Free The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe Page A

with appropriate reverence. The witch doctor then leads the village in a procession from the coconut tree to the village shrine, where the supernatural object is deposited and where it is worshipped to this day.
    That was the most dramatic of the many imported, beautifully packaged, but demeaning readings available to our children, perhaps given them as birthday presents by their parents.
    So it was that when my friend the poet Christopher Okigbo, representing Cambridge University Press in Nigeria at that time, called on me and said I must write him a children’s book for his company, I had no difficulty seeing the need and the urgency. So I wrote
Chike and the River
and dedicated it to Chinelo and to all my nephews and nieces.
    (I am making everything sound so simple. Children may belittle, but writing a children’s book is not simple. I remember that my first draft was too short for the Cambridge format, and the editor directed me to look at Cyprian Ekwensi’s
Passport of Mallam Illia
for the length required. I did.)
    With Chinelo, I learned that parents must not assume that all they had to do for books was to find the smartest department store and pick up the most attractive-looking book in stock. Our complacency was well and truly rebuked by the poison we now saw wrapped and taken home to our little girl. I learned that if I wanted a safe book for my child I should at least read it through and at best write it myself.
    Our second daughter, Nwando, gave us a variation on Chinelo’s theme eight years later. The year was 1972 and the place Amherst, Massachusetts, where I had retreated with my family after the catastrophic Biafran civil war. I had been invited to teach at the university, and my wife had decided to complete her graduate studies. We enrolled our three older children in various Amherst schools and Nwando, who was two and a half, in a nursery school. And she thoroughly hated it. At first we thought it was a passing problem for a child who had never left home before. But it was more than that. Every morning as I dropped her off she would cry with such intensity I would keep hearing her in my head all three miles back. And in the afternoon, when I went back for her, she would seem so desolate. Apparently she would have said not a single word to anybody all day.
    As I had the task of driving her to this school every morning, I began to dread mornings as much as she did. But in the end we struck a bargain that solved the problem. I had to tellher a story all the way to school if she promised not to cry when I dropped her off. Very soon she added another story all the way back. The agreement, needless to say, taxed my repertory of known and fudged stories to the utmost. But it worked. Nwando was no longer crying. By the year’s end she had become such a success in her school that many of her little American schoolmates had begun to call their school Nwando-haven instead of its proper name, Wonderhaven.
    2009

Recognitions

    The recognitions that came my way in the months of May and June 1989 could make even a modest man like me have delusions of grandeur. That spring I concluded a term of teaching at New York’s City College with a party that I was told had been intended as a small gathering of intimate friends and colleagues at lunch but ended as a big evening affair, one of whose amazements was the reading of a signed, sealed, and framed proclamation issued by the president of the Borough of Manhattan and declaring the day of the event, May 25, Chinua Achebe Day, “in recognition of his commitment to his art as well as to the expression and transmission of knowledge and truth through his writing and teaching.” That was a totally new kind of experience for me in the matter of recognitions and immediately set my mind working on that tricky subject.
    I have written previously on a countryman of mine, who wrote a very interesting narrative of his life and published it in London a little over two hundred years