Nigeria, at independence from British rule in
1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large
population, an educated elite and many natural
resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to
fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it
is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a
government model, was closer to a dictatorship
than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation,
created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn
in history class in the endlessly repeated
sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form
one country and his wife gave it the name
Nigeria.’ It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria
was a nation at all. The amalgamation was an
economic policy; the British colonial government
needed to subsidise the poorer North with
income from the resource-rich South. With its
feudal system of emirs, beautiful walled cities, and centralised power systems, the North was
familiar to Lord Lugard – not unlike the Sudan,
where he had previously worked. In the South,
the religions were more diverse, the power
systems more diffuse. Lugard, a theorist of
imperial rule, believed in the preservation of native cultures as long as they fitted his theories
of what native cultures should be. In the North,
the missionaries and their Western education
were discouraged, to prevent what Lugard called
their ‘corrupting influence’ on Islamic schools.
Western education thrived in the South. The regions had different interests, saw each other as
competitors, and became autonomous at
different times; there was no common centre. A
nation is, after all, merely an idea. Colonial policy
did not succeed in propagating the idea of a
nation: indeed, colonial policy did not try to. In the North colonialism entrenched the old elite; in
the South it created a new elite, the Western-
educated. This small group would form the core
of the nationalist movement in the 1950s,
agitating for independence. They tried to
establish the idea of ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ as binary, in opposition to each other, a strategy they
believed was important for the exercise of
nation-building. But the politicisation of ethnicity
had already gone too far. After independence a vicious regional power
struggle ensued. The ‘fear of domination’ of one
region by another was everywhere. Elections
were rigged. The government was unpopular.
Only six years later a group of army majors
carried out a coup and murdered top government officials. In the North the coup was
seen as an Igbo coup, a plot by the southern Igbo
to gain dominance. It didn’t help that the new
head of state, in a clumsy attempt to calm the
nation, instituted a unitary decree. Instead of
regional civil services Nigeria now had a single civil service. A second coup by northern officers
saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered.
Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’
may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because
the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are
so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the
thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who
were killed between May and September 1966,
their homes ransacked and set on fire: Nigerian
civilians killed by Nigerian civilians. The numbers
are still disputed, but most agree that at least seven thousand died. The federal government
seemed incapable of stopping the killings. Had the
massacres not occurred, or had they been dealt
with differently, the south-eastern region would
not have seceded and declared itself the
independent nation of Biafra. The darkest chapter of Nigeria’s history: the
Nigeria-Biafra war that left a million people dead,
towns completely destroyed and a generation
stripped of its innocence. On the Biafran side,
intellectuals actively participated in the war,
buoyed by their belief in the secessionist cause. They drafted press releases, served as roving
ambassadors, made weapons. The best known
and most influential African poet in English,
Christopher Okigbo, joined the Biafran army. He
was a romantic, unsatisfied with the
administrative or diplomatic roles his fellow intellectuals took on; Chinua Achebe, his close
friend, describes him as a man about whom there
was a certain inevitability of drama and event.
Mere months into the war, he died in battle.
Achebe’s recollection of Okigbo’s death in There
Was a Country is brief, and no less moving for that. Achebe hears the announcement on his car
radio and pulls up at the roadside: The open parkland around Nachi stretched away
in all directions. Other cars came and passed. Had
no one else heard the terrible news? When I finally got myself home and told my
family, my three-year-old son, Ike, screamed:
‘Daddy don’t let him die!’ Ike and Christopher had
been special pals. When Christopher came to the
house the boy would climb on his knees, seize
hold of his fingers and strive with all his power to break them while Christopher would moan in
pretended agony. ‘Children are wicked little
devils,’ he would say to us over the little fellow’s
head, and let out more cries of feigned pain. In the years since the war, Okigbo has become
an icon to writers throughout the continent:
venerated, enmeshed in myth, his death a
striking example of the great tragedy of the war.
Achebe almost died too. Before the war started,
when Igbo people were under siege in Lagos, soldiers raided his house and only just missed
him. Later, his home and his office were bombed,
and later still the Biafran army set up an armoury
in his porch overnight; his family woke to the
sound of shelling and knew it was time to flee.
His story is a story of near-misses, of deep scars left by what could have been. After an air raid in
Enugu at the beginning of the war, Achebe stares
at the ruins of what had been the office of Citadel
Press, a publishing company he had started with
Okigbo, and thinks: ‘Having had a few too many
homes and offices bombed, I walked away from the site and from publishing for ever.’ Achebe is the most widely read African author in
the world, and was already a known and
respected writer in 1967, when he joined the
Biafran war effort. He served as an ambassador
for Biafra, travelling to different countries to raise
support for the beleaguered nation, and participating in various committees, one of which
came up with the Ahiara declaration, a moving if
starry-eyed document that was the new nation’s
intellectual foundation. He has written poems and
short stories about Biafra – Girls at War (1972) is
a magnificent collection of stories set there. But many have waited and hoped for a memoir, for
his personal take on a contested history. Now at
last he has written it. Although it is subtitled ‘A
Personal History of Biafra’, There Was A Country
is striking for not being very personal in its
account of the war. Instead it is a Nigerian nationalist lament for the failure of the giant that
never was; Achebe is mourning Nigeria’s failures,
the greatest and most devastating of which was
Biafra. This is a book for Achebe’s admirers, or for those
not unfamiliar with his work. Parts are similar to
passages from previous essays, and interspersed
in the narrative are poems which, even if
tweaked here, have been published before. Keen
followers of Achebe will be interested in some of the new material about his life in the first section
of the book. But the second section, about the
war itself, mostly forgoes personal memory. In
writing about the major events, Achebe often
recounts what he was told rather than what he
felt and the reader is left with a nagging dissatisfaction, as though things are being left
unsaid. There are a few glimpses. On a visit to
Canada as a Biafran ambassador, one of his hosts
at the Canadian Council of Churches made a joke,
and in the middle of the loud laughter that
followed, it occurred to Achebe that Biafra had become different from other places, where
laughter was still available. And, later, hearing a
plane take off from Heathrow, he instinctively
wanted to dive for cover. There are other small
details, but all tantalisingly brief, sometimes
oblique. I longed to hear more of what he had felt during those months of war – in other words, I
longed for a more novelistic approach. The book’s first section is much more satisfying
in this respect: more involved and personal.
There is his happy childhood, his close-knit
family, with portraits of his father, an upright
missionary teacher, and his mother, about whom
he writes: ‘It is her peaceful determination to tackle barriers in her world that nailed down a
very important element of my development – the
willingness to bring about change gently.’ The
first section is also a celebration of the richness of
Igbo philosophy and cosmology and its inclusive
culture. In recounting his memory of how welcoming his people were to early white
missionaries, he writes about ‘how
wholeheartedly they embraced strangers from
thousands of miles away, with their different
customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a
Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo religion, which he
found more ‘artistically satisfying’. Much of his
work is rooted in this tension between old and
new, between the Christian religion of his
parents and the retreating older religion of his
ancestors. He began to write Things Fall Apart after a British
lecturer told him an earlier story he had written
lacked ‘form’, but was then unable to explain to
him what form meant. ‘I was conscripted by the
story,’ he writes, ‘and I was writing at all times –
whenever there was any opening. It felt like a sentence, an imprisonment of creativity.’ He is,
famously, one of the writers who ‘wrote back’ to
the ‘West’, who challenged, by writing his own
story, the dominant and reductive Western
images of his people. In his essay ‘The Novelist as
Teacher’ he wrote that he would be happy if his work did nothing more than show his people
that theirs had not been a life of darkness before
the advent of the Europeans. ‘The writer,’ he
says, ‘is often faced with two choices – turn
away from the reality of life’s intimidating
complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon
runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired
fiction.’ On the other hand, his work never sinks
under this burden of responsibility. He describes the situation in eastern Nigeria in
the months leading up to war. In Nigeria’s urban
mythology, the war would not have happened
had it not been for the personal ambition of the
Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the
British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an
overambitious man who had engineered the
secession and manipulated his people into
supporting him. Many others have repeated this
view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe
that following the pogroms, or rather, the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred over the four
months starting in May 1966, which was
compounded by the involvement, even
connivance, of the federal government …
secession from Nigeria and the war that followed
became an inevitability.’ To him it is self-evident that an ethnic group known for its independence
of mind could not easily be manipulated into
supporting a war. He writes about the reaction
among Igbo people after the Northern massacres: One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit
one did not know existed, a determination in
fact. The spirit was that of a people ready to put
in their best and fight for their freedom … But the
most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was
that they were finally in a safe place … at home. This was the first and most important thing, and
one could see this sense of exhilaration in the
effort that the people were putting into the war.
Young girls, for example, had taken over the job
of controlling traffic. They were really doing it by
themselves – no one asked them to. That this kind of spirit existed made us feel tremendously
hopeful. One gets the sense from Achebe’s memoir of a
man who is effortlessly himself, who will keep
silent rather than say what he doesn’t believe. He
is meticulous and sincere in his expressions of
praise and gratitude – to fellow writers, to people
who helped him or helped Biafra. He has a sense of humour, but very little cynicism. Today, when
many Western male writers of a certain age are
mythologised for their bad manners – rudeness,
selfishness etc – as though great male talent must
be accompanied by boorishness, it is refreshing
to encounter a great male talent of a certain age who feels no need for posturing. Achebe has sometimes been characterised as a
writer lacking ‘style’, that word often used by
people for whom prose, to be noteworthy, must
be an exercise in flashy phrasemaking. If style is
that, a form of pyrotechnics, then this is a fair
characterisation of his work. But if style is a distinctive way of writing prose, whatever that
may be, then Achebe’s style is quite evident. His
sentences are confident. He writes a Nigerian,
and sometimes a distinctly Igbo English. His
writing is quiet, and in this regard he is similar to
writers like William Trevor and Okot p’Bitek. He is free of literary anxiety. My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this
universal storytelling before we can say, ‘Now
we’ve heard it all.’ I worry when somebody
from one particular tradition stands up and says,
‘The novel is dead, the story is dead.’ I find this to
be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is
dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet. His prose, which often has the cadence of spoken
Nigerian English in his fiction, is sometimes
plainly conversational here. I was reminded of
my father, a contemporary of Achebe’s, telling
stories of his past, in the circuitous storytelling
tradition of the Igbo, each story circling in on itself, revelling in coincidence. I imagine Achebe
would tell the stories in this book in much the
same way as he writes them, with an elegiac,
gentle vagueness, a lack of interest in adhering to
hard fact. He ‘came first or second’ in an exam;
his wife’s father died ‘in the mid-1980s’. There are many repetitions, schoolfriends are
introduced more than once, there are digressions,
and he casually uses quaint words like ‘lad’ and
‘serpent’. There is more of what writing teachers
call ‘telling’ and less ‘showing’. Sometimes, his
stories are fable-like, with the simplicity – and simplifications – of that form. In Nigeria under
colonial rule, he could travel from Lagos to the
south-east at night without worrying about
armed robbers. This, he argues, is because the
British managed their colonies well. His
simplification is rooted in disappointment. He is a member of Nigeria’s generation of the
bewildered, the people who were fortunate to
be educated, who were taught to believe in
Nigeria, and who watched, helpless and
confused, as the country crumbled. He was a
Biafran patriot, as were most of his Igbo colleagues, because they no longer felt they
belonged in Nigeria. He still seems surprised,
almost disbelieving, not only at the terrible things
that happened but at the response, or lack of
response, to them. ‘As many of us packed our
belongings to return east some of the people we had lived with for years, some for decades,
jeered … that kind of experience is very
powerful. It is something I could not possibly
forget.’ Later: I was one of the last to flee Lagos. I simply could
not bring myself to accept that I could no longer
live in my nation’s capital, although the facts
clearly said so. My feeling toward Nigeria was
one of profound disappointment. Not only
because mobs were hunting down and killing innocent civilians in many parts, especially in the
North, but because the federal government sat by
and let it happen. Achebe mourns Biafra, but his anger is directed
at the failures of Nigeria. His great
disappointment manifests itself in a rare moment
of defiance towards the end of the book: There are many international observers who
believe that Gowan’s actions after the war were
magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of
treatises that talk about how the Igbo were
wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have
news for them: the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the
main reasons for the country’s continued
backwardness, in my estimation.

