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

ago. His situation wasso different from mine. He had been enslaved as a child and, after many adventures, had managed to buy back his freedom and settle down in London. In presenting his book to the English public of his day, he wrote:
    It is … not a little hazardous in a private and obscure individual, and a stranger too thus to solicit the indulgent attention of the public… I am not so foolishly vain as to expect from it either immortality or literary reputation.
    “Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African” was the flamboyant way this author identified himself on the cover of his book. The flamboyance, it must be said, was thrust upon Equiano. The editor of the 1989 reissue of his book tells us that the English naval officer who had bought him “gave him the name of Gustavus Vassa, following the condescending custom of giving slaves the names of European heroes.” 1 I suppose it is rather like someone calling his cat Napoleon. Equiano fought back unsuccessfully to keep his Igbo name and finally scored partial success with that lengthy compromise. He did achieve a certain recognition, because his book went through nine editions in England between 1789 and 1797, when he died. He is today being rediscovered in Igboland and far beyond it. I have myself pinpointed to my own satisfaction and from the evidence in his text the village of his birth as Iseke. An even bolder if not outright injudicious enthusiast has gone further, to produce Equiano’s present-day relations! One example of the fascination of Equiano was an international conference in Salt Lake City to commemoratethe bicentennial of
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
. Geography contracts; history is telescoped.
    The restraint in expectations which Equiano cautions regarding immortality and literary reputation is well taken. But his extraordinary life and his record of it are clearly the stuff of great literature. Was he indeed the first writer in England to carry his books from place to place and door to door? If so, he took a major cultural practice from West Africa to Europe. If not, we may limit ourselves to calling him the stuff of legend.
    Before the City College event, I had been invited by my American publishers to a booksellers’ dinner in Washington, D.C. The cab ride was a capsule story of its own.
    The driver turned out to be a Nigerian. He looked over his shoulder as I boarded his vehicle and called my name in the form of a question. I nodded in answer and he became so excited that he talked all the way to our destination. The other two passengers in the cab, another writer and an editor from our publishing house, just sat and watched this moving drama, which I, being partly responsible for it, tried at intervals and with little success to halt or divert. At the end of the journey, the editor held out a twenty-dollar bill to the driver. He shook his head and said that Chinua Achebe cannot pay to ride in his cab. I told him I was not paying, that my publisher was paying, and that my publisher was very rich. He still shook his head and said that Chinua Achebe’s friends cannot pay in his cab!
    So much for pleasant and profitable recognitions. I was tobe reminded of the other kind in a matter of days, in one of those contrasting sequences that seem to come to us by courtesy of some unseen stage director. The occasion was a visit to me by Nuruddin Farah, the Somali writer, at the International House on Riverside Drive in New York City, where I lived during my visit. He was on his way to the airport at the end of his stay at the state university branch in Stony Brook.
    As we stood at the reception hall exchanging papers, one of the receptionists recognized Mr. Farah and asked excitedly if he was Nuruddin Farah, to which he replied no, he was not. You are, said the other. No, I am not, said Farah. This went on, playfully and not so playfully, for quite a while before the