The Education of a British-Protected Child
Search in google:
From the celebrated author of Things Fall Apart and the winner of the Man Booker International Prize comes a new collection of autobiographical essays—-his first new book in more than twenty years.The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn 1989, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, best known for his 1959 novel Things Fall Apart, was invited to attend a meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. "Here was I," he writes, recalling his puzzlement, "...a guest, as it were, from the world's poverty-stricken provinces at a gathering of the rich and powerful..." Participants discussed, in particular, the economic shock treatment required to "yank the sufferer out of the swamp of improvidence back onto the high and firm road of free-market economy." When the governor of the Bank of Kenya demurred, citing the disastrous case of Zambia, he was patronizingly reassured. Then Achebe signaled his desire to speak. "I said that what was going on before me was a fiction workshop," he recalls, "Here you are, spinning your fine theories, to be tried out in your imaginary laboratories.... I have news for you. Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people." As he spoke, he noticed astonishment on some faces but also heard the Dutch director-general of the OECD, who sat beside him, muttering "Give it to them!"The realization that he may have been invited by this man to "set my cat among his own pigeons" was the one insight that gave him hope.
Preface The Education of a British-Protected ChildThe Sweet Aroma of Zik's Kitchen: Growing Up in the Ambience of a LegendMy Dad and MeWhat Is Nigeria to Me?Traveling WhiteSpelling Our Proper NameMy DaughtersRecognitionsAfrica's Tarnished NamePolitics and Politicians of Language in African LiteratureAfrican Literature as Restoration of CelebrationTeaching Things Fall Apart Martin Luther King and Africa The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics Stanley Diamond Africa Is People Notes Acknowledgments
