The Education of a British-Protected Child (3 page)

British colonization of Nigeria was never a labor-intensive affair. White people were a rare sight, whether in the administration or the church or in commerce. This rareness did not, however, diminish their authority. The name of the British resident for Onitsha Province, Captain O’Connor, was so generally invoked that there is an age-grade named after him in Ogidi.
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But I only saw him twice, from a distance. The bishop on the Niger, the Right Reverend Bishop Bertram Lasbrey, came to our church perhaps once in two or three years. His sermon left me disappointed. I don’t know what I expected; perhaps I thought that if mere teachers and pastors could do as well as some that I knew, a bishop must set a congregation ablaze. But perhaps again it was the problem of having to preach through an interpreter.

Elementary education began with two years in infant school and six years in primary school. For some children there was a preschool year in what was called religious school, where they spent a year chanting and dancing the catechism.

But I was spared that. I suppose I imbibed adequate amounts of religion at home from the daily portions of the Bible we read at prayer time every morning and every night.

The Second World War began just as I was finishing my second year in primary school, that is, in Standard Two. The rest of my primary education happened against its distant
background. But it got close one morning when two white people and their assistants came to our school and conscripted our art teacher.

I think we were loyal to Britain and did what we could to help. I remember the campaign to increase the production of palm kernels for the war effort. Our headmaster told us that every kernel we collected in the bush would buy a nail for Hitler’s coffin. As the war continued, supplies for home and school became more and more scarce. Salt was severely rationed, and disappeared from the open market.

We soldiered along, singing “Rule, Britannia!,” but the really popular song was “Germany Is Falling”:

The enemy list concluded, you moved on to friends whom you were naturally prepared to visit:

Sung lustily in an arrangement for cantor and chorus, “Germany Is Falling” was as stirring as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and other evangelical war songs.

I had two choices for secondary school—the very popular Dennis Memorial Grammar School, a C.M.S. institution in Onitsha, or Government College, Umuahia, much farther away and much less known to me. My elder brother John, a teacher who had taken me to live with him in my last year of primary school, decided I should go to Umuahia. It was not the decision I would have made myself. But John turned out to be, as usual, absolutely right.

I don’t know what prompted the British colonial administration in Nigeria in the decade following the end of the First World War to set up two first-class boarding schools for boys
in Nigeria, one at Ibadan and the other at Umuahia. The arguments, whatever they were, must be fascinating, but I have not been privileged to read them. Howbeit, an extraordinary English cleric, Robert Fisher, was appointed the founding principal of Government College Umuahia, and the school opened its doors in 1929. By the time Fisher retired eight years later, Umuahia was a byword in Nigeria for excellence.

Then came the Second World War, and other arguments prevailed in colonial high places, and Government College Umuahia was closed down and its buildings turned over to a prisoner-of-war camp for German and Italian nationals. There was yet a third change of colonial mind even before the war ended, and the campus was returned to education and ready to accept my generation of students in 1944. Colonial policy moved in mysterious ways!

Our new principal, William Simpson, a Cambridge man in the colonial education service, set about rebuilding the school. And what a job he did! His experience of colonial education must have persuaded him that “excessive devotion to book-work is a real danger,” as he constantly intoned for our benefit, and that the cramming which often passed for education in the colonies was in fact education’s greatest enemy. Though Simpson was a mathematics teacher, he made a rule which promoted the reading of novels and prohibited the reading of any textbooks after classes on three days of the week. He called it the Textbook Act. Under this draconian law, we could read fiction or biographies or magazines like
Illustrated London News
or write letters or play Ping-Pong or just sit about, but not open a textbook, on pain of detention. And we had a
wonderful library from Robert Fisher’s days to support Mr. Simpson’s Textbook Act.

Perhaps it was a mere coincidence, but Government College Umuahia alumni played a conspicuous role in the development of modern African literature. That so many of my colleagues—Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, Chukwuemeka Ike, I.N.C. Aniebo, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and others—should all have gone to one school would strike anyone who is at all familiar with this literature. What we read in the school library at Umuahia were the books English boys would have read in England—
Treasure Island, Tom Brown’s School Days, The Prisoner of Zenda, David Copperfield
, et cetera. They were not about us or people like us, but they were exciting stories. Even stories like John Buchan’s, in which heroic white men battled and worsted repulsive natives, did not trouble us unduly at first. But it all added up to a wonderful preparation for the day we would be old enough to read between the lines and ask questions…

In my first or second year at Umuahia the postwar Labour government in Britain decided that a university in West Africa might not be a bad idea. So a high-powered commission under Walter Elliot was sent to survey the situation on the ground. Such was the reputation of Umuahia that the commission paid us a visit and spent a whole weekend at our school. Most of them came to chapel service on Sunday morning, but Julian Huxley, the biologist, roamed our extensive grounds watching birds with binoculars.

