He was not thinking of politics, just whether or not a book spoke to him

From Reading Wuthering Heights in Kenya by Helen Rittelmeyer.

Do children have to read about characters only like themselves as some activists claim? This vignette offers a contrafactual.

The trouble is figuring out which books will appeal across cultural boundaries. Philip Roth, Edith Wharton, and Louis Auchincloss could all be called regional authors, but I wouldn’t want to assume that their appeal is only regional. (Though Philip Roth obviously isn’t a hit in Sweden—yet.) It is difficult to predict whether a book will pall when it leaves its home borders. The only real way to know is to try it.

The novelist James Ngugi (who now goes by his Kikuyu name Ngugi wa Thiong’o) was educated in colonial Kenya, first at a mission school, then a village school, then a British-style boarding school for black students. His memoir of his schooldays, released two months ago, tells of his attempt to read every book in his boarding school library—not a strange ambition for a boy who would grow up to be a Nobel contender. Almost all of the books were written by white European authors. This alienated him in some cases, but by no means all:

Good: Three Men in a Boat; Wuthering Heights (“the winds of the Yorkshire moors reminded me of the frosty winds in Limuru in July”); Tolstoy’s childhood memoirs; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“recalls the magic of African oral tradition”); As You Like It (“I could not help comparing the pairs of exiles in Arden to my brother, Good Wallace,” who had run off to join the Mau Mau); Treasure Island; Sherlock Holmes; Robin Hood; the Grimms; Aesop; Hans Cristian Andersen.

Bad: King Solomon’s Mines (“could not stand without a savage Africa as the background”); With Clive in India; Biggles in Africa (though the other Biggles books were fine); any poem about flowers and seasons (“in Kenya there was sunshine and green life all year round, and flowers were never a thing of surprise”).

The breadth of his taste is probably disappointing to those who wish he had torn up his library card and proclaimed “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.” It must also disappoint those who assume that the appeal of great books is always universal. I figured the nature poems of the Romantics would speak to anyone who had ever been outside, so his line about flowers being ho-hum to a Kenyan threw me a bit. But that’s the point—it’s very hard for an outsider to predict what will fall flat and what will resonate. (Three Men in a Boat?)

[snip]

But the opinions in his memoir are those of a teenage boy, which makes them immature but also very honest. He was not thinking of politics, just whether or not a book spoke to him. There are two lessons to be drawn from this: that, contra the canon warriors, sometimes smart people should be taken at their word when they say that a great work of literature just doesn’t speak to their cultural experience; and that this often has very little to do with whether or not the author looks like them.