So a lot happened this week that stirred the hornets' nest across the Black Twitter diaspora.

I'm gonna double back to this @BBCAfrica post. Many folks cite incidents like it as illustrative of why "Africans should tell their own stories". I think the idea is worth unpacking ...

The axiom is an interpolation of a Chinua Achebe quote. It sounds wonderful and important to me. urgent, even. The question is what stories are we talking about here? who is the "their" whose stories are being told? who is doing the telling, and what does "telling" look like?

If there's any lesson we ought to have learned from the 'Africa Rising' years, it should be that the sunshine journalism that accompanied that narrative did a lot to hinder the accountability role of media which should feed itself back into political systems across the continent.

Afterall, the narrative went, if African countries were becoming democratic, Africa's middle class was growing, with tech entrepreneurship fueling innovation, this proved that Western neoliberal orthodoxy was finally working in Africa and concerns about it could be overlooked.

We now know that the "Africa Rising" narrative, while not entirely built around fictional developments, was largely a PR exercise designed to open up Africa to western investors. Equally, many current African political-economic fissures stem from decisions taken during that era.

Thus, "Africans should tell their own stories" is inseparable from that zeitgeist. If "Africans should tell their own stories" means English-speaking, middle-class Africans positioning themselves as gatekeepers of new narratives about Africa, I'm not sure what good that does.

If "Africans should tell their own stories" means uncritically positive, context-free and simplistic narratives about a tiny sliver of Africans, this doesn't help Africa to be understood on its own terms, which is ostensibly the point of "Africans should tell their own stories".

I often poke fun at "The Africa You Never See on TV" - respectability-driven jostling for status among Africa's diasporic middle class because that's precisely what it is. And truthfully, a lot of what I see lurking behind "Africans should tell their own stories" is exactly that.

"Africans should tell their own stories" in reality would be an unpathologized, non-deterministic portrayal of the daily realities of Africans in all their variations and contradictions, just like everywhere else. Anything else is simply swapping one bad paradigm for another.