Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.
For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.
I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.
It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.
The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.
Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.
The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:
“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.
My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”
Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:
“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.
The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.
Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:
“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”
Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.
And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:
“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.
Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!
The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”
Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.
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