REVIEW: Chinua Achebe's The Education of a British-Protected Child

POSTED: Thursday, October 15, 2009, 5:01 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Knopf, 172 pp., $24.95, Oct. 6

The Igbo people of Nigeria periodically construct temples filled with clay sculptures of all the life-forms that inhabit their world: historical figures, legendary characters and individuals or scenes from their own community. When European colonial officials entered the daily lives of the Igbo, sculptures of district officers wielding a pipe and helmet began to appear. As colonizers spread smallpox south of the Sahara, human statues disfigured by the disease's telltale spots joined the displays.

Renowned Nigerian author Chinua Achebe describes this tradition, known as mbari, as an example of his 'precolonial inheritance ' of art as celebration of my reality,' in his new essay collection, The Education of a British-Protected Child. Achebe's reality has been intricately entangled with art both expressionist and manipulative. In these wide-ranging, dynamic essays, he examines the perils of mistaking art for reality, whether in the lofty chambers of world economic fora or from the fanciful visions of Joseph Conrad.

Once described by an Irish newspaper columnist as the inventor of African literature, Achebe is best known for the novel Things Fall Apart, about a Nigerian farmer who tries to resist the colonial regime imposed on his village by European missionaries. But a few years after that book propelled him to worldwide success, Achebe wrote a political satire about Nigeria that happened to culminate in a coup d'etat ' and was published two days before the young nation's first actual coup d'etat. He was acclaimed as a visionary by foreign critics, but nearly arrested by the coup-makers.

Achebe's writing has frequently bled into political realities more extreme than his own nuanced worldview. In 1989, he was bemused to receive an invitation to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. When he arrived and listened to top economists contemplating financial 'shock treatment' to jerk African economies out of their tailspins, however, Achebe suddenly realized 'that what was going on before me was a fiction workshop, no more and no less.' Their plans to devalue currency and remove food subsidies might have some abstract appeal, he informed the group, but they would devastate the lives of ordinary Africans.

When asked why his own art doesn't offer tidy solutions for the real world, Achebe writes, he rejects the 'uncomplicated, linear equivalency of sympathetic magic' that causes some African fiction writers to always reward their righteous characters and punish their villains. Many African writers, after all, begin writing in an attempt to revise the overly simplistic narrative of Africa composed by Europeans, according to Achebe. That's not to say African writers must rewrite history; merely that they must 'recover what belongs to them ' their story ' and tell it themselves.'

Even Achebe sometimes lets his fancies shape his recollection of history. In a reflection on Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, for example, he remembers a rumor that Azikiwe had returned to Lagos to seek a teaching job after being educated in the United States: 'Whether this is true or not I don't know, and don't care! I like it; it ought to be true.' Achebe's surrenders to such delusions, however, are rare and usually mockingly self-aware.

These essays clarify ' or, at their best, further complicate ' the blurred boundaries between art and reality in discussions of Africa. Colonialism severely distorted African voices, Achebe is declaring, but the effort to unravel them from the artful edifice of imperialism is well under way.

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