Africa’s Tarnished Name - A Review
“If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” – Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe’s Africa’s Tarnished Name at first sight seemed to be just another essay by a legendary name, but after letting it brew for some hours, it felt like a reckoning, and it is.
It strips away the romantic veils and polite silences that have long cushioned Western portrayals of Africa. Instead, he offers a fierce clarity: Africa’s name was not simply forgotten; it was deliberately misnamed, and continues to be misused and abused.
But what happens when a continent begins to remember its true name?
I bought the 55-page collection of 4 essays as an afterthought. Its petite A6-sized pages gave me the impression that I could gobble it in one bite, and I almost did! I breezed through the first essay, “What’s Nigeria to me?”, whose storyline hits like a bad hangover when you know full well that you didn’t even catch a whiff of the holy waters. “Travelling white” gave me goosebumps and a vision, not sure which came first, but that part he said, “Southern Rhodesia was simply awful.” It hit home. Because it is home, restored to its True name, Zimbabwe, yet, the feeling Chinua Achebe felt in 1960, in some places, can still be felt today. At this point, I began to see Chinua Achebe in his True form, not just as a critic of empire, but as a cartographer of recovery —a thinker who saw that to name is to claim, misnaming is a wound, and re-naming is a form of healing.
The essay “Africa’s Tarnished Name” is placed just rightly in the booklet. Let’s walk through this essay using two of The Thinking Savannah’s guiding tools: The Acacia Framework and Maps of Memory.
Naming as Nourishment (Through The Acacia Framework lens)
The Acacia Framework (note to self, I don’t think I’ve spoken much about this tool) teaches that knowledge must be rooted in:
Belonging (who we are and where we come from),
Balance (how we relate to others and the earth),
Becoming (how we grow and shape the future).
Chinua Achebe shows how colonial narratives uprooted all three.
Writers like Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene didn’t just misdescribe Africa. They emptied it, flattened it into a backdrop, a stage for European moral drama. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the African landscape becomes a symbol of chaos rather than culture. Africans are rendered voiceless, unnamed, undignified.
Chinua Achebe challenges this not with rage but with an awkward calm, a re-rootedness of sorts. He names the distortion in plain language and then lifts up the truth. Africa is not a void; it is a cradle of civilisation. Its name is not “dark”; it is deep.
Balance is not restoration of the old world, but renewal of dignity. Not romanticism, but responsibility.
Redrawing the World (Maps of Memory analysis)
Chinua Achebe’s deeper warning is that distortion is not accidental.
Western images of Africa were part of a deliberate cartography, maps of memory designed not to remember Africa, but to control how the world thinks of it.
These maps were drawn in literature, in missionary schools, and diplomatic language. They told us that Africa had no history, that its people were stuck in the past, that its present could only be shaped from outside.
But as The Savannah teaches through the Maps of Memory tool, memory is not passive; it is political. And every generation has the power to redraw it.
Chinua Achebe’s invite: take back the pen.
Message from the grave:
“Africa has been badly served by the world of letters, and its image needs urgent repair, not to impress the West, but to tell the truth.”
In plain English, write again, speak from within, let’s tell our own stories, not in reaction, but in rootedness.
The Savannah Call
What the world thinks of Africa doesn’t matter. What does Africa remember of herself?
The title essay says it all: naming is power.
Africa must reclaim her voice in the world, her wisdom in the future, and her dignity in the face of history’s betrayal.
So, to the storytellers: Write stories that do not explain Africa, but extend her memory. To the teachers: Bring names back into the classroom. Not “tribes,” but nations. Not “myths,” but philosophies. To the builders: Design systems that reflect African rhythms, collective growth and, spiritual balance. To the elders and youth: Walk together. Let memory be a fire passed on, not a relic hidden away.
Final Word
Africa’s tarnished name is not the end of the story. The last essay is titled “Africa is People,” and all I can say is that names can be cleaned and stories can be retold.
In the savannah, even the dust holds memory. Let us walk it with open eyes.
Let us be the ones who remember.