‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’: Africa Did Not Start with Colonialism
A review of ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’, by Chinua Achebe.
Chinua Achebe takes the slightly drawn-out title of this collection from his first passport. Three years after failing to get accepted to Cambridge, and three years before Nigeria won its independence, he left Nigeria for London to study at the BBC Staff School and was described in his travel documents as a ‘British Protected Person’. The importance of this to him, one of Africa’s great literary emancipators (Mandela called him a ‘freedom-fighter’) is discussed in the first essay in this slim collection. It is a ‘gross crime for anyone to impose himself on another’, writes Chinua, but it is ‘too disingenuous’ to make out that the victim is ‘some kind of ward or minor requiring protection’. Even the culprit knows this, says Achebe, which is why he will ‘camouflage his brigandage with such brazen hypocrisy’.
Achebe works hard to show to all who might think otherwise that the idea that Africans achieved nothing before the coming of white Europeans is nonsense. He describes the arrival in 1482 of the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão in the Congo. Cão was looking for something else (a passage into the Indian Ocean) but found his way to the River Congo and left four Franciscan monks there to ‘study the situation’. When he returned, they had vanished, and he took four hostage Africans back to Portugal in response. They returned years later as Portuguese-speakers and Christians. The Congolese King, Nzinga Mbemba, to whom Diogo and the hostages were taken, then converted to Christianity and learned to read and write in Portuguese. Not only this, but Dom Afonso I, as he came to call himself, went on to attack his Portuguese counterpart, his ‘royal brother’, for the perceived strictness and inflexibility of Portuguese law. This friendship ended with the arrival in Brazil of the Portuguese and the ‘depopulation’ of Congolese men and women. Acheve calls the slave trade the greatest crime against humanity ever committed.
Dom Afonso I attacked his Portuguese counterpart, his ‘royal brother’, for the perceived strictness and inflexibility of Portuguese law. This friendship ended with the arrival in Brazil by the Portuguese and the ‘depopulation’ of Congolese men and women.
On African history, Achebe disagrees with James Baldwin. Achebe admires Baldwin and praises his ‘uncommon gift of eloquence in defining our condition’, but says Baldwin was unsettled by the continent’s seeming ‘lack of achievement’. In ‘Stranger in the Village’, Baldwin sets the heritage of a Swiss peasant against his own, lamenting that ‘the most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine …’ Achebe writes that Baldwin clearly thought his ancestors did nothing but sit around waiting for white slavers to arrive.
Achebe shatters other myths. He notes support for the slave trade followed rather than proceeded its inception. Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow wrote in a study on the trade that ‘a vested interest in the slave trade produced a literature of devaluation’. In other words, the need to perpetuate the slave trade gave rise to the writing defending it. Achebe says often in these essays that the coloniser is wounded by the system he creates. Such an idea is reflected in the Igbo proverb, ‘Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya’, writes Achebe: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down’.
Achebe says often in these essays that the coloniser is wounded by the system he creates. Such an idea is reflected in the Igbo proverb, ‘Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya’.
He attacks Joseph Conrad and his ‘anti-imperialist’ tract, the gorgeous yet (for Achebe) racist Heart of Darkness. The explorer David Livingstone — ‘no saint’, for Achebe — was 44 years older than Conrad and one of his role models, but did not disparage Africans to the same degree that Conrad did. ‘After long observation, I came to the conclusion that they are just a strange mixture of good and evil as men are everywhere else,’ wrote Livingstone; and, adds Achebe, centuries before Shakespeare gave The Tempest’s Caliban, a kind of fictitious colonial subject created at the dawn of Europe’s age of expansion, some of the most beautiful lines of the play. Conrad can only give his stamping Africans ‘a violent babble of uncouth sounds’. There is a scene Achebe brings up more than once: the one in which an ‘improved’ African fires up a vertical boiler, in thrall to ‘strange witchcraft’.
Of course, Achebe has his own detractors (many of them ‘friends’, as he puts it); and the main charge made against him is that he wrote Things Fall Apart in English. But, Achebe argues, the British stressed their preference for their colonial subjects to speak in their mother tongues, not in English. Colonialism forced people into new nationalities; it was those who had been colonised who wished to learn English, cross linguistic borders and, in the end, bring down colonialism. English, then, was a language of both oppression and liberation. And Achebe says that without it, he could not have spoken to his classmates at his school, which was modelled on its traditional English counterpart.
Achebe immersed himself in English literature, finding that he related more to the ‘good and reasonable and smart and courageous’ oppressors to begin with than the ‘savages’ they oppressed. This lent Chinua that invaluable writer’s ability to adopt multiple points of view.
At that school, Achebe immersed himself in English literature, relating more to the ‘good and reasonable and smart and courageous’ oppressors to begin with than the ‘savages’ they oppressed. This lent him the invaluable writer’s ability to adopt multiple points of view, to see a problem from all sides. For the critic Jules Chametzky, this throws light on the end of Things Fall Apart, which reduces its tragic protagonist to dust. The District Commissioner, in a matter-of-fact sort of way, reflects that Okonkwo’s story will make a good page in his book, or perhaps a ‘reasonable paragraph’. Such a comment makes us confront the Rashomon side of experience, says Chametzky: an appreciation that ‘things look different to different observers and that one’s very perceptions are shaped by the social and cultural context out of which one operates’.
Achebe writes all of this in his clear and elegant prose, made livelier by the grounded, local metaphors that pervaded Things Fall Apart. He rounds up the collection with a coda, in which he pitches the European individualistic ideal, exemplified in Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’, against the Bantu saying, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’: ‘A human is human because of other humans.’ ‘If we learned that lesson even this late in the day,’ he closes by saying, ‘we would have taken a truly millennial step forward.’
