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  • Published: 12 May 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141930664
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

The Education of a British-Protected Child



This volume of autobiographical essays, now in paperback, is one of Achebe's most powerful and personal works to date

The pieces here span reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on Achebe's lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of 'Africa' for its own authorship. For the first thirty years of his life, before Nigeria's independence in 1960, Achebe was officially defined as a 'British Protected Person'. In The Education of a British-Protected Child he gives us a vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its 'middle ground', interrogating both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule.

  • Published: 12 May 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141930664
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

About the author

Chinua Achebe

Born in 1930, Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe is probably black Africa's most widely read novelist. His first work, Things Fall Apart, is regarded as a classic of world literature and has been translated into 40 languages.

Introducer Biography:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria and now lives in the United States. She is the author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sunand The Thing Around Your Neck.

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Praise for The Education of a British-Protected Child

'Achebe is one of the founding fathers of African literature ... his writing crackles with animated dialogue, laugh-out-loud humour and clever turns of phrase'

Guardian