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

myself go; go so far, in fact, as to consume a half-penny worth of groundnuts. For many years afterwards the very mention of groundnuts would turn my stomach.
    My other memory is much happier. I saw with my own eyes a man who was as legendary as Onitsha itself, an eccentric Englishman, Dr. J. M. Stuart Young, who had been living and trading in Onitsha since the beginning of the twentieth century. I saw him walking down New Market Road bareheaded in the sun, just as legend said he would be. The other thing legend said about Stuart Young was that he had been befriended by the mermaid of the River Niger, with whom he made a pact to remain single in return for great riches.
    Later I was to learn that J. M. Stuart Young’s story contained a few doubtful details, such as whether or not he did have a doctoral degree. But it was probably true that he had first come to Nigeria as a colonial civil servant and then turned against the colonial system and become a merchant intent on challenging, with African support, the monopoly of European commercial cartels. He also wrote and published poetry and fiction. Years later I was to invoke his memory and name in my short story “Uncle Ben’s Choice.”
    The other secular event, which we called simply Anniversary,was the annual commemoration of the coming of the Gospel to Igboland, on July 27, 1857. It is reported that Bishop Adjai Crowther and his missionary team, who arrived in Onitsha on that day, were heavily beaten by rain, and as a result every Anniversary celebration since has been ruined by bad weather. Perhaps those first Anglicans did not know where the rain began to beat them! The good news is that schoolchildren were always fed new yams and stew at the Anniversary celebration. For most people it was their first taste of juicy new yam for the year.
    British colonization of Nigeria was never a labor-intensive affair. White people were a rare sight, whether in the administration or the church or in commerce. This rareness did not, however, diminish their authority. The name of the British resident for Onitsha Province, Captain O’Connor, was so generally invoked that there is an age-grade named after him in Ogidi. * But I only saw him twice, from a distance. The bishop on the Niger, the Right Reverend Bishop Bertram Lasbrey, came to our church perhaps once in two or three years. His sermon left me disappointed. I don’t know what I expected; perhaps I thought that if mere teachers and pastors could do as well as some that I knew, a bishop must set a congregation ablaze. But perhaps again it was the problem of having to preach through an interpreter.
    Elementary education began with two years in infant school and six years in primary school. For some children there was a preschool year in what was called religious school, where they spent a year chanting and dancing the catechism.
    Who is Caesar?
Siza bu eze Rom

Onye n’achi enu-uwa dum
.
    (Caesar is the King of Rome
Who rules the entire world.)
    Who is Josiah?
    Josaya nwata exe

Onye obi ya di nlo

Onatukwa egwu Chineke
.
    (Josiah the infant king
Whose heart was soft;
He also feared the Lord.)
    But I was spared that. I suppose I imbibed adequate amounts of religion at home from the daily portions of the Bible we read at prayer time every morning and every night.
    The Second World War began just as I was finishing my second year in primary school, that is, in Standard Two. The rest of my primary education happened against its distantbackground. But it got close one morning when two white people and their assistants came to our school and conscripted our art teacher.
    I think we were loyal to Britain and did what we could to help. I remember the campaign to increase the production of palm kernels for the war effort. Our headmaster told us that every kernel we collected in the bush would buy a nail for Hitler’s coffin. As the war continued, supplies for home and school became more and more scarce. Salt was severely rationed, and