Chinua Achebe

Hope Amazon doesn't mind...and, you can't look inside....
but there I've given them some much-needed advertising I guess...

Abby Bartels sent me a book for my birthday, "The Education of a British-Protected Child" by Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer of the famous "Things Fall Apart" and much more. This book is a collection of talks and pieces he has written on Nigeria, Africa, and colonialism. It is so interesting and well written, a very easy read but full of insights. I love his voice as much as anything; it is like sitting down with a John Senyonyi or an Eliphaz Maari - wise, critical but not hostile, humble, and both exasperated by and hopeful for Africa.

But, the book is making me feel a bit depressed for Africa at the same time, as I read about incidents from Achebe's childhood and early adulthood. And how the search for an African identity is still in process and is still needed. I didn't use to understand why so many of my colleagues' PhDs were on the lines of "In search of an African identity, an African theology, etc." As if it hadn't been found already. But reading this book has made me understand a bit more. Achebe describes how over the four hundred years since Europeans arrived in Africa, they have written and spoken stereotypes, in order to justify or rationalise  their treatment of Africa. In the second half of the last century, with independence, new images of Africa are arising, but there is still a lot of the old as well. And it takes a long time to emerge out of that, like a person who has been told for years and years that they are second-best, or not very clever, or ugly, or won't succeed.

Another new understanding for me came in a paragraph introducing his family:

"All my life I have had to take account of the million differences - some little, others quite big - between the Nigerian culture into which I was born, and the domineering Western style that infiltrated and then invaded it. Nowhere is the difference more stark and startling than in the ability to ask a parent: "How many children do you have?" The right answer should be a rebuke: "Children are not livestock!" Or better still, silence, and carry on as if the question was never asked." (p68)

I have asked that question so so many times, because I thought it was polite in Africa to be interested in a person's family! I remember being tickled once when the reply came: "...um, about eight." But I took this vague answer to be purposeful, rising from the feeling that if someone knew too much they could do some kind of harm to that family, rather than from an actual uncertainty of how many children they had. But now I wonder if the person actually objected to the question. I suppose thinking about it, one ought to ask "How is your family?" but perhaps not, "How many children are in your family?" Or maybe this is more sensitive in Nigeria than elsewhere. Eighteen years in Africa and still so much to learn!


Chinua Achebe's book Things Fall Apart was seminal and is read by nearly every African child in school, and I read it before going out to Zimbabwe, but now I want to read it again. Now I feel excited about African Literature all over again. Thanks Abby!