The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe  - recently published and described as a collection of autobiographical essays, is only loosely the latter. As Geoff Wisner, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, says, "Of the 16 essays and speeches included here, the most directly autobiographical – “My Dad and Me” and “My Daughters” – are among the briefest."

Wisner goes on: "If The Education of a British-Protected Child doesn’t tell us much that is new about Achebe’s life, it does tell us a lot about his views on other matters." As The New York Times puts it, "In this book he tangles further, and profitably, with the obsessions that have defined his career: colonialism, identity, family, the uses and abuses of language."

Particularly interesting is a reprint of Achebe's essay 'Africa's Tarnished Name', (originally published in 2000), itself an extended version of a 1975 essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness titled 'Images of Africa'. That latter is a bitter analysis of what Achebe argues is Conrad's intense racism in Heart of Darkness and the lasting legacy of that writer's (quoting F.R. Leavis) "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" in describing the continent.

Achebe: "In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc."

In 'Africa's Tarnished Name' Achebe observes, "It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose land mass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe's very antithesis."

He argues that Europe's perception of the alienness and otherness of Africa "was in general a deliberate invention" whose purpose was to allow, first, for the slave trade, and second, for the colonisation of the continent. The 'derogatory images' of Africa generated by this perception of alienness, he says, "gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day."

Achebe was writing in 2000, but 'our own day' as well describes 2010. A Google news search for 'africa "dark continent"' turns up four pages of results from just the past month - many, it is true, along the lines of "Some people still see Africa as 'the dark continent...", but indicative, despite their jaundiced tone, of the persistence of the myth given its literary imprimatur by Conrad.

While slightly hyperbolic, Rod Chavis in 'Africa in the Western Media' gives a good summary of this legacy: “Nouns and adjectives like hut, dark, tribe, King Kong, tribalism, primitive, nomad, animism, jungle, cannibal, savage, underdeveloped, third world, developing, etc., are pervasive when Africa is the story. Images of Africa in the Western Media, many times, are deeply troubling psychologically and emotionally, especially to those claiming her as primordial heritage, lineage, and descendancy. They portray a no there there: no culture, no history, no tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void.

“With the stroke of a journalist's pen, the African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively reduced to nothing (but)… a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism, primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs distended. These "universal" but powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television audiences, connote something not good, perennially problematic unworthiness, deplorability, black, foreboding, loathing, sub humanity, etc.”

While the Western media's confused and flat-footed approach to describing events and life on the African continent is hardly news, this collection of essays is worthwhile both for the historical overview of European narratives of Africa it offers, and for the blade concealed within Achebe's scholarly tone, one which methodically (and sometimes savagely) deconstructs these narratives.

And although many of the essays in The Education of a British-Protected Child are a decade or more old, and the subjects they deal with many decades older, they still remain (incredibly, depressingly) relevant.  In 'Spelling Our Proper Name' Achebe writes, “The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally….So much psychological, political and, economic interest is vested in the negative image.”

This is not the whole truth, naturally, but the following elegant passage (from 'Images of Africa') gives a good summation of Europe's difficulty in 'storying' Africa: "As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate."