₦airaland Forum

Chigold101:
Why all this panic? Is it because GEJ lost election and you are afraid that Ndi Igbo and other members of lower Niger are really forming a greater alliance that will liberate them (us) from this zoo called Nigeria.

Di you for once remember that "there was a country is not "just" a book but a memoir. It is his day to day experience etcetera. I know your brain is really dark and is running riot on it is way to rottenness. Who wrote the books you read? Do you know that everything that have to do with the Biafran story was banned in Nigeria before now... During the time of the military? Someone like me grew up outside this country and at the age of 15, i started reading books written by none Nigerian authurs and book by Nigerian authors which were all published outside Nigeria.

You must be running mental by now and your zoo masters of hausa/fulani extraction must be very happy with you for what you just wrote. it is a pity.
1.- Ken saro Wiwa was killed by those who told him and Adaka Boro to fight against Biafra.
2.- Abiola was killed by those he thought that are his friend. And as if that is not enough, they also killed his wife.
3.- The yorubas are still busy fighting the Igbos who have done nothing wrong to them and their man Bola Ige was murdered in cold blood.
4.- Awolowo who couldnt stand against the evils he did and committed against the Igbos, finally committed suicide.

Man if I were you, I will watch my back and be careful while writing about the Biafran people or people of Lower Niger...


Be warned!

superstar1:
Another misplaced noise making.

No be ony Biafra u go see, you go soon see Upper Zambezi.

If i hear

Chigold101:
your little mind is really mis leading you...

pazienza:
[b] In the chapter, The Calabar Massacre,
Achebe not only totally blanks out the
well-documented atrocities, including
massacres Biafran forces committed
against the Efiks, Ibibios, Ikwerre, when
they occupied their lands and when they
were retreating in the face of federal
onslaught. Achebe writes: “By the time the
Nigerians were done they had shot at
least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic],
most of them civilians.” There were other
atrocities throughout the region. “In Oji
River,” The Times of London reported on
August 2, 1968, “the Nigerian forces
opened fire and murdered fourteen nurses
and the patients in the wards.” Achebe
continues still referring to the same Times
article: “In Uyo and Okigwe, more innocent
lives were lost to the brutality and
bloodlust of the Nigerian soldiers (pg137)
.” How the fact-checking services of his
publishers allowed him to get away with
these is baffling. I looked up the 1968
piece, of course. It is a syndicated story
written by Lloyd Garrison of The New York
Times to balance the piece by John
Young, which appeared three days before.
In the piece Achebe quotes, there is no
mention of Uyo or Okigwe or Oji River at
all. This is what is in the piece–the
journalist was quoting Brother Aloysius,
an Irish missionary in Uturu 150km away
from Abakaliki: “But when they took
Abakaliki, they put the 11 white fathers
there on house arrest. In the hospital
outside Enugu, they shot all the fourteen
Biafran nurses who stayed behind, then
went down the wards killing the patients
as well. It was the same thing in Port
Harcourt.” This missionary had believed
the ruthlessly efficient Biafran propaganda
service. Because of the atrocities Nigeria
soldiers committed on the Ogoja –Nsukka
front and the revenge killings in Asaba,
the world had been alerted and it was
hurting Nigeria’s arms procurement
abroad. So, Gowon agreed to an
international observer team made of
representatives from UN General-
Secretary and OAU to monitor the
activities of the three Nigerian divisions
and the claims of Radio Biafra.
In their first report released on 9 October
1968, there was no evidence of the
killings, though it was brought to their
attention. Even Lloyd Garrison and other
members of the international press corps
in Biafra could not find evidence of that
particular killings in the hospital. Also
note Achebe’s statement: “By the time the
Nigerians were done, they had shot at
least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic],
most of them civilians.” How can a man
of Achebe’s stature write: “They had shot
at least 1,000,” which is an uncertainty;
follow it up with another uncertainty:
“perhaps 2,000 Ibos” and then say with
certainty, “most of them are civilians”?
How can he be sure that most of them
were civilians when he was not even sure
whether they are 1,000 or 2,000? [/b]


This man is evil, is he denying the massacres perpetrated by Nigerian Army in the East and Anioma?

