Achebe’s most recent book, his long-awaited memoir of the Nigerian-Biafra war, is both sad and angry, a book by a writer looking back and mourning Nigeria’s failures… an account of the most important event in Nigeria’s history by Nigeria’s most important storyteller.
I
have met Chinua Achebe only three times. The first, at the National
Arts Club in Manhattan, I joined the admiring circle around him. A
gentle-faced man in a wheelchair.
“Good evening, sir. I’m Chimamanda Adichie,” I said, and he replied, mildly, “I thought you were running away from me.”
I mumbled, nervous, grateful for the crush of people around us. I had been running away from him. After my first novel was published, I received an email from his son. My dad has just read your novel and liked it very much. He wants you to call him at this number.
I read it over and over, breathless with excitement. But I never
called. A few years later, my editor sent Achebe a manuscript of my
second novel. She did not tell me, because she wanted to shield me from
the possibility of disappointment. One afternoon, she called.
“Chimamanda, are you sitting down? I have wonderful news.” She read me
the blurb Achebe had just sent her. We
do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new
writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Adichie knows what
is at stake, and what to do about it. She is fearless or she would not
have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war. Adichie
came almost fully made. Afterwards, I held on to the phone and
wept. I have memorized those words. In my mind, they glimmer still, the
validation of a writer whose work had validated me.
She read me the blurb Achebe had just sent her. “We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers…” Afterwards, I held on to the phone and wept. I have memorized those words. In my mind, they glimmer still, the validation of a writer whose work had validated me.
I
grew up writing imitative stories. Of characters eating food I had
never seen and having conversations I had never heard. They might have
been good or bad, those stories, but they were emotionally false, they
were not mine. Then came a glorious awakening: Chinua Achebe’s fiction.
Here were familiar characters who felt true; here was language that
captured my two worlds; here was a writer writing not what he felt he
should write but what he wanted to write. His work was free of anxiety,
wore its own skin effortlessly. It emboldened me, not to find my voice,
but to speak in the voice I already had. And so, when that e-mail came
from his son, I knew, overly-thrilled as I was, that I would not call.
His work had done more than enough. In an odd way, I was so awed, so
grateful, that I did not want to meet him. I wanted some distance
between my literary hero and me.
Chinua
Achebe and I have never had a proper conversation. The second time I
saw him, at a luncheon in his honor hosted by the British House of
Lords, I sat across from him and avoided his eye. (“Chinua Achebe is the
only person I have seen you shy with,” a friend said). The third, at a
New York event celebrating fifty years of THINGS FALL APART, we crowded
around him backstage, Edwidge Danticat and I, Ha Jin and Toni Morrison,
Colum McCann and Chris Abani. We seemed, magically, bound together in a
warm web, all of us affected by his work. Achebe looked pleased, but
also vaguely puzzled by all the attention. He spoke softly, the volume
of his entire being turned to ‘low.’ I wanted to tell him how much I
admired his integrity, his speaking out about the disastrous leadership
in my home state of Anambra, but I did not. Before I went on stage, he
told me, “Jisie ike.” I wondered if he fully grasped, if indeed it was
possible to, how much his work meant to so many.
His work had done more than enough. In an odd way, I was so awed, so grateful, that I did not want to meet him. I wanted some distance between my literary hero and me…
History
and civics, as school subjects, function not merely to teach facts but
to transmit more subtle things, like pride and dignity. My Nigerian
education taught me much, but left gaping holes. I had not been taught
to imagine my pre-colonial past with any accuracy, or pride, or
complexity. And so Achebe’s work, for me, transcended literature. It
became personal. ARROW OF GOD, my favorite, was not just about the
British government’s creation of warrant chiefs and the linked destinies
of two men, it became the life my grandfather might have lived. THINGS
FALL APART is the African novel most read – and arguably most loved – by
Africans, a novel published when ‘African novel’ meant European
accounts of ‘native’ life. Achebe was an unapologetic member of the
generation of African writers who were ‘writing back,’ challenging the
stock Western images of their homeland, but his work was not burdened by
its intent. It is much-loved not because Achebe wrote back, but because
he wrote back well. His work was wise, humorous, human. For many
Africans, THINGS FALL APART remains a gesture of returned dignity, a
literary and an emotional experience; Mandela called Achebe the writer
in whose presence the prison walls came down.
