“There Was a Country,” Chinua Achebe’s long-awaited memoir of Biafra

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0000

“There Was a Country” is a book title that is loaded with sadness because of its use of the past tense: There was a country, but it is a country no longer. The country in question is Biafra, the losing side in the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970. Chinua Achebe was its leading poet and cultural ambassador, and, now, its defining historian.

Achebe’s history is rooted in the personal, a choice that begins to seem a moral rather than an aesthetic one as “There Was a Country” proceeds. History, he seems to be saying, is something that happens to human beings, to individuals, to families, to cultures. The fates of empires and great leaders are not insignificant, but the significance of empires and great leaders is rooted not in their power, glory or reach, but rather in the disruptions and occasional blessings they visit upon individuals, families and cultures.

So Achebe, fittingly, doesn’t begin with war. He begins with memoir and family history, in the spirit of the Igbo proverb that says that “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.”

Salon.com > Biafra

“There Was a Country,” Chinua Achebe’s long-awaited memoir of Biafra