The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
By Chinua Achebe
Alfred A. Knopf
208 pages. $24.95
Growing up and as youngsters dealing with academia at the secondary level, "we the boys" talked a whole lot about scholarship and applauded the works of our literary idols -- Chinua Achebe, John Munonye, Adiele Afigbo, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Agostinho Neto, Cyprien Ekwensi, Kofi Awoonor, Ali Mazrui, Meja Nwangi, Dominic Mulaisho, Elechi Amadi and uncountable others. We talked quite a bit as aspiring scholars to a point our mothers, whichever house we had convened would stuff our mouth with food to quiet us for the fact we talked too much on issues of the day as they did look forward to a developed youngish intellectuals. But time did fly, just like that.
And as a whole lot, too, has changed over the years based practically on generational thing that popped up with new era, anyone who thought Chinua Achebe was done writing his fascinating stories or had called it quits in using his pen to express his feelings about societal ills and "naked dictatorship" of colonialism, and at the same time educating our minds with his brilliant essays, storytelling and wit in literature, ought to stop by any bookstore and ask about the literary giant's newest entry on the bookshelves.
Or if you are too lazy to walk or drive to a good bookstore in your hood, just google "The Education of a British-Protected Child" and sample a few of the hundreds of thousands of entries found there on the subject matter. I was even baffled from what I saw wondering about a book just released in less than a week and how it has collected over six hundred and something thousand entries. And who are these people curious about Achebe's new book? Would it mean they have been waiting for his new release since he has not written a book in twenty years? Or would it be the master storyteller is back again and everybody is eager to check it out, known for who he is?
Well, I did stop by many of the bookstores in my neck of the wood upon hearing Achebe has written a new book which would be his first new book in twenty years. First, I had called Random House for a copy which was kind of late not knowing the protocol was something I should have taken care of earlier; that is, if I had intended to read the book. I'm quite sure I have gone through that before, with a different publishing house, though. In that quest,I had called Borders to find out if Achebe's book has arrived the shelves. The sales clerk at Borders, the one at Howard Hughes Center Promenade in Culver City, told me they've "sold out." She requested for an order immediately which would however take about a week to reach me. I had no nerves to wait. I called some other branches in the Southland. All that I called either sold out or haven't received shipment yet.
As it happened and coincidentally, I was heading to Long Beach when I bumped into Borders on Bellflower Blvd. I walked in and asked for Achebe's new entry. The sales clerk ran the author's name and found out they haven't received shipment yet. He placed a copy on hold for me. When the shipment arrived, I was called to "come and pick the book up."
And I did get the copy on time for early review. From the preface in which the author tells us about the fiftieth year anniversary of Things Fall Apart, the breaking news of his auto accident relayed to his wife, his family's reaction to that and sixteen well-written essays, Achebe literally wrote his memoirs in The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays." Achebe talked about his two daughters, Chinelo and Nwando; and his two boys, Ikechukwu and Chidi who gave him all the support he needed when he was involved in an automobile accident that nearly cost him his life.
In the first essay, The Education of a British-Protected Child, Achebe did not find colonialism funny, especially the result of lack of profound leadership in Nigeria, and even assuring his readers that he would not give "a discourse on colonialism," he could not "swallow" the fact that colonialism was damaging to the African continent pointing out briefly the evils of colonial rule:
"In my view, it is gross crime for anyone to impose himself on another, to seize his land and his history, and then to compound this by making out that the victim is some kind of ward or minor requiring protection. It is too disingenous. Even the aggressor seems to know this, which is why he will sometimescomouflage his brigandage with such brazen hypocrisy."
Achebe was born in Ogidi 78-years ago in what use to be a Southern Protectorate of British Empire, and then Eastern Region, now Anambra State of a fabricated nation-state ordained by the colonists. His father, an early convert was a teacher for the missionaries. Receiving his early education at Church Missionary Society Primary School, he attended Government College, Umuahia, and then proceeded to University College, Ibadan, for his first degree. He became a writer rather than "a clear-cut scholar," supposedly his dream when Trinity College, Cambridge, declined his application for admission. Being turned down for post-graduate studies at Trinity College, he found work as a producer at Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation.
