The Education of a British-Protected Child (18 page)

Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone. We rise above the animal together, or not at all. If we learned that lesson even this late in the day, we would have taken a truly millennial step forward.

1998

1.
Guy Burrows,
The Land of the Pigmies
(London: 1898), quoted in Robert Kimbrough’s edition of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
(New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 128, 130.

2.
Robert B. Shepard,
Nigeria, Africa and the United States
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 88, 89.

1.
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,”
The Fire Next Time
, 1963.

2.
John Buchan,
Prester John
, quoted in Brian V. Street:
The Savage in Literature
(London, Boston: Routledge & K Paul, 1975), p. 14.

3.
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,”
The Fire Next Time
, 1963.

4.
Basil Davidson,
The African Slave Trade
(Boston: Atlantic—Little, Brown, 1961), pp. 147–148. Quoted in Chinweizu,
The West and the Rest of Us
(Pero Press, 1987), p. 28.

5.
C. R. Boxer, “The Kingdom of Congo,”
The Dawn of African History
, Roland Oliver, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 78. Quoted in Chinweizu,
The West and the Rest of Us
, p. 331.

6.
Dorothy Randall Tsuruta, “James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe,”
Black Scholar
, no. 12 (March–April 1981), p. 73.

1.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
, edited and with an introduction by Paul Edwards (Harlow and White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1989).

1.
Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow,
The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa
(Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1992), pp. 22–23.

2.
Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 37.

3.
Ibid.

4.
Ibid., p. 4.

5.
I am indebted to Basil Davidson’s
The African Slave Trade
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980) for the outline of this story.

6.
Mbanza was the capital of the kingdom of Congo; the king soon renamed it São Salvador. The quoted passage is from Davidson,
The African Slave Trade
, p. 136.

7.
Ibid., p. 152.

8.
Joseph Conrad. “Geography and Some Explorers,”
National Geographic
(March 1924).

9.
Davidson,
The African Slave Trade
, p. 147.

10.
Sylvia Leith-Ross,
African Women: A Study of the Igbo of Nigeria
(London: Faber and Faber, 1938); see p. 19.

11.
Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, pp. 38–39.

12.
Ibid., p. 51.

13.
Davidson, op. cit., p. 29.

14.
Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, p. 147.

15.
David Livingstone,
Missionary Travels
, quoted in Hammond and Jablow,
The Africa That Never Was
, p. 43.

16.
Reyahn King et al.,
Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters
(London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997), p. 28.

17.
Ibid., p. 30.

18.
William F. Schultz and Willis Hartshorn, “1997 Amnesty International Calendar: Photographs from the Collection of the International Center of Photography” (New York: Universe Publishing, 1996).

19.
Ibid.

1.
Obiajunwa Wali. “The Dead End of African Literature?”
Transition
4, no. 10 (September 10, 1963).

2.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “The Language of African Literature,”
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
(London: Heinemann, 1986).

3.
Ibid.

4.
Richard Symonds,
The British and Their Successors
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 202.

5.
David R. Smock and Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill, eds.,
The Search for National Integration in Africa
(London: Collier Macmillan, 1975), p. 174.

6.
J. F. Ade Ajay,
Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891
(London, 1965), pp. 133–34.

7.
Smock and Enchill,
The Search for National Integration in Africa
, p. 176.

1.
Quoted in Brian Street,
The Savage in Literature
(London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 14.

2.
Philip D. Curtin,
The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Actions
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. vi.

3.
Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, p. 37.

4.
Cheikh Hamidou Kane,
Ambiguous Adventure
, Katherine Woods, trans. (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 37.

5.
Ibid., p. 79.

1.
From “In Dialogue to Define Aesthetics: James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe,”
The Black Scholar
12 (March–April 1981),
Conversations with James Baldwin
.

2.
Jules Chametzky,
Our Decentralized Literature
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).

1.
Davidson,
The African Slave Trade
, p. 12.

2.
Ibid., p. 25.

3.
Dorothy Randall Tsuruta, “In Dialogue to Define Aesthetics: James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe,”
The Black Scholar
12 (March–April 1981), p. 73.

1.
House of Lords Official Report, August 27, 1968.

2.
Suzanne Cronje,
The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972), p. 211.

1.
Quoted in Jonah Raskin,
The Mythology of Imperialism
(New York: Random House, 1971).

2.
James D. Wolfensohn,
Africa’s Moment
(Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1998).

Some of the essays in this work originally appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, as follows:

“The Education of a British-Protected Child”: Adapted from a speech delivered as the Ashby Lecture, Cambridge University, January 22, 1993.

“The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen: Growing Up in the Ambience of a Legend”: Adapted from a speech delivered at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, April 1994. This speech was given at a conference honoring Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, hosted and sponsored by Lincoln University’s president, Niara Sudarkasa.

“My Dad and Me”: From
My Dad and Me: A Heartwarming Collection of Stories About Fathers from a Host of Larry’s Famous Friends
. Larry King (New York: Crown, 1996).

“What is Nigeria to Me?”: Adapted from the keynote address at
The Guardian’s
Silver Jubilee, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, on October 9, 2008. It was subsequently reprinted in the
Nigeria Daily News
on October 14, 2008.

“Traveling White”: Originally published in
The Weekend Guardian
(London), October 22, 1989.

“Spelling Our Proper Name”: Adapted from a speech delivered at a conference entitled “Black Writers Redefine the Struggle,” on the occasion of the death of James Baldwin, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, April 22-23, 1988. It was subsequently published in an earlier form in
A Tribute to James Baldwin
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989).

“Africa’s Tarnished Name”: Originally published in
Another Africa
. Robert Lyons and Chinua Achebe (Anchor Books, 1998).

“Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature”: Originally published as “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature” in
FILLM
(International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures)
Proceedings
. Ed. Doug Killam (Guelph, Ontario: University of Guelph, 1989).

“African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”: From
Chinua Achebe: A Celebration
. Eds. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford (Oxford and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Sydney, Australia and Coventry, England: Dangeroo Press, 1990), 1-10.

“Teaching
Things Fall Apart”:
From
Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart. Ed. Bernth Lindfors. Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series: 37 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1991), 20-24. Reprinted in
Morning Yet on Creation Day
.

“Martin Luther King and Africa”: Originated as a talk given at the King Holiday Celebration, January 20, 1992, at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of History in Washington, D.C.

“The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics”: From
The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics
(Enugu, Nigeria: ABIC Books and Equipment, 1988).

“Stanley Diamond”: From
Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond: The Politics of Culture and Creativity
. Ed. Christine Ward Gailey (University of Florida Press, May 1992).

“Africa Is People”: Adapted from a speech originally delivered at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, France, 1998. Subsequently published in
Massachusetts Review
40.3 (Autumn 1999).

Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.

Cited in the
London Sunday Times
as one of the “1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century,” for defining “a modern African literature that was truly African” and thereby making “a major contribution to world literature,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays, and children’s books. His volume of poetry,
Christmas in Biafra
, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels,
Arrow of God
won the New Statesman-Jock Campbell Award, and
Anthills of the Savannah
was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize in England.
Things Fall Apart
, Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, has been published in fifty different languages and has sold millions of copies in the United States since its original publication in 1958–1959. In 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. He lives with his wife in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where they teach at Bard College. They have four children and three grandchildren.