In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the rulers of Mbanta give the missionaries ‘a real battlefield in which to show their victory’: the ‘evil forest’ in which the ‘potent fetishes of great medicine-men’ are dumped upon their death, and the final resting place of the victims of abominable diseases. The villagers expect the deities of the land to retaliate against the Christians’ disruptive presence. But the missionaries and their congregation flourish, bringing about a profound change in the historical and cultural order. This is a fictional story, but it bears a remarkable similitude to a key event in the history of colonial education in Nigeria.

In 1928, Robert Fisher, an English cleric, arrived in the Owerri Province of Southeastern Nigeria to acquire land for creating a teacher training institution. The amused chiefs of the Lodu, Olikoro, and Umudike communities offered him more than 10 square miles of a ‘desecrated’ land used as a burial-ground for outcasts in the relative backwoods of Umudike-Ibeku, four miles from the eastern Nigerian town of Umuahia and 80 miles inland half-way between Port Harcourt and Enugu. For the vast terrains, they exacted the negligible price of two heads of tobacco and twenty pennies per annum for nine years. A year later, the Umuahia Teacher Training College opened its doors to twenty-three male students from all over Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and the British Cameroons. In 1930, it was promoted to the more enviable status of a boarding secondary school with the name of Government College, Umuahia. The institution reached its apogee in the early postwar years as ‘the Eton of the East’.