses 'art for art's sake' as a luxury, even an evasion, for writers whose societies have been taught self-contempt.
Achebe identifies a pattern in which Western critics praise African writing for being 'universal' and fault it for being parochial. In practice, 'universal' is used to mean conformity to European experience and taste. The critic's own local perspective poses as the neutral standard, so African particularity reads as a flaw and European particularity reads as humanity itself. Achebe says the word should be banned until it stops meaning 'as far from home as possible.'
Achebe defends writing in English, the language colonialism imposed, rather than rejecting it. His grounds are that English lets writers reach across Africa's many language groups and the world. The writer's job is to bend it into 'a new English,' still in communion with its ancestral home but altered by Igbo proverb, rhythm, and thought. Having been given the language, he intends to use it and change it rather than let it change him.