There are even video evidences of such massacres on you tube, yet this devilish man denies such.

Meanwhile, there no single evidence of Ndiigbo killing Eastern/ Midwest minorities.

The extend Yorubas can go to vilify Ndiigbo is shocking.

superstar1:
Apart from the various hard copy books, kindly read the following:

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/02/19/biafra-the-untold-story-of-nigerias-civil-war/

https://waidigbenro./tag/l-colonel-odumegwu-ojukwu/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57717003/How-Biafra-Came-to-Be-COMPLETE#scribd

We should all endeavour to read these for posterity sake

superstar1:
who cares?

Chigold101:
you over care that is why you wrote all this which many people are not interested in reading

superstar1:
lol. Joker.

People that are in search of the truth are reading it.

Mind you it is not my write up and i am not claiming the right to the write up.

BlackTechnology:
You mean the trash you called truth.

superstar1:
Uwechue did what Achebe never did: acting from a firm moral base, he berated Ojukwu and all the Biafran leaders for rallying the Igbo to die en masse for the secession. “Sovereignty or mass suicide,” he writes, “is an irresponsible slogan unworthy of the sanction or encouragement of any serious and sensible leadership.” What could have caused a thinking man to at least flinch, Achebe rejoices in. Here, he is narrating the “explosion of musical, lyrical, and poetic creativity and artistry (pg151)” that the Biafran war had brought about. “But if the price is death for all we hold dear/ Then let us die without a shred of fear…/Spilling our blood we’ll count a privilege…/We shall remember those who died en mass…(pg 152)”

That is the Biafran national anthem, Land of the Rising Sun. Achebe continues: “The anthem was set to the beautiful music of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius….” And for any group to compare the Biafran deaths to the Holocaust is to desecrate the Holocaust and cast insults on the memory of the Jewish dead. European Jewry never had an anthem rallying themselves to mass deaths this way.
Another telling episode in the book is the war-ready celebrations amongst Biafran Christians in their houses of God: “Biafran churches made links to the persecution of the early Christians, others on radio to the Inquisition and the persecution of the Jewish people. The prevalent mantra of the time was ‘Ojukwu nyeanyiegbekaanyinuo agha’ – ‘Ojukwu give us guns to fight a war.’ It was an energetic, infectious duty song, one sung to a well-known melody and used effectively to recruit young men into the People’s Army (the army of the Republic of Biafra). But in the early stages of the war, when Biafran army grew quite rapidly, sadly Ojukwu had no guns to give those brave souls (pg 171).” “Sadly”… “brave souls”… “in the house of God” are all Achebe’s words.

Ojukwu’s wrong-headed intransigence to take another path in place of secession that was even alarming to neutral observers never makes it into this book unlike other books that recounted the stories. Azikiwe’s Origins of Civil War lists the properties Ojukwu stole even before he declared secession. How “he obstructed the passage of goods belonging to neighbouring countries like, Cameroun, Chad and Niger, and expropriated them”. Achebe writes that wealthy Biafrans’ private accounts were used to buy hardwares for the war. He never tells us that Ojukwu stole via armed robbery, money worth billions in today‘s rates, at the CBN branches at Benin, Calabar and Enugu, because he had no money to prosecute a war he was obsessed with, fighting without thinking the consequences through. Achebe never berates Ojukwu, both then and now that he is recollecting with benefit of hindsight on clearly invalid judgements. For instance, swindled by propaganda, Dick Tiger, the Liverpool-based Nigerian boxer, renounced his MBE to come and fight for Biafra. Achebe writes: “Ojukwu made Dick Tiger a lieutenant in the army of Biafra as soon as he enlisted (pg 158.)” That was a man with no military training or background being given over a hundred fighters to command as an assistant of a captain by just showing up in Nigeria!

