The Education of a British-Protected Child Read Free Page A

masquerade ten times (as might happen with the livelier ones), you only counted it once.
    And then the sounds of the village.
    There was language, in song and speech, all around you. True, Christianity divided the village into two—the people of the church and the people of the world—but the boundary between them had very many crossings. The average Christian enjoyed the sights and sounds of traditional festivities. Non-Christians, for their part, observed us closely and treated some of our practices with indulgent amusement. In the mostcelebrated song of those days—“Egwu obi,” “Song of the Heart”—they mimicked our singing in tonic sol-fa:
    Ukwe ndi uka

Sss ddd m rd mr-e-e
    In spoken language there was sometimes a difference in matter but none in manner between church and village. There were great orators in both. Christians of my father’s generation who preached on Sundays at St. Philip’s Church were not all orators, but a good number of them were. Although the Anglican Church, in a misguided effort at unification, had dealt a severe blow to the Igbo language by imposing a mechanical “union” dialect on it, the hybrid language it created remained between the covers of the Bible and was not allowed to cramp the style of sensible preachers once they had read out their obligatory text and closed the Bible. One such preacher was well known for taking to the pulpit at the time of the village feast to warn true believers against the great evil of accepting gifts of food surreptitiously over their compound wall from heathen neighbors. Obviously the traffic was heavy on the crossings. Christians had their own festivals, of course: the big one, Christmas, and the small one, Easter, although preachers kept telling you it was the other way around.
    There were also two secular festivals which livened up our Christian year—Empire Day on May 24, and Anniversary on July 27.
    May 24, as every schoolchild knew, was the birthday of Queen Victoria. It was a major school event and schoolchildrenfrom all over the district would march in contingents past the British resident, who stood on a dais wearing a white ceremonial uniform with white gloves, plumed helmet, and sword.
    The day’s events ended with a sports competition among the schools. My first Empire Day was indeed memorable. My school, which had some very big boys and was supposed to do well in the tug-of-war, managed quite unaccountably to collapse in seconds to their opponents. Rumor had it that this was no ordinary rout but an Anglican plot whereby our headmaster had instructed our boys to give in to a fellow Anglican side to prevent a Roman Catholic victory. Empire Day celebrations took place at the provincial headquarters at Onitsha, seven miles from my village. I think it was in 1940, when I was in Standard Three and ten years old, that I was judged old enough to walk to Onitsha and back. I did it all right but could hardly get up for one week afterwards. And yet it was a journey I had looked forward to so eagerly and which I cherished for years. Onitsha was a magical place and did live up to its reputation. First of all, to look down from a high point on the road at dawn and see, four miles away, the River Niger glimmering in the sky took a child’s breath away. So the river was really there! After a journey of two thousand six hundred miles from the Futa Jalon Mountains, as every schoolboy would tell you. Well, perhaps not every schoolboy. I was particularly fortunate in having parents who believed passionately in education, in having old schoolbooks that three older brothers and an older sister had read. I was good enough in my schoolworkto be nicknamed Dictionary by admirers. Although not so good in games; but no one in our culture would seriously hold that against anybody.
    Two other things stand out in my mind about that first Empire Day visit to Onitsha. Cut free from my village moorings and let loose in a big city with money in my pocket, I let