By Missang Oyongha
When the late Matthew Tawo Mbu was interviewed by Newsbreed magazine in February 1974, he took particular pride in being questioned about his son John, who was then the captain of Carter House at Eton, the elite college founded in 1440 by Henry VI. Probed about what ‘hallmarks’ of the tutelage or traditions had drawn him to send his son there, Mbu told his interlocutor: ‘If anything has influenced me at all, it is the success story of ex-Etonians in business, politics, military and other fields. The school prepares a child for the rough and tumble of life’. Fascimites of Eton and the English public school were planted wherever the British established colonies, ostensibly to educate the sons of the local illuminati in the finest Anglo-saxon tradition. Lagos had King’s College; Port of Spain had Queen’s Royal College; Singapore had Raffles College, Cairo had Victoria College; but none could quite claim the cachet and patina of grand old Elon, playing field for scions of the status quo, hothouse for a past, present and future British ruling class, enclave of tophatted Englishness. For anglophile Nigerian patricians of a certain generation, men like Ladoke Akintola, Charles Onyeama, and M T Mbu, Eton was more than ideal for their scions. A literal and symbolic drawbridge was lowered in April 1964 when Tokunbo Akintola entered Eton as its first ‘negro’ pupil. The New York Times published a story announcing his artival from ‘west Nigeria’. ( It would have been more accurate, in view of the political climate, to call it ‘wild West Nigeria’).
Nigger at Eton was Dilibe Onyeama’s seminal testimony about the four years he spent at the college from 1965 to 1969. The fraught, self conscious epithet in his title certainly occasioned some bed conscience in his original publishers, Leslie Frewin, whose jacket statement was keen to stress that the words were entirely the author’s. A later edition (currently being reissued by Penguin as part of the Black Voices initiative) was released with the sanitised title, A Black Boy at Eton. Young Dilbe Onyeama was put down for Eton as soon as he was born. When he arrived at the college in January 1965, Onyeama and Tokunbo Akintola were the only blacks out of a total student body of one thousand two hundred. The relationship between the two Nigerians was cold and stiff to the point of glacial.
For adolescents poised between youth and adulthood, college can be a defining, wrenching experience. The evolving antennae of the social self and the growine sense of racial amour propre are ever alert forr offence, forr injury. Edward Said was bruised considerably by his expulsion from Cairo’s Victoria College in 1951 for allegedly being a ‘troublemaker’. In his essay , ‘Between Worlds’, Said wrote also about being unable ‘to understand or forgive’ the fact of being denied ‘the rank of valedictorian or salutatorian’ ‘ at Northheld Mount Hermon School, the Massachusetts college to which his father sent him after the Victoria College debacle. The school fathers had decided that Said was ‘not fit for the honour’, and the adult Said found that a moral judgment beyond compehension.
At Northfield Mount Hermon Said was the only boy ‘who was not a native- born American, who did not speak with the required accent, and had not grown up with baseball, basketball, and football’. In James Joyce’s autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the authorial alter ego, Stephen Daedalus smarts endlessly after he is caned by the prefect of studies at the Jesuit-run Clongowes College and accused of malingering because he has broken his glasses and cannot write his lessons. A precociously drolll schoolmate intones: ‘The Senate and the Roman people declared that Daedalus had been wrongly punished’. Feeling that not only his palms but his very name have been injured, Daedalus finds himself unable to rest until he has taken up the injustice with the rector, and secured official acknowledgement that he has truly been wrongly punished.
At Eton, late Dilibe Onyeama was ethnically distinct but academically undistinguished, by his own account. Nigger at Eton was a narrative about himself, and what he suffered there ; its moral nuance meant that it was also a narrative against himself. Never a swot, Onyeama freely admitted that his low grades and the ‘rips’ they drew from his masters were well deserved, but is silently resentful that allowances were being seen to be made for him because of his colour. ‘You’ve done nothing but fish all term’, his housemaster tells Onyeama when he does poorly in his second term ‘trials’. His black skin assumed a sort of Rorschach quality that allowed it to account all at once for his boxing prowess, his failure in the trials, his examination successes, his ‘prodigious’ football kicks, his powers of hypnotism, and his perceived inability to feel pain from caning. He was, Onyeama was led to surmise, the incarnation of all the fevered myths about the black man, insufficient example and crude generalisation be damned. He experienced the soft racism of low expectations and innuendo ; as well as the coarse variant of ape noises and invective. Onyeama was admired for his boxing skills, but not so much for his hard-fisted ripostes to being racially insulted, repeatedly. He hurled invective of his own: ‘filthy white trash’ and ‘albino bastard’ being two barbs of choice. He was insulted because he was black, and disliked even more because he always retaliated with force, roiled by testosterone and resentment. Even when he is elected into Debate, a fraternity made up of ‘the top six or seven boys in the house’, who had ‘the divine right to fag boys to do their chores’, Onyeama cannot help overthinking the turn of events. He teases out the sheer implausibilities involved in his apotheosis: he is not yet a Specialist (that is, an A’ level student); he does not have the mandatory seniority; he believes he is particularly disliked by some members of Debate; the bonhomie expressed on the day of his election seems too incredible, too well choreographed to be heartfelt. He comes to the conclusion that he has been the beneficiary of a benign ploy by his headmaster and his house captain to cheer him up during the Biafran war, when his father was held up in secessionist territory and had been rumoured killed.
