The Education of a British-Protected Child: Chinua Achebe

The pieces here span reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on Achebe`s lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of `Africa` for its own authorship. For the first thirty years of his life, before Nigeria`s independence in 1960, Achebe was officially defined as a `British Protected Person`. In The Education of a British-Protected Child he gives us a vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its `middle ground`, interrogating both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule.