The Education of a British-Protected Child Read Online Free

disappeared from the open market.
    We soldiered along, singing “Rule, Britannia!,” but the really popular song was “Germany Is Falling”:
    Germany is falling, falling, falling
Germany is falling to rise no more.
    If you are going to Germany before me
Germany is falling to rise no more
Tell Hitler I’m not coming there
Germany is falling to rise no more.
    If you are going to Italy before me
Tell Mussolini I’m not coming there.
    If you are going to Japan before me
Tell Hirohito I’m not coming there.
    The enemy list concluded, you moved on to friends whom you were naturally prepared to visit:
    If you are going to England before me
Tell Churchill I am coming there.
    If you are going to America before me
Tell Roosevelt I am coming there.
    If you are going to Russia before me
Tell Stalin I am coming there.
    If you are going to China before me
Tell Chiang Kai-shek I am coming there.
    If you are going to Abyssinia before me
Tell Haile Selassie I am coming there.
    Sung lustily in an arrangement for cantor and chorus, “Germany Is Falling” was as stirring as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and other evangelical war songs.
    I had two choices for secondary school—the very popular Dennis Memorial Grammar School, a C.M.S. institution in Onitsha, or Government College, Umuahia, much farther away and much less known to me. My elder brother John, a teacher who had taken me to live with him in my last year of primary school, decided I should go to Umuahia. It was not the decision I would have made myself. But John turned out to be, as usual, absolutely right.
    I don’t know what prompted the British colonial administration in Nigeria in the decade following the end of the First World War to set up two first-class boarding schools for boysin Nigeria, one at Ibadan and the other at Umuahia. The arguments, whatever they were, must be fascinating, but I have not been privileged to read them. Howbeit, an extraordinary English cleric, Robert Fisher, was appointed the founding principal of Government College Umuahia, and the school opened its doors in 1929. By the time Fisher retired eight years later, Umuahia was a byword in Nigeria for excellence.
    Then came the Second World War, and other arguments prevailed in colonial high places, and Government College Umuahia was closed down and its buildings turned over to a prisoner-of-war camp for German and Italian nationals. There was yet a third change of colonial mind even before the war ended, and the campus was returned to education and ready to accept my generation of students in 1944. Colonial policy moved in mysterious ways!
    Our new principal, William Simpson, a Cambridge man in the colonial education service, set about rebuilding the school. And what a job he did! His experience of colonial education must have persuaded him that “excessive devotion to book-work is a real danger,” as he constantly intoned for our benefit, and that the cramming which often passed for education in the colonies was in fact education’s greatest enemy. Though Simpson was a mathematics teacher, he made a rule which promoted the reading of novels and prohibited the reading of any textbooks after classes on three days of the week. He called it the Textbook Act. Under this draconian law, we could read fiction or biographies or magazines like
Illustrated London News
or write letters or play Ping-Pong or just sit about, but not open a textbook, on pain of detention. And we had awonderful library from Robert Fisher’s days to support Mr. Simpson’s Textbook Act.
    Perhaps it was a mere coincidence, but Government College Umuahia alumni played a conspicuous role in the development of modern African literature. That so many of my colleagues—Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, Chukwuemeka Ike, I.N.C. Aniebo, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and others—should all have gone to one school would strike anyone who is at all familiar with this literature. What we read in the school library at Umuahia were the