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  I also privately wished to go to Government College, Umuahia, because I wanted to do something different from my brothers. Umuahia, a new elite boarding school established in 1929, was rapidly developing a reputation as the Eton of the East, and I fancied receiving an education akin to the royals of England!

  The Anglican Protestants of the Church Mission Society, as well as the Methodists, Baptists, and Roman Catholics, had built missionary schools throughout the South and Middle Belt of Nigeria. These new government colleges—exemplified by Government College, Umuahia, and Government College, Ibadan—were built to continue the tradition of educational excellence established by even older secondary schools, King’s College and Queen’s College, both in Lagos. Between these four schools—King’s, Queen’s, Umuahia, and Ibadan—we had some of the very best secondary schools in the British Empire. As a group, these schools were better endowed financially, had excellent amenities, and were staffed with first-rate teachers, custodians, instructors, cooks, and librarians. Of course today, under Nigerian control, these schools have fallen into disrepair, and are nothing like they were in their heyday.

  Shortly after taking the national entrance examination I received a letter in the mail addressed to me explaining that I was under consideration for admission to Umuahia. That had to be the first letter I had ever received in my life.

  I traveled to Umuahia to be interviewed by a former principal, a very tall and large man—I believe his name was Mr. Thorp. My interviewer first asked why I did not reply to the letter he wrote me offering me admission. I said I did not know that I was supposed to reply, and he picked up a copy of the letter and read, “Please acknowledge receipt.” I did not know the meaning of that phrase, and I said to myself, “Well, I am not getting in at this point.” But after a little more conversation he gave me admission to his school.

  As the first day of school approached I was overtaken by a sense of excitement and trepidation. I had never been to Umuahia before my interview; in fact, I did not know of anyone who had been to Umuahia. I was to travel first by lorry to Enugu, and then by train to Umuahia.

  I arrived at Umuahia railway station alone. A man and his son approached me. The man asked me whether I was going to Umudike, the village where the secondary school was located, and I replied “Yes, sah.” He was going there too, with his son. They had hired two bicycles, and he suggested I ride with them. I carried his son, who was considerably smaller than I, on the handlebars of the bicycle to Umudike, which was about three and a half miles from the railway station.

  As we sped off, I kept thanking this man for the help. I was completely surprised at the hospitality and warmth that greeted me on my first day in school. His son became a friend, naturally, because he was the first “Umuahian” I had met. Later that semester I would discover that this lad, who would become a renowned physician, Dr. Francis Egbuonu, had come to Umuahia from St. Michael’s School, Aba. It was, coincidentally, the very same school that another very close friend of mine, Chike Momah, had attended.

  THE UMUAHIA EXPERIENCE

  Government College, Umuahia, was built on a sprawling, parklike campus at the fringes of a tropical forest. The grounds were dotted with large evergreen trees on well-maintained lawns and crisscrossed by hand-crafted stone pathways that were bordered by manicured hedges. The buildings—wood-framed brick-and-stucco bungalows surrounded by wide verandas—were adorned with shuttered windows and crowned with large metal roofs. The vaulted-ceiling design also enhanced ventilation and tempered the tropical heat. Most of the structures rested on elevated foundations or stilts—to protect them from floods and to keep termites, wild animals, serpents, and rodents out.

  There were three dormitories at Umuahia—the Niger, Nile, and School houses. I was assigned to Niger house and once there unpacked my few belongings in my dormitory locker. In my time the school had about two hundred students, and our lives were strictly regimented, with literally every hour slated for an activity.

  One of the most thrilling peculiarities of the Umuahia experience was the culture of playing cricket. Not all secondary schools in the area played the game; soccer was far more commonplace. Cricket matches were often organized between: Government College, Umuahia; King’s College, Lagos; Government College, Ibadan; and a few other elite secondary schools.

