luke, Rand is certainly a polemicist, but she can offer the reader a powerful mission statement, despite that her characters become mere mouthpieces.
African Love, I get a bit weary with the oppressed people syndrome going after Caucasian authors in their time who tried to deal with *difference*. As it was once pointed out in another thread, Achebe himself is an Anglophone. Is Huckleberry Finn racist? No, because the reality of the South at that time was worse than what comes out of Twain's pen in the guise of a boy tough rascal.
Twain spent seven years on this novel; it is a satiric masterpiece that exposes Southern culture as so much deadwood, and Jim is actually one of the most morally centered characters in the book. In the same vein, Conrad has the courage to raise his voice and ask if colonialism is worth what it was doing to the Western soul. It is unfair to expect Conrad to create Sidney Poitier in an era when the British Enpire still ruled most of the known world. It took great courage just to publish Heart of Darkness as a text.
If I had a chip on my shoulder about how the disabled were portrayed by 18th and 19th century writers, that tunnel vision would hinder me from getting at certain levels of interpretation. Achebe is unfair in his level of expectation and laying on the guilt. Africa and Europe have clashed and interacted since Carthage very nearly destroyed the city of Rome, and human rights were few for a very long time, human existence was brutal, and I refuse to erase that history just because 1860 to 1960 plus saw a surge of progressive liberalism.