Achebe’s
most recent book, his long-awaited memoir of the Nigerian-Biafra war,
is both sad and angry, a book by a writer looking back and mourning
Nigeria’s failures. I wish THERE WAS A COUNTRY had been better edited
and more rigorously detailed in its account of the war. But these flaws
do not make it any less seminal: an account of the most important event
in Nigeria’s history by Nigeria’s most important storyteller.
An
excerpt from the book has ignited great controversy among Nigerians. In
it, Achebe, indignant about the millions of people who starved to death
in Biafra, holds Obafemi Awolowo, Nigerian finance minister during the
war, responsible for the policy of blockading Biafra. He quote’s
Awolowo’s own words on the blockade – ‘all is fair in war and starvation
is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our
enemies fat in order for them to fight harder’ and then argues that
Awolowo’s support of the blockade was ‘driven by an overriding ambition
for power for himself in particular and for the advancement of his
Yoruba people in general.’
I wanted to tell him how much I admired his integrity, Before I went on stage, he told me, “Jisie ike.” I wondered if he fully grasped, if indeed it was possible to, how much his work meant to so many.
I
have been startled and saddened by the responses to this excerpt. Many
are blindingly ethnic, lacking in empathy and, most disturbing of all,
lacking in knowledge. We can argue about how we interpret the facts of
our shared history, but we cannot, surely, argue about the facts
themselves. Awolowo, as de facto ‘number two man’ on the Nigerian side,
was a central architect of the blockade on Biafra. During and after the
war, Awolowo publicly defended the blockade. Without the blockade, the
massive starvation in Biafra would not have occurred. These are the
facts.
Some
Nigerians, in responding to Achebe, have argued that the blockade was
fair, as all is fair in war. The blockade was, in my opinion, inhumane
and immoral. And it was unnecessary – Nigeria would have won anyway, it
was the much-better-armed side in a war that Wole Soyinka called a
shabby unequal conflict. The policy of starving a civilian population
into surrender does not merely go against the Geneva conventions, but in
this case, a war between siblings, people who were formerly fellow
country men and women now suddenly on opposite sides, it seems more
chilling. All is not fair in war. Especially not in a fratricidal war.
But I do not believe the blockade was a calculated power grab by Awolowo
for himself and his ethnic group; I think of it, instead, as one of the
many dehumanizing acts that war, by its nature, brings about.
Awolowo
was undoubtedly a great political leader. He was also – rare for
Nigerian leaders – a great intellectual. No Nigerian leader has,
arguably, articulated a political vision as people-centered as
Awolowo’s. For Nigerians from the west, he was the architect of free
primary education, of progressive ideas. But for Nigerians from the
east, he was a different man. I grew up hearing, from adults, versions
of Achebe’s words about Awolowo. He was the man who prevented an Igbo
man from leading the Western House of Assembly in the famous ‘carpet
crossing’ incident of 1952. He was the man who betrayed Igbo people when
he failed on his alleged promise to follow Biafra’s lead and pull the
Western region out of Nigeria. He was the man who, in the words of my
uncle, “made Igbo people poor because he never liked us.”
I have been startled and saddened by the responses to this excerpt. Many are blindingly ethnic, lacking in empathy and, most disturbing of all, lacking in knowledge. We can argue about how we interpret the facts of our shared history, but we cannot, surely, argue about the facts themselves.
At
the end of the war, every Igbo person who had a bank account in Nigeria
was given twenty pounds, no matter how much they had in their accounts
before the war. I have always thought this a livid injustice. I know a
man who worked in a multinational company in 1965. He was, like Achebe,
one of the many Igbo who just could not believe that their lives were in
danger in Lagos and so he fled in a hurry, at the last minute, leaving
thousands of pounds in his account. After the war, his account had
twenty pounds. To many Igbo, this policy was uncommonly punitive, and
went against the idea of ‘no victor, no vanquished.’ Then came the
indigenization decree, which moved industrial and corporate power from
foreign to Nigerian hands. It made many Nigerians wealthy; much of the
great wealth in Nigeria today has its roots in this decree. But the Igbo
could not participate; they were broke.
