The Penguin Moderns series is a collection of 50 little books that sell in Australia for $2.50. Handbag-friendly, they are typically about 50 pages in length, and can be letters, travelogues, short stories, speeches, poetry and essays: selected, says the Penguin website, to represent the radical spirit of Penguin Modern Classics. I have four of them so far:
The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino;
Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell;
Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch by Hans Fallada; and the subject of this review,
Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe.
Like the essays and speeches within, Africa’s Tarnished Name is a provocative title. There are two essays and two speeches, and all of them are the words of an angry man, one who is outraged by the representation of Africa by the West yet disappointed by Nigeria’s post-independence flaws.
‘What is Nigeria to me?’
‘Travelling White’
‘Africa’s Tarnished Name’, and
‘Africa is People’.
Chinua Achebe, (1930-2013), said to be ‘the father of African literature’, is famous for his ground-breaking novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which I read at school. This was followed by No Longer at Ease (1960, see my review) and No#3 in the trilogy Arrow of God (1964) which is listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. There are other novels too, (but I’m not going to buy them till I’ve read Arrow of God!) and also works of non-fiction, among which is The Education of a British-Protected Child (2011), in which these essays and speeches are collected.
The two earliest essays challenge readers to reflect on the experiences of a Nigerian in transition from colonialism. ‘Travelling White’ was first published in The Guardian in 1989, and it’s about Achebe’s first travels in 1960, on a Rockefeller Fellowship which funded him to travel anywhere he liked in Africa for six months. He went to Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, and planned to visit South-west Africa and South Africa – but abandoned his trip after his experiences in Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). In a hotel in Salisbury (now Harare) he ordered a drink for the two white academics and a black postgraduate student from the new University of Rhodesia. ( )

This small book fits well in a pocket and Achebe reads as well; about sitting in the white part of the bus as a black, the Nigeria statehood struggle, Igbo, the Biafra war with 2 million dead, and about white authors questionable writing on Africans. ( )