Introduction^{Footnote 1}

Government College, Umuahia was established in 1929, under the aegis of the colonial Education Department of Nigeria, in Umudike-Ibeku, four miles from the eastern Nigerian town of Umuahia. The school’s government ownership and the involvement of prominent education officers in its creation accorded it a special status from the onset. Highly meritocratic, well-funded, and staffed mostly by Oxbridge graduates, Umuahia earned a reputation as one of the jewels on the Education Department’s crown. For a decade, Government College was an “adaptationist” institution, “educating the African along his own lines” with an emphasis on vocational training and moral/religious instruction to prepare candidates for intermediate positions in the colonial civil service. In the early forties, responding to policy changes during the Second World War, Government College, Umuahia became a British public school-type institution tasked with the creation of intellectuals and future leaders. Through this transition, which roughly coincided with the principalship of William Simpson (1944–1951), Umuahia reached impressive academic heights. In later years, many of the school’s alumni occupied prominent positions in the intellectual and political spheres. Umuahia’s main singularity, however, is its literary pre–eminence: the writers Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Chukwuemeka Ike, Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, I.N.C. Aniebo, and Ken Saro-Wiwa were all products of the school, and the first five of this list coincided in the school during Simpson’s tenure as principal of Government College.

As Adam Howard and Rubén A. Gaztambide remind us, elite education “has remained virtually unmapped terrain and remains largely outside the public and scholarly gaze.”^{Footnote 2} This is particularly true of elite colonial education in British Africa and its proposed transformation of talented African youth into intellectually empowered, yet politically quiescent colonial replicas of English gentlemen. And while historians of colonial education have assiduously studied the implementation of educational policy and the racial images pervading the imperial curriculum,

Indeed, the implementation of political pedagogies in the elite colonial classroom – which in most cases constituted a “hidden curriculum” – remains the preserve of school stories and life-writing. These reminiscences of pedagogical praxis are typically fragmentary and thus, on their own, constitute limited historical evidence. And yet, as this article demonstrates, memories of the colonial classroom, when contextualized and used in combination with coetaneous sources, such as textbooks and lesson notes, can be crucial elements in the reconstruction of the classroom transmission of political knowledge, its assimilation and postcolonial negotiation. Here I present a concrete case involving a facet of Umuahian school life on which documentary sources remain remarkably silent: the school authorities’ attempts to rein in and redirect anti-colonial nationalist undercurrents. By piecing together a number of apparently unconnected but mutually consistent epiphanic moments^{Footnote 4} in the life-writing and interviews of the writers Chinua Achebe and Chike Momah, it was possible to trace and identify a mysterious textbook of logic, R.W. Jepson’s Clear Thinking (1936), as a vital component of the school’s political-cum-humanistic instruction in the academic year 1944–1945.^{Footnote 5} On its own, the textbook sheds little light into the school’s pedagogical culture, hinting only at its elite British identity and wholesale appropriation of metropolitan textbooks. But by locating in the book a series of openings into which the psycho-political preoccupations of the Umuahians of this period can be slotted, thereafter re-reading the dispersed records and memories of the book’s classroom use, it is possible to reconstruct the discursive mechanisms for political control deployed at Government College.^{Footnote 6} This is important because it allows us to locate, in part, the possible origins of Achebe’s revisionist historical and literary poetics, the pioneering use of which triggered the rise of Nigerian first-generation writing, Chinua Achebe’s seminal position in African literary history, and ultimately Umuahia’s claim to worldwide fame – providing further insights into the ambivalent relationship between nationalism, elite colonial schooling, and mental decolonization.

