Postcolonial Everyman
By KAIAMA L. GLOVER
Published: January 29, 2010, NYTimes

Chinua Achebe has a real knack for titles. With its simple assertion that “Things Fall Apart,” Achebe’s now classic 1958 novel took Yeats’s horrified imaginings of Christian Europe’s apocalyptic end and made them resonate within the space of precolonial black Africa. Now, some 50 years later, Achebe has given this volume of autobiographical essays its own Pandora’s box of a title. Deceptively disarming, “The Education of a British-­Protected Child” belies the complexity of what he calls the “strongly multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious, somewhat chaotic” situation he was born into as a colonial subject whose first passport described him as a “British Protected Person.” As the 16 essays in this collection reveal, the “education” Achebe and his fellow Nigerians received from their exploitative and racist self-proclaimed protectors “would not be a model of perfection.” Indeed.

That said, Achebe isn’t one to hold grudges. As he makes clear in the title essay, he has no scores to settle and isn’t out to lay the blame for history’s wounds at the feet of any one nation or people. While he very clearly — though without any particular drama — denounces colonialism, Achebe is equally clear in his intention not to be reactionary in his reactions, to concern himself with individuals rather than ideologies. This personal and political position, which he calls the “middle ground,” is defined as “the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony.” It is the place from which he strives to act and to write with empathy and nuance rather than with fanaticism — to resist the entrenched oppositions of “a world in which easy sloganeering so quickly puts the critical faculty to flight.” Of course, for a postcolonial intellectual, even one heralded as the father of modern African literature, the middle can be a rather tricky space to navigate.

Achebe takes on this challenge in his characteristically gentle narrative style, that way he has of seeming to be in casual conversation, discussing matters big and small with an interested and sympathetic companion. Simply and directly, he addresses many of the most fraught realities of colonial and postcolonial existence for the 20th- and 21st-century West African. The tone of his book is patient and measured, his voice personable and welcoming. Playfully deflating his own narrative authority by allowing admittedly shaky memories to stand as fact, Achebe juxtaposes ostensibly mild personal anecdotes with serious political reflections. He moves adroitly from the particular to the general, humbly revealing the greatness in each one of his small stories.

In one instance, he evokes the biblical tale of the infant Moses and the pharaoh’s daughter to describe his own cultural adoption by the guardians of the “alien palace” that was the British Empire, but then quickly retreats, calling this allusion the “sheer effrontery” of “the glowworm comparing itself to the full moon.” Later, in “Traveling White,” he tells of an excursion to Victoria Falls on a segregated bus in the Northern Rhodesia of the early 1960s. Not noticing that there were separate entrances for blacks and whites, he’d sat down at the front among the Europeans — and remained with them, despite their obvious hostility, even after realizing his mistake. Playing down his part in this Rosa Parks moment, Achebe merely relates the bare facts of the incident, emphasizing instead his despair when the black passengers rushed to congratulate him after they all disembarked at the falls. “I was not elated,” he recalls. “A monumental sadness descended on me. I could be a hero because I was in transit, and these unfortunate people, more brave by far than I, had formed a guard of honor for me!”

The collection is filled with scenes like this, in which Achebe insists on an Everyman status. While from many other writers, this might come off as false modesty, Achebe’s middle-grounded stance turns it into something else — an opportunity to make individual acts speak to larger human truths. This emphasis on personal accountability and responsibility determines, for example, his response to the racism he finds in children’s literature: “I learned that if I wanted a safe book for my child I should at least read it through and at best write it myself.” (Which is, of course, what he went on to do.)

These principles also motivate Achebe’s efforts to set the record straight on matters both political and personal. In “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature,” he takes to task those of his countrymen who, in positions of power, either deliberately or unconsciously erect obstacles to Nigeria’s healing. Gracefully accepting the rather dubious obligation to defend and explain his choice to write of Africa in English, he denounces African intellectuals who insist on “playing politics” with issues of language. In “The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics,” he offers a brilliant analysis of the word “elite,” arguing that while the concept has certainly been corrupted in postcolonial Africa by self-interested cultural and political leaders, elite systems are not in and of themselves reprehensible.

As this essay demonstrates, Achebe can be harshly critical of his fellow Nigerians; he assumes personal responsibility for “setting down beside the glories” of the Nigerian past “every inconvenient fact.” At the same time, though, he doesn’t shy away from implicating European actors in Africa’s contemporary misfortunes. In the powerful essay “Africa’s Tarnished Name,” for example, he returns to his highly polemical 1975 assessment of Joseph Conrad’s racism in “Heart of Darkness.” Adamantly refusing the notion that the British writer’s portrayal of African barbarity might be excused by his socio-historical context, Achebe makes Conrad, the man, answerable for the offensive stereotypes he promulgates as a writer. Comparing Conrad’s novel to other European portraits of Africa and its peoples, Achebe concludes that “without doubt, the times in which we live influence our behavior, but the best or merely the better among us . . . are never held hostage by their times.”

Paradoxically, this essay illuminates both the strength and the weakness of the entire collection. While the inclusion of these comments on Conrad underscores the coherence and consistency of Achebe’s thought over the last several decades, it also reminds us that much of the work collected here was originally aimed at smaller, more specific audiences. Achebe has lived in the United States for the past 20 years, and almost half of these essays are transcriptions of lectures he has given at universities and conferences in America, Europe and Africa from the late 1980s onward. In addition, then, to a certain dated quality, the book has something of a recycled feel. This is not helped by the fact that several of Achebe’s more affecting anecdotes are repeated from one essay to another.

“The Education of a British-Protected Child” does, however, succeed in presenting an eclectic and thorough view of Achebe in his longtime roles as writer, father and teacher. With the same generosity and humility that have always distinguished his work, Achebe once again shares his thoughtful perspective on a world about which, despite his privileged placement in the “luxurious” space of the middle, he remains more than a little wary.

Kaiama L. Glover teaches French and Francophone literature at Barnard ­College.