The Education of a British-Protected Child Read Online Free Page A

books English boys would have read in England—
Treasure Island, Tom Brown’s School Days, The Prisoner of Zenda, David Copperfield
, et cetera. They were not about us or people like us, but they were exciting stories. Even stories like John Buchan’s, in which heroic white men battled and worsted repulsive natives, did not trouble us unduly at first. But it all added up to a wonderful preparation for the day we would be old enough to read between the lines and ask questions…
    In my first or second year at Umuahia the postwar Labour government in Britain decided that a university in West Africa might not be a bad idea. So a high-powered commission under Walter Elliot was sent to survey the situation on the ground. Such was the reputation of Umuahia that the commission paid us a visit and spent a whole weekend at our school. Most of them came to chapel service on Sunday morning, but Julian Huxley, the biologist, roamed our extensive grounds watching birds with binoculars.
    The Elliot Commission Report led to the foundation of Nigeria’s first university institution: a university college atIbadan in special relationship with London. By the time it was built I was ready for university education and so walked in. By that time also I was no longer a British-Protected Child but a British Protected Person.
    One of the more remarkable teachers I encountered at Ibadan was James Welch, professor of religious studies. I was intrigued by all the things he was said to have done before coming to Ibadan—head of religious broadcasting at the BBC in London; chaplain to the king; principal of a theological college. He had even gone to Nigeria before all that as a missionary in the 1930s, and then had returned to Africa at the end of the war as director of education with the British government’s ill-fated East African Groundnut Scheme.
    In my final year at Ibadan, I once had a chance to discuss with Professor Welch one of a growing number of disagreements the students were beginning to have with the college. He was then vice principal. In some exasperation he said to me, “We may not be able to teach you what you want or even what you need. We can only teach you what we know.”
    Even in exasperation, James Welch stayed calm and wise. What else can an honest and conscientious teacher teach but what he knows? The real teachers I have had in my life have been people who did not necessarily know what my needs would ultimately be but went ahead anyhow in good faith and with passion to tell me what they knew, leaving it to me to sort out whatever I could use in the search for the things that belonged to my peace. Because colonialism was essentially a denial of human worth and dignity, its education program would not be a model of perfection. And yet the great thingabout being human is our ability to face adversity down by refusing to be defined by it, refusing to be no more than its agent or its victim.
    What I have attempted to suggest in this rambling essay is the potency of the unpredictable in human affairs. I could have dwelt on the harsh humiliations of colonial rule or the more dramatic protests against it. But I am also fascinated by that middle ground I spoke about, where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity. And this was to be found primarily in the camp of the colonized, but now and again in the ranks of the colonizer too.
    The Reverend Robert Fisher was such a spirit. Technically he was of the camp of the colonizer. But such was the vision and passion he brought to his task of creating a new school at Umuahia that when he was offered a bishopric in the course of his labors he turned it down. Years later, he attempted to make light of that decision by saying he wouldn’t have made a good bishop anyway. But that was not the reason. The crest he brought to Umuahia was a pair of torches, one black, one white, shining together silently. A generation later an Australian teacher added the logo
“In unum