Context

From all accounts, the Second World War and the rise of Nnamdi Azikiwe as bête noire of the colonial order were the two principal influences under which Nigerian children awakened to the political realities of the period. Like every other sector of society, children experienced or witnessed such manifestations of “war imperialism” as food rationing, forced conscriptions, and the barrage of official propaganda to promote wartime production of raw materials.^{Footnote 7} Picking palm kernels for the war effort, singing pro-British songs such as Rule Britannia!, and marching in front of the white Resident on Empire Day all fostered a sense of imperial belonging. On the other hand, the quasi-antithetical figure of Nnamdi Azikiwe^{Footnote 8} – popularly known as Zik of Africa – “bestrode the world” of these children “like a colossus.”^{Footnote 9} The story of Azikiwe’s rise to fame was well known among the masses. After concluding his secondary education in Nigeria, Azikiwe had moved on to the US for his university education, gaining degrees from Lincoln University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. During his American sojourns, he experienced extreme forms of racial discrimination and came under the influence of Garveysim, Communism, Pan-Africanism and the Harlem Renaissance. He returned to Nigeria in 1934, but moved over to the Gold Coast after his failed application for a teaching position at King’s College, Lagos. In his new station, he founded the African Morning Post. In 1937, he was convicted for publishing a seditious article, but won the case on appeal. Determined to make his voice heard in his fatherland by all means, he founded the polemical anti–colonialist newspaper West African Pilot (1937) upon his return to Lagos and amplified his journalistic enterprise with provincial papers in Kano, Warri, Ibadan, Onitsha and Port Harcourt. Zik’s gadfly papers were characterized by their light style, banner headlines, blend of radical nationalism and gossip, and a belligerence that sometimes veered into “malice” and “irresponsible name calling.”^{Footnote 10} Azikiwe’s defense of workers’ rights and improvement unions, confrontational attack on white racism and the British colonial government won him a large following.^{Footnote 11} While Zik’s newspapers – “the principal source of his fame and power, and the most crucial single precipitant of the Nigerian awakening”^{Footnote 12} – fulfilled, to a large extent, their mandate to ‘show the light” to adults, children absorbed the “headiness, even [the] slight intoxication”^{Footnote 13} of Zik’s legend through oral lore.

After its closure for use as a prisoner of war camp from 1939 to 1942, the Umuahia Government College re-emerged as a visiting institution King’s College, Lagos. Despite its status as the premier and most prestigious colonial government college, the name of King’s was often mentioned in connection to Nigeria’s nationalist movement. In 1934, Azikiwe was denied an appointment at the college on the grounds of his “unsuitable” American education. That year marked the creation of the Lagos Youth Movement, comprised mostly of King’s College students and alumni; and in the late 1930s, the school’s students became active in the Youth Study Circles convened by alumnus and leading nationalist H.O. Davies for the discussion of Nigeria’s colonial problems and their possible solutions.^{Footnote 14} In March 1944, three months into Achebe and Momah’s entry into Umuahia, King’s College, Lagos grabbed the national headlines for a notorious student strike. Like the Government College school compound, the student dormitories of King’s College had been requisitioned and turned over to the army, and students were obliged to take unpleasant and highly inconvenient accommodation in town. They wrote a petition protesting “the physical hardships and study problems created by congestion, filth, and factors of a degenerating moral character,”^{Footnote 15} but their appeal went unheeded. The ensuing strike culminated in the detention, trial and expulsion of seventy-five senior boarders and the conscription of the eight ring-leaders, one of whom died in custody.^{Footnote 16} The incident provoked national outrage and reinvigorated the nationalist cause. The Nigeria Union of Students (NUS) convened a mass meeting on 10 June 1944 to discuss the strike, raise funds for a national school and form a representative student committee, which became the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) in 1945. At Umuahia, the school authorities ardently hoped that the school’s location “far from the madding crowd” of such places as Lagos and other major townships”^{Footnote 17} would efficiently shield students from the seditious tendencies that came to be associated with such centrally-located institutions as King’s College, Lagos. But the news of the King’s College incidents found their way into the Umuahia Government College, like everywhere else, and its bewildered students took in the merits and demerits of the non serviam of their revolutionary peers on the other side of the Niger, the students of King’s College, Lagos.^{Footnote 18}

Keeping Seditious Fumes at Bay

Sam Anthony K. Epelle, a student known to have participated in anti-war revolts at King’s College during the Umuahian exile,^{Footnote 19} culled news stories from the old radio set in the assembly hall and posted them up anonymously on the notice board. These reports were not always complimentary to the powers that be, and when Epelle’s identity was discovered the Principal saw him “as something of a political renegade.”^{Footnote 20} Luckily for Epelle, Simpson did not believe in radical solutions. He had been on the staff of King’s College, and knew the likely results of punitive intervention in politically sensitive affairs. Simpson was keen to have his students capitalize on their talents,^{Footnote 21} and had been secretly impressed with Epelle’s journalistic gifts. What he did was divert these talents to a more “conductive” end by “asking” the unruly student to limit the scope of his reports to the progress of the Allied Forces.^{Footnote 22} But the principal did not entirely succeed in containing Epelle’s rebellious streak. The young political renegade is credited with being the first student to sneak copies of The West African Pilot, The Nigerian Statesman, and Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Renascent Africa into the school.^{Footnote 23} It was thus that “the sweet aroma of Zik’s kitchen” began to waft, alluringly, at the Umuahia Government College. But what to the students was a sweet aroma, was more of a deadly stench to the European masters “and perhaps one or two of the Africans.”^{Footnote 24} Around this time, Zik’s two Lagos dailies were banned for purportedly misrepresenting the facts of the general strike of 1945. There was also the scandal surrounding his denunciation of an alleged government plot to assassinate him.^{Footnote 25} These incidents brought Zik’s popularity to fever pitch, but also hardened the already infuriated and alienated British officials.^{Footnote 26} And while the nationalist press was never explicitly banned at Government College, Principal Simpson’s handling of the “Epelle Affair” epitomized the standard for future interventions: the use of subtle arts of suasion to keep seditious fumes at bay.

