Forethoughts: The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe

And so I come to The Education of a British-Protected Child, a book penned by one of the real icons of African literature, Nigerian Chinua Achebe. Recently published in the UK on the 12th January 2010 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin), this new work from Achebe – a writer perhaps most famed for his ‘African Trilogy’ – consists of sixteen collected essays, which explore various autobiographical topics. Join me in these forethoughts as I tell you a little bit about the book, and my motivations for reading it.

From the outset I must confess – rather shamefully – that I’ve never traveled far into the literature of Achebe. But I don’t think that this will have a negative affect on my reading of this autobiographical collection. You see getting to know the backgrounds and motivations of a writer is a major passion of mine – whether I know them or not – because along with learning more about the craft, I always feel that if I can get to know how a writer has evolved behind the pen, then I will be better able to understand his/her writings in front of it. To meet this end I always try to read as much memoir-related material from writers as I can; anything from autobiographies to letter collections, journal records to essays, even notes scribbled on the back of napkins if they’re available to me.

So even though I approach The Education of a British-Protected Child as a relative newcomer to the writings of Achebe, I still approach with much anticipation and hope. Anticipation because I’m about to set out on a new and exciting journey into the more personal side of a very highly acclaimed writer, and hope because I really want to come away from this book not only harbouring a desire to explore more of Achebe’s writings, but to have discovered something important about the writer’s mind.

And if the lengthy cover blurb for The Education of a British-Protected Child is to be believed then I am definitely in for an incredible journey of discovery:

Chinua Achebe is one of the towering figures in world literature, whose writing forged new ways of expression and overturned perceptions of Africa permanently. This unprecedented volume of autobiographical essays, many of which have never been published before, is one of his most powerful and personal works to date.

The pieces here span reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on Achebe’s lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of ‘Africa’ for its own authorship. For the first thirty years of his life, before Nigeria’s independence in 1960, Achebe was officially defined as a ‘British-Protected Person’. In his essay ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’ he gives us a vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its ‘middle ground’, interrogating both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary schools and also the harsher truths of colonial rule.

In other pieces Achebe’s extraordinary family come to the fore, such as in ‘My Dad and Me’ and ‘My Daughters’. Here too are writings on Achebe’s complex and often tense relationship with his native land over the last half-century, such as ‘What is Nigeria to Me?, which criticizes the failures of the post-colonial nation. There are also many opinionated and heartfelt political pieces tackling racism and the world’s view of Africa, such as Travelling White’, describing his experience of segragation on buses in Rhodesia, and ‘Africa is People’, a postive call for the West to cancel Third World debt.

Infused with wry, self-deprecating wit, honesty and passion, these writings give us a new and unique insght into Achebe the writer, and the man.