BOOK SA – Reviews

Verdict: carrot

Many years ago, Chinua Achebe and other writers were invited to a symposium to commemorate one millennium of the city of Dublin; the theme for their presentations was “Literature as celebration”. Most of the participants, Achebe writes, couldn’t easily make the link between literature and celebration. Achebe, on the other hand, found a ready parallel in his Igbo culture’s ritual of mbari, which he describes as “a celebration, through art, of the world and of the life lived in it”.

In a way this collection of essays could be viewed as a celebration of Achebe’s world, and the almost 80 years he has lived in it. As his new collection shows, this world is large and all-encompassing – his essays range from the political to the historical to the personal, yet they are all projected through an intimate, biographical lens, thus making each a milestone on his long journey on this earth. They were written at different times, the earliest in 1988, the latest in 2009. They range from the author’s childhood in Ogidi village in south-eastern Nigeria, to his education in Ibadan, to fame as a writer, to exile and family. And though most of them cover territories the author’s followers are familiar with from other collections, such as Home and Exile, or Hopes and Impediments, it is a mark of Achebe’s genius as a narrator that one could hear him many times on the same subject and never grow bored – a reminder that in the art of the storyteller, it is not content alone that matters, it is also the performance, the presentation and the passion.

• Complete review in the Guardian

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
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Verdict: big, big carrot

Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s greatest writers, has received very little recognition from those who grant the world’s prestigious literary awards. The Man Booker’s lifetime award, its International Prize for fiction, was conferred on him as recently as 2007 but the grand acknowledgement, the Nobel Prize, eludes him still.

Yet, if world acclaim has been restrained, in Africa adulation has come in simple yet complete ways. In his native Nigeria Achebe (80) is affectionately known as the Eagle on Iroko. Two potent images: the majestic eagle, king of the birds of prey, and the iroko, a giant tree native to West Africa and considered to be sacred.

The Education of a British-Protected Child (Penguin), his new collection of essays, confirms his cultural and political importance to Africa and the rest of the world. Achebe’s oeuvre, comprising poetry, short stories, children’s books, essays and fiction, includes the much-adored Things Fall Apart, the majestic Arrow of God and the essay collection Hopes and Impediments.

• Complete review in the Mail and Guardian

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
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Verdict: carrot

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.

• Complete review in The New York Times

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot from Ireland

IN The Education of a British-Protected Child , Chinua Achebe’s new collection of essays, the author recalls attending a symposium in Dublin some years ago, organised by the Arts Council, around the theme of literature as celebration. While some writers present took issue with the theme, Achebe, calling on the more inclusive notion of “celebration” favoured by his people – he comes from the Igbo ethnic group, one of the largest in Africa – embraced it. For the Igbo, celebration is “the acknowledgment, not the welcoming, of a presence . . . the courtesy of giving to everybody his due”. As such, it includes all significant encounters, even and especially those new and threatening – even colonialism.

Achebe also recalls that on the morning he spoke in Dublin The Irish Times referred to him as “the man who invented African literature”. Though this sort of title is often bestowed on him, Achebe balks at such “well-meant but blasphemous” characterisations, citing an Igbo taboo against claiming for oneself what arises out of the communal enterprise that is creativity. The paragraphs on Dublin provide a jumping-off point for an essay that touches on themes Achebe returns to throughout this collection: art and its necessary representation of the totality of humanity, colonialism and its effects – including the languages in which people choose to write – and the question of who can lay claim to which stories.

• Complete review in the Irish Times

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
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Verdict: carrot

It’s a welcome return. Those who have closely followed Mr. Achebe’s career won’t find much that’s new in “The Education of a British-Protected Child.” He deals only glancingly with subjects his readers might be curious about in 2009, like how the aftershocks of his accident have affected his life and work.

But in this book he tangles further, and profitably, with the obsessions that have defined his career: colonialism, identity, family, the uses and abuses of language. And he returns to some of the still smoldering controversies that have shaped his reputation. These include his groundbreaking 1975 analysis of the racism lurking in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and his defense against critics who have attacked him for writing African literature in the colonizer’s language, English.

• Complete review in The New York Times

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Verdict: carrot

The Education of a British-Protected Child, a collection of autobiographical essays, is Achebe’s first new book in twenty years.

The occasion of a new book by Chinua Achebe—Africa’s most celebrated writer and author of Things Fall Apart, the great African novel—cannot be ignored. It’s been twenty years since his previously published book and more than that since his last novel. Much has happened to Achebe and Nigeria during those years, much of it not good. But even prior to those twenty years there was the civil war in Nigeria (1967-1970), after the country’s Igbos succeeded and formed their own country called Biafra. It took years for the scars of those events to heal (if they ever did). Achebe and many other Igbos were left in a state of emotional collapse and, if you talk to Igbos today in southeastern Nigeria, they’ll tell you that a similar situation could occur again.

• Complete review in Counter Punch

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Image courtesy Chinua Achebe.net

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.

• Complete review in The Christian Science Monitor

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Uitspraak: wortel

Vrouehandel en prostitusie, die belewenisse van Afrika-vroue wat onwettig in Europa ’n bestaan probeer voer – dit is die temas wat Chika Unigwe in haar nuutste roman On Black Sisters’ Street deurtrap. En sy doen dit nadat sy self op spykerhakke en in stywe leerrompies Antwerpen se rooiligdistrik aangedurf het om onwettige Nigeriese prostitute se verhale te hoor: die redes waarom hulle uit Afrika weg is en hul ervarings in Europa.

Sy plaas haar roman met gesag in Afrika én Europa: sy’s gebore in Nigerië en woon tans in België.

As skrywer is sy nie onbekend nie. Haar Engelse kortverhale het al verskeie toekennings ontvang onder andere van die BBC én die Statebond se kortverhaaltoekennings. Haar eerste Neder lands­talige kortverhaal is met ’n Vlaamse literêre prys bekroon. Die verhaal “The Secret” was in 2005 ’n ­finalis vir die Caine-prys.

• Lees die volledige artikel in Die Burger

Boekbesonderhede

• On Black Sisters’ Street deur Chika Unigwe
  EAN: 9780224085304
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Verdict: carrot

From first to last, each one of Barrett’s short stories in this collection delivers startling scenes and revelations. I have not read the first edition so cannot comment, nor compare the two, but From Caves of Rotten Teeth (2nd Ed.) signalled to me the rise of another great African writer.

“I was born on the same day as the poet Robert Frost, but 105 years later . . . I . . . envy the earthworm and its well-adjusted life, view knowledge as a machete in a jungle of ignorance, reject absolutism in all human-related affairs, and worship new experiences. Also, I am a writer.” —A. Igoni Barrett, switchedonnaija.com interview

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Verdict: carrot

A fresh perspective from Nigeria on the bestselling book by “the other Mbeki”, as the reviewer – who adds minor criticism to his carrot – puts it:

There seem to be a new crop of the “what’s wrong with Africa” books that have been trundling off the production line ever since the era of independence. Back in the 1960s, French agronomist Rene Dumont’s created a stir with his False Start in Africa which highlighted some of the flaws of the new regimes: in the 1980s the report of Elliot Berg to the World Bank paved the way for the ravages of structural adjustment, but also for the boosting of the private sector. The last 20 years have seen more African views of how to turn the continent round. Some, like Damisa Moyo’s recent Dead Aid seem to cater for what people in the West want to hear. The same cannot be said of Architects of Poverty by Moeletsi Mbeki, a well-known South African commentator and controversialist, who although the brother of former President Thabo Mbeki, maintains a firmly independent stand, often distancing himself from his politician brother.

Not that Moeletsi is not also highly political. Indeed, the book relishes taking a particularly controversial line on the misdeeds of African elites, on whom all the present ills of the continent are dumped. In particular, he has strong words of criticism for the crony capitalists who have benefited from Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), as not being genuine entrepreneurs, but political rent-seekers of a kind that are found in many of what he perceives as the neo-colonial states of sub-Saharan Africa. This is a criticism of the continuum of rule by the African National Congress (ANC) since 1994, during part of which period Thabo Mbeki was in power.

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