“Not Fitting Works of the Intellect”

The favored approach at Government College was to drive home the fact that nationalist writings were “not fitting works of the intellect”^{Footnote 27} and thus not worthy of the attention of cultivated gentlemen. But as the underground readers of Renascent Africa soon noticed, the kind of education promulgated in Zik’s manifesto, inclusive of contributions to precolonial African history^{Footnote 28} was not entirely at odds with the kind of historical instruction proffered at Government College. There was the fact that the history master, Martin Ogle, highlighted the ancient African kingdoms in his 1943/1944 classes;^{Footnote 29} furthermore, Principal Simpson “often sang [the] praises”^{Footnote 30} of Edward Harland Duckworth, the Inspector of Education and Editor of the magazine Nigeria, whose counter-hegemonic cultural militancy from within the ranks of the colonial hierarchy and symbiotic relationship with the nationalist press had raised so many eyebrows at the Education Department.^{Footnote 31} But there were occasional lapses:

Momah first revealed the above in “Reminiscences of Government College, Umuahia in the Forties,” published in the Golden Jubilee edition of the school magazine. He was careful not to disclose the identity of the teacher in question, despite the fact that he would be instantly recognizable to the editor of the volume, his classmate and friend Chinua Achebe, and other contemporaries. He also tried to defuse the explosive nature of the master’s statements by highlighting the colonial context in which they took place. Ezenwa-Ohaeto finally identified the instructor as Adrian P.L. Slater in his 1997 biography of Chinua Achebe.^{Footnote 33} This information is somewhat sensitive, but by revealing the teacher’s identity, it is possible to examine his words within the context of his broader pedagogical practice and its overall impact on the students’ subconscious. Taken on their own, Slater’s allusions to “African stupidity” and “Renascent Africa” reek of colonial prejudice. However, they speak to something more, and reading them against his experimental pedagogy makes the casting of blame more problematic.

“A Little Book of Elementary Logic”

Adrian Slater’s teaching methods were distinctive, and he forged for himself a reputation as one of Umuahia’s most demanding masters. His punitive methods, rigid marking scheme, astounding amount of homework, and extensive list of recommended readings are among the most remembered facets of the man credited with impressing Achebe and Momah “respect for language.”^{Footnote 34} But there was something else: a “little book of elementary logic,” mentioned cursorily in Robert Wren’s interviews with Achebe and Slater in Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan: 1948–1966. During the course of my research on the influence of Government College, Umuahia on Nigerian first-generation writing, I found the use of such a book at the school intriguing, but the title of the book remained elusive to me until I read Slater’s lesson notebook in 2010. While the lesson notes were sketchy and disordered, it was possible to glean timetables, lesson topics, titles of recommended texts and assigned essays, as well as references to favored teaching approaches. Scrawled in pencil near references to propaganda, the popular press, and nationalist newspapers was the title: Clear Thinking: An Elementary Course of Preparation for Citizenship (1936). A reading of this tome confirmed that Jepson’s book was the mysterious book of logic. The volume, fashioned “to help the reader to cultivate habits of clear thinking so that he may acquire the power to detect his own and other people’s prejudices”^{Footnote 35} was the outcome of R.W. Jepson’s own UK-based experiment with boys in their late teens, who had just passed the School Certificate Examination, and was intended primarily for use in the upper forms of British secondary schools. That Slater chose to use this particular book with Form I students at Umuahia aged anything between eleven and fourteen years, is the first inconsistency with his complaints on “African stupidity.”

Figure 1. Achebe’s dedication to Slater of a copy of his novel Arrow of God: “To the man who taught me respect for language.” Photo provided by and used with permission of Elizabeth Smith.

