How Often Do We Tell African Stories?

Walk into most Nigerian classrooms today, and you’ll find shelves lined with glossy books filled with stories of snowy forests, gingerbread men, and magical lands far from the red earth of Aba or the crowded bus parks of Accra. 

These stories are often well-written, beautifully illustrated, and culturally rich in their own way. But they aren’t ours. And when they are the only stories our children grow up reading, the result is not a broadened worldview it’s an erased one.

African children are brimming with imagination. What they lack is consistent access to books that reflect their lives, their neighborhoods, their foods, their languages, and the stories they hear from their grandparents. 

This absence is not due to a lack of African stories. They exist. In fact, they’re growing in number. Writers like Atinuke (Anna Hibiscus), Olubunmi Aboderin-Talabi (Tobi Learns to Swim), and Ifeoma Onyefulu (A is for Africa) are creating beautiful, relatable stories rooted in African culture and childhood.

The issue isn’t creativity, it’s access.

Despite this rich pool of homegrown literature, these books are often absent from school libraries and local bookstores. Many institutions hesitate to stock them unless the author is already popular or the publisher is foreign. 

It’s a quiet, persistent belief that stories are more valuable when they come from “out there.” And that belief affects everything, from what children read, to how they see themselves. It wasn’t always like this.

Many Nigerian adults fondly remember books like Chike and the River, An African Night’s Entertainment, or The Drummer Boy. These were stories that entertained and educated, that showed children growing up in familiar towns, facing real challenges, and learning values within cultural contexts they understood. 

Somewhere along the way, those stories began to disappear from the spotlight. Replaced by shinier imports, they were pushed to the edges, and eventually, off the shelves.

This loss matters. Because when children don’t see themselves in stories, they begin to believe their lives aren’t worth writing about.

We don’t need to stop reading foreign books. There’s value in learning about different cultures. But balance is crucial. Children should be able to read about snow and sand. About talking bears and stubborn goats. About Christmas in London and New Yam festivals in Onitsha.

And this is where schools, publishers, bookstores, and even parents have work to do. If every school stocked just ten African children’s books each term, if every parent bought even one local story for their child, we would start to rebuild a culture of storytelling that places value on the African experience.

Even more promising is the wave of young African writers now telling their own stories about friendship, kindness, love, family, community, and hope. Some of these books have been published, others are still waiting to be found. 

But without proper support from educational systems, libraries, and local publishing industries these voices may never make it to the children they were meant for.

If we truly care about literacy, we must care about relevance. 

We must care about representation. It’s not just about teaching kids to read. It’s about teaching them that their stories matter too.

We often say we want to promote African literature. The question is, how often do we tell African stories, and how often do we make sure they are read? Because the stories are here. What’s missing is the bridge that brings them home.