There Was a Country… Learning from our past

2026-03-01 - 23:37

By BANJI OJEWALE In the distant past, you wouldn’t talk about Chinua Achebe without instant reference to his mountaintop novel, _Things Fall Apart._ He was inseparable from this literary creature that outstripped its creator. But Achebe was lucky: he was spared the tragedy of bringing forth a monster that would fatally prey on its Frankenstein god. Achebe’s own genie was genial. Upon escape from the bottle-cage, it gave the illustrious novelist a new identity tag: Africa’s foremost storyteller. However, 2012 would deliver another lingering literary lease to this great man of letters. He wrote _There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra._ More than five decades had passed as a hiatus between the book of Achebe’s youth and the new product of his advanced age. Both were mileposts — the one his first published novel (1958), and the other his last huge work before his death in 2013. But critics are always drawn to the eminent raconteur’s latter-day effort rather than to the one that lionized him. Why? _Things Fall Apart_ adumbrates a system (community) collapse, whereas _There Was a Country_ mourns the arrival of the foretold decadence and disintegration. Man is given to concerns about the now and how he can step on it to launch into a tomorrow unaffected by a deleterious yesterday. True, he needs to know what led him to the now, so he can disallow old pitfalls from surfacing again. Yet, man must understand more of his present and work on it to enable him to shape a future close to nirvana — a future defeating its own deadly past. That is what many compatriots salute Achebe for in _There Was a Country._ He writes of the past, the present and the future. Of the past, he sees a near-perfect Nigeria that enabled him to script a bestseller at 28. There was a country that saw Achebe work at the old Radio Nigeria at Ikoyi, Lagos, in a senior position. Here, in this non-nepotistic country, he later became Director of External Broadcasting. There was a Nigeria that put Achebe in the company of other Nigerians from the North, East, West and South, with none looking over his shoulder to see if a dagger-wielding figure was lurking in the shadows. There was also a country that took the Anambra State-born Achebe to the University College, Ibadan, in the old Western Nigeria where, as he studied Liberal Arts after dropping Medicine, he beheld the progressive socio-economic and political developments of the Action Group administration under the great statesman, Obafemi Awolowo. There was a country that blissfully enjoyed a centrifugal federal order where the regions were lifted to enviable heights because they did not take orders from some lordly central government. There was a country where the talking point was not our fault lines that might lead to the creation of destabilising cracks. By the way, in that country, were there such open or concealed cleavages that held us down as they do today? Now, there arose another country that deposed the ‘ideal’ one Achebe met. Here, the soldiers were at work. Dismantling the structures on the ground that had admirably nurtured the land to place her on the path heading for a golden future, the men in boots did to Nigeria what the Barbarians did to the Roman Empire in 410 AD. They sacked Nigeria and imposed on us a sterile centripetal ‘federal’ arrangement. Rome writhed into extinction after the Barbarians’ assault. There was indeed a country. Now, there was yet a third country that arose from the battle over what was left of Nigeria, following the dissolution of its federal soul into a unitary contraption: Biafra. Those who brought it into existence said it was the answer to the untended injustices that accompanied the actions of the soldiers and their political collaborators as well as their shadowy friends in the civil service and the private sector. According to Achebe, Biafra happened because: “There was a strong sense that Nigeria was no longer habitable for the Igbo... (which) made us realize that Nigeria ‘did not belong we,’ as Liberians would put it.” He argues: “Following the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred over the four months starting in May 1966, which was compounded by the involvement, even connivance, of the federal government, secession from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.” Why we are revisiting _There Was a Country_ today nearly a decade and a half after it was published is simple: it addresses poignant political issues we are all talking about as we prepare for new public office holders in 2027. If we do not want to drop again into a rapid succession of ‘countries’ the book depicts, none of which was permitted the opportunity to lead us into the Promised Land, it does us priceless good to be guided by Achebe’s observations, among them his claim that the Biafrans’ secessionist bid was a logical reaction to the apparent rejection of the Igbo by Nigeria. It’s neither here nor there decades after to ask if a breakaway was the answer to the challenge of perceived or proven marginalization. What matters is if we have learnt from what happened in those three ‘countries’. We must see more than one country, Biafra, in Achebe’s book. What we observe, sadly, is that the main players of the political class are back to that jejune old game by refusing to recognise the reality of injustice in the ‘ouster’ of the South-East from the presidential race in 2023. The presidential contest shouldn’t have been an all-comers’ affair. It should have been an exclusive South-East game to demonstrate our faith in what we profess: justice, fairness and equity for all in the land. We honoured these values in 1998 when the military and their political arm, beholding the injustice the Yoruba were suffering from following the raw deal given their son, Moshood Abiola, in an earlier poll, ‘arranged’ for only candidates from the South-West to contest for the presidential slot. For today presents a troubling landscape. Too many challenges bedevil the Nigeria of now, the most prominent being insecurity, as terrorists operate on rampage in different parts of the country. Many Nigerians no longer feel safe in their own country. Apart from that, there is also the crisis in leadership succession. For example, following the bitter experience of the 2023 elections, many Nigerians have lost confidence in the electoral process as they no longer believe their votes count. These are among the reasons why many older Nigerians still look back at that time when they believed there was indeed a country that was worth its name, unlike what obtains at the moment where uncertainty seems to be the rule rather than the exception. In 2027, a better country must emerge from the ashes of the failed ones. That new country should outlaw political lopsidedness which makes power move in ‘circles’ between only two geo-ethnic zones. No one would then take up arms to protest “Nigeria did not belong we” and seek justice in a new place carved out of Nigeria.