A Tale of Two Countries: Looking Back on the Path Not Taken
Book Review | Author: Chinua Achebe | Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) |Page
Number: 352
When we hear the name Chinua Achebe, we remember a giant of African literature, most
famous for his 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart,” which sold more than eight million
copies worldwide and paved the way for modern African literature. In 2012, after more
than 40 years, the internationally acclaimed Nigerian author broke his silence on
Nigeria’s civil war with the release of his nonfiction book, “There Was a Country.” To
read this autobiography, is to embark on a journey of heartache that begins, in classic
Achebe fashion, with a proverb from his Igbo tribe: “A man who does not know where
the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.”
Achebe’s recollections remind you of a wise grandfather reflecting on a not-too-distant
past. They are the kind of tales that my father used to tell me of a once–different Nigeria.
In that past, Achebe sees the magical years of his childhood, when he was nicknamed
“Dictionary” and enjoyed the best of the British colonial education system. He recalls
falling in love with the woman who would become the mother of his four children and
writing “Things Fall Apart.”
But, more important, Achebe remembers the “march to independence” from Britain in
1960, when it seemed to him–at age 29–that Nigeria’s “possibilities were endless.” He
and many other Nigerian intellectuals believed that their outstanding education was
enough to prepare them to take destiny into their own hands. But nothing prepared them
for what was to come: neo-colonialism, corruption, dark days of ethnic tension, genocide
and socioeconomic decline.
As Achebe reveals, the country that he and his peers had invested their dreams in was set
up to fail from its inception, when a British governor general oversaw the rigging of
Nigeria’s first elections. Through colonial manipulation, the seeds of Nigeria’s decay
were sown and they yielded years of corruption and misrule.
In the book, Achebe’s writing occasionally drifts from gripping memoir to bland history
lesson. We get glimpses of his hopes and anguish, but at other times he seems distant,
almost unable to contain his words and emotions in the same room.
Perhaps this discordance is understandable. In the civil war Nigeria waged from 1967 to
1970 against the secessionist state of Biafra, formed by Achebe’s Igbo tribe, the author
lost his best friend, his homes and he almost lost his life and family. He watched as
nearly a million Igbos perished.
After spending those years serving as a roving ambassador for the Biafran cause and
helping to draft the Ahiara Declaration (the Biafran equivalent of the Declaration of
Independence), the struggle for the young nation amounted to nothing. His multilayered
grief includes not only physical losses but also the death of dreams.
Some critics faulted Achebe for violating a cardinal rule of creative writing by telling
more than he showed. They noticed a deviation from the clarity of his older books. What
they failed to take into account was that the bright-eyed, innocent Achebe who wrote
“Things Fall Apart” when Nigeria was young and vibrant is not the same man who, more
than half a century later, was lamenting its deterioration and the roles he tried to play to
redeem it and himself.
As Achebe guides us through this autobiography, his grief is evident, and sometimes
stifling. He writes:
My generation had great expectations for our young nation. After the war
everything we had known before about Nigeria, all the optimism had to be
rethought. The worst had happened … We [the former Biafrans] had to carry on
… and learn very quickly to live with such a loss. We would have to adjust to the
realities and consequences of a Nigeria that did not appeal to us any longer.
Nigeria had not succeeded in crushing the spirit of the Igbo people, but it had left
us indigent, stripped bare and stranded in the wilderness.
And he turns to his old poems, interspersed throughout the book, to push the narrative
forward. One of them is his 1971 poem, After a War, which begins: “After a war life
catches/ desperately at passing/ hints of normalcy like/ vines entwining a hollow twig.”
As the title suggests, “There Was a Country” is a solemn lament for two countries: the
what-could-have-been in the Republic of Biafra and the glory days of Nigeria’s past,
when the US dollar was on par with the naira and Nigerian universities were revered
throughout West Africa.
This disappointment is not just Achebe’s. It is felt by thousands of Nigerians, but
especially those of Achebe’s generation who have watched the country wither over the
years. It comes laced with a disillusion that has now devolved into apathy, epitomized by
the Nigerian Afrobeat legend, Fela Kuti, in his song “Shuffering and Shmiling.”
In the New York Times review of “There Was a Country,” Adam Nossiter, the West and
Central Africa bureau chief for The Times, described Achebe’s “judgment” on
contemporary Nigeria as “more the products of a writer’s jaundiced backward glances
than a coming to grips with the reality of what was and what is.”
Nossiter said today’s Nigeria is more than just a “seething cauldron,” but a country “full
of promise in its immense energy and human resources.” What Nossiter fails to realize is
that Nigeria has always been a land of ‘promise,’ ‘potential’ and ‘hope.’ As a country, it
seems to have held on to the promise of hope for too long. And the Nigerian people are
tired of incessantly clinging to it.
Perhaps that hope is paying off in its recent declaration of membership in MINT
(Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey), the new generation of emerging markets and
successors of BRIC. But it is also the country of terrorist groups that lead daily
massacres; it is also where, in January 2014, it was discovered that $20 billion of oil
money had gone missing. According to the World Bank, since independence, “$400
billion has been pilfered from Nigeria’s treasury.”
Chinua Achebe died only months after his autobiography was published, and so, it is apt
to call “There Was a Country,” Achebe’s last words. But those words are not all
despairing. In the end, he stresses the need to develop a new patriotic consciousness and
to have great men like the late Nelson Mandela as leaders. Nigerians are well aware of
these solutions–and of their blatant staleness in relation to what their country has become.
Revealingly, Achebe was a man who spent the last years of his life abroad and twice
turned down Nigeria’s national honors. Let’s not kid ourselves. In truth, those last words
bear witness to the sad reality that to be Igbo is to be hurt, to be Nigerian is to be
heartbroken.