On What is Nigeria to me? Achebe spoke very ill of a country that was just six years old with the sudden eruption of chaos leading to the pogrom and civil war. He applauds the country as a child that is "gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward." Writing with emotion, his tale of experience in Lagos during the crisis when alcohol-addled soldiers' crackdown on Igbos and their properties coupled with a telephone call alerting him "armed soldiers" who had been on the rampage came looking for him and in his own words because of the book that he wrote, A Man of the People.
Achebe wrote with anger and distress [my emphasis], a war that was deliberately programmed to wipe out the Igbo people from the face of this planet in retaliation to where a group of young military officers organized themselves in what would be Nigeria's first military coup and a topple of its First Republic. And just like the counter coup, J.T.U Aguiyi-Ironsi and his host Adekunle Fajuyi were kidnapped, flogged and murdered in the most brutal of circumstances on the orders of Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, while 4th Batallion commanding officer J Akahan kept himself busy rounding up Igbo millitary officers and killing them in an immense scale.
Or the six-year-old boy in Minna, at school and witnessing a band of northern nihilists and hoodlums walk into his classroom and stab his teacher with a machete, a native Yoruba who was mistaken for Igbo, bleeding from her wounds to death. That being emphasized by me, Achebe is totally disappointed with Nigeria not because of the hoodlums and nihilists but because of the federal government that stood by and allowed such horrific events to unfold.
Why the pogrom was going on in the north, Igbo people were also sought in Lagos by drunken "federal troops" who had launched a search and kill attack. Meanwhile, Achebe had whisked his wife and kids back to the East while he stayed-put to await the outcome of the carnage unleashed by the nihilists, hoodlums and "federal troops." In Lagos, Achebe hid from place to place until he luckily escaped the federal troops who had launched a manhunt for him. In that very situation, Achebe finds it difficult to forgive "Nigeria" for what it did to his kith and kin. The northerners and their collaborators had a masterplan since the revenge in the counter coup, allegedly, wasn't enough, and if the conflict had ended after the counter coup, Achebe had this to say:
If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the north and unleashed waves of brutal massacres, which Colin Legum of 'The Observer' was the first to describe as a pogrom. It was estimated that thirty thousand civilian men, women and children died in these massacres. Igbos were fleeing in hundreds of thousands from all parts of Nigeria to their homeland in the east I was one of the last to flee from Lagos. I simply could not bring myself quickly enough to accept that I could no longer live in my nation's capital, although the facts clearly said so. One Sunday morning I was telephoned from Broadcasting House and informed that armed soldiers who appeared drunk had come looking for me to test which was stronger, my pen or their gun!
The offense of my pen was that it had written a novel called A man of the People, a bitter satire on political corruption in an African country that resembled Nigeria. I wanted the novel to be a denunciation of the kind of independence we were experiencing in postcolonial Nigeria and many other countries in the 1960s, and I intended to scare my countrymen into good behavior with a frightening cautionary tale. The best monster I could come up with was a military coup d'etat, which every sane Nigeria at the time knew was rather far-fetched!...
As one reads on, Achebe tells us about his travels to many African countries in which he acknowledged "the chief problem was racism." He did go on to tell us about Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, Chukwuemeka Ike, I.N.C. Aniebo and Ken Saro-Wiwa who were all products of Government College, Umuahia, and what they read in those days at the school library -- Treasure Island, Tom Brown School Days, The Prisoner of Zender, David Copperfield -- which had nothing to do with African literature.
In Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature, and as a founding editor of The African Writers Series, he told us about the gathering of African writers in 1962 at Makerere University , Kampala, Uganda, which included the poet Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi, and Obi Wali he said "was himself a teacher of literature and a close friend of the poet Christopher Okigbo, might have been expected to lead the way along the lines of his prescription; but what he did was abandon his acdemic career for politics and business." Achebe was disappointed in Wali's move.
Achebe wrote extensively on African Literature as Restoration of Celebration, Teaching Things Fall Apart, Martin Luther King Jr. and The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics.
The book, a reflection of events takes us aback to take a look at Africa's past which literally has been a tragedy. Nobel Laureate, Tony Morrison simply put it thus: "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe. For passion, intellect and crystalline prose, he is unsurpassed."
Without question, Chinua Achebe still got game.
