http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/books/16book.html?_r=1&hpwThe first novel and masterpiece from the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, “Things Fall Apart,” is such an economical and lucid depiction of a tribal society cracking under the weight of colonialism that it has become required reading in many American high schools. It’s the stinging “To Kill a Mockingbird” of modern African literature.
First published in 1958, “Things Fall Apart” turned 50 last year, to wide acclaim. In 2007 Mr. Achebe won the Man Booker International Prize, a lifetime achievement award. But if Mr. Achebe has been much in the news, he’s been silent on the page. His new volume of essays, “The Education of a British-Protected Child,” is his first book since he was paralyzed from the waist down, in 1990, in a car accident in Nigeria.
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.
Mr. Achebe grew up in British colonial Nigeria, and this book takes its title from the designation on his passport when he traveled out of his country for the first time, in 1957, to attend BBC Staff School in London. The passport read, “British Protected Person.” It was, Mr. Achebe slyly writes, “rather arbitrary protection.”
In Nigeria Mr. Achebe attended schools modeled on British public schools. He read classic English novels, plenty of them about Africa. He writes firmly and vividly about his first experience of these novels, and how the blinders eventually fell from around his eyes. It’s worth quoting his recollections at length:
“I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
“But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”
Mr. Achebe is sickened by what he reads in “Heart of Darkness.” Conrad speaks of Africans as “rudimentary souls” and savages, and compares one mechanically adept African man to “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs.”
Mr. Achebe calls this “poisonous writing,” and he has no patience for anyone who argues that Conrad’s racism was the norm for its time. He quotes earlier writers (one a hero of Conrad’s) who were far less backward.
Albert Schweitzer also comes under his disapproving gaze. “A saint like Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than a King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother,” Mr. Achebe writes.
In the essay “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature,” Mr. Achebe describes the criticism he has received, from the writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, for writing in English, the oppressor’s language. (Mr. Achebe’s native tongue is Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major languages.)
Mr. Achebe replies that because much of his country’s daily business is conducted in English, and because about 200 languages are spoken in Nigeria, English is the only way to reach a wide audience there. He also argues that English was not forced “down the throats of unwilling natives,” but that it was seen even by progressive politicians as a way to achieve a unified discourse.
There are other essays in “The Education of a British-Protected Child”: about Mr. Achebe’s boyhood and his father, who was a Christian evangelist; about raising his daughters and protecting them from the racism in far too many children’s books; about Nigerian politics; about teaching his own writing.
A few are slack and talky (many began as lectures), and Mr. Achebe is not wrong to describe several as rambling. But at its best, this collection will put you in mind of lines spoken by the poet Ikem in Mr. Achebe’s 1987 novel, “Anthills of the Savannah”: “Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches!”
We are likely to hear more from Mr. Achebe. In an interview with The Village Voice last year, he said he is at work on two novels. One is a work most of us will never get to read, but it sounds like pressing work to its author. That book, Mr. Achebe said, is a translation of “Things Fall Apart” “back into the Igbo language from which it came.”
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