Can't read this crap - re-edit the nonsense, mate..

^^^^I've done the 'hardwork' for you, OP... A better write-up by Chimamanda...

R.I.P Christopher Okigbo!

@OP
Even though av read this masterpiece, I crave that u edit this post so that pipu can read without stress.
Hmmm Chimamanda, a fast rising writer for now. Wow . Great one my dear.I cringe in utter bewilderment weneva I read ur write up. u too mush jor.

Abeg notify after summerising ds tori.

Summarize this rubbish please. This girl is heading down the same biafra only and only biafra story road. That's all she knows and just like the ones on NL, that's what she was fed..

It's not different from the same trash being regurgitated on several threads. Okigbo was the bravest of them all. A man who died for what he believed. A man who did not stay in the comfort of his house and send the masses to war. An intellectual who towered above his peers not this racist, bitter, pitiable, petty inconsequential professor of English in one pseudo Ivy league university that is always at the bottom of ranking tables.

Ojukwu got all his belongings back. Ojukwu collected pensions from Nigerian military, the same army he waged what he called a war of "conscience" against before he died. Ojukwu joined the Northern party on his return from exile. Ojukwu endorsed northern general for presidency in his late lonely years. What was ideological about Ojukwu? Did he really believe in Biafra that he declared?

Apart from when Obasanjo was in power, the essential politics of the West is opposition politics! Even during his disastrous presidency, we still had a dominant party in the West completely against their pro one Nigeria nonsense. They are the ones making alliances with the North from independence even till now. Efulefus

What is this nonsense

So long a letter. I do not understand why igbos cry on spilled milk. The deed is done. Every tribe in Nigeria lost their loved ones to Biafra war. Do the igbos think heavier losses should be recorded in a war declared in their on soil? What do they really want from Nigeria and nigerians?

