In his chapter on ‘National Consciousness’ in The Wretched of the Earth (1965), Frantz Fanon speaks of the importance of rescuing history from the colonizer's custody. In the face of European denials of any worthwhile native culture or history, he states:

That ‘Africans did not hear of civilization for the first time from Europeans’, as Chinua Achebe declared, is a claim central to many works in the early stages of contesting a colonialist mentality. Achebe sees this as one of the main messages carried in his historical novels, Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964), the first of which will be discussed in greater detail below. Perhaps because Africa has been the victim of the greatest denial and contempt, seen as the ‘Dark Continent’, and, as Fanon puts it, the home of ‘barbarism, degradation, and bestiality’, the affirmation of its cultural validity, the delineation of a history in its own terms, has been particularly the task of novelists throughout the African continent such as Achebe from Nigeria, Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana, Assia Djebar from Algeria, Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya and Solomon Plaatje from South Africa.