  Umuahia had a huge cricket field, which had a beautiful grass lawn and a clear sand pitch area with wooden wickets. It was cared for almost more carefully than grass anywhere else in the school. In the afternoons, cricket matches were packed, and the bleachers and grandstands had scarcely an empty spot.

  Cricket was not a game that I knew anything about before coming to Umuahia. Over time I began to appreciate that this was a very important global sport, and that it was very popular in literally every part of the British Empire. The schoolmasters referred to the game as one for “gentlemen” and made sure Umuahia athletes played it “properly”—dressed in immaculate white shirts and trousers, gloves, knee-high pads, and helmets. I was not known for my athletic ability, but Chike Momah and Christopher Okigbo were particularly good batsmen and bowlers of the sport.

  Christopher Okigbo was a very extraordinary person. He was two years below me, but Christopher was not one to allow two years to get in his way. He quickly became one of my closest friends.

  He was born in Ojoto, in Anambra state, and came from a highly talented family, part of the so-called Okigbo trio of intellectual giants that included his older brother, the late legendary economist Dr. Pius Okigbo, and their cousin Professor Bede Okigbo, the renowned agronomist.1

  Christopher was just somebody you could not ignore or suppress. He struck people because he was so energetic, and so fearless. He was somebody who would walk into a room, sit down, and start learning to play the school piano without any prior exposure. He had an innate understanding of what was required to play the instrument without the regimented, torturous, orthodox lessons. Christopher was a talented artist and a sports hero, and he had a keen mind that won him the admiration of many of the British schoolmasters. He quickly became very popular throughout Umuahia.

  His reputation for mischievous exploits preceded him. I think the first time he got the attention of the entire school was when the principal, William Simpson, decided that there was a lot of food waste coming from the kitchen; in other words, it seemed we were being given too much food to eat! Simpson decided to give food not according to one’s academic year—the pupils in the higher classes were given more food than those in the junior classes. Simpson felt that this practice was not a very good idea, and that it led to a waste of food. A better arrangement, he thought, was for people to be given food according to their weight. Before we knew what was happening, Christopher, who was slightly built, had talked with the dining prefect, and we noticed that he was now in the food equivalent of heavyweights, receiving more food than his classmates!

  There was a strong culture of meritocracy and a very high quality of instruction at Umuahia. I quickly noticed that there were very bright boys in my class, yet there was a sense of friendly competition that pervaded our academic life. I made friends gradually at school, at first mainly with pupils I met in the dormitory, then with a number of others in the classroom, through partnerships that the class master set up for assignments and projects. Benjamin Uzochukwu became one of my closest friends at the beginning of the first semester; he later qualified as an engineer, after studying in Great Britain, and became the director of the Federal Department of Public Works in Lagos.

  Ekpo Etien Inyang was another close friend. He was one of my most brilliant classmates—he became a physician—but unfortunately he later committed suicide. We had very different backgrounds, especially in terms of religion. When he arrived at Umuahia, the school officials discovered that he had not been baptized. Most of us did not ask fellow pupils whether they were baptized or not; one just assumed that if you were a Christia
n you would have been. But Inyang’s father was not a particularly religious person. So when he became an upperclassman Inyang decided to be baptized, and after subjecting himself to the religion classes and preparation that were required, he asked me to be his godfather. So I had a godson who was the same age as me. That was quite an extraordinarily moving gesture on his part, to ask me to step in on his behalf in this capacity.

  Six of us, including Inyang and me, were promoted to the second-year from the first-year class during our second term at Umuahia. Students with a record of excellent work and who were the best performers in their respective years were combined into a larger second-year class. It was an honor, but it also meant that I began to see a large majority of my contemporaries from my first-year class less often, including my close friends Ben Uzochukwu and Chike Momah.

  English was the language of instruction at Government College, Umuahia. It was at Umuahia that I first truly understood the power and importance of that unifying language. The schoolmasters, well aware that Nigeria had over 250 ethnic groups, had very carefully enrolled students from every nook and cranny of the nation, where possible. While African languages and writing should be developed, nurtured, and preserved, how else, I would wonder later, would I have been able to communicate with so many boys from different parts of the country and ethnic groups, speaking different languages, had we not been taught one language?

