the guidance of what appear to have been excellent teachers, and his involvement with Nigerian media and politics. He also describes the period in the 1950’s when he studied at the British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School in London, noting that his passport identified him as a “British Protected Person.” The designation represented an official denial of his status as an Igbo, as an African, and as an autonomous adult.

Interestingly, Achebe says little about his wife and sons, his horrific car accident, or his life in the United States since 1990, although two of the essays are titled “My Dad and Me” and “My Daughters.” Instead, he looks back almost exclusively to his years in Nigeria, pausing to pay tribute to Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, in “The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen”; the African American writer James Baldwin, in “Spelling Our Proper Name” and “Martin Luther King and America”; and the anthropologist Stanley Diamond, whose perceptions about Biafra in the failed Nigerian Civil War “are rooted in prodigious learning and a profoundly humane sensibility.” Achebe is clear in his condemnation of colonial power and postcolonial corruption, but he is generous with praise for those who use their gifts in the service of dialogue and understanding.

Achebe declares in the beginning of “The Education of a British-Protected Child,” the essay that serves as an introduction to the collection, “I hope my readers are not expecting to encounter the work of a scholar.” However, he does address some of the issues of scholarly debate that he has discussed throughout his career. The most prominent of these is Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness. Achebe reads the novella as an instrument of colonial oppression, rather than as an argument against imperialism. He acknowledges in “Africa’s Tarnished Name” that Heart of Darkness is but one example in a long tradition of presentations of Africa by Westerners, but again and again he has returned to that example as an emblem of that tradition that “has invented an Africa where nothing good happens or ever happened, an Africa that has not been discovered yet and is waiting for the first European visitor to explore it and explain it and straighten it up.”

In the essay, he traces Conrad’s boyhood fascination with explorers, especially those who visited Africa, and wonders why he was so attracted to the writings of men such as Mungo Park and David Livingstone. Achebe’s tone is mild, even conversational, as he notes that “it is not a crime to prefer the Africa of explorers to the Africa of colleges.” When he turns to discussing Heart of Darkness, however, and presents an extended passage in which the narrator compares one of the Africans he met (a “savage”) to a dog, Achebe’s mildness vanishes: “This is poisonous writing.”

Achebe describes Conrad’s “simple hierarchical order of souls,” with Africans at the bottom and Europeans at the top, and reminds readers of Conrad’s descriptions of “gyrating and babbling savages.” Achebe’s discussions of Conrad date back at least to 1975, when he presented a lecture on racism in Conrad’s novel at Amherst College. In the intervening years, other scholars have presented alternative readings of Conrad, many seeing the novel as a condemnation of imperialism written by a novelist who does not see the world as his narrator does. In “Africa’s Tarnished Name,” Achebe again refutes these readings. “People are wrong,” he writes, “when they tell you that Conrad was on the side of the Africans because his story showed great compassion towards them.”

Achebe’s thinking about Conrad is more nuanced than this summary suggests, and he returns to Conrad in other essays in the collection. In “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration,” he admires the language and imagery of Heart of Darkness and acknowledges Conrad’s “high-minded” intentions. He admits that, when he read the novel as a student, he was among the readers swept away by the adventure and that as a young reader he “took sides with the white men against the savages.” Not until he was older, he writes, did he understand that Conrad and other writers about Africa had “pulled a fast one” on him. It is this very realization, he explains, reached by many people, that created the African writer: “His story had been told for him, and he had found the telling quite unsatisfactory.” In his opening essay, Achebe’s resentment is directed only at Kurtz, the “dreadful character” from Heart of Darkness, not at Conrad or at the novel itself.

Thus, when Achebe says in the first essay that he is not appearing in the role of a scholar, he does not mean that he is not addressing scholarly concerns. The admirable accomplishment of the discussions of Conrad’s novel in this volume is that Achebe explains for general readers what the controversies are and why he reads as he does. The discussions are reasonable, thoughtful, and blessedly free of the complex jargon for which postcolonial criticism is notorious. By offering his thoughts about Heart of Darkness as one component in analyses of broader issues, rather than as a focused, linear argument about one novel, Achebe shows how criticism can be a dialogue, an activity for living, breathing readers.

With “Politics and Politicians of Language in Africa Literature,” Achebe takes up another scholarly debate in which he is an important voice: the choice made by African writers to write either in a colonial language (English, French, or Arabic) or in their “mother tongue.” Achebe, who writes in English, disagrees with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose 1986 essay “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature” famously called on African writers to create literature in their own languages, as he himself declared his intention to do. Achebe, whose essay title intentionally echoes Ngugi’s, continues the dialogue, again with a jargon-free, conversational diction that welcomes readers to think about an issue they may not have considered before.

Nigeria, Achebe patiently points out to his ignorant American audience, is home to “more than two hundred component nationalities,” each with its own mother tongue. For him, the choice to write in English is a practical one: “I can only speak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians in English.” He traces the history of missionary schools and language education in Africa, coming to different conclusions than Ngugi does, and concludes, “the only reason these alien languages are still knocking about is that they serve an actual need.”

Throughout the collection, Achebe comes across as a wise, thoughtful elder. He has read widely as well as deeply, from Homer to William Shakespeare to Okigbo; he has lived through colonialism, independence, and civil war; he is the author of one of the most important books Africa has produced. While he is opinionated, he is never cross or petty; while he is more knowledgeable than his intended readers, he is never pedantic. The Education of a British-Protected Child is an insightful and thought-provoking collection of essays for readers who are curious about African literature and culture, whether or not they are scholars. Many readers will come to this collection to learn more about Achebe, and that goal will be met. Because of Achebe’s probing mind and generosity of spirit, many will also discover new books, new writers, and new historical and cultural events to explore.