Chimamanda Adichie's review of Chinua Achebe's, 'There Was A Country''

Chimamanda Adichie is Nigerian the author of Half of a Yellow Sun and on Forbes Top 40 Celebrities in Africa. Here is her review of Chinua Achebe's There was a Country: A personal History of Biafra 

Nigeria, at independence from British rule in 1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large population, an educated elite and many natural resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a government model, was closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’
It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all.

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PAGE 51: THE ORIGIN OF ACHEBE-AWOLOWO CONTROVERSY

On Page 51 of the 333 page book 'There Was A Country: A Personal History Biafra by Chinua Achebe, you will find the origin of the nationwide crisis. The so called debate about Achebe vs Awolowo.

On that page, Achebe wrote:
“The original ideal of one Nigeria was pressed by the leaders and intellectuals from the Eastern Region. With all their shortcomings, they had this idea to build the country as one."
                                                  ...
“The first to object were the Northerners led by the Sardauna, who were followed closely by the Awolowo clique that had created the Action Group."

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There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra by Chinua Achebe

 Achebe, the author of the widely read "Things Fall Apart," a novel translated into more than 50 languages and has sold more than 10million copies worldwide recounts the events surrounding the Nigerian Civil War, a three-year battle lasting from 1967-1970 in a new book 'There Was a Country.' This book describes the state of the country prior and post to the war.

There Was a Country has all the elements of an author’s journey through his own life. There is the story of his orphaned father’s conversion to Christianity, Achebe’s education, his own experiences of both western tradition and Christianity.
The book also portrays Achebe and his involvement in the Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Nigeria-Biafra War) of 1967–70, which claimed up to 3 million lives, most of them from the Igbo ethnic group of which he originated from began after the mass slaughter of Igbos in northern Nigeria. The Igbos, inspired by the late Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu fought back to declare an independent state in the Igbo-dominated southeast soon later led to a segregated country.
Forty years on, it is impossible not to see the impact of that civil war on Nigeria and even families today. For many Igbos, the impact is still very personal.
Achebe writes that after the war, “the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country’s continued backwardness, in my estimation.” A trip to the Igbo-dominated southeast reveals abysmal roads, bridges threatening to collapse, and a power grid that is all but entirely useless, all what many Igbos believe is a deliberate policy of neglect as punishment for the sin of secession. The country has suffered as a result of what Achebe calls the evil of tribalism.

Source: Newsweek Magazine

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