Read Online The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe - Free Book Online
Authors: Chinua Achebe
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anything, including mine,” he says to his nephew, “but trust your experience.”
Baldwin felt deeply, instinctively, most powerfully, the need for the African-American to know whence he came before he can know where he is headed.
The simplistic answer would be: he came from Africa, of course. Not for Baldwin, however, any simple answers. He had too much intelligence and integrity for that. “What is Africa to me?” asked an African poet who never left the motherland. Imagine, then, the tumult of questions in the soul of a man like Baldwin after three or four hundred traumatic years of absence. So in his anguished tribute to Richard Wright, he speaks of the Negro problem and the fearful conundrum of Africa.
Fearful conundrum, a terrifying problem admitting of no satisfactory solution. I am not an African-American. It would be impertinent of me to attempt to unravel that conundrum. But let me suggest two strands in its hideously tangled tissue of threads. One: the Africans sold us to Europeans for cheap trinkets. Two: Africans have made nothing of which we can be proud.
I am not sure whether or not Baldwin referred specifically to the allegation of African complicity in the slave trade. But he was seriously troubled as a young man by Africa’s lack of achievement. In the famous statement in “Stranger in the Village” he contrasts his African heritage most adversely with that of a very humble European: a Swiss peasant.
The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out oftheir hymns and dances came Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in full glory—but I am in Africa watching the conquerors arrive.
This lament issues from a soul in torment and cannot be ignored. But before we look at it, let me say two things. First, I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety. Flowing from that, it is not necessary for black people to invent a great fictitious past in order to justify their human existence and dignity today. What they must do is recover what belongs to them—their story—and tell it themselves.
The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally. That must change and is indeed beginning to change, but not without resistance or even hostility. So much psychological, political, and economic interest is vested in the negative image. The reason is simple. If you are going to enslave or to colonize somebody, you are not going to write a glowing report about him either before or after. Rather you will uncover or invent terrible stories about him so that your act of brigandage will become easy for you to live with.
About A.D . 1600, a Dutch traveler to Benin in modern Nigeria had no difficulty comparing the city of Benin rather favorably with Amsterdam. The main street of Benin, hewrote, was seven or eight times wider than its equivalent—the Warmoes—in Amsterdam. The houses were in as good a state as the houses in Amsterdam.
Two hundred and fifty years later, before the British sacked the same city of Benin, they first described it as the “City of Blood,” whose barbarism so revolted their civilized conscience that they simply had to dispatch a huge army to overwhelm it, banish its king, and loot its royal art gallery for the benefit of the British Museum and numerous private collections. All this was done, it was said with the straightest of faces, to end repugnant practices like human sacrifice. No mention whatsoever of a commercial motive—the penetration of a
Baldwin felt deeply, instinctively, most powerfully, the need for the African-American to know whence he came before he can know where he is headed.
The simplistic answer would be: he came from Africa, of course. Not for Baldwin, however, any simple answers. He had too much intelligence and integrity for that. “What is Africa to me?” asked an African poet who never left the motherland. Imagine, then, the tumult of questions in the soul of a man like Baldwin after three or four hundred traumatic years of absence. So in his anguished tribute to Richard Wright, he speaks of the Negro problem and the fearful conundrum of Africa.
Fearful conundrum, a terrifying problem admitting of no satisfactory solution. I am not an African-American. It would be impertinent of me to attempt to unravel that conundrum. But let me suggest two strands in its hideously tangled tissue of threads. One: the Africans sold us to Europeans for cheap trinkets. Two: Africans have made nothing of which we can be proud.
I am not sure whether or not Baldwin referred specifically to the allegation of African complicity in the slave trade. But he was seriously troubled as a young man by Africa’s lack of achievement. In the famous statement in “Stranger in the Village” he contrasts his African heritage most adversely with that of a very humble European: a Swiss peasant.
The most illiterate among them is related, in a way I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out oftheir hymns and dances came Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in full glory—but I am in Africa watching the conquerors arrive.
This lament issues from a soul in torment and cannot be ignored. But before we look at it, let me say two things. First, I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety. Flowing from that, it is not necessary for black people to invent a great fictitious past in order to justify their human existence and dignity today. What they must do is recover what belongs to them—their story—and tell it themselves.
The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally. That must change and is indeed beginning to change, but not without resistance or even hostility. So much psychological, political, and economic interest is vested in the negative image. The reason is simple. If you are going to enslave or to colonize somebody, you are not going to write a glowing report about him either before or after. Rather you will uncover or invent terrible stories about him so that your act of brigandage will become easy for you to live with.
About A.D . 1600, a Dutch traveler to Benin in modern Nigeria had no difficulty comparing the city of Benin rather favorably with Amsterdam. The main street of Benin, hewrote, was seven or eight times wider than its equivalent—the Warmoes—in Amsterdam. The houses were in as good a state as the houses in Amsterdam.
Two hundred and fifty years later, before the British sacked the same city of Benin, they first described it as the “City of Blood,” whose barbarism so revolted their civilized conscience that they simply had to dispatch a huge army to overwhelm it, banish its king, and loot its royal art gallery for the benefit of the British Museum and numerous private collections. All this was done, it was said with the straightest of faces, to end repugnant practices like human sacrifice. No mention whatsoever of a commercial motive—the penetration of a
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