Mighty Sparrow: So long a letter. I do not understand why igbos cry on spilled milk. The deed is done. Every tribe in Nigeria lost their loved ones to Biafra war. Do the igbos think heavier losses should be recorded in a war declared in their on soil? What do they really want from Nigeria and nigerians?

STFU.
Go and tell south-africans to forget about the arpatheid.
Go and tell the UN to erase the memory of the holocaust from history,before asking the igbos to forget about the biafra war.
As long as they stay in the same country with the yaribas and the hausas,they will always remember the biafran war.

There are tons of
treatises that talk about how the Igbo were
wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have
news for them: the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the
main reasons for the country’s continued
backwardness, in my estimation.

I acutally disagree the reason Nigeria is backward is PLAINLY because Nigerians are backward has nothing to do with igbos. Igbos under Obj IBB Gowon Abacha have been given strategic spots in Nigeria No doubt.

Igboman can become president, Nigeria WILL still be backwards. Plenty of states in the North are BACKWARDS- but that has nothing to do with igbo, Plenty of states in the Niger delta are Backwards but that has nothing to do with igbo, Plenty of states in the SW and middle are backwards but that has nothing to do with igbo, and PLENTY OF IGBO states where igbos are governing are backwards but that has nothing to do with ibo integration.

Nigerians are very backwards regardless of tribe or tribal integration, That is why I laugh when people clamour for a president from their region. Yorubas cried over MKO- Obj did NOTHING. Niger deltans cried for GEJ, nothing for Niger delta as of yet(hes preoccupied with the north and terrorrism which will take up his presidency for SURE)

solomon111: STFU.
Go and tell south-africans to forget about the arpatheid.
Go and tell the UN to erase the memory of the holocaust from history,before asking the igbos to forget about the biafra war.
As long as they stay in the same country with the yaribas and the hausas,they will always remember the biafran war.

Nigerian civil war was not apartheid.

Nigerian civil war was not holocaust.

It was a civil war

You went to war and Nigeria went to war with you

You picked up guns and nigeria picked up guns

You killed nigerians and they killed your people too

Unfortunately in wars, somebody dot to be the winner and somebody got to be the loser.

You are the loser so instaed of equating civil war with apartheid and holocaust like another illiterate, accept your loss and quit crying like crybabies...

Now at last he has written it. Although it is subtitled ‘A
Personal History of Biafra’, There Was A Country is striking for not being very personal in its account of the war. Instead it is a Nigerian nationalist lament for the failure of the giant that never was

Nigeria is the Giant that never was

Eko Ile:

Nigerian civil war was not apartheid.

Nigerian civil war was not holocaust.

It was a civil war

You went to war and Nigeria went to war with you

You picked up guns and nigeria picked up guns

You killed nigerians and they killed your people too

Unfortunately in wars, somebody dot to be the winner and somebody got to be the loser.

You are the loser so instaed of equating civil war with apartheid and holocaust like another illiterate, accept your loss and quit crying like crybabies...

The igbos lost the battle but whom did they really lose to . below is what the british foreign seceretary said during the war

[qoute]The then British Labour Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, agonised over this policy.

"It would have been quite easy for me to say: This is going to be difficult - let's cut off all connexion with the Nigerian Government," he says now.

"If I'd done that I should have known that I was encouraging in Africa the principle of tribal secession - with all the misery that could bring to Africa in the future."

[/qoute]

Eko Ile:

Nigerian civil war was not apartheid.

Nigerian civil war was not holocaust.

It was a civil war

You went to war and Nigeria went to war with you

You picked up guns and nigeria picked up guns

You killed nigerians and they killed your people too

Unfortunately in wars, somebody dot to be the winner and somebody got to be the loser.

You are the loser so instaed of equating civil war with apartheid and holocaust like another illiterate, accept your loss and quit crying like crybabies...

The igbos lost the battle but whom did they really lose to . below is what the british foreign seceretary said during the war

The then British Labour Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, agonised over this policy.

"It would have been quite easy for me to say: This is going to be difficult - let's cut off all connexion with the Nigerian Government," he says now.

"If I'd done that I should have known that I was encouraging in Africa the principle of tribal secession - with all the misery that could bring to Africa in the future."

^^^^^ What's that crap got to do with anything or the fact that it was a war where you killed other people and you not only got killed, you lost the damn war so keep quiet?


People fight wars all the time and there's always winners and losers. They all move on, but not you crybabies. Decades later you are still crying like little girls or faHGS is I may say...


Y'all losers need to move on...