"Worse, after the end of civil war, "a new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to this day," he laments. The country is a "laughingstock." His disappointment fortifies his belief that "the British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care." Achebe is careful to say that he is "not justifying colonialism." But this partially rose-tinted view of the colonial past — a view one sometimes hears from other elderly Nigerians confronting the chaos of daily life — surely has much to do with the favored status enjoyed by Her Majesty's onetime brilliant subject.
Like his nostalgia for Biafra, Achebe's judgment on contemporary Nigeria seems excessive — more the products of a writer's jaundiced backward glances than a coming to grips with the reality of what was and what is. Nigeria today is a seething caldron, maddening in its contradictions and capacity for self-destruction but full of promise too, in its immense energy and human resources.
As for judgments on Biafra — perhaps we should rely on Nigeria's other great man of letters, Wole Soyinka, whose blunt appraisal is that secession was "simply politically and militarily unwise.""
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- Ikhide
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