Yet none of what he experienced in the way of racial taunts ought to have surprised Onyeama: both his father and his English guardian the Reverend Cox had warned him in advance that he might encounter this . He admits : ‘In the holidays I never had the courage to confess to my father and my guardian that they had been right, in fact t even denied that l was experiencing any form of teasing, lying to them that I had a great number of friends and that I was finding the school really enjoyable in every respect.
When the agitated Onyeama asks his boxing teammate Tim Fearon whether he thinks Eton will expel him should he stumble at the trials a second time, Fearon, precociously astute, says no: ‘ Because if you were thrown out of the school, it would get in the papers and nost probably a political row would result. You see, everybody nowadays is incredibly race conscious and it would boil down to racial prejudice . That is what the school would be frightened of’. In the 1990s, Musa Okwonga, another, black Etonian, was stunned to be told by a cynical white classmate that he could win any argument simply by insisting that his interlocutor was being racist . It had never occurred to Okwonga that his skin could be seen or used as a polemical weapon. In Onyeama’s time, when he escapes a beating for failing the colour test thrice, he is convinced that his skin has given him armour, and he thanks the gods ‘for painting me black’. When his antagonists delend their ape noises and incendiary remarks as legally enshrined free speech, Onyeama repays the logic by retorting that his punches too are an exercise of his legally enshrined right of reply. (All of this fifty years before the semioticians of the US Supreme Court designated corporate money as electoral free speech in 2010).
The sensation about Onyeama’s race overwhelmed what might have been an anodyne field report from Elon about the rites of passage of louche young lords basking in inherited privilege. Class, snobbery and aspiration are after all the staples of the British imagination, the adolescent imagination too. George Orwell, King’s Scholar at Eton from 1917 to 1921, was plagued by ‘resentment against the boys whose parents were richer than mine and who took care to let me know it’. .He might be sneered at by the boys for being black, but Onyeama could be buoyed by the fact that his father was listed in the Eton College Alphabetical List as ‘Honourable Mr Justice Onyeama, Federal Supreme Court, Lagos, Nigeria; and later on as ‘His Excellency Judge Onyeama’ of the International Court at the Hague. The literary critic James Wood recalls that when he was at Eton in the 1980s he ‘refined a test’ to determine the wealth and dynastic trees of his fellow pupils : ‘If a boy’s father had gone there ( to Eton, that is) then that boy’s grandparents had been rich enough, in the early nineteen-fifties, to come up with the money. And, if his grandparents had had enough cash to send Grandpa there in the nineteen-twenties’ then Woods’ conjecture about inherited privilege was confirmed.
Onyeama’s grandfather was a wealthy Igbo merchant and slave trader who had adroitly made himself valuable to the British when they arrived with imperial tidings among the tribes of the lower Niger. Bolstering his fendal lemper, in the early 20th century the colonial authories made him a warrant chiec, a sort of emergency maharajah, granted tax collecting and law enforcement powers over his fief in Eastern Nigeria. Grandpa Onyeama, with his maharajah’s wealth, his maharajah’s fleet of luxury cars, and his benign view of British civilisation, had thus been able, in the 1940s, to send two of his sons to Oxford University. In turn, Iustice Onyeama had had enough cash, in the 1960s, to send young Dilibe to Eton ; the college fees in Onyeama’s time were £684 per annum; in 1965 the average British worker. could expect to earn an annual income in the region of £900.
The Eton of Onyeama’s account was an institution liberal enough to serve boys over sixteen beer on Founder’s day, and at the college pub, Christopher Tap. This reader was surprised to learn that in Onyeama’s time ‘it was forbidden for masters to strike boys in any way and if they did, boys had a right, traditionally, to hit back’. Stephen Daedalus would have been pleased. There was a robust extracurricular regimen of cricket, boxing, sprints, drama, regattas, and school trips to Germany ; a peculiarly English mix of scholarly rigour and licensed mischief. Each boy had a room of his own, furnished at leisure with record players, cameras,and guitars. Meals were served by maids and Italian waiters. The fictional James Bond, cinema exemplar of suave Englishness, spent two terms at Eton, but was expelled for being overly stirred by a maid.
