NONFICTION

Achebe essays offer wealth of insights

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Last year, Western New Yorkers got the chance to hear the poetry and reflections of the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, as part of Just Buffalo’s Babel series. 2008 was a big year for Achebe, as his masterpiece, the novel “Things Fall Apart,” celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Now comes Achebe’s first new book in more than 20 years, a collection of 16 essays— most of them written in the late 1980s and 1990s.

From the outside, “The Education of a British-Protected Child” may seem somewhat slight: a late, minor addition to the canon of a 20th century giant. It’s a short book; the topics are miscellaneous; and many of the essays are adapted from speeches. Achebe rambles quite casually through topics, sometimes recycling anecdotes from one piece to another.

And yet, this collection does something quite wonderful: it gives the reader the feeling of sitting across the table and talking on easy terms with one of the world’s deepest and broadest literary minds, gaining insights into Achebe’s life and work, but also into Nigeria, colonialism, and the complicated interplay of European and African culture.

Achebe was born in 1930, the son of a Christian minister, and grew up in a town that was saturated with two languages and two cultures: Ibgo and English. Achebe is an unsparing critic of colonial brutality (he makes a devastating analysis of the racism in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”), but he is careful to avoid polarized thinking. Having seen the Europeans deny the humanity of the Africans, he is too subtle a thinker to deny the humanity of the Europeans.

Instead, Achebe favors what he calls the “middle ground,” which is “the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony.” Achebe’s essays make the most of this middle ground, crafting unpredictable combinations of memoir, history, literature, folk tale and humor.

In a typical passage, Achebe notes that the 1960 Nigerian national anthem, given to the Nigerians as a “parting gift” by the British, and written by an English housewife, called Nigeria a “motherland.” The current anthem, an “even worse” song written by a committee of Nigerian intellectuals, calls Nigeria a “fatherland.” In Achebe’s view, however, Nigeria is neither his mother or father, but a child: “enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward.”

Achebe’s language is casual, but his point is profound. In the United States, as in Nigeria, we are often asked to love our nation as if it were a parent (the word “patriot” comes from the Latin word for father) — offering it unquestioning obedience, trusting that it knows better. What if, following Achebe, we loved our country with equal passion, but as our child — as the mutual creation of all citizens? What if we took full responsibility for guiding its actions, fully understanding how wayward a nation can be?

Achebe’s essays are filled with thought-provoking moments such as this. They are grounded in the Nigerian experience, but their meanings are universal, and even readers who have not yet read “Things Fall Apart” or Achebe’s other work will find them rich and insightful.

Sam Magavern is the co-director of the Partnership for the Public Good and the author of “Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey.”

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

By Chinua Achebe

Knopf

166 pages, $24.95

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