I
do not agree, as Achebe writes, that one of the main reasons for
Nigeria’s present backwardness is the failure to fully reintegrate the
Igbo. I think Nigeria would be just as backward even if the Igbo had
been fully integrated – institutional and leadership failures run across
all ethnic lines. But the larger point Achebe makes is true, which is
that the Igbo presence in Nigerian positions of power has been much
reduced since the war. Before the war, many of Nigeria’s positions of
power were occupied by Igbo people, in the military, politics, academia,
business. Perhaps because the Igbo were very receptive to Western
education, often at the expense of their own traditions, and had both a
striving individualism and a communal ethic. This led to what, in
history books, is often called a ‘fear of Igbo domination’ in the rest
of Nigeria. The Igbo themselves were insensitive to this resentment, the
bombast and brashness that is part of Igbo culture only exacerbated it.
And so leading Igbo families entered the war as Nigeria’s privileged
elite but emerged from it penniless, stripped and bitter.
Today,
‘marginalization’ is a popular word in Igboland. Many Igbo feel
marginalized in Nigeria, a feeling based partly on experience and partly
on the psychology of a defeated people. (Another consequence of this
psychology, perhaps, is the loss of the communal ethic of the Igbo, much
resented sixty years ago. It is almost non-existent today, or as my
cousin eloquently put it: Igbo people don’t even send each other.)
Some
responses to Achebe have had a ‘blame the victim’ undertone, suggesting
that Biafrians started the war and therefore deserved what they got.
But Biafrians did not ‘start the war.’ Nobody with a basic knowledge of
the facts can make that case.
I think Nigeria would be just as backward even if the Igbo had been fully integrated – institutional and leadership failures run across all ethnic lines. But the larger point Achebe makes is true, which is that the Igbo presence in Nigerian positions of power has been much reduced since the war.
Biafrian
secession was inevitable, after the federal government’s failure to
implement the agreements reached at Aburi, itself prompted by the
massacre of Igbo in the North. The cause of the massacres was arguably
the first coup of 1966. Many believed it to be an ‘Igbo’ coup, which was
not an unreasonable belief, Nigeria was already mired in ethnic
resentments, the premiers of the West and North were murdered while the
Eastern premier was not, and the coup plotters were Igbo. Except for
Adewale Ademoyega, a Yoruba, who has argued that it was not an ethnic
coup. I don’t believe it was. It seems, from most accounts, to have been
an idealistic and poorly-planned nationalist exercise aimed at ridding
Nigeria of a corrupt government. It was, also, horrendously, inexcusably
violent. I wish the coup had never happened. I wish the premiers and
other casualties had been arrested and imprisoned, rather than murdered.
But the truth that glares above all else is that the thousands of Igbo
people murdered in their homes and in the streets had nothing to do with
the coup.
Some
have blamed the Biafrian starvation on Ojukwu, Biafra’s leader, because
he rejected an offer from the Nigerian government to bring in food
through a land corridor. It was an ungenerous offer, one easy to refuse.
A land corridor could also mean advancement of Nigerian troops. Ojukwu
preferred airlifts, they were tactically safer, more strategic, and he
could bring in much-needed arms as well. Ojukwu should have accepted the
land offer, shabby as it was. Innocent lives would have been saved. I
wish he had not insisted on a ceasefire, a condition which the Nigerian
side would never have agreed to. But it is disingenuous to claim that
Ojukwu’s rejection of this offer caused the starvation. Many Biafrians
had already starved to death. And, more crucially, the Nigerian
government had shown little regard for Biafra’s civilian population; it
had, for a while, banned international relief agencies from importing
food. Nigerian planes bombed markets and targeted hospitals in Biafra,
and had even shot down an International Red Cross plane.
Ordinary
Biafrians were steeped in distrust of the Nigerian side. They felt safe
eating food flown in from Sao Tome, but many believed that food brought
from Nigeria would be poisoned, just as they believed that, if the war
ended in defeat, there would be mass killings of Igbo people. The
Biafrian propaganda machine further drummed this in. But, before the
propaganda, something else had sown the seed of hateful fear: the 1966
mass murders of Igbo in the North. The scars left were deep and abiding.
Had the federal government not been unwilling or incapable of
protecting their lives and property, Igbo people would not have so
massively supported secession and intellectuals, like Achebe, would not
have joined in the war effort.
But, before the propaganda, something else had sown the seed of hateful fear: the 1966 mass murders of Igbo in the North. The scars left were deep and abiding.
I
have always admired Ojukwu, especially for his early idealism, the
choices he made as a young man to escape the shadow of his father’s
great wealth, to serve his country. In Biafra, he was a flawed leader,
his paranoia and inability to trust those close to him clouded his
judgments about the execution of the war, but he was also a man of
principle who spoke up forcefully about the preservation of the lives of
Igbo people when the federal government seemed indifferent. He was, for
many Igbo, a Churchillian figure, a hero who inspired them, whose
oratory moved them to action and made them feel valued, especially in
the early months of the war.
