There Was a Country: A Memoir

by Chinua Achebe

  The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood. The writer is often faced with two choices—turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.9

  The Igbo believe that art, religion, everything, the whole of life are embodied in the art of the masquerade. It is dynamic. It is not allowed to remain stationary. For instance, museums are unknown among the Igbo people. They do not even contemplate the idea of having something like a canon with the postulate: “This is how this sculpture should be made, and once it’s made it should be venerated.” No, the Igbo people want to create these things again and again, and every generation has a chance to execute its own model of art. So there’s no undue respect for what the last generation did, because if you do that too much it means that there is no need for me to do anything, because it’s already been done.10

  —

  One thing that I find a little worrying, though, is the suggestion that perhaps what was done in the 1960s, when African literature suddenly came into its own, was not as revolutionary as we make it out to be. That African literature without a concerted effort on the part of the writers of that era would still have found its voice. You find the same kind of cynicism among young African Americans who occasionally dismiss the contributions of the civil rights activists of that same period. Many of these same critics clearly did not know (or maybe do not want to be told) what Africa was like in the 1940s, back when there was no significant literature at all.

  There are people who do not realize that it was a different world than the world of today, one which is far more open. This openness and the opportunities that abound for a young intellectual setting out to carve a writing career for him- or herself are in fact partly a result of the work of that literature, the struggles of that era. So even though nobody is asking the new writer or intellectual to repeat the stories, the literary agenda or struggles of yesteryear, it is very important for them to be aware of what our literature achieved, what it has done for us, so that we can move forward.

  As I write this I am aware that there are people, many friends of mine, who feel that there are too many cultures around. In fact, I heard someone say that they think some of these cultures should be put down, that there are just too many. We did not make the world, so there is no reason we should be quarreling with the number of cultures there are. If any group decides on its own that its culture is not worth talking about, it can stop talking about it. But I don’t think anybody can suggest to another person, Please drop your culture; let’s use mine. That’s the height of arrogance and the boast of imperialism. I think cultures know how to fight their battles; cultures know how to struggle. It is up to the owners of any particular culture to ensure it survives, or if they don’t want it to survive, they should act accordingly, but I am not going to recommend that.

  My position, therefore, is that we must hear all the stories. That would be the first thing. And by hearing all the stories we will find points of contact and communication, and the world story, the Great Story, will have a chance to develop. That’s the only precaution I would suggest—that we not rush into announcing the arrival of this international, this great world story, based simply on our knowledge of one or a few traditions. For instance, in America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes. But that’s not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don’t even have to go too far in terms of geography—you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

  —

  Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote Things Fall Apart I couldn’t have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it, and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law, who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!11

  The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.12

  1966

  absentminded

  our thoughtless days

  sat at dire controls

  and played indolently

  slowly downward in remote

  subterranean shaft

  a diamond-tipped

  drill point crept closer

  to residual chaos to

  rare artesian hatred

  that once squirted warm

  blood in God’s face

  confirming His first

  disappointment in Eden1

  January 15, 1966, Coup

  On Saturday, January 15, 1966, a pivotal day in the history of Nigeria, members of the Society of Nigerian Authors happened to be gathered for a meeting. The venue was an office building on Kingsway Road in Ikoyi, Lagos. There were about ten of us living in Lagos at the time: John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (aka J. P. Clark), Wole Soyinka, Onuora Nzekwu, and a few others. A few members were sitting at a table that looked out onto the Lagos Lagoon. We were engaged in polite conversation, delaying the start of the meeting as some of our members trickled in.

  It happened that my new novel, A Man of the People, was about to be published in London, and I was communicating with my publisher, Heinemann. I knew that the book was going to be problematic for me because of its criticism of Nigerian politics—very severe criticism. The novel, after all, climaxes in a military coup.

  I had sent one copy of the novel to J. P. Clark on a Wednesday, two days earlier. When J.P. arrived at the meeting his voice rang out from several hundred feet away.

  “Chinua, you know, you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a coup!”

  That very evening, unbeknownst to us, a military coup was being launched that would change Nigeria forever.

  The next day I got a message from Heinemann, a cable or telex, asking me whether they should go ahead and publish the book. Why would they send this message? I wondered. I was unaware that a coup had happened the night before. I told the gentleman who carried this message—I think from the British embassy—to tell my publisher to go ahead and publish the novel. I was not particularly afraid, even though I had concerns. I thought, Who was likely to misunderstand? My sentiment changed from incredulity to dread when we heard details and the surrounding events of the coup.

  In those days we went to work on Saturdays and worked till noon. When I got to my office that Saturday there were soldiers everywhere, surrounding Broadcasting House. The soldiers stopped me and interrogated me until they were satisfied that I worked there, and then let me pass through. The announcement of a coup on the radio had not been made. Some people had their suspicions, because soldiers in military vehicles were seen being deployed throughout the city, and roadblocks with barbed wire were being erected everywhere.

  News began to seep through
. We heard that the prime minister was missing. Then came news from Kaduna that the Sardauna,1 Sir Ahmadu Bello, the most powerful of the premiers, had been killed. We then heard that Samuel Akintola, the premier of Western Nigeria, had also been killed. Those of us working in broadcasting in the coming days would get a more detailed list of those killed, imprisoned, or detained during the coup. These events thrust Nigeