The Education of a British-Protected Child (8 page)

All my life I have had to take account of the million differences—some little, others quite big—between the Nigerian culture into which I was born, and the domineering Western style that infiltrated and then invaded it. Nowhere is the difference more stark and startling than in the ability to ask a parent: “How many children do you have?” The right answer should be a rebuke: “Children are not livestock!” Or better still, silence, and carry on as if the question was never asked.

But things are changing and changing fast with us, and we have been making concession after concession even when the other party shows little sign of reciprocating. And so I have learned to answer questions that my father would not have touched with a bargepole. And to my shame let me add that I suspect I may even be enjoying it, to a certain extent!

My wife and I have four children—two daughters and two sons, a lovely balance further enhanced by the symmetry of
their arrivals: girl, boy, boy, girl. Thus the girls had taken strategic positions in the family.

We, my wife and I, cut our teeth on parenthood with the first girl, Chinelo. Naturally, we made many blunders. But Chinelo was up to it. She taught us. At age four or thereabouts, she began to reflect back to us her experience of her world. One day she put it in words: “I am not black; I am brown.” We sat up and began to pay attention.

The first place our minds went was her nursery school, run by a bunch of white expatriate women. But inquiries to the school board returned only assurances. I continued sniffing around, which led me in the end to those expensive and colorful children’s books imported from Europe and displayed so seductively in the better supermarkets of Lagos.

Many parents like me, who never read children’s books in their own childhood, saw a chance to give to their children the blessings of modern civilization which they never had and grabbed it. But what I saw in many of the books was not civilization but condescension and even offensiveness.

Here, retold in my own words, is a mean story hiding behind the glamorous covers of a children’s book:

A white boy is playing with his kite in a beautiful open space on a clear summer’s day. In the background are lovely houses and gardens and tree-lined avenues. The wind is good and the little boy’s kite rises higher and higher and higher. It flies so high in the end that it gets caught under the tail of an airplane that just happens to be passing overhead at that very moment. Trailing the kite, the airplane flies on past cities and
oceans and deserts. Finally it is flying over forests and jungles. We see wild animals in the forests and we see little round huts in the clearing. An African village.

For some reason, the kite untangles itself at this point and begins to fall while the airplane goes on its way. The kite falls and falls and finally comes to rest on top of a coconut tree.

A little black boy climbing the tree to pick a coconut beholds this strange and terrifying object sitting on top of the tree. He utters a piercing cry and literally falls off the tree.

His parents and their neighbors rush to the scene and discuss this apparition with great fear and trembling. In the end they send for the village witch doctor, who appears in his feathers with an entourage of drummers. He offers sacrifices and prayers and then sends his boldest man up the tree to bring down the object, which he does with appropriate reverence. The witch doctor then leads the village in a procession from the coconut tree to the village shrine, where the supernatural object is deposited and where it is worshipped to this day.

That was the most dramatic of the many imported, beautifully packaged, but demeaning readings available to our children, perhaps given them as birthday presents by their parents.

So it was that when my friend the poet Christopher Okigbo, representing Cambridge University Press in Nigeria at that time, called on me and said I must write him a children’s book for his company, I had no difficulty seeing the need and the urgency. So I wrote
Chike and the River
and dedicated it to Chinelo and to all my nephews and nieces.

(I am making everything sound so simple. Children may be
little, but writing a children’s book is not simple. I remember that my first draft was too short for the Cambridge format, and the editor directed me to look at Cyprian Ekwensi’s
Passport of Mallam Illia
for the length required. I did.)

With Chinelo, I learned that parents must not assume that all they had to do for books was to find the smartest department store and pick up the most attractive-looking book in stock. Our complacency was well and truly rebuked by the poison we now saw wrapped and taken home to our little girl. 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.

Our second daughter, Nwando, gave us a variation on Chinelo’s theme eight years later. The year was 1972 and the place Amherst, Massachusetts, where I had retreated with my family after the catastrophic Biafran civil war. I had been invited to teach at the university, and my wife had decided to complete her graduate studies. We enrolled our three older children in various Amherst schools and Nwando, who was two and a half, in a nursery school. And she thoroughly hated it. At first we thought it was a passing problem for a child who had never left home before. But it was more than that. Every morning as I dropped her off she would cry with such intensity I would keep hearing her in my head all three miles back. And in the afternoon, when I went back for her, she would seem so desolate. Apparently she would have said not a single word to anybody all day.

As I had the task of driving her to this school every morning, I began to dread mornings as much as she did. But in the end we struck a bargain that solved the problem. I had to tell
her a story all the way to school if she promised not to cry when I dropped her off. Very soon she added another story all the way back. The agreement, needless to say, taxed my repertory of known and fudged stories to the utmost. But it worked. Nwando was no longer crying. By the year’s end she had become such a success in her school that many of her little American schoolmates had begun to call their school Nwando-haven instead of its proper name, Wonderhaven.

2009

The recognitions that came my way in the months of May and June 1989 could make even a modest man like me have delusions of grandeur. That spring I concluded a term of teaching at New York’s City College with a party that I was told had been intended as a small gathering of intimate friends and colleagues at lunch but ended as a big evening affair, one of whose amazements was the reading of a signed, sealed, and framed proclamation issued by the president of the Borough of Manhattan and declaring the day of the event, May 25, Chinua Achebe Day, “in recognition of his commitment to his art as well as to the expression and transmission of knowledge and truth through his writing and teaching.” That was a totally new kind of experience for me in the matter of recognitions and immediately set my mind working on that tricky subject.

I have written previously on a countryman of mine, who wrote a very interesting narrative of his life and published it in London a little over two hundred years ago. His situation was
so different from mine. He had been enslaved as a child and, after many adventures, had managed to buy back his freedom and settle down in London. In presenting his book to the English public of his day, he wrote:

“Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African” was the flamboyant way this author identified himself on the cover of his book. The flamboyance, it must be said, was thrust upon Equiano. The editor of the 1989 reissue of his book tells us that the English naval officer who had bought him “gave him the name of Gustavus Vassa, following the condescending custom of giving slaves the names of European heroes.”
¹
I suppose it is rather like someone calling his cat Napoleon. Equiano fought back unsuccessfully to keep his Igbo name and finally scored partial success with that lengthy compromise. He did achieve a certain recognition, because his book went through nine editions in England between 1789 and 1797, when he died. He is today being rediscovered in Igboland and far beyond it. I have myself pinpointed to my own satisfaction and from the evidence in his text the village of his birth as Iseke. An even bolder if not outright injudicious enthusiast has gone further, to produce Equiano’s present-day relations! One example of the fascination of Equiano was an international conference in Salt Lake City to commemorate
the bicentennial of
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
. Geography contracts; history is telescoped.

The restraint in expectations which Equiano cautions regarding immortality and literary reputation is well taken. But his extraordinary life and his record of it are clearly the stuff of great literature. Was he indeed the first writer in England to carry his books from place to place and door to door? If so, he took a major cultural practice from West Africa to Europe. If not, we may limit ourselves to calling him the stuff of legend.

Before the City College event, I had been invited by my American publishers to a booksellers’ dinner in Washington, D.C. The cab ride was a capsule story of its own.

The driver turned out to be a Nigerian. He looked over his shoulder as I boarded his vehicle and called my name in the form of a question. I nodded in answer and he became so excited that he talked all the way to our destination. The other two passengers in the cab, another writer and an editor from our publishing house, just sat and watched this moving drama, which I, being partly responsible for it, tried at intervals and with little success to halt or divert. At the end of the journey, the editor held out a twenty-dollar bill to the driver. He shook his head and said that Chinua Achebe cannot pay to ride in his cab. I told him I was not paying, that my publisher was paying, and that my publisher was very rich. He still shook his head and said that Chinua Achebe’s friends cannot pay in his cab!

So much for pleasant and profitable recognitions. I was to
be reminded of the other kind in a matter of days, in one of those contrasting sequences that seem to come to us by courtesy of some unseen stage director. The occasion was a visit to me by Nuruddin Farah, the Somali writer, at the International House on Riverside Drive in New York City, where I lived during my visit. He was on his way to the airport at the end of his stay at the state university branch in Stony Brook.

As we stood at the reception hall exchanging papers, one of the receptionists recognized Mr. Farah and asked excitedly if he was Nuruddin Farah, to which he replied no, he was not. You are, said the other. No, I am not, said Farah. This went on, playfully and not so playfully, for quite a while before the two finally settled the matter and rattled away in Somali.

“I never admit who I am, as a matter of principle,” said Mr. Farah, a fact I was somewhat familiar with. And I knew one of the reasons, too: he had on one occasion, at least, narrowly escaped death at the hands of agents from his homeland.

So one is lucky to be able to revel in the sunshine of recognition by others. Or perhaps just naïve.

2009

It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose landmass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in the European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe’s very antithesis. The French-African poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, in full awareness of this paradox, chose to celebrate that problematic proximity in a poem, “Prayer to Masks,” with the startling imagery of one of nature’s most profound instances of closeness: “joined together at the navel.” And why not? After all, the shores of northern Africa and southern Europe enclose, like two cupped hands, the waters of the world’s most famous sea, perceived by the ancients as the very heart and center of the world. Senghor’s metaphor would have been better appreciated in the days of ancient Egypt and Greece than today.

History aside, geography has its own brand of lesson in the paradox of proximity for us. This lesson, which was probably
lost on everyone else except those of us living in West Africa in the last days of the British Raj, was the ridiculous fact of longitudinal equality between London, mighty imperial metropolis, and Accra, rude rebel camp of colonial insurrection; so that, their unequal stations in life notwithstanding, they were named by the same Greenwich meridian and consequently doomed together to the same time of day!

But longitude is only half the story. There is also latitude, and latitude gives London and Accra very different experiences of midday temperature, for example, and perhaps gave their inhabitants over past eons of time radically different complexions. So differences are there, if those are what one is looking for. But there is no way in which such differences as do exist could satisfactorily explain the profound perception of alienness which Africa has come to represent for Europe.

This perception problem is not in its origin the result of ignorance, as we are sometimes inclined to think. At least, it is not ignorance entirely, or even primarily. It was in general a deliberate
invention
devised to facilitate two gigantic historical events: the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa by Europe, the second event following closely on the heels of the first, and the two together stretching across almost half a millennium from about
A.D
.
1500. In an important and authoritative study of this invention, two American scholars, Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, show how a dramatic change in the content of British writing about Africa coincided with an increase in the volume of the slave trade to its highest level in the eighteenth century. That content