The Education of a British-Protected Child

by Achebe, Chinua

• ISBN13: 9780307272553
• ISBN10: 0307272559
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-06
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

From the celebrated author of Things Fall Apart and winner of the Man Booker International Prize, comes a new collection of autobiographical essays-- his first new book in more than twenty years. Chinua Achebe's characteristically measured and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. In a preface, he discusses his historic visit to his Nigerian homeland on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, the story of his tragic car accident nearly twenty years ago, and the potent symbolism of President Obama's election. In "The Education of a British-Protected Child," Achebe gives us a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its "middle ground", recalling both his happy memories of reading novels in secondary school and the harsher truths of colonial rule. In "Spelling Our Proper Name", Achebe considers the African-American diaspora, meeting and reading Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, and learning what it means not to know "from whence he came." The complex politics and history of Africa figure in "What Is Nigeria to Me?", "Africa's Tarnished Name", and "Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature."-- And Achebe's extraordinary family life, comes into view in "My Dad and Me" and "My Daughters", where we observe the effect of Christian missionaries on his father and witness the culture shock of raising "brown" children in America. Charmingly personal, intellectually disciplined, and steadfastly wise, The Education of a British-Protected Child is an indispensable addition to the remarkable Achebe oeuvre.

Author Biography

Chinua Achebe lives in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.

Table of Contents

Peface	p. ix
The Education of a British-Protected Child	p. 3
The Sweet Aroma of Zik's Kitchen: Growing Up in the Ambience of a Legend	p. 25
My Dad and Me	p. 35
What Is Nigeria to Me?	p. 39
Traveling White	p. 47
Spelling Our Proper Name	p. 54
My Daughters	p. 68
Recognitions	p. 73
Africa's Tarnished Name	p. 77
Ploitics and Politicians of Language in African Literature	p. 96
African Literature as Restoration of Celebration	p. 107
Teaching Things Fall Apart	p. 124
Martin Luther King and Africa	p. 131
The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics	p. 138
Stanley Diamond	p. 150
Africa Is People	p. 155
Notes	p. 167
Acknowledgments	p. 171
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

MY DAUGHTERS

All my life I have had to take account of the millionbdifferences—some little, others quite big—between the Nigerian culture into which I was born, and the domineering Westernbstyle that infiltrated and then invaded it. Nowhere is the difference more stark and startling than in the ability to ask a parent: “How many children do you have?” The right answer should be a rebuke: “Children are not livestock!” Or better still, silence, and carry on as if the question was never asked.

But things are changing and changing fast with us, and we have been making concession after concession even when the other party shows little sign of reciprocating. And so I have learned to answer questions that my father would not have touched with a bargepole. And to my shame let me add that I suspect I may even be enjoying it, to a certain extent!

My wife and I have four children—two daughters and two sons, a lovely balance further enhanced by the symmetry of their arrivals: girl, boy, boy, girl. Thus the girls had taken strategic positions in the family.

We, my wife and I, cut our teeth on parenthood with the first girl, Chinelo. Naturally, we made many blunders. But Chinelo was up to it. She taught us. At age four or thereabouts, she began to reflect back to us her experience of her world. One day she put it in words: “I am not black; I am brown.” We sat up and began to pay attention.

The first place our minds went was her nursery school, run by a bunch of white expatriate women. But inquiries to the school board returned only assurances. I continued sniffing around, which led me in the end to those expensive and colorful children’s books imported from Europe and displayed so seductively in the better supermarkets of Lagos.

Many parents like me, who never read children’s books in their own childhood, saw a chance to give to their children the blessings of modern civilization which they never had and grabbed it. But what I saw in many of the books was not civilization but condescension and even offensiveness.

Here, retold in my own words, is a mean story hiding behind the glamorous covers of a children’s book:

A white boy is playing with his kite in a beautiful open space on a clear summer’s day. In the background are lovely houses and gardens and tree-lined avenues. The wind is good and the little boy’s kite rises higher and higher and higher. It flies so high in the end that it gets caught under the tail of an airplane that just happens to be passing overhead at that very moment. Trailing the kite, the airplane flies on past cities and oceans and deserts. Finally it is flying over forests and jungles. We see wild animals in the forests and we see little round huts in the clearing. An African village.

For some reason, the kite untangles itself at this point and begins to fall while the airplane goes on its way. The kite falls and falls and finally comes to rest on top of a coconut tree.

A little black boy climbing the tree to pick a coconut beholds this strange and terrifying object sitting on top of the tree. He utters a piercing cry and literally falls off the tree.

His parents and their neighbors rush to the scene and discuss this apparition with great fear and trembling. In the end they send for the village witch doctor, who appears in his feathers with an entourage of drummers. He offers sacrifices and prayers and then sends his boldest man up the tree to bring down the object, which he does with appropriate reverence. The witch doctor then leads the village in a procession from the coconut tree to the village shrine, where the supernatural object is deposited and where it is worshipped to this day.

That was the most dramatic of the many imported, beautifully packaged, but demeaning readings available to our children, perhaps given them as birthday presents by their

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Excerpted from The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
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