  Many of our teachers at the time were alumni from Cambridge, the University of London, and other major British institutions of higher learning. They included A. P. L. Slater, who was fondly called “Apples” by his close associates and a few of us who were his former students. Shortly after I left Umuahia, the duo R. H. Stone, a biology instructor, and A. B. Cozens, a onetime principal of the college, arrived. Together Stone and Cozens published a very famous biology textbook called Biology for Tropical Schools that was used throughout Africa and beyond.

  It was at Umuahia that I continued the introduction to the work of William Shakespeare that my father had first made possible, as well as to Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Stevenson’s Treasure Island. We were blessed to have had energetic, egalitarian principals such as the Reverend Robert Fisher and W. C. Simpson, who created and encouraged, respectively, the “textbook act”—a time between 4:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. when all textbooks had to be put away and novels picked up and read.

  Reading these books was a transforming experience, and I have written elsewhere about the influence Umuahia had in educating many of the pioneers of modern African literature—Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike, Christopher Okigbo, Elechi Amadi, I. N. C Aniebo, Chike Momah, Gabriel Okara, and later Ken Saro-Wiwa. Less often stated is the role the school played in producing leaders in the fine arts, such as Ben Enwonwu, and politics, such as Jaja Wachukwu, Nigeria’s first speaker of the House of Representatives and later ambassador to the United Nations. Umuahia turned out other stars, such as Okoi Arikpo, Dr. E. M. L. Endeley, and N. U. Akpan. The school also produced respected African intellectuals such as: the agronomist Professor Bede Okigbo; the physician and First Republic Minister of Health J. O. J. Okezie; Chu Okongwu, a former minister of finance; Kelsey Harrison, a renowned professor of obstetrics; and musician and professor Laz Ekwueme, among others.

  We went through the designated courses in secondary school, and the last examination that we took was the Cambridge School Certificate exam. There were four classifications of grades: A for distinction, C for credit, P for pass, and F for fail. Most pupils at Umuahia passed all their subjects. I passed my school certificate exam with five distinctions and one credit. Inyang passed with six distinctions and one credit. I narrowly graduated top of the class only because the distinctions that I got were higher in the courses that I took despite the fact that Inyang had more As in more courses. Whatever the case, I held Mr. Inyang in great esteem, especially as he had an A in literature while I had a credit.

  As I was completing my secondary school education at Government College, Umuahia, the colonial government announced that it was predisposed to building a University College in West Africa. There was some kind of competition—would it be in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) or in Nigeria? So a high-powered commission under Walter Elliott was sent to survey the situation on the ground. Such was the reputation of Government College, Umuahia, that the commission paid us a visit and spent a whole weekend at our school. Most of them came to chapel service on Sunday morning, but Julian Huxley, the biologist, roamed our extensive grounds, watching exotic birds with binoculars. The Elliott Commission report led to the foundation of Nigeria’s first university institution: a university college at Ibadan in a special relationship with London.

  I finished secondary school and literally walked into University College, Ibadan! Well, maybe not walked in. There was a nationwide examination, and I came in first or second in the country. I won what was called a “major” scholarship.2

  I grew up at a time when the colonial educational infrastructure celebrated hard work and high achievement, and so did our families and communities. Government College, Umuahia, was so proud of my work that they put up a big sign announcing my performance in the national entrance examination. That notice stayed on the wall for years. My family was very pleased with my school performance, from the end of primary school through to this time. No matter that I was not known for my athletic ability; they encouraged me to read voraciously, taking great pleasure in my nickname: Dictionary.

