The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe: summary part I

"The Education of a British Protected Child" is a lecture delivered by Chinua Achebe in the Cambridge University on 22^nd January 1993. The central concern of the lecture was human values. He discusses how he grew up to be a writer. 

 

Achebe begins the essay by telling about the title. "The  title  I  have  chosen  for  these  reflections  may  not  be  immediately  clear  to everybody". He proposes that every man may not like the title, as it is long and it demands little explanation from him. In fact, he wanted to deal with something else before get into the title. 

 

He points out in advance that the audience are not listening to the voices of a scholar. Then, he talks about the workings of poetic justice in his life. He happened to miss the opportunity to become a scholar.

 

Before 40 years, he had applied to the Trinity college of Cambridge, but unfortunately his application was rejected. So, he completed his graduation from the University College of Ibadan. Luckily, his teacher and sponsor James Welch was the graduate in Cambridge University. About whom, he would like to say a few more words later. Anyhow, he stayed in his homeland and later turned to a novelist. He asserts the fact that if he had been admitted to Cambridge University, he would never have become a writer but rather a scholar instead. He comments: “nothing has the capacity to sprout more readily or flourish more luxuriantly in the soil of colonial discourse than mutual recrimination”. So, he decided to become a writer instead of a scholar, as someone must strike against the colonial discourse.

 

Now, he stands in the same university which rejected him earlier to deliver a lecture, this is what he meant by the workings of poetic justice.

 

In 1951, three years after the rejection of his application in Cambridge University, he had his first opportunity to travel out of Nigeria to study briefly at the BBC staff school in London. For the first time he needed and obtained a passport, and saw himself defined therein as a “British Protected Child”, this made him unsettled. He had to wait three years more for Nigeria’s independence in 1960 to end that tyrannical protection.

He proposes that nobody wants to hear about the advantages and disadvantages of colonial rule over and over. Normally, he provides only the arguments against colonial rule. Nevertheless, he views the events from neither the foreground nor the background, but rather the middle ground through the essay.

 

Obviously, the middle ground is the least admired of the three. It lacks the luster; it is undramatic, unspectacular and un remarkable. His Igbo culture gives more prominence to the middle ground. He quotes a rhyme which celebrates the middle ground as the most fortunate.

Afterwards, Achebe asks some questions and explain it. “Why do the Igbo call the middle ground lucky? What does this place hold that makes it so desirable? Or, rather, what misfortune does it fence out? The answer is, I think, Fanaticism.”

 

He affirms that the middle ground prevents fanaticism(extremism/fixation). As far as a fanatic is concerned he is single minded, and follows one way, one truth, one life menace and so on. He lives completely alone. Igbo people calls it “Bad thing and bare neck”. Thus, the preference of Igbo is not singularity but duality. Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.

 

The middle ground is neither the origin of things nor the last things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, suspension of disbelief, playfulness, unpredictable and irony.

 

Later, he gives a short character sketch of the Igbo people. When Igbo people encounter human conflict, their first impulse is not to decide who is right but quickly to restore harmony. There was a saying in his hometown Ogidi that the judgement of Ogidi doesn’t go one side. They are the social managers rather than legal draftsmen.

The Igbo people are not starry –eyed (having lots of dreams) about the world. Their poetry doesn’t celebrate romantic love. They have a proverb which his wife dislikes, in which a woman is supposed to say that she does not insist , she be loved by her husband as long as he puts out Yams (food) for lunch every afternoon. When it comes to the men, an old villager once told him (not in a proverb but from real life): “My favourite soup is egusi. So I order my wife never to give me egusi soup in this house. And so she makes egusi every evening!” This is then the picture: The woman forgoes love for lunch; the man tells a lie for his supper!”

 

 Finally, he sums up the notion of marriage according to Igbo culture, it is tough and bigger than any man or woman. They recommend to find a way to cope.

According to him, colonial rule was stronger than any marriage. The Igbo fought against them and lost. The people who read his novel  as if novels were history books, asked him that- what made the conversion of Igbo people to Christianity in his novel Things Fall Apart so easy?

 

He says: it was not so easy, neither in history nor in fiction. But a novel cannot reproduce historical duration; it has to be brilliantly compressed. In fact, Christianity did not sweep through Igbo land like wild fire. “One illustration will suffice. The first missionaries came to the Niger River town of Onitsha in 1857. From that beachhead they finally reached my town, Ogidi, in 1892. Now, the distance from Onitsha to Ogidi is only seven miles. Seven miles in thirty-five years: that is, one mile every five years. That is no whirlwind.”

 

Achebe goes on with his argument that he must keep his promise not to give a discourse on colonialism. But, he states simply his fundamental objections to colonial rule.

 

In his opinion, it is an obvious crime for anyone to impose himself on another, to seize their land and their history then to exploit them pretended to be protectors. It reveals their cunning, hypocritic and untruthful nature.

 

Later he compares the hypocrisy of colonial rule and the nineteenth century Belgian king Leopold II. He let loosed many atrocities in Congo. The king too was of the opinion that his army men were the protectors of the natives. It can not possible to ignore the basic assumption of  all European powers that participated in the process of scrambling Africa. Just as all of Europe had contributed to the making of frightening character Mr.Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

 

He also puts forward the fact that colonizers were also wounded by the system they had created. They may not have lost land and freedom like the colonized victims, but they paid a number of seemingly small prices like loss of the sense of ridiculous, a sense of proportion and a sense of humour.

 

Afterward he talks about the case of victims. There is no scope of humour in dispossession(loss).

 

“Dispossession is, of course, no laughing matter, no occasion for humor. And yet the amazing thing is that the dispossessed will often turn his powerlessness to good account and laugh, and thereby lift himself out of desolation and despair. And save his humanity by the skin of his teeth(barely manage to do something), for humor is quintessentially human!”

 

 

                                                           Part II