Instead of upbraiding him, Achebe goes on to praise Ojukwu as a man who needed little or no advice. “This trait would bring Ojukwu in direct collision with some senior Biafrans, such as Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr. Michael Okpara, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani and a few others, who were concerned about Ojukwu’s tendency toward introversion and independent decision making (pg119).” The US State Department’s files on Ojukwu did not dignify dictatorship with fanciful language the way Achebe does; they called it by its proper name. Here is a telegram cabled to Washington and some other American embassies worldwide:
“Internal situation has changed a great deal since secession was first declared. Ojukwu now rules as a dictator and moves about surrounded by retinue of relatives and yes men. Responsible Ibos, who had been advising him at the start of the war, have been eliminated in one way or the other from the picture because they came to believe accommodation of some sorts would have to be reached with FMG (Gowon’s Federal Military Government). Situation so bad that Biafran representative in Paris, Okechukwu Mezu, has quit in disgust. Azikiwe refuses to go back to Biafra and is sitting in London as an exile. Ojukwu’s propaganda machine, by succeeding in creating the impression of some forward movement, masked the cold fact that Biafrans are unable to break out of FMG’s encirclement.”

That was 2 February 1969. Had Ojukwu listened to the advice of “responsible Ibos” in his inner caucus all along, more lives would have been saved. Instead, he surrounded himself with yes men. Take the chapter, The Republic of Biafra: The Intellectual Foundation of a New Nation. Achebe’s committee was National Guidance Committee; his office was in Ojukwu’s State House. “Ojukwu then told me he wanted the new committee to report directly to him, outside the control of the cabinet. I became immediately apprehensive…Nevertheless I went ahead and chose a larger committee of experts for the task at hand (pg 144).” Then the experts started to work on what was to become the Ahiara Declaration, which Ojukwu read on radio 1 June 1969 “very close to the end of the war”. There was starvation, great panic, epidemic, anxiety, bereavements and despair in the streets. Even according to Biafra’s propaganda statistics, over a million were already dead. The war was obviously unwinnable. Federal forces had captured Enugu, Biafra’s first capital; Umuahia, the second capital, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Nsukka and many places in Biafra. Biafran troops were desperately fleeing and hiding. Yet, Achebe and other Igbo intellectuals, who were clearly in a position to tell Ojukwu the truth and prevent further deaths, were busy writing sycophantic declarations. N.U. Akpan, Secretary to the Biafran government, was particularly scathing on these “arrogant” “ignorant” intellectuals in his account of the war. “The day this declaration was published and read by Ojukwu was a day of celebration in Biafra,” Achebe writes. “My late brother, Frank, described the effect of this Ahiara Declaration this way: ‘Odikasigbabiaagbagba’ (It was as if we should be dancing to what Ojukwu was saying). People listened from wherever they were. It sounded right to them: freedom, quality, self-determination, excellence. Ojukwu read it beautifully that day. He had a gift for oratory (pg 149).”

The Americans took note of the contextual inanities of the two and a half hour-long declaration and cabled this commentary to Washington: “Ojukwu repeatedly develops the theme that our disability is racial. The root cause of our problems lies in the fact that we are black.” Considering the humanitarian and political support in response to Biafran propaganda, the level of relief flown in and the concern expressed by private organisations and governments, Ojukwu’s speech was almost unreal as he skipped even a passing reference to the International Red Cross, Caritas or French military assistance. The Americans continue: “In his efforts to foster solidarity and support for continuing the war and maintaining the secession, Ojukwu appeals as much to fear and xenophobia… Ojukwu sees the Nigerian Civil War in almost conspiratorial terms. For example, he describes the war as the ‘latest recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the blackman for his true stature of man’. We are the latest victims of a wicked collusion between the three traditional curses of the blackman: racism, Arab-Muslim expansionism and white economic imperialism.”

