The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe Read Free Book Online

ahorrendous tit for tat. But the northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the north and unleashed waves of brutal massacres, which Colin Legum of
The Observer
was the first to describe as a pogrom. It was estimated that thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children died in these massacres. Igbos were fleeing in hundreds of thousands from all parts of Nigeria to their homeland in the east.
    I was one of the last to flee from Lagos. I simply could not bring myself quickly enough to accept that I could no longer live in my nation’s capital, although the facts clearly said so. One Sunday morning I was telephoned from Broadcasting House and informed that armed soldiers who appeared drunk had come looking for me to test which was stronger, my pen or their gun!
    The offense of my pen was that it had written a novel called
A Man of the People
, a bitter satire on political corruption in an African country that resembled Nigeria. I wanted the novel to be a denunciation of the kind of independence we were experiencing in postcolonial Nigeria and many other countries in the 1960s, and I intended it to scare my countrymen into good behavior with a frightening cautionary tale. The best monster I could come up with was a military coup d’état, which every sane Nigerian at the time knew was rather farfetched! But life and art had got so entangled that season that the publication of the novel, and Nigeria’s first military coup, happened within two days of each other.
    Critics abroad called me a prophet, but some of my countrymen saw it differently: my novel was proof of my complicity in the first coup.
    I was very lucky that Sunday morning. The drunken soldiers, after leaving Broadcasting House, went to a residence I had recently vacated. Meanwhile I was able to take my wife and two little children into hiding, from where I finally sent them to my ancestral home in Eastern Nigeria. A week or two later, unknown callers asked for me on the telephone in my hideout. My host denied my presence. It was time then to leave Lagos.
    My feeling towards Nigeria was one of profound disappointment. Not because mobs were hunting down and killing in the most savage manner innocent civilians in many parts of northern Nigeria, but because the federal government sat by and let it happen. The final consequence of this failure of the state to fulfill its primary obligation to its citizens was the secession of Eastern Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra. The demise of Nigeria at that point was averted only by Britain’s spirited diplomatic and military support of its model colony. It was Britain and the Soviet Union which together crushed the upstart Biafran state. At the end of the thirty-month war, Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The cost in human lives was a staggering two million souls, making it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.
    I found it difficult to forgive Nigeria and my countrymen and-women for the political nonchalance and cruelty that unleashed upon us these terrible events, which set us back a whole generation and robbed us of the chance, clearly within our grasp, to become a medium-rank developed nation in the twentieth century.
    My immediate response was to leave Nigeria at the endof the war, having honorably, I hoped, stayed around long enough to receive whatever retribution might be due to me for renouncing Nigeria for thirty months. Fortunately the federal government proclaimed a general amnesty, and the only punishment I received was the general financial and emotional indemnity that war losers pay, and some relatively minor personal harassment. I went abroad to New England (no irony intended), to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and stayed four years and then another year at the University of Connecticut. It was by far my longest exile ever from Nigeria and it gave me time to reflect and to heal somewhat. Without setting out consciously to do so, I was redefining my relationship to Nigeria. I