Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: the making of a literary elite by Terri Ochiagha (review)

During the 1940s, a ‘remarkable concentration of future writers’ – Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chukwuemeka Ike, Chike Momah and Christopher Okigbo – attended the same secondary school in south-eastern Nigeria: Government College, Umuahia (p. 6). Of these figures, four are among the most illustrious of the so-called first-generation Nigerian writers, who began publishing in the years around Nigeria’s independence celebrations in 1960, while the fifth, Momah, has become a prolific novelist since retiring from the United Nations in 1990. According to Terri Ochiagha’s engaging new book, it is no ‘mere coincidence’, as Achebe once put it, that all five studied at Umuahia during the tenure of Principal William Simpson, an Englishman who made it his mission to make Umuahia an English public school on African soil (p. 3). Ochiagha proposes that ‘the unique humanistic ambience’ of Simpson’s Umuahia both acted as catalyst for these students’ subsequent literary work and had enduring ‘psychopolitical consequences’ for them (p. 11).

Equally a work of cultural history and of literary criticism, Achebe and Friends at Umuahia valuably makes use of both disciplines’ methods. Ochiagha has assembled a rich archive of documentary sources, literary texts, oral histories and personal communications from alumni of Umuahia, including Amadi, Ike and Momah. She grounds familiar concerns of postcolonial theory such as colonial discourse and hybridity in a detailed, sensitive account of how an unusually articulate group of men experienced – and later reflected on – the contradictions of their colonial schooling. In eight compact chapters, generously illustrated with historical photographs, the book moves from the 1929 founding of Umuahia as a teacher training college and the 1930s era when another major writer, Gabriel Okara, attended the school, to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s education there in the 1950s and the post-graduation trajectories of the five writers on whom Ochiagha concentrates. The central chapters focus on the Simpson years (1944–51), specifically the students’ humanities curriculum, encounters with nationalist thought, first literary efforts, and later literary engagement with colonial mimicry. Chapters 3 and 4, in particular, are full of memorable rediscoveries – a 1951 performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and a ‘mysterious book of logic’ central to the Umuahian classroom, to name just two – that also provide real insights into the paradoxes of the public school model (p. 99). Chapters 5 and 6, meanwhile, demonstrate how to read literary texts, whether juvenilia or later autobiographical fiction and poetry, through a historical frame without reducing the texts to transcriptions of history.

Ochiagha’s book is the first in a new series called African Articulations, edited by Stephanie Newell and Ranka Primorac, which refuses ‘to privilege the internationally visible above the supposedly ephemeral local cultural spaces and networks’ (p. ii). While the title of Achebe and Friends at Umuahia may privilege the name of an internationally visible novelist over those of his compatriots, the book as a whole revalues writers who have received inconsistent attention from critics outside Nigeria. Ochiagha stresses the importance of Amadi and Ike, in particular, for Nigerian readers and schools, arguing that ‘Ike’s thematic range remains nonpareil in Nigerian literature’ and that ‘the “final” verdicts on Ike and Amadi’s work have been issued taking only their first works in consideration’ (p. 178). The title, then, not only evokes R. K. Narayan’s 1935 novel of colonial schooling, Swami and Friends, but also offers friendship – or ‘literary affinity and companionship’ – as a way to conceive of these writers’ relationship to Achebe that does not consign them to being his imitators or followers (p. 16). As an added benefit, Ochiagha’s emphasis on secondary schooling allows her to approach well-worn topics in Nigerian literary history, including the impact of the university in Ibadan or the canon of Civil War literature, from an original perspective.

If this reader has any reservation about the book, it is that the model of subject formation Ochiagha deploys...