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

realized that I could not reject her, but neither could it be business as usual. What was Nigeria to me?
    Our 1960 national anthem, given to us as a parting gift by a British housewife in England, had called Nigeria “our sovereign motherland.” The current anthem, put together by a committee of Nigerian intellectuals and actually worse than the first one, invokes the father image. But it has occurred to me that Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father. Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward.
    Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting. I have said somewhere that in my next reincarnation I want to be a Nigerian again; but I have also, in a rather angry book called
The Trouble with Nigeria
, dismissed Nigerian travel advertisements with the suggestion that only a tourist with a kinky addiction to self-flagellation would pick Nigeria for a holiday. And I mean both.
    Nigeria needs help. Nigerians have their work cut out for them—to coax this unruly child along the path of useful creative development. We are the
parents
of Nigeria, not vice versa. A generation will come, if we do our work patiently and well—and given luck—a generation that will call Nigeria father or mother. But not yet.
    Meanwhile our present work is not entirely without its blessing and reward. This wayward child can show now and again great intimations of affection. I have seen this flow towards me at certain critical moments.
    When I was in America after the Biafran war, an army officer who sat on the council of my university in Nigeria as representative of the federal military government pressured the university to call me back home. This officer had fought in the field against my fellow Biafrans during the civil war and had been seriously wounded. He had every right to be bitter against people like me. I had never met him, but he knew my work and was himself a poet.
    More recently, after a motor accident in 2001 that left me with serious injuries, I have witnessed an outflow of affection from Nigerians at every level. I am still totally dumbfounded by it. The hard words Nigeria and I have said to each other begin to look like words of anxious love, not hate. Nigeria is a country where nobody can wake up in the morning and ask: what can I do now? There is work for all.
    2008
    In its original form, this essay was delivered as the keynote address at
The Guardian’s
Silver Jubilee, at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, on October 9, 2008. It was subsequently reprinted in the
Nigeria Daily News
on October 14, 2008.

Traveling White

    In October 1960, I enjoyed the first important perk of my writing career: I was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to travel for six months anywhere I chose in Africa. I decided to go to east, central, and southern Africa.
    I set out with high hopes and very little knowledge of the real Africa. I visited Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, and then Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. I had had vague notions of going to South-West Africa as well, and even South Africa itself. But Southern Rhodesia proved more than enough for me on that journey and I turned around after a little more than a week there.
    The chief problem was racism. The only African country I had visited before was Ghana, the flagship of Africa’s independence movement. Ghana had been independent for a few years and was justly the pride of emergent Africa. Nigeria had won her own freedom from Britain just before my journey, onOctober 1, 1960, and I set forth with one month’s worth of ex-colonial confidence—the wind of change, as it were, behind my sails.
    The first shock came when we were about to land in Nairobi, and we were handed immigration forms to fill out. After your name, you had to define yourself more fully by filling in one of four boxes: European, Asiatic, Arab, Other! At the airport there were more of the same