Dialogues: USA Africa Dialogue Series - There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe: review

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

USA Africa Dialogue Series - There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe: review

There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe: review

Chinua Achebe's brave memoir, 'There Was a Country', offers no easy answers for Nigeria

Chinua Achebe, whose memoir of the Biafran conflict is 'There Was A Country' Photo: AFP

By Tim Ecott

7:00AM BST 09 Oct 2012

Comment

Chinua Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), continues to be one of the most widely read books by an African author. Now, in his eighties, Achebe has written something close to a memoir. It is a brave, clear-sighted treatment of the political background and brutal reality of the Nigerian-Biafran War in which upwards of three million people, most of them children, died, principally of starvation.

Achebe confronts the causes of the continuing failure of post-independence Nigeria with assurance, not just as a legacy of colonial meddling, but as the result of its own tribal jealousies. It is a thesis which will not win him many friends. His own people, the Igbo, have a storytelling tradition "steeped in intrigue, spiced with oral acrobatics and song, but always resolute in its moral message". The other major Nigerian tribes, the Hausa/Fulani, are "hindered by a wary religion", while the Yoruba are "hampered by traditional hierarchies".

Biafra, the eastern region of Nigeria which tried to secede after thousands of Igbo were murdered following the coup of 1966, became a political headache for Britain. The resulting implosion of Nigeria was an embarrassment to the Labour government of Harold Wilson, whose own visit to Nigeria Achebe likens to "a cruel deception of locusts that appear from a distance as a welcome visit of dark clouds gorged with rain". The British government supplied arms to Nigeria, worried that the secession of Biafra would encourage other such movements. The United Nations, says Achebe, was part of the "vacuum in moral and humanitarian leadership which allowed the Nigerian government to operate with reckless abandon". Nigeria, and many other African states, suffered countless further coups d'états.

But Achebe, as an African intellectual, is perfectly placed to ask the important questions about why so few of the newly independent nations became, by most measures, successful. Nigeria, he argues, had people of great quality, and its chaotic, shambolic, corrupt society is "a great disappointment".

Achebe does not give us neat answers, other than to point out that in Nigeria there is "political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry and the corruption of the ruling class [which] continues to this day". He confronts the bitter truth that since independence, $400billion has been lost from Nigeria's treasury through corruption.

Achebe points out in the final pages the danger of failing to deal with the Islamist extremists Boko Haram. I wanted Achebe to say more, to tell us how, and if, he believes Nigeria can be fixed.