All along, the Americans knew of the ruthlessly efficient Biafran propaganda. They questioned how they arrived at the 20/30/50,000 killed in the North before the war. Reviewing Ojukwu’s radio broadcast of 14 November 1968, the Americans cabled this to Washington: “Ojukwu claimed 50,000 were ‘slaughtered like cattle’ in 1966, adding that in the course of war, ‘well over one million of us have been killed, yet the world is unimpressed and looks on in indifference.’ It was the highest figure we have seen him use for the pre-war deaths, and the one million he claimed killed since the war began is inconsistent with his assertion in the same speech that 6,700 Biafrans have been killed daily since July 6, 1967.”

They also noted Ojukwu’s dishonest fabrications in his broadcast of 31 October 1969 that President Nixon “had acknowledged fact of genocide”, that earlier on, he called on Nixon “to live up to his words”. When at the inception of secession, Biafran Radio broadcast the countries that had recognised Biafra, the Americans informed Washington: “Following countries have denied recognition of Biafra: US, USSR, Ethiopia, Israel, Australia, Ghana, Guinea…wording of statements varies greatly, but all disapprove of secession, or use words such as recognition, integrity of Nigeria, support for federal government (June 9, 1967).” In fact, Ojukwu and the Biafran project were one long crisis of credibility. In the cable of 22 May 1969, the Americans cabled Washington: “How he (Ojukwu) can continue to deceive his people, and apparently get away with it, is minor miracle, but difficult to see how much delusions can last much longer.”

Blaming Awolowo
By the time truth finally triumphed over propaganda, the Biafrans had to find another man to blame for the war and the deaths. Enter Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whom Achebe falsely claimed Ojukwu released from prison. First, this is what the autobiography of Harold Smith, one of the colonial officers the British Government sent to rig Nigeria’s pre-independence elections in favour of the North, had to say about Awolowo:
“But the British were not treated as gods by the Yoruba. In my experience, the Yoruba regarded themselves as superior to the British and one only had to read a book written by Awolowo, the Western leader, to know why. The Yoruba were often highly intelligent and they taunted the British with sending inferior people to Nigeria. The Igbo would be humble and avert his eyes in the presence of a European. The Yoruba child would look at an important European and shout, ‘Hello, white man,’ as if he were a freak.”

What is more: “Awolowo in the West had taunted the British by claiming that his government had accomplished more in the space of two or three years for his people than the British had since they arrived in West Africa.” Of course, Achebe knows about these facts because he quoted from the book in his (pg 50), but only the part favourable to his agenda. Smith again:
“The thrust of the British Government’s policy was against the Action Group led by Chief Awolowo, which ruled in the Western Region. Not only was the British Government working hand in glove with the North, which was a puppet state favoured and controlled by the British administration, but it was colluding through Okotie-Eboh with Dr. Azikiwe – Zik – the leader of the largely Igbo NCNC, which ruled in the East. We tricked Azikiwe into accepting to be president having known that Balewa will be the main man with power. Awolowo has to go to jail to cripple his genius plans for a greater Nigeria.”

Achebe reveals his own mentality we never suspected before: “We [intellectuals] were especially disheartened by the disintegration of the state because we were brought up in the belief we were destined to rule [pg 108].” He uses this mind-set of his to judge Awolowo:
“It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for his Yoruba people in general…However Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacle to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigeria-Biafra War – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case, it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the number of his enemies significantly through starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generation (pg233).”

It is a mystery that a man of his stature could be so persuaded. Awolowo built the first stadium in Africa, the first TV station in Africa, the first high-rise building in Nigeria, first industrial estate, cocoa development board and the Odua Investment Group. He offered free universal education and free universal primary healthcare. Remarkably, Awolowo never situated any of those landmarks in his hometown of Ikenne in Ogun State; he spread them round the region he presided on. And the free universal education and free primary healthcare were available to anyone of any tribe or nationality including Nupe, Igbo, Ijaw and Ghanaians living in the Western Region. Awolowo was interested in bettering the lives of everyone, not just the Yoruba.

