The Education of a British-Protected Child
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
Print Length: 181 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Autobiography or Memoir, Literary Criticism, History, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Political Science
Area: Nigeria, Africa, West Africa, England, The United Kingdom (UK)
Topic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Culture & Society, Education, Identity, History, Language & Literature, Leadership, Nationalism, Politics & Power, Race, Racism, Ethnic & Ethnicity, Belonging, Family, Writing
The pieces here span reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on Achebe’s lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of ‘Africa’ for its own authorship. For the first thirty years of his life, before Nigeria’s independence in 1960, Achebe was officially defined as a ‘British Protected Person’. In The Education of a British-Protected Child he gives us a vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its ‘middle ground’, interrogating both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. The Education of a British-Protected Child
2. The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen: Growing Up in the Ambience of a Legend
3. My Dad and Me
4. What Is Nigeria to Me?
5. Traveling White
6. Spelling Our Proper Name
7. My Daughters
8. Recognitions
9. Africa’s Tarnished Name
10. Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature
11. African Literature as Restoration of Celebration
12. Teaching Things Fall Apart
13. Martin Luther King and Africa
14. The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics
15. Stanley Diamond
16. Africa Is People
Notes
Acknowledgments
Chinua Achebe Simpson was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centres of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan. His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad. For more than 15 years he was the Carles P. Stevenson Jr Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College; he then became the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Chinua Achebe received numerous honours from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honorary doctorates from more than 30 colleges and universities. He was also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize. He died on 22nd March 2013.
Source: https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/chinua-achebe
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