Textbooks have been summarily dismissed as objects of study due to their purported low cultural worth and association with a passive learning style.^{Footnote 36} And yet, as John Issit underlines “when the research focus is on the construction, manipulation and reproduction of power and ideology, textbooks offer rich picking.”^{Footnote 37} If, as in the present case, the textbook alerts its colonized readers to the manipulative nature of political discourse, the importance of its analysis is trebled.

The political agenda of Clear Thinking is evident throughout the book, particularly in the three chapters that Slater signaled out for attention in class: “Language,” “The Popular Press,” and “Propaganda.” On account of the war campaign and the authorities’ aversion to the nationalist press, these themes would invariably appeal to Umuahian readers. As Jepson indicates in the introduction:

Jepson’s aim is a lofty one, and his prescription for the solution of “the political, social and economic problems” of society – adopting a critical and unprejudiced attitude and expressing the results of purposive thought in clearer and unequivocal speech and writing^{Footnote 39} – of crucial importance in alerting students to the snares of both colonial and anti-colonial discursive manipulation. To help students attain the desired outlook, Jepson draws from psychology and formal logic to exemplify instances of muddled thinking so as to enable students detect the ways in which they can get “flattered, cajoled, bullied, stampeded or drugged into ways of thought.”^{Footnote 40} Jepson recommended that the book be used primarily to prepare students for the oral discussion of texts and exercises in class, but it also featured essay topics and written tasks. As his lesson notes show, Slater followed the book’s prescriptions to the letter. In between his official English and History classes, he slotted periods for “General Knowledge,” which he devoted to Jepson’s particular brand of “clear thinking.” In these classes, Slater led discussions on such topics as the rulers of Oyo, the 1930 Economic Regression, and the cause of the two World Wars. He also analyzed popular newspapers to exemplify prejudice and its manipulations. The contents and premises of Clear Thinking also formed the basis of the essays he assigned and his expectations of written work.^{Footnote 41}

Jepson’s engagement with race and Empire exemplifies the unbiased, detached outlook he promulgates throughout the book. However, the book’s projected readership was comprised of democratic citizens. The chapter on the popular press highlights the prerogative of a democratic government to abet “freedom of expression, freedom of discussion, freedom to criticize, and full knowledge of the facts.”^{Footnote 42} Jepson qualified that “in times of stress or crisis, on the ground of self-preservation (…) we are not unwilling to forgo some of our liberties in order that we may ultimately retain all of them.”^{Footnote 43} Thus, Jepson provided space into which to slot the colonial difference, which precluded the extension of these universal rights to the colonies.^{Footnote 44} The school authorities could also grab on to Jepson’s belief that the popular press was as dangerous and tyrannical as state journalistic monopoly to justify their own strategic maneuver of weaning students away from the burgeoning nationalist papers. However, the emphasis of Clear Thinking on mediatic manipulation also provided students with ideological ammunition with which to question the school’s pretentions to persuasive control. Hence, attentive students – and “the students were a captive audience, intelligent and able students,” as Slater himself recalled in an interview^{Footnote 45} – must have extrapolated Jepson’s exhortations against “the tendency to accept without question whatever one sees in print, or in the expressed opinions of so-called authorities”^{Footnote 46} to their own British history books, literary works, official information channels, and the school’s implicit endorsement of British cultural superiority. Autobiographical and imaginative recreations of life at the Government College of those years reflect subjective processes of interrogation, revelation and subdued integration of politically-sensitive knowledge in the configuration of non-servile selfhood. It is not hard to find traces of Jepson’s quasi-scientific approach in these colonial schoolboy subjects’ individual quests for truth.^{Footnote 47}

The Zik group of newspapers typified the features that Jepson reviled in the popular press, including the “catchphrases of the politician, the ‘slogans’ and axe-grinding propaganda.”^{Footnote 48} While Achebe never referred to Slater’s explicit admonitions in any of his interviews and autobiographical essays, he did capture an instance of the master’s use of the nationalist press in the classroom in the essay “The Sweet Aroma of Zik’s Kitchen:”

Achebe’s quotation also reflects colonial aversion to African-American revolutionary ideas, which were absorbed and reproduced in the nationalist press. These contrary ideas also had to be contained, hence the need to signal them out for attention in Umuahia’s particular campaign against nationalist leaders:

Apart from Jepson-inflected discussions of the nationalist press and Nigerian current affairs, life at Umuahia was rarely punctuated by political distractions. Indeed, there was a “monotonous sameness of outlook and behavior pattern among the boys” when it came to political matters.^{Footnote 51} This serene temperament was apparently imbibed to such an extent that even the less conforming students learned to restrain their impulses. One day, after Slater had “probably over-stepped the mark” with his comments:

