The Education of a British-Protected Child Read Free

you should tell me the right way. It is wrong to laugh at me,” or words to that effect.
    My mother told that story many times in my hearing and each time we would all laugh all over again, because
“Awakwana afele”
is quite hilarious baby talk.
    By the time it was my turn to go to primary school, in 1936, missionary teachers like Miss Warner were no longer around. Education at that level was completely in the hands of native teachers, but the legacy of the unspared rod remained, with just one small amendment. You were walloped not for laughing when a mistake was made, but for making it.
    The Chinese did not invent wall posters for cultural education. My father did. Beside the picture of Miss Warner was a framed motto of St. Monica’s School in blue letters. It said “Speak true, Live pure, Right wrong, Follow the king.”
    As I began to learn my first English words at school, I would naturally test my ability on various wall hangings in our home. I remember the difficulty I had figuring out “Right wrong.” I kept wondering which it was—right or wrong! I am certain that even the earnest Miss Warner would have smiled at the problem I was having with English nouns and verbs.
    My father filled our walls with a variety of educational material.There were Church Missionary Society yearly almanacs, with pictures of bishops and other dignitaries. But the most interesting hangings were the large paste-ups which my father created himself. He had one of the village carpenters make him large but light frames of soft white wood onto which he then gummed brown or black paper backing. On this paper he pasted colored and glossy pictures and illustrations of all kinds from old magazines. I remember a most impressive picture of King George V in red and gold, wearing a sword. There was also a funny-looking little man with an enormous stride. He was called Johnnie Walker. He was born in 1820, according to the picture, and was still going strong. When I learnt many years later that this extraordinary fellow was only an advertisement for Scottish whiskey, I felt a great sense of personal loss. There was an advertisement from the Nigerian Railways in which the big “N” and “R” served also for “National Route.” That also gave me some trouble, as I recall reading it as “Nigerian National Railway Route,” which made some kind of sense too!
    So my education went from the walls of our home in a haphazard fashion through the village to St. Philip’s C.M.S. Central School and back again.
    It was sheer effrontery, hinting at any kind of comparison between my puny story and the story of Moses at the beginning of this account. It was like the glowworm comparing itself to the full moon. I do apologize. I was carried away. But the village of Ogidi did keep surreptitious watch over me through the exile of Christianity. My river, though, was notthe Nile but the Niger. Indeed, our official title was the Diocese on the Niger. Not
of
the Niger but
on
. Our bishop was Bishop on the Niger.
    The village of Ogidi was only part Christianized when I was growing up and still provided its traditional sights and sounds from which I—a Christian child—was technically excluded, an exclusion making them all the more compelling. Like all children I looked forward to the Nwafor Festival, the major holiday of the traditional year, during which ancestral masquerades of all kinds left their underground homes through antholes to visit the living. For eight whole days we saw them, from a reasonable distance, because they and their attendants carried bundles of whips with which they occasionally punished themselves to prove their toughness and certainly punished you if you were available. We would keep count of the masquerades we saw every day and tally the figures at the end of the eight days and then compare our grand total with the previous year’s. In a good year, the number could be well over a hundred. And the rule was that even if you saw the same