Book description
The pieces here span reflections on personal and collective identity,
on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on
Achebe's lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of 'Africa' for its
own authorship. For the first thirty years of his life, before Nigeria's
independence in 1960, Achebe was officially defined as a 'British
Protected Person'. In
The Education of a British-Protected Child
he gives us a vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing
up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its 'middle ground', interrogating
both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in
secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule. Chinua
Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village
of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in
Eastern Nigeria, and was a graduate of University College, Ibadan. His
early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as
Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national
upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry
of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and
fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad. For
over fifteen years, he was the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of
Languages and Literature at Bard College. He was the David and Marianna
Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana studies at Brown
University. Chinua Achebe wrote over twenty books - novels, short
stories, essays and collections of poetry - and received numerous
honours from around the world, including the Honourary Fellowship of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honourary doctorates
from more than thirty colleges and universities. He was also the
recipient of Nigeria's highest award for intellectual achievement, the
Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker
International Prize for Fiction. He died in 2013.