Eton, like any tailcoated tribe, had its mores, iidioms and rituals of degradation. One night at 11pm Onyeama is summoned to a conclave of the Library (another Eton fraternity) and charged with being ‘bloody rude to the Italian waiters’. His penalty is to be caned on his bare bottom by Simon Rawlence, the house captain.-The punishment exacted, Rawlence says ‘thank you, Onyeama’, as if it has merely been a fair exchange of free speech. Not suprisingly, the college also maintained a feudal tradition of ‘fagging’, essentially the right of senior boys to treat junior ones as designated serfs and courtiers; makers of toast, arrangers of laundry, messengers to Windsor town, if not necessarily hewers of wood. Senior boys could levy fines against their ‘fags’, but needed the permission of a master to apply the cane. In true seigneurial fashion, at the end of term the pleased senior was obliged to give a tip to a dutiful factotum. Fagging and tophats were abolished during Onyeama’s time at Eton. The abolition of fagging was particularly disappointing for him because he had looked forward to compensating himself for being fagged by inflicting some fagging of his own.
Eton today is much more ethnically diverse than in Onyeama’s day. A 2016 article by old Elonian Christopher de Bellaigue recorded the surprised discovery by one parent that ‘the commonest name at the school was Patel’, a patronym of Indian origin. The Eton List, which allowed boys like Dilibe Onyeama to be registered as infants for a place in the college, was ended in 1990. The sterling quality of a boy’s entrance exam grades still matters as much as the quantity of sterling in his father’s bank account. Eton still has a place, however, for bright boys from genteel backgrounds, insider-outsiders like Orwell; this year there are twelve Orwell Award winners whose fees are to be paid for by a trust founded in the great writer’s name. When M T Mbu rhapsodised about ‘the success story of ex-Etonians’ he may have had in mind the fact that Eton has seemed, for two centuries, the default alma mater of British prime ministers and statesmen. Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister at the time when Mbu was Nigeria’s first High Commissioner to Britain in the late 1950s, named over thirty fellow old Etonians to his cabinet. Twenty old Etonians, including the incumbent, Boris Johnson, have occupied 10 Downing Street. Gordon Brown’s premiership was notable for being the rare one in British history that did not contain a single old Etonian.
Colleges like Eton have invariably never been merely about the education of a ‘cognitive elite’, as Herrnstein and Murray called it in The Bell Curve (1994), but also about the priming of a caste consequential across society’s various spheres, the shadow old Etonian government of much caricature, When Onyeama was elected into Debate at Eton, his friends secured a promise from him not to punish them for offences which he himself had been guilty of in his plebeian, pre- Debate life, namely smoking and drinking. Onyeama agrees, adding a codicil that his old friends would not therefore flout the rules with juvenile abandon. In a sense that episode was an innocuous parody of the alleged workings of the old Etonian network , able to suborn government and the law merely by invoking the bonds of friendship, the bonds of past complicity.
One of the more poignant passages in Nigger at Eton comes when Onyeama reflects on the fact that in college he was never able to claim that he had a close, long-term friendship. A master who should surely have been doubling as a Foreign Office adviser told Onyeama that the bad blood between himself and Akintola fils may have had its roots in Nigerian tribal politics, curdled especially by the January 1966 coup in which Akintola pere was killed. With other schoolmates there was the superficial camaraderie of ‘messing’, where boys treated one another to the spoils of their provision cupboards or the offerings of the college confectionery. There was the natural joviality of ‘mobbing’, essentially male horseplay and hugging. Onyeama’s mobbing was considered excessive, homoerotic even ; he came to believe, of his traducers, that ‘physical contact of that sort with a black man repulsed them’. Ironically, he got on better with two Afrikaans boys from apartheid -era South Africa than with his British peers. Tim Fearon had been convinced that Eton would be loath to send Onyeama away for fear of stirring up racial controversy, but when Nigger at Eton was about to be published the Eton authorities, stung by the salt of its revelations, tried to suppress it. Onyeama was banished, eternally, from the Eton college grounds, even though he was of course no longer a pupil there. He has stayed away for half a century.. In 2020, Simon Henderson, principal of Eton, apologised for the racial abuse that Onyeama had had to endure at Eton, and rescinded the banishment. Alter half a century, the principal and the fellows of Eton declared that Onyeama had been wrongly punished.
•Missang Oyongha, Lagos, Nigeria. Email:[email protected]
