Verdict: carrot
Our first glimpse of the new book from Chinua Achebe, due in South Africa early next year, from the author of A Basket of Leaves: 99 books that capture the spirit of Africa:
The Education of a British-Protected Child is neither a memoir nor exactly what it is advertised to be: a collection of autobiographical essays. Of the 16 essays and speeches included here, the most directly autobiographical – “My Dad and Me” and “My Daughters” – are among the briefest. The memories in the title essay are separated by ruminations on British colonialism and the character of the Igbo people. As for the 1990 car accident that cost him the use of his legs, Achebe disposes of it with a couple of sentences in his preface.
But if “The Education of a British-Protected Child” doesn’t tell us much that is new about Achebe’s life, it does tell us a lot about his views on other matters. In it, among other things, he returns to the topics of two of his most controversial older essays: “An Image of Africa,” on the racism of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and “The African Writer and the English Language,” on the use of English by African writers.
“Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature” renews Achebe’s argument with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the best-known proponent of the idea that African literature should be written in the indigenous languages of Africa. Ngugi, he says, believes that the choice of a language must be either/or, while Achebe believes one can embrace both. One of his own best poems, he says, was an elegy for the poet Christopher Okigbo, who died during the Biafran war. It was written in the Igbo language.
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