First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections On Achebe’s New Book (1)

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By Biodun Jeyifo

Where one thing stands, another thing will thing stand beside it.

-          Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God

First, there was a country; then there wasn’t. To anyone who has read Chinua Achebe’s recently published book, There Was A Country, this statement that serves as the title of this piece refers to Biafra. Achebe’s book is a powerful and harrowing account of the crises that led both to the creation and the destruction of the secessionist republic. But I am also adverting to Nigeria in this statement. For implicitly and implacably, Achebe’s new book also hints at a Nigeria that once was - or at least was on the verge of becoming - but is now vanished, seemingly forever, leaving only the trace of a national desire that is now completely in ruins. Not since Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died published in 1972 has a book so grippingly taken us back to the very foundations of how our country came into being only to be almost immediately faced with the possibility of being stillborn, with only very vague hints at how, if we are courageous, truthful and fortunate, we might yet realize the Nigeria that we wish for.

Thus, Achebe’s new book is almost at every turn aware of itself as the work of a writer, an intellectual addressing other writers and intellectuals and challenging them on such fundamental issues as the relationship of the writer to ethics and justice and the responsibilities of the true, humanistic intellectual to racial, national and ethnic others. Indeed, as much as Achebe’s new book is also very much conscious of the general reader and is for the most part mainly addressed to the international community and the world at large, like Soyinka’s 1972 book it is also a direct challenge to Nigeria’s community of writers and intellectuals, especially those who see themselves in the progressive and humanistic traditions of intellectualism. At any rate, this is the point of departure for the series of reflections on Achebe’s new book that begins with this week’s column.

Chinua Achebe is of course one of the world’s preeminent writers and intellectuals. For members of my generation of Nigerian and African writers, critics and academics, as we came to intellectual and political-activist maturity, Achebe was a figure who exerted a powerful, authoritative fascination for us, even if there were the inevitable occasional small disagreements and quarrels. For me in particular, I have always regarded Achebe as one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in perhaps the last one and half centuries. The proof of these assertions is the fact that among all living writers and second only to Wole Soyinka, Achebe is the writer to whose works I have returned again and again in the last three decades. In all, I have written a monograph and about five essays, three of them quite substantial, on Achebe as a writer and intellectual. Moreover, the regular or dedicated readers of this column may, I hope, remember that on many occasions in the last five and half years, the epigraphs for essays in the column have been drawn from what I consider the plenitude of wisdom and insight in Achebe’s writings. This is the broad background for the reflections in the series on Achebe’s most recent book that commences with this piece and I ask the reader to please bear this in mind.

I can report that the Achebe that I have personally encountered in this book is more or less the enormously powerful realist writer that I had seen and greatly admired in nearly all his previous writings minus his poetry. However, there is another Achebe that is almost completely new to me in There Was A Country. It is a challenge to precisely characterize this new or other Achebe that is standing beside the old, urbane and subtle realist writer in this new book, but I will try.

The writer as propagandist, media apparatchik and ideologue, this is the Achebe that stands side by side with the great writer we’ve seen and admired since Things Fall Apart. As I went through the middle two parts of the four parts of There Was A Country, I was startled by the recognition of how close, from start to finish, Achebe had been to the Biafran political leadership. By his own often repeated assertions and anecdotes in the book, Achebe was not only one of the most important roving ambassadors for Biafra he was also the star media and information propagandist for the breakaway republic. And also going by his own assertions in the book, Achebe was a close adviser and confidant of Ojukwu, the Head of State of Biafra.

To perceive one of the many ramifications of this aspect of Achebe’s self-presentation in his new book, it is important to recognize that while some prominent intellectuals felt and expressed major differences with the Biafran leadership during the war - with some actually being accused, tried and executed for treason – to the very end Achebe remained close to and intimate with the Biafran leadership. In my view and unless I am mistaken, among all major and highly regarded African writers in the 20th century, only Agostino Neto of Angola went farther than Achebe in Biafra in placing his writing and his intellectual capacities completely at the service of the state.

The point, though, is that while Neto, who was himself the leader of the anti-colonial nationalist movement and Head of State of the independent Angolan state, was very open and even militant in insisting that his intellectualism was indivisible from his role and actions as a politician-statesman, Achebe in There Was A Country operates under the presumption that regardless of how close and faithful he was to the Biafran leadership, his independence and autonomy as a writer and intellectual were intact. But this is at best a genuine but mistaken assumption; at worst it is more or less a self-serving delusion and mystification.

In this series, I intend to bring these “two Achebes” that we encounter in There Was A Country into a dialogical relationship with each other: on the one hand, the superb realist writer and progressive intellectual; on the other hand, the war-time propaganda, media warrior and ethno-nationalist ideologue. For those who might intuitively presuppose that I have in mind a hierarchy, a “higher” and “lower” order of integrity between these two putative Achebes, l hasten to say that this is not so. In other words, I will in this series not be holding one “Achebe” as a corrective, a benchmark for the other. Far from this, my central frame of reference, simply, is that against Achebe’s own presuppositions we must keep both in view, the writer and the ideologue.

Achebe’s book is divided into four parts. In reality, the fourth and last part is really an epilogue that brings the chronological, temporal ordering of the contents of the book from the past of the first and second coups of 1966, the pogroms of May and August of the same year, and the Nigerian-Biafran war to present-day Nigeria. For those who might have either completely missed it or seen it and not paid much attention to it, let me emphasize the fact that it is in this fourth part, precisely on page 243, that Achebe for the first time in the book talks explicitly of a Nigerian ruling class. Thus, for the main three sections of the book, there is not even a casual nod to class; the focus is totally and uncompromisingly on “tribe”, on ethnicity.

For everyone of us and especially for writers and intellectuals, this raises many questions. Was this a deliberate choice on Achebe’s part? What particular kind of conception of ethnicity does he deploy in There Was A Country? Was there no “ruling class” in the Nigeria of the pre-civil war years? And in Biafra, was class so effectively and completely folded into ethnicity that it had little or no relevance or significance? If Achebe quite deliberately decided to base the main sections of his book on ethnicity while excluding class and other indices of social standing and identity, what methodological and philosophical pressures does this exclusion place on him as a writer and intellectual, especially in light of the fact that he is, first and foremost, a realist writer? Can the devastating case that Achebe makes against the Nigerian ruling class in the fourth section of his book also be made against the Biafran ruling class of which he was such a prominent and influential figure, especially with regard to the central moral and human catastrophe at the heart of the book, this being the issue of mass starvation and the alleged attempted and nearly successful genocide committed against the children of Biafra?

These are extremely difficult questions for which there are no easy or simple explanations. Achebe’s new book provides us with both a great challenge and a wonderful opportunity to engage them honestly and rigorously.

To be continued.

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