Of course, we know that the lasting legacy of the Biafra war was the creation of a well-organised Yoruba-bashing industrial complex headquartered in Igbo consciousness, working with machine regularity from generation to generation and whose genuine aim is to fundamentally deflect blame from Ojukwu and his sycophants like Achebe until misunderstandings are perverted into evidence of Yoruba guilt, outright lies are perverted into undisputed truth.

Undoubtedly, Awolowo was a master architect of the war to defeat the secession. Therefore, the case against him requires scrutiny.

Blockade
To talk about a blockade on Biafra is to concede that the control of Biafra’s borders was already in Awolowo’s hands. The control or defence of borders is the main aim of any war since the beginning of war making all over the world. But the 34-year-old Ojukwu led Biafra to secede based on 2,000 professional soldiers and extremely few artillery; they did not have enough to defend their borders. “If the Nigerian side had known the state of Biafran troops including their morale, they would have pursued them even on canoes across the River Niger. Had the Nigerians taken up such pursuit, they might have taken Onitsha, Awka and Enugu that same day.” That is Achike Udenwa, who was a Biafran soldier and later became the governor of Imo State, writing about the federal defeat of Biafra in the Midwest during the early weeks of the war in his own recollection, Nigerian/Biafra War. Even, the so-called January boys, Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna, both voiced their concern that the Biafran soldiers were vastly underprepared for any kind of war. Achebe writes: “Biafran soldiers marched into war one man behind the other because they had only one rifle between them, and the thinking was that if one soldier was killed in combat the other would pick up the only weapon available and continue fighting(pg 153).”

Therefore, even before the first bullet was fired, the secession was not only a failure but was an epic humanitarian catastrophe waiting to happen. Awolowo told Ojukwu one of the reasons the West was not keen to join the secession was because the region already occupied by northern troops did not have enough loyal men in the Nigerian Army to defend it. Weaned on the hermeneutics of Yoruba history, Awolowo was not persuaded by the seductive but flawed logic that the Nigerian forces would lose because they would be incapable of prosecuting war on two fronts if the West joined the East in seceding. At one point during the Kiriji war in the 19th century, Bashorun Ogunmola (Omoarogundeyo), the Kingdom of Ibadan’s generalissimo, was simultaneously warring with five neighbouring and far-flung kingdoms. Ibadan never lost. To defeat Ibadan you did not have to defeat even its retreating soldiers only, you had to defeat those dull-looking hills surrounding it. In fact, one of the reasons Ibadan was so belligerent in its history was that those mighty hills allowed it to spend little resources defending and more on attacking.

But Biafra was not surrounded by hills, literally or figuratively. Its borders were so porous that they fell easily into the opponent’s hand. Days after declaration of secession, the sea boundary of Biafra was already being manned by Nigeria’s battleships and boats. By the sixth week all the boundaries of Biafra were already under the control of Nigerian government. What remained was zooming in. In fact, had only Awolowo’s Western Region seceded, the strategy to recapture it would not be a variance with the one used against Biafra because the West is geographically an enantiomer of the East. It was the same blockade Nzeogwu used to capture and kill their targets, Sardauna and his senior wife; Ademulegun and his wife, Latifa, who was eight months pregnant, in the presence of their two children, Solape and Kole. As Solape recollected years later, Nzeogwu, who shot her mother, was a family friend that regularly visited to eat pounded yam and egusi soup. The little girl was even calling him uncle while he shot her mother in the chest in their bedroom. It was the same blockade Captain Emmanuel Nwobosi used to capture Remi Fani-Kayode and kill S.L Akintola, the Western premier. It was the same blockade American Navy Seals used to capture and kill Osama bin Laden.

What about Cameroon? Whose side was it on? Of course, Cameroun was firmly on the Nigerian side, yet it had a sizeable Igbo population and Azikiwe’s party was NCNC – National Council for Nigerian and the Cameroons. But Ojukwu had stepped on their toes: he had stolen enough of their goods and supplies that they helped the federal side to take Calabar and cooperated with the Naval blockade of Biafra. As the US State Department’s cable of 29 November 1968 discloses: “GFRC [Government of the Federal Republic of Cameroon] continues to support FMG [Federal Military Government] and recently ordered the dissolution of newly formed Cameroon Relief Organisation (CAMRO) which was being organised to receive Biafran children in west Cameroon.”

superstar1:
Had...They were his people unlike other Midwestern tribes’ sufferings he could not find “credible corroboration of.”

