How can fiction be interesting if one character is not made the ugly villain and another, the white knight? And if the Europeans found us Africans barefoot, how else do we want them to describe us in novels? And how are we dignified when we write our stories in the coloniser's language? You may claim that the reason is to gain a broader readership, but why can't we write in our own language and try to colonise other parts of the world to read in our languages and alphabet? And didn't Things Fall Apart shoot us in the foot by saying there were not even bicycles in Nigeria, and it was brought there by the white man - which is true? In the last two chapters, the book also says when OKWONKO and five other men were detained: "The six men ate nothing throughout that day and the next. They were not even given any water to drink, and they could not go out to urinate or go into the bush when they were pressed." This implies there were not even latrines there in the 19th century. So, how do you want a novelist to portray characters from that demographic? In Africa, the only nation that has asked for linguistic affirmative action from the onset of their literature, the very fact that we had to create a simplified version of our English and be praised for it is some form of discrimination.

In contrast, the West does not take us seriously but praises us for shortcuts, meaning we are not smart enough to learn accurate English. We need a new breed of authors who will go their own way and not write in African English. I do not condone this Affirmative Action in novel writing.

Nobody says that we should NOT have variety in our set of African authors. To every writer, their own. Yes, I concur with you that we Africans have an easy way around it when it comes to writing and speaking English. We are less scrutinised. At worst, pan-Africanists and Westerners would call it a deliberate variety of English. The same leniency is not given to Russians who write in English. Fortunately, we have linguists such as Oshodi and Olowela.

(The two researchers propose better English in Africa with proper grammar and phonetics. They argue that English has not been spoken in Africa correctly, let alone long enough, for us to claim an African English.)

Oshodi, B., and Olowela, O. “The standard Nigerian English in Perspective: A variety or an interlanguage?” Journal of Second and Multiple Language Acquisition, vol. 8, no. 2, 2020, pp. 28 - 44.