  A very distinguished member of the colonial educational system—a British gentleman—who was also the chairman of some important colonial council, heard about my entrance examination result and came to our house to greet me. Now, I had never encountered such a thing before. Surely people of that distinction did not call on children? But here was this man, who was a very important person in the British educational system, who thought that my work deserved encouragement, recognition, and a visit from him. So clearly I had a good beginning.

  As a young man, surrounded by all this excitement, it seemed as if the British were planning surprises for me at every turn, including the construction of a new university! It is, of course, only a joke, but I am sure many of my colleagues shared similar feelings. Here we were, a whole generation of students who really could not have had any clear idea of going to university until these events began to unfold.

  It was a remarkable group—Chike Momah, Flora Nwapa, Mabel Segun, Ben Obumselu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Kelsey Harrison, Gamaliel Onosode, Wande Abimbola, Iya Abubakar, Adiele Afigbo, Igwe Aja-Nwachukwu, Theophilus Adeleke Akinyele, Grace Alele Williams, Mohammed Bello, Elechi Amadi. A bit later Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Oluwokayo Oshuntokun, M. J. C. Echeruo, Christopher Okigbo, Ayo Bamgbose, Christine Okoli (my future wife), Emeka Anyaoku, Chukwuemeka Ike, Abiola Irele, Zulu Sofola, and several others. These young men and women came from all over the country—from elite secondary schools modeled on the public schools of England—Government College, Umuahia, Dennis Memorial Grammar School, Government College, Ibadan, and Abeokuta, King’s College, Lagos, and Queen’s College, Lagos.

  THE IBADAN EXPERIENCE

  Umuahia had a large contingent of students admitted to University College, Ibadan, with a number of students winning at least minor scholarships.

  I received my scholarship to study medicine at Ibadan. I wanted to be in the arts but felt pressure to choose medicine instead. After a year of work I changed to English, history, and theology, but by so doing I lost the bursary and was left with the prospect of paying tuition.

  I remember what the dean of the Faculty of Arts, Professor E. A. Cadle, said to me when I went to ask to be moved from the sciences to the arts: in order to get into the arts I had to have taken a school certificate exam in Latin, which was not taught at Umuahia. I was faced with a difficult dilemma and spent some time thinking about the ramifications of taking extra courses in Latin.


  But providence had other plans. Soon after my conversation with Professor Cadle an announcement came through from the University of London, our parent institution, indicating that it was dropping the Latin requirement for admission into the Faculty of Arts. The University of London argued that the native languages of students from the British Commonwealth could stand in for the Latin requirement. I was elated. I went back and asked Professor Cadle for admission into the Arts Faculty. He brought out my file and told me that I was admitted on the basis of my performance in physics and chemistry. He wanted reassurance from me that I would be able to make such a fundamental shift in academic focus and maintain good grades. After a little more conversation, he admitted me to study English, history, and theology, and I moved from medicine to the Arts Faculty.

  My older brother Augustine Achebe, an engineer by training, had returned from his studies in England and had landed a good job. On learning that I had lost my bursary, Augustine gave me money he had saved up for his annual leave so that I could pay the university tuition and continue my studies, which I did, very pleasantly.

  After graduation I did not have to worry about where I would go next. The system was so well organized that as we left university most of us were instantly absorbed into civil service, academia, business, or industry. We trusted—I did, anyway—the country and its rulers to provide this preparatory education and then a job to serve my nation. I was not disappointed. I went home to my village at the end of the holiday and visited a secondary school within my district, called the Merchants of Light, in Oba, near Ogidi. I asked the principal to give me a job as an English teacher. And he did!

  It helped that my colleague J. O. C. Ezeilo had completed a short tenure at the same school and recommended it to me. Ezeilo is often described as Nigeria’s leading mathematician, alongside Chike Obi. Ezeilo graduated from University of London in 1953, with a first class honors in mathematics, an amazing feat by any measure, and particularly extraordinary for the time. He would go on to receive his PhD from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, in 1958, and then rise rapidly through the Nigerian academic ranks to become vice chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and several other Nigerian institutions of higher learning.3