Lordave:
Nobody, no matter your intellectual capacity can convince an average man to believing Nna anyi Achebe is a Chameleon or whatever you want to portray him as.





Achebe 'is' an Igbo and he made it clear several times. He was proud of his root and he courageously defended it.

Perhaps if he had wrote with Nigeria bias you'd have sung his praise. I'm sure as hell the idi@t that wrote this junk would've wrote another junk if Achebe had written in the favour of Nigeria. The nama would've wrote about how divided the Igbos are and why Biafra will never be cos even Nna anyi Achebe favours a united Nigeria. Hopeless hypocrite!








As an Igbo man, anything Igbo will always remain my utmost priority , yes Nna anyi Achebe corrupted my mind and the mind of some other Igbos with that, and yes we are happy he did and wish for more corruptions of our mind with Igbo priorities.

superstar1:
Yeah it is quite long but it is worth reading, to be able to separate the truth from their lies.

superstar1:
Apart from the various hard copy books, kindly read the following:

http://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2013/02/19/biafra-the-untold-story-of-nigerias-civil-war/

https://waidigbenro./tag/l-colonel-odumegwu-ojukwu/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57717003/How-Biafra-Came-to-Be-COMPLETE#scribd

We should all endeavour to read these for posterity sake

Volksfuhrer:
Nobody is casting aspersions on Achebe. You see, Achebe is not just any other writer, because there's nothing ordinary about him. Therefore whatever he presents as non-fiction must by all means maintain every noble standard of veracity.

Achebe's works are very widely read, so merely saying he was only corrupting Igbo minds is just ludicrous!

In any case, I did enjoy reading "There Was A Country", not much for its historical content but for its literary accomplishment.

Lordave:
You can say that again.

The world won't end if the writer of that article reasoned like you, or better still criticised Nna anyi Achebe when he was still alive.

Lordave:
You can say that again.

The world won't end if the writer of that article reasoned like you, or better still criticised Nna anyi Achebe when he was still alive.

superstar1:
Placed side by side independent accounts of the Nigerian Civil War, Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country is a pot-pourri of deliberate misrepresentations, outright inventions and a one-eyed view of events

A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It is not the business of a writer to side with the powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be thoughtless and wrong. The Nazi party was once a powerless group. A writer should not prefer falsehood to reality just because it serves patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should get out and warn the society that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when they are not properly moderated by higher considerations, they can prove more destructive than nuclear weapons. Four months after America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the dead eventually totalled 240,000. In the ethnic rivalry between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, within two months 500,000 were murdered with ordinary machetes.

Patriotism, when deployed, must always be simultaneously governed by something higher and lower than itself, like the arms of a democratic government. These provide checks and balances so that patriotism does not become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Chinua Achebe’s patriotic autobiography, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, in the light of something higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret, Top Secret US State Department Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967-1969 and something lower: The Education of a British Protected Child by Chinua Achebe himself.

There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be fingered for the cause. Achebe’s logic is neat, but too simple: Africa began to suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is, there was no suffering or inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206 countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation of consciousness, which makes it possible to treat a person as an individual and not basically a member of another tribe. That is the first error of Achebe.

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with every step you make. All the places that should alarm the moral consciousness of any writer, Achebe is either indifferent to or dismisses them outright because the victims are not his people. But in every encounter that shows the Igbo being killed or resented by Nigerians, or by the Yoruba in particular, Achebe intensifies the spotlight, deploying stratospheric rhetoric, including quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in end notes to show he is not partial. Achebe calls upon powerfully coercive emotive words and phrasings to dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore, not only does he take pride in ignoring the findings of common sense, he allocates primetime attention to fact-free rants just because they say his people are the most superior tribe in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is a masterpiece of propaganda and sycophancy. It is not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to lies.