Other
responses to Achebe have dismissed the war as something that happened
‘long ago.’ But some of the people who played major roles are alive
today. We must confront our history, if only to begin to understand how
we came to be where we are today. The Americans are still hashing out
details of their civil war that ended in 1865; the Spanish have only
just started, seventy years after theirs ended. Of course, discussing a
history as contested and contentious as the Nigeria-Biafra war will not
always be pleasant. But it is necessary. An Igbo saying goes: If a child
does not ask what killed his father, that same thing will kill him.
We must confront our history, if only to begin to understand how we came to be where we are today. An Igbo saying goes: If a child does not ask what killed his father, that same thing will kill him.
What
many of the responses to Achebe make clear, above all else, is that we
remember differently. For some, Biafra is history, a series of events in
a book, fodder for argument and analysis. For others, it is a loved one
killed in a market bombing, it is hunger as a near-constant companion,
it is the death of certainty. The war was fought on Biafrian soil. There
are buildings in my hometown with bullet holes; as a child, playing
outside, I would sometimes come across bits of rusty ammunition left
behind from the war. My generation was born after 1970, but we know of
property lost, of relatives who never ‘returned’ from the North, of
shadows that hung heavily over family stories. We inherited memory. And
we have the privilege of distance that Achebe does not have.
Achebe
is a war survivor. He was a member of the generation of Nigerians who
were supposed to lead a new nation, inchoate but full of optimism. It
shocked him, how quickly Nigeria fell apart. In THERE WAS A COUNTRY he
sounds unbelieving, still, about the federal government’s indifference
while Igbo people were being massacred in Northern Nigeria in 1966. But
shock-worthy events did not only happen in the North. Achebe himself was
forced to leave Lagos, a place he had called home for many years,
because his life was no longer safe. His crime was being Igbo. A Yoruba
acquaintance once told me a story of how he was nearly lynched in Lagos
at the height of the tensions before the war; he was light-skinned, and a
small mob in a market assumed him to be ‘Igbo Yellow’ and attacked him.
The vice chancellor of the University of Lagos was forced to leave. So
was the vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan. Because they were
Igbo. For Achebe, all this was deeply personal, deeply painful. His
house was bombed, his office was destroyed. He escaped death a few
times. His best friend died in battle. To expect a dispassionate account
from him is a remarkable failure of empathy. I wish more of the
responses had acknowledged, a real acknowledgement and not merely a
dismissive preface, the deep scars that experiences like Achebe’s must
have left behind.
Ethnicity
has become, in Nigeria, more political than cultural, less about
philosophy and customs and values and more about which bank is a Yoruba
or Hausa or Igbo bank, which political office is held by which
ethnicity, which revered leader must be turned into a flawless saint. We
cannot deny ethnicity. It matters. But our ethnic and national
identities should not be spoken of as though they were mutually
exclusive; I am as much Igbo as I am Nigerian. I have hope in the future
of Nigeria, mostly because we have not yet made a real, conscious
effort to begin creating a nation. (We could start, for example, by not
merely teaching Mathematics and English in primary schools, but also
teaching idealism and citizenship.)
We cannot deny ethnicity. It matters. But our ethnic and national identities should not be spoken of as though they were mutually exclusive; I am as much Igbo as I am Nigerian.
For
some non-Igbo, confronting facts of the war is uncomfortable, even
inconvenient. But we must hear one another’s stories. It is even more
imperative for a subject like Biafra which, because of our different
experiences, we remember differently. Biafrian minorities were
distrusted by the Igbo majority, and some were unfairly attacked, blamed
for being saboteurs. Nigerian minorities, particularly in the midwest,
suffered at the hands of both Biafrian and Nigerian soldiers. ‘Abandoned
property’ cases remain unresolved today in Port Harcourt, a city whose
Igbo names were changed after the war, creating “Rumu” from “Umu.”
Nigerian soldiers carried out a horrendous massacre in Asaba, murdering
the males in a town which is today still alive with painful memories.
Some Igbo families are still waiting, half-hoping, that a lost son, a
lost daughter, will come home. All of these stories can sit alongside
one another. The Nigerian stage is big enough. Chinua Achebe has told
his story. This week, he turns 82. Long may he live.
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