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.
© 2012, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In the face of stiff financial
competitions in the Nigerian market and global financial advancement, a
mobilemoney operator would proudly tell you that mobilemoney has gained grounds
in Nigeria and is here to stay. He might even go the extra mile of pointing out
a transport vehicle or two branded with mobilemoney stickers. He has clearly
passed a message across, "mobilemoney has been introduced into the
Nigerian system," but the bone of contention here is; who is the
mobilemoney deployment being structured for? According to Wikipedia,
"mobilemoney refers to payment services operated under a financial
regulation and performed from or via a mobile device."
