By Adam Nossiter
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| Achebe |
Nigeria did fracture once, however, and it is this story that Chinua Achebe, a giant of African letters, tells. His memoir of the moment describes when the country, yoked together artificially by British colonizers, split apart at a cost of more than a million lives.
Nigeria is the Texas of Africa:
it’s big and loud and brash, a place of huge potential, untapped talent, murderous
conflict and petroleum riches. It also has a singular capacity for irony and
self-reflection that is both cultural habit and survival tactic. It is
difficult and often dangerous to get by in Nigeria unless you are a fortunate
member of the infinitesimally small and mostly corrupt oil-fed elite. Acute
awareness of your surroundings is a necessity; along with it goes another
Nigerian trait, thinking and dreaming big.
All these characteristics
were in play when the nightmare for weak nation-states became reality in 1967.
Seven years after Nigerian independence, the prosperous Ibos, dominant in the
eastern part of the country and targets of persecution and pogroms, declared
their independence. Led by the charismatic Oxford-educated, Shakespeare-loving
Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the fledgling nation called itself the Republic of Biafra.
Achebe, an Ibo himself and the new country’s pre-eminent intellectual, a
product of Nigeria’s finest English-style schools and author of “Things Fall
Apart” — soon went to work at Biafra’s Ministry of Information, serving as
special envoy and chairman of a committee charged with writing a constitution
for the new country.
The architects of Biafra were correct in their frustration with the
Nigerian government, which did not intervene as thousands of Ibos were
massacred. But they were deluding themselves that Biafra
was viable. The nascent state had virtually no chance of survival once the
authorities in Lagos
decided they were going to stamp out the secession in what they called a “police
action.” Was Biafra ever really a “country,”
as Achebe would have it? It had ministries, oil wells, a ragtag army, an
often-shifting capital, official cars (Achebe had one) and a famous airstrip.
But as a “country,” it was stillborn.
Nonetheless, for over two
brutal years, the Biafran war dragged on at the insistence of Ojukwu —
described as “brooding, detached and sometimes imperious” in a 1969 New York
Times profile by Lloyd Garrison — and meddling international players. Hundreds
of thousands of civilians were killed. As many as 6,000 a day starved to death
once the federal government blockaded the ever diminishing Republic of Biafra.
But Ojukwu refused to give up. The final death toll was estimated at between
one and three million people.
It was the first conflict in
Africa to draw much outside media attention;
the photographs of starving Biafran children with distended bellies became
symbols of African suffering, and they triggered an extensive Western relief
effort.
We get glimpses of this
immense human tragedy in Achebe’s characteristically plain-spoken narrative:
the millions of citizens escaping the war zone, targets of the federal Nigerian
planes even as they fled; the men and women driven mad by the grinding, endless
war who “could often be seen walking seemingly aimlessly on the roads in
tattered clothes, in conversation with themselves”; the federal soldier, who
“wandered into an ambush of young men with machetes” and was murdered and
mutilated “in a matter of seconds.”
But mostly Achebe’s account
is tinged with odd nostalgia for the ephemeral moment when Biafra
seemed to birth a national culture. “One found a new spirit among the people, a
spirit one did not know existed, a determination, in fact.” This feeling —
evidently alive for him a half-century later — recalls the spirit that imbues
his most celebrated work, “Things Fall Apart,” itself a fairy-tale-like
re-creation of self-sufficient, indigenous nationhood.
Literature for Achebe had a
didactic function; working for officialdom thus was not a stretch. It is clear
that the writer, long a resident of the United
States and now a professor at Brown University,
recalls this period as a golden age. “During the war years one never really
unpacked,” Achebe writes, but despite the hardships, he paints it as a time of
unequaled excitement and stimulation. His committee produced a landmark speech
for Ojukwu, the “Ahiara declaration,” “an attempt to capture the meaning of the
struggle for Biafran sovereignty.”
Yet when Achebe praises
Ojukwu’s “gift for oratory,” the colors in the new nation’s flag or the
accomplished design of its new currency it is sharply at odds with the haunting
images of the suffering engendered by the war: the famine, the bodies “rotting
under the hot sun.” His nostalgia seems jarring and misplaced.
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| Late Ojukwu |
And that nostalgia, in
turn, is a kind of justification for one of this book’s underlying themes:
bitterness over what Nigeria
became after independence from Britain
in 1960 — a stance familiar to those who follow the country and Achebe’s
regular critical pronouncements on it.
“There was enough talent,
enough education in Nigeria
for us to have been able to arrange our affairs more efficiently, more
meticulously, even if not completely independently, than we were doing. . . . Nigeria had
people of great quality, and what befell us — the corruption, the political
ineptitude, the war — was a great disappointment and truly devastating to those
of us who witnessed it,” he says. Writers faced political repression and “found
that the independence their country was supposed to have won was totally
without content. . . . Like the head of John the Baptist, this gift to Nigeria proved
most unlucky.”
Worse, after the end of
civil war, “a new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to
this day,” he laments. The country is a “laughingstock.” His disappointment
fortifies his belief that “the British governed their colony of Nigeria with
considerable care.” Achebe is careful to say that he is “not justifying
colonialism.” But this partially rose-tinted view of the colonial past — a view
one sometimes hears from other elderly Nigerians confronting the chaos of daily
life — surely has much to do with the favored status enjoyed by Her Majesty’s
onetime brilliant subject.
Like his nostalgia for
Biafra, Achebe’s judgment on contemporary Nigeria seems excessive — more the
products of a writer’s jaundiced backward glances than a coming to grips with
the reality of what was and what is. Nigeria today is a seething
caldron, maddening in its contradictions and capacity for self-destruction but
full of promise too, in its immense energy and human resources.
As for judgments on Biafra
— perhaps we should rely on Nigeria’s
other great man of letters, Wole Soyinka, whose blunt appraisal is that
secession was “simply politically and militarily unwise.”
Adam
Nossiter is West Africa bureau chief for The Times and the author of
books on France and Mississippi.
[New York
Time Review]
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