Achebe and Friends in Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite, author Terri Ochiagha explains, takes its title from Swami and Friends by the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan. This beloved fictional work concerns the formation of a middle-class intellectual elite. The central goal of her own book, Ochiagha asserts, is to reconstruct ‘the institutional genesis of Government College Umuahia, its changing ideological and intellectual nature, the humanistic and literary ambience in the period of 1944–52, its legacy in the mid to late 1950s, and the primus inter pares generation's shared intellectual life après Government College’. The book is about the factors that stirred the inaugural moments of African literature at Government College Umuahia, the ‘Eton of the East’, the English-style boarding school in Umudike, Umuahia, in Eastern Nigeria, where a remarkable number of Africa's most important writers were educated in the 1940s and 1950s. What factors made Government College Umuahia the staging ground of what was to become a remarkable literary tradition? ‘What’, Ochiagha asks in short, ‘are the exact constituent ingredients and in what proportions did they coalesce into the magical formula’ that ignited the talents, and their very significant response in the making of Africa's literary modernity? What, of that generation of African writers educated at Umuahia, can be ascribed to socialization or environment? Can the conditions at Umuahia be grasped and reproduced? Terri Ochiagha attempts to answer these questions in a tightly written and magnificently told account.

Ochiagha casts important light on the conditions and practices that made a place like Umuahia unique in the molding of young imagination and talent in the colonial period. Was it a fluke or deliberate? In the end, Ochiagha does not answer all these questions, but she does touch on the aspect of British colonial education that yielded these fruits in the age of colonialism and decolonization. In the emergence of some of the major African writers of that age – Chinua Achebe, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo, V. C. Ike, Elechi Amadi, I. N. C. Aniebo, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and, to some extent, the poet Gabriel Okara – all from one place, we glimpse the making of a tradition that in the end, feels occluded because it could not be sustained in the postcolonial environment. The Government Colleges, such as Umuahia, were the site of colonial mimicry. However, even as sites of the formation of ‘colonial/postcolonial subjectivities’, they remain, Ochiagha reminds us, ‘virtually unmapped terrain’ that remains ‘outside the public and scholarly gaze’. A link between African literature and an Anglican spirit, the result of the ‘psycho-cultural’ effect attendant upon strategic acculturation through the elitism of the English public school model, is an intriguing and powerful subtext of Ochiagha's argument. Fanon would have come very handy here for Ochiagha, who missed the chance to explore the psycho-cultural aspect of Umuahian education and its effect on the writers a little further, for what should have been a rounder perspective.

Terri Ochiagha's book, the story of a remarkable place and a remarkable time, is also the story of the heroic exertion of dedicated people – English and African educators – who did the work of the British Empire in quiet places, unaware of how it might turn out. E. H. Duckworth and Robert Fisher, whose idealism and sensitivity to the reality of an Africa under colonialism led them to disregard the strictures of colonial public education policy, launched the innovative experiment that laid the foundation for Government College Umuahia. William Simpson's ‘Text-Book Act’ may account for the intellectual orientation of the writers that came out of Umuahia. Adrian P. L. ‘Apple’ Slater's English lessons prompted Chinua Achebe to scribble a note of gratitude at the publication of Arrow of God, for ‘the man who taught me respect for language’.

The book relates the story of the attempt to transplant English values in the creation of elite sites of privilege through schools modeled after Eton, Rugby, Harrow, and Marlborough. Terri Ochiagha captures these mimetic attempts finely in ways that make the 1940s and 1950s feel like a lost arcadia in West African education. With an impressive use of archival sources and interviews of the living writers, Achebe and Friends in Umuahia explains how the evolution of Government College Umuahia as a British colonial experiment in public education came to mirror the emergence of a colonial elite. Their new and conditioned sensibilities, in due course, shaped the initial development of modern African Art and Literature. Chinua Achebe, one of these important beneficiaries of an Umuahian education, gave some thought, in a general way, to this subject in his own book, The Education of a British Protected Child. Terri Ochiagha's book provides a multi-perspectival historical look at this hallowed site.