The Elliot Commission Report led to the foundation of Nigeria’s first university institution: a university college at
Ibadan in special relationship with London. By the time it was built I was ready for university education and so walked in. By that time also I was no longer a British-Protected Child but a British Protected Person.

One of the more remarkable teachers I encountered at Ibadan was James Welch, professor of religious studies. I was intrigued by all the things he was said to have done before coming to Ibadan—head of religious broadcasting at the BBC in London; chaplain to the king; principal of a theological college. He had even gone to Nigeria before all that as a missionary in the 1930s, and then had returned to Africa at the end of the war as director of education with the British government’s ill-fated East African Groundnut Scheme.

In my final year at Ibadan, I once had a chance to discuss with Professor Welch one of a growing number of disagreements the students were beginning to have with the college. He was then vice principal. In some exasperation he said to me, “We may not be able to teach you what you want or even what you need. We can only teach you what we know.”

Even in exasperation, James Welch stayed calm and wise. What else can an honest and conscientious teacher teach but what he knows? The real teachers I have had in my life have been people who did not necessarily know what my needs would ultimately be but went ahead anyhow in good faith and with passion to tell me what they knew, leaving it to me to sort out whatever I could use in the search for the things that belonged to my peace. Because colonialism was essentially a denial of human worth and dignity, its education program would not be a model of perfection. And yet the great thing
about being human is our ability to face adversity down by refusing to be defined by it, refusing to be no more than its agent or its victim.

What I have attempted to suggest in this rambling essay is the potency of the unpredictable in human affairs. I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it. But I am also fascinated by that middle ground I spoke about, where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity. And this was to be found primarily in the camp of the colonized, but now and again in the ranks of the colonizer too.

The Reverend Robert Fisher was such a spirit. Technically he was of the camp of the colonizer. But such was the vision and passion he brought to his task of creating a new school at Umuahia that when he was offered a bishopric in the course of his labors he turned it down. Years later, he attempted to make light of that decision by saying he wouldn’t have made a good bishop anyway. But that was not the reason. The crest he brought to Umuahia was a pair of torches, one black, one white, shining together silently. A generation later an Australian teacher added the logo
“In unum luceant”
under the emblem.

And there was William Simpson, teacher of mathematics, who would have been greatly surprised if anyone had said to him in the 1940s that he was preparing the ground for the beginnings of modern African literature.

Or even that strange Englishman J. M. Stuart Young, who opted out of the colonial system in Onitsha and set himself up in competition against his own people in giant European trading
companies. His ambition to open up commerce to African traders may have seemed quixotic at the time, but the people of Onitsha admired him and gave him a big traditional funeral when he died.

These people had reached across the severe divide which colonialism would have, and touched many of us on the other side. But more important, far more important, was the fact that even if those hands had not reached across to us we would still have survived colonial tribulations, as we had done so many others before them through the millennia. That they did reach across, however, makes a great human story.

In 1976, U.S. relations with Nigeria reached an all-time low in the face of particularly clumsy American handling of the Angolan—Cuban—South African issue. Henry Kissinger, whose indifference to Africa bordered on cynicism, decided at last to meet Joseph Garba, the Nigerian foreign minister, at the United Nations. In a gambit of condescending pleasantness, Kissinger asked Garba what he thought America was doing wrong in Africa. To which Garba replied stonily: “Everything!” Kissinger’s next comment was both precious and, I regret to admit, true. He said: “Statistically that is impossible. Even if it is unintentional, we must be doing something right.”
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That exchange could easily have been about colonialism.

1993

If you are blind, describing an elephant is easy. You can call it, like one of the six blind men in the fable, a huge tree trunk; or perhaps a gigantic fan; or an enormous rope, and so on. But having eyes, far from making such descriptions easy, actually complicates them.

So what do we do if we have to describe a phenomenon as vast as Azikiwe? Take a small part that you have a little knowledge of and tell all of it; but never pretend that what you tell is the story.

I am taking my own advice and reflecting on a very small segment of the Azikiwe story. But you can already see my difficulty in the fact that I can’t seem to decide which of two titles to use; and I sense a couple more looming in the back-ground
—“Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe: Zik of Africa,” for example, the first president of Nigeria.

I remember, in exact and complete detail, the first day I saw Azikiwe’s name in print and realized that I had been calling it wrongly all my life. I must have been about six or seven. I had gone to visit the children of one of our neighbors, a church teacher who lived three houses down the road from us. Unlike my father, who had retired from evangelical work and now lived permanently in our village on a grand pension of one pound, ten shillings a month, this neighbor was still on active missionary service and only came home to Ogidi now and again. His house, like ours, was a modern affair: mud walls and corrugated iron roof.

As I entered the front room, called the piazza in the vocabulary of missionary architecture, I saw a new almanac hanging on the wall and went immediately to look at it. I was as curious about wall hangings and posters in those days as my father was conscientious in putting new ones on our walls every year at Christmastime. A great part of my education came from those wall hangings.