The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
By Chinua Achebe
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Knopf (October 6, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307272559
Price: $18.21 (Amazon)
When I read the work of non-white authors, especially those whose writing has dealt in any significant way with issues of colonialism, I find myself paying special attention to the blurbs at the back of the book. For these blurbs, should the author be globally known and respected, are often written by Western reviewers, or at least reviewers with a Western sensibility. Now Western reviewers do not like to see a lot of anger in the writing of postcolonial subjects. When the Empire writes back, it had better watch its language. So, if our writer has won their praise, I look in the accolades for words such as “generous,” “humane,” “wise,” “compassionate,” and increasingly these days, for the critic’s new buzzword “nuanced.” All of which can often mean that the writer has kept from overly harsh criticism of colonial and neocolonial enterprise. Or if (s)he has indulged such criticism, her tones have been measured and deliberate and (s)he has avoided offending Western (white) sensibilities too blatantly.
An example from a different sphere might be that of the publicly betrayed politician’s wife (the late Elizabeth Edwards and Hillary Clinton come to mind) who refrains from criticizing the errant husband in public and, as often as not, declares her determination to stay by his side. Media commentators are inclined to applaud such a wife for her restraint with adjectives such as “wise,” “mature,” and so on. You see, they have kept their dirty linen where it belongs—in the closet. We have been spared the distasteful sight of the raging harridan and have instead been treated to an exemplar of lady-like behaviour. Our sensibilities have been spared.
Curiously, a somewhat similar loyalty appears to be expected from non-white postcolonial writers. Yes, they can protest colonialism, but softly, softly. They can talk, but they had better not thunder denunciations, however richly deserved; simmer gently, but not permit themselves to boil over. That, in the Western view, would be a crime almost greater than colonialism itself. Rage against the oppressor is the one emotion that such a writer cannot openly display. Rage is ugly and crude and naked. Rage insists and embarrasses and frustrates. Decencies must be preserved, however indecent be the realities that are thus covered up. The moral burden thus descends—surprise, surprise—on the colonized, rather than the colonizer.
In an artificial climate like this, words like “wise,” and “nuanced,” often become code for “muted,” “acceptable,” and “co-opted.” No angry black/brown men/women need apply. So, opening Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child, his collection of essays and his first new book in two decades, I was a little apprehensive. The back of the book is littered with praises from Western reviewers, including rather liberally words such as “generous “measured,” “humane,” and “compassionate.” Had Achebe mellowed so much over the years that his voice has ceased to speak the terrible truths, both about Africa and the West, that we find in his novels?
On the surface, indeed, Achebe does fulfill these expectations and stays within the role prescribed for him—African sage, distinguished writer, above the bickering and recrimination of much postcolonial resistance writing. So urbane, and sometimes playful, is his tone that the reader may be forgiven for thinking that Achebe does not wish to criticize colonialism—not wholesale, at all events. For does not the Westerner’s secret fantasy always whisper that some good things must have come out of colonialism? And when Achebe, with devastating honesty, admits the truth of Henry Kissinger’s remark that America must be doing something right in Africa, however unintentionally, the fantasy begins to tremble on the edge of fact; the colonial apologist may be pardoned for feeling somewhat vindicated. The path for the launching and justification of the neocolonial project, now well under way in Africa and the Middle East, now lies clear.
But the whole burden of Achebe’s argument—and the collection does contain a unifying argument, several in fact—contains the seed of opposition to such a complacent reading of his work. For as Achebe makes clear, unintentionality is not what counts. What really matters is the intention of human actions, their ability, willingness, and desire deliberately to examine their own motives and the effect of their actions on others. When intentions are suspect is when the colonial mind begins to spin out great suffocating swaths of falsehoods, weaving faster and faster that poisonous web at whose heart lies hidden and denied the most precious of all truths: the simple humanity of the colonized subject. And when Achebe zeroes in on such myth-makers, or to give them their proper name, deluding and self-deluded liars, held up to admiration in the Western world as great men, he is scathingly accurate in pointing out the viciousness of their racism.
Achebe brings up in particular the examples of Albert Schweitzer and Joseph Conrad, pointing out that though their racism is often excused as the product of the times in which they lived, no man can truly be said to be great who allows himself to be dominated by his times. Schweitzer and Conrad failed in intention; they failed to be fully human because they denied the humanity of others. What price then their greatness, still unquestioningly accepted as fact in much of the Western world? A recent appeal that reached me in the mail to contribute to a no-kill animal shelter contained at its head a quote from Schweitzer—the very same Schweitzer to whom the black man was his brother, but his “junior brother.” The irony is too potent to be ignored.
What does it reveal about a “post-racial” society that we continue to minimize this horrifying crime—that of refusing to recognize the humanity of one’s fellows—when it is committed by white men and women? Achebe does not shy away from asking these inconvenient questions. We cannot comfortably canonize him and Conrad side by side, and smooth over the troublesome facts. In this book, Achebe makes clear his intention to disrupt such complacency. He intends to tell stories that will redeem the humanity of the colonial—and increasingly the neocolonial—subject. He does so in an especially poignant and personal essay about a children’s book which, attracted by its colourful cover, he purchased for his young daughter—only to be horrified by its racist content. He describes how he ended up writing a remedy—a children’s book that heals and redeems the lost and stolen humanity of Africans.
Like the writing of the children’s book, Achebe’s quite self-aware intention in this collection is to sound the clarion call for the simplest of undertakings—the deliberate and perpetual recognition of the humanity of the nonwhite world by the white Western world. I could say the recognition of the humanity of one group of humans by another, but if I may be permitted to take a figurative leaf out of Achebe’s book, I will not do so. In one of his powerfully effective examples of Nigerian storytelling and folklore that light up the book, Achebe reminds us of an Igbo saying: “A human is only human because of other humans.” In other words, the Igbo have remembered what the West has too often forgotten. The burden of recognition, the moral burden, is not upon us. It is upon them.
I must just point out another example of Achebe’s intention, brilliantly expressed throughout, to build bridges between human communities. He discusses in moving language his meeting with black American writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, the former saying of their meeting: “This is my brother whom I have not seen for four hundred years . . . it was never intended that we should meet.” And so Achebe, with the intentionality central to his authorial enterprise, reaches out in this book to the Africans who were, centuries ago, so cruelly sundered from their motherland. He reaches out to us all—black, brown, white—sounding the warning—not a plea, but a warning: in this age of rapid globalization, with billions in poverty and a few remaining obscenely rich—we must urgently recognize our common interests as fellow human beings. We must, like Achebe, shake off the “protection,” of those who claim to represent our interests. We will find, as Achebe has, that those “protections,” are nothing but barriers, and once we recognize their essential malignity we shall be enabled to destroy them.
I could recommend this book for many other delightful reasons. There is Achebe’s humorously written yet significant challenge to the monolithic postcolonial narrative embodied in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work. There are his unapologetic critiques of Nigeria’s current political situation and the abysmal failure of its leadership. There is his marvelous, and heartening, resurrection of African history in the form of Dom Alfonso, ruler of Congo in the sixteenth century, which answers decisively the claims of colonial apologists that Africa was somehow a land without a history, where, as Achebe ironically remarks, the inhabitants did nothing but stare out across the ocean waiting for white massa to arrive and tell them what to do. Read The Education of a British-Protected Child for all these reasons. But read it most of all as a love song to humanity.
Achebe intended that you should.
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.
