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

luceant”
under the emblem.
    And there was William Simpson, teacher of mathematics, who would have been greatly surprised if anyone had said to him in the 1940s that he was preparing the ground for the beginnings of modern African literature.
    Or even that strange Englishman J. M. Stuart Young, who opted out of the colonial system in Onitsha and set himself up in competition against his own people in giant European tradingcompanies. His ambition to open up commerce to African traders may have seemed quixotic at the time, but the people of Onitsha admired him and gave him a big traditional funeral when he died.
    These people had reached across the severe divide which colonialism would have, and touched many of us on the other side. But more important, far more important, was the fact that even if those hands had not reached across to us we would still have survived colonial tribulations, as we had done so many others before them through the millennia. That they did reach across, however, makes a great human story.
    In 1976, U.S. relations with Nigeria reached an all-time low in the face of particularly clumsy American handling of the Angolan—Cuban—South African issue. Henry Kissinger, whose indifference to Africa bordered on cynicism, decided at last to meet Joseph Garba, the Nigerian foreign minister, at the United Nations. In a gambit of condescending pleasantness, Kissinger asked Garba what he thought America was doing wrong in Africa. To which Garba replied stonily: “Everything!” Kissinger’s next comment was both precious and, I regret to admit, true. He said: “Statistically that is impossible. Even if it is unintentional, we must be doing something right.” 2
    That exchange could easily have been about colonialism.
    1993
    In its original form, this essay was delivered as the Ashby Lecture at Cambridge University, January 22, 1993. Eric Ashby, for whom the Ashby Lecture series is named, was master of Clare College at the university from 1959 to 1967. The lectures’ broad theme is that of human values.
    * “Age-grade,” in the Igbo tradition, is an association of people within an age bracket, functioning largely as a village group. It begins in childhood and continues throughout the duration of the individual’s life. In Igbo tradition, it was unheard of for an age-grade to be named after a white man until Captain O’Connor.

The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen
Growing Up in the Ambience of a Legend

    If you are blind, describing an elephant is easy. You can call it, like one of the six blind men in the fable, a huge tree trunk; or perhaps a gigantic fan; or an enormous rope, and so on. But having eyes, far from making such descriptions easy, actually complicates them.
    So what do we do if we have to describe a phenomenon as vast as Azikiwe? Take a small part that you have a little knowledge of and tell all of it; but never pretend that what you tell is the story.
    I am taking my own advice and reflecting on a very small segment of the Azikiwe story. But you can already see my difficulty in the fact that I can’t seem to decide which of two titles to use; and I sense a couple more looming in the back-ground—“Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe: Zik of Africa,” for example, the first president of Nigeria.

    I remember, in exact and complete detail, the first day I saw Azikiwe’s name in print and realized that I had been calling it wrongly all my life. I must have been about six or seven. I had gone to visit the children of one of our neighbors, a church teacher who lived three houses down the road from us. Unlike my father, who had retired from evangelical work and now lived permanently in our village on a grand pension of one pound, ten shillings a month, this neighbor was still on active missionary service and only came home to Ogidi now and again. His house, like ours, was a modern affair: mud walls and corrugated iron roof.
    As I entered the front room, called the piazza in the vocabulary of missionary