First, let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo. Throughout the book, Achebe presents Okigbo in loving moments complete with tender details: Okigbo attending to Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering opulent room service dishes for Achebe’s wife in a swanky hotel, while millions were allegedly dying of starvation and Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo being a dearly beloved uncle to Achebe’s children and Okigbo opening a publishing house in the middle of the war. Out of the blue, he writes that he hears on Radio Nigeria the death of Major Christopher Okigbo. Major? The reader is completely shocked and feels revulsion for the side that killed him and sympathy for the side that lost him. Unlike other accounts, like Obi Nwankama’s definitive biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips details of Okigbo running arms and ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and also from place to place in Biafra; he omits the fact that Okigbo was an active-duty guerrilla fighter, killing the other side before he himself got killed. Like many other episodes recounted in the book, Achebe photoshops the true picture so that readers would allocate early enough which side should merit their sympathy, which side should be slated for revulsion. Pity, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what is on sale throughout the book. Achebe, of course, is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.

superstar1:
Placed side by side independent accounts of the Nigerian Civil War, Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country is a pot-pourri of deliberate misrepresentations, outright inventions and a one-eyed view of events

A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It is not the business of a writer to side with the powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be thoughtless and wrong. The Nazi party was once a powerless group. A writer should not prefer falsehood to reality just because it serves patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should get out and warn the society that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when they are not properly moderated by higher considerations, they can prove more destructive than nuclear weapons. Four months after America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the dead eventually totalled 240,000. In the ethnic rivalry between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, within two months 500,000 were murdered with ordinary machetes.

Patriotism, when deployed, must always be simultaneously governed by something higher and lower than itself, like the arms of a democratic government. These provide checks and balances so that patriotism does not become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Chinua Achebe’s patriotic autobiography, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, in the light of something higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret, Top Secret US State Department Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967-1969 and something lower: The Education of a British Protected Child by Chinua Achebe himself.

There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be fingered for the cause. Achebe’s logic is neat, but too simple: Africa began to suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is, there was no suffering or inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206 countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation of consciousness, which makes it possible to treat a person as an individual and not basically a member of another tribe. That is the first error of Achebe.

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with every step you make. All the places that should alarm the moral consciousness of any writer, Achebe is either indifferent to or dismisses them outright because the victims are not his people. But in every encounter that shows the Igbo being killed or resented by Nigerians, or by the Yoruba in particular, Achebe intensifies the spotlight, deploying stratospheric rhetoric, including quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in end notes to show he is not partial. Achebe calls upon powerfully coercive emotive words and phrasings to dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore, not only does he take pride in ignoring the findings of common sense, he allocates primetime attention to fact-free rants just because they say his people are the most superior tribe in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is a masterpiece of propaganda and sycophancy. It is not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to lies.

First, let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo. Throughout the book, Achebe presents Okigbo in loving moments complete with tender details: Okigbo attending to Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering opulent room service dishes for Achebe’s wife in a swanky hotel, while millions were allegedly dying of starvation and Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo being a dearly beloved uncle to Achebe’s children and Okigbo opening a publishing house in the middle of the war. Out of the blue, he writes that he hears on Radio Nigeria the death of Major Christopher Okigbo. Major? The reader is completely shocked and feels revulsion for the side that killed him and sympathy for the side that lost him. Unlike other accounts, like Obi Nwankama’s definitive biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips details of Okigbo running arms and ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and also from place to place in Biafra; he omits the fact that Okigbo was an active-duty guerrilla fighter, killing the other side before he himself got killed. Like many other episodes recounted in the book, Achebe photoshops the true picture so that readers would allocate early enough which side should merit their sympathy, which side should be slated for revulsion. Pity, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what is on sale throughout the book. Achebe, of course, is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.

superstar1:
The article was written when Achebe was alive, shortly after releasing his anti-christ book.

Who's the Christ?


Laughing @ your bitterness