The Education of a British-Protected Child

My review of Chinua Achebe’s new collection of essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child, is up at the Christian Science Monitor.

In it, among other things, Achebe renews a long-time sparring contest with his colleague Ngugi wa Thiong’o over the use of indigenous languages, and his more deadly struggle with Joseph Conrad over Heart of Darkness.

Here’s a bit from the review:

Achebe does not temper his language when attacking racism, colonialism, and their defenders. But that is not to say that he fails to see different points of view. The Igbo people, he says, prefer to view events not from the extremes but from the middle ground. The middle ground is a guard against fanaticism. It is “the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony.”