When I was a member of my first book group about ten years ago, the first book we read together was Chinua Achebe’s fine African novel Things Fall Apart. Since writing this novel in 1958, Achebe has had a distinguished academic career and was one of the first African writers to awaken the Western conscience to the culturally negative effects of colonialism, exposing the naive attitudes to Africa held by most white Westerners.
In The Education of a British Protected Child we find a collection of essays and transcribed talks given by Achebe covering a wide range of topics from memories of his early life to mature reflections on his work and its impact on readers around the world.
The book is not a difficult read in terms of complexity, the message of the various chapters being quite straightforward. It could however be uncomfortable reading for anyone not familiar with development issues. Achebe challenges most Western attitudes to Africa, and one of the most enlightening messages is that Africa has had cultured and successful kingdoms in previous centuries, the fruits of which were destroyed by colonialism. For example, the King of Congo in the late 15th century took the Western name Dom Afonso I and Achebe reports that Congo was represented in the Vatican by a bishop who addressed the Pope in Latin.
Joseph Conrad’s name occurs again and again in the book, and Achebe blames Conrad for creating powerful negative images of Africa in his book Heart of Darkness and other writings. This book, and a long line of predecessors, “has invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up”. Achebe goes on to list highly educated Africans from previous centuries, not least Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth century man of letters painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1786 and also Frances Williams, a graduate of Cambridge, a poet, and a founder of a school in Jamaica.
Achebe was educated by Christian missionaries, and indeed, his father served 35 years as a Christian evangelist. Despite Achebe’s later stance as a critic of colonialism, he never demolishes the value of work done in education and health care by the missions, but he does point out its historical context:
My father had a lot of praise for missionaries and their message and so have I. But I have also learned a little more skepticism about them than my father had any need for. Does it matter I ask myself that centuries before these European Christians sailed down to us in ships to deliver the Gospel and save us from darkness, their ancestors, also sailing in ships had delivered our forefathers to the horrendous transatlantic slave trade and unleashed darkness in our world?
It was of course the slave trade that caused Westerners to denigrate African people. How much easier to oppress and harass people who are described as backward and barely human. Theologians could debate whether the African had a soul and educators could express surprise that black children could actually be taught to read and write. The alternative view, that black people are in fact our equals could only bring condemnation on those who tore them from their lands and shipped them off across oceans.
It is all too easy to condemn African people for their governments, even going so far as to suggest that the people have ended up with the governments they deserve. This view takes no account of the fact that the African nations were created by Colonialist rules and made little attempt to give Africa back the older boundaries and civic systems which had been taken from them by European colonisers.
This is a compact book and is divided up into 16 short chapters. It is easy to read and gives a very useful overview of Achebe’s thinking. His humanity comes across in its pages, but also the uncompromising but unfailingly polite critique of those who will read it in Western nations. Achebe’s style is the opposite of hectoring, and I felt that he treats his readers almost gently in leading them to open their eyes to their prejudices and preconceptions.
At a time when western people tend to write off Africa as a hopeless case it reminded this reader at least that we have been a major cause of Africa’s problems and must do all we can to ensure that our governments become part of its solution, not by recolonisation, but by working together to undo the poisoned legacy which we have left in that vast continent.
