The Education of a British-Protected Child Read Online Free PDF

editor replied quite calmly: “I know you didn’t, but you should have.”
    I feel the same way about Zik’s application to teach at Yaba. If it didn’t happen, it should have. It would offer us one greatincident of poetic justice over which we can gloat and say to colonialism:
Ntoo;
served you right!
    Ten years before Azikiwe, another great African nationalist had returned home to West Africa from studies in America. His name was James Kwegyir Aggrey, Dr. Aggrey of the Gold Coast. The colonial service accepted him in Achimota College, not as principal, which he deserved, but as an assistant to a nice but colorless English cleric. So Aggrey was co-opted and contained by colonial rule.
    Azikiwe escaped Aggrey’s fate and was able to design the strategy of his revolution—a sweeping educational project not constrained in institutions but unleashed on the streets and pathways of Nigeria’s towns and villages. “Show the Light and the people will find the way.” He showed and they found.
    There was politics in Lagos before Zik arrived home in 1937. There were even newspapers before the
West African Pilot
brought its light. But the politics and the newspapers catered to a small coterie of well-educated, well-to-do city dwellers. It has been said that editorials in Lagos newspapers of those days were apt to be liberally spiced with long Latin quotations. Azikiwe turned his light loose among the people and transformed Nigeria overnight. Workers in government departments, teachers in missionary schools, students, clerks in European-owned commercial houses, traders in the markets—the educated and semieducated began to read newspaper stories about political freedom and the social affairs of their towns and communities. Popular singers made records eulogizing Zik nwa Jelu Oyibo, the child who journeyed to the land of the whites.
    Our colonial masters were by no means novices in containing agitation among their subjects. Many school authorities banned Zik’s newspapers from their institutions, which only made them doubly attractive. I went to a more enlightened school, where the teachers did not talk of banning but showed you how badly written the articles were, which was not surprising in view of the low standard of American education. I remember my English teacher in my second year setting an exam for us in which we were expected to explain such incredible words as “gubernatorial” and “eschatological.” We all scored zero in that number, whereupon he revealed to us that he had taken the words straight out of a recent issue of one of Zik’s papers. I suppose it was a way of telling us what a sticky end we would all come to if we followed Zik’s bombastic example. It turned out, instead, to have been a very effective way of learning new English words and remembering them forever afterwards.
    Those were, of course, early days in the anticolonial struggle. As Zik’s influence grew, so did the measures to contain him, the most effective method ultimately being what we might call, in retrospect, the Buthelezi complex: whereby the colonizer confounds the freedom movement by sponsoring factional leaders in its ranks. This was so skillfully done in Nigeria that independence from Britain in 1960 was virtually a trap, and has remained so to this day.
    This may be an appropriate time to explain the rather fanciful title of this rambling essay. I recall one of Dr. Azikiwe’s First October garden parties at Government House Lagos in the early 1960s. Those were high-life days, and one of thebands that played that evening was the famous Eleazer Arinze and His Music. They played one of their best compositions, which saluted Zik the incomparable chef, the wonderful aroma of whose cooking was now floating in the wind to every corner of the land—to the north, to the east, and to the west.
    The point of these lyrics, which would not have been lost on any Nigerian, was—if I may change the metaphor—that Zik had baked the cake of