A close-reading of this passage yields interesting insights. Note the way in which the Abiriba boy visually divests himself of the symbol of identity imposed by the college – the all-white school uniform – sartorially asserting his indigenousness before taking on this independent, albeit inconclusive, act of insurgency. Also note that the student “thought better” of the planned retaliation before reaching the teacher’s premises. Did it dawn on him that such “exaggerated and intemperate language accounts for many misunderstandings and misjudgments, and not only because it may arouse our worst passions and prejudices, but also because we often discount it, as it were in advance,”^{Footnote 53} as “the little book” established? Or did he merely choose to safeguard his place in the college, knowing the fate of the mutinous students of King’s? Both options need not be mutually exclusive. What matters is that the student’s proud assertion of selfhood evinces an ongoing process of mental decolonization that was not necessarily disrupted by his conformist decision. I will return to this matter presently.

But back to Slater’s polemical statements. Were the references to “African stupidity” and “Renascent Africa” a roundabout way to demonstrate the correlation between emotional involvement and impaired/muddled thinking? Or was this simply a case of “true colors” showing through in unguarded moments? The allusion to Renascent Africa can either be interpreted as a slight to African collective pride and uplift, or as a metonymic evocation of Zik, the epitome of everything the school authorities, not just Slater, held contrary to their educational principles. The reference to “African stupidity” is even more ambiguous. Jepson devoted much of the chapter “How Judgments are Made II” to the flawed reasoning involved in this type of national typecasting, categorically affirming that in times of crisis “sweeping generalizations about people arouse the worst barbaric passions. (…) The habit of attributing qualities to nations as a whole instead of to individuals is a dangerous one and a serious obstacle to international understanding.”^{Footnote 54} To test students’ comprehension of the bad logic involved in the common retort “the exception proves the rule” when instances are quoted against a generalization, Jepson set the following example:

Comment on the course of this argument:

1. A. “Negroes are incapable of intellectual development.”

2. B. “But what about Booker Washington and Paul Robeson?”

3. A. “Yes, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule!”^{Footnote 55}

Such questions and the provocative essay title that Slater once assigned in class, “The Effect of Climate on Man’s Work or Character”^{Footnote 56} allowed for a logical interrogation of racist tropes and must have impressed valuable lessons on the construction of stereotypes and the politics of representation. However, it was one thing for “little black colonial boys”^{Footnote 57} to read and apply such lessons in the controlled environment of the classroom, and another to hear a severe European master, and an annoyed one to boot, rehash such stereotypes. According to Ann Stoler, this unsettling gap between rhetoric and practice was frequent in colonial situations: “Sometimes political grammars constrained what colonial agents thought, sometimes those grammars delimited the political idioms in which people talked, indicating not what they thought, but only what they said.”^{Footnote 58} The less flattering explanation for Slater’s words is that he actually thought what he said, but there is no evidence whatsoever to support it. But if we choose to read his declarations through the prism of How to Think Clearly, it seems reasonable to realize, as Slater probably wished his students would, “how often differences arise merely through the misunderstandings of words and phrases! How easy to be misled by ambiguities! (…) Words, too, can be used to conceal or disguise thought, not to elucidate it (emphasis added).”^{Footnote 59}

In private, the English and History master always told his family of his students’ potential, the high expectations he had of them and disclosed his objection to “many aspects of the colonial education service and the attitude of the British Government and many Europeans he came across.”^{Footnote 60} In public, he only had praise for their remarkable intelligence:

Slater made the above reflections in an interview with Robert Wren forty years after his time at Umuahia, and the element of hindsight is hard to obviate. His statements neither refer to nor explain possible lapses in his relationship with the students, but incur in a retrospective evaluation of a quality he did not consciously recognize, but took for granted – his students’ intellectual acumen.^{Footnote 62} I concur with the historian of colonial education Clive Whitehead that:

The conditions affecting colonial education in the years 1944–1945 were more complicated than might appear at first sight and it is important “to see that form of multiple and contradictory belief that emerges as an effect of the ambivalent, deferred address of colonialist governance,” as postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has written.^{Footnote 64} My use of pedagogical material to illuminate personal testimony, inferential as it may seem to be, coalesces and complicates the political, institutional, and psychological registers that affected the students of Government College, Umuahia, and it is in this “admittedly colonized – but also confused – space” to borrow Philip Zachernuk’s words, that “we must look for what could not have been simple imperial success and African loss but was rather imperial negation operating among many contending forces.”^{Footnote 65}