The above captures a minor but significant epiphany in Chinua Achebe's colonial childhood – his first encounter with Nnamdi Azikiwe's name in print. Achebe was six or seven years old at the time. Up until then, he had thought that ‘Azikiwe’ was composed of two names – the foreign Christian name Isaac and the Igbo surname Iwe. He had also been accustomed to Church Missionary Society wall hangings and not to secular almanacs like the one in which he saw Azikiwe's name for the first time. But instead of proclaiming the subtext that he had so precociously deciphered in this first encounter with ‘nationalist’ print – the inscription of an indigenous selfhood at odds with a colonial frame – he instinctively decided to keep this newfound knowledge to himself. This episode preceded Achebe's entrance to Government College, Umuahia by at least five years, but it stresses the psychobiographical significance of minor, albeit intense political epiphanies – a notion of crucial importance in decoding the imprint of the college on its future writers, and one that drives this chapter.

The singular setting of the Umuahia Government College was politically advantageous to its authorities throughout the school's first twenty years. In the 1930s, Reverend Fisher had relished the school's isolated location “far away in the Bush” for the institutional independence it afforded, and in the 1940s, a period of major political upheavals in Nigeria, the school authorities ardently hoped that the college site “‘far from the madding crowd’ of such places as Lagos and other major townships” would efficiently shield students from the ‘unwholesome influences’ and ‘seditious tendencies’ that came to be associated with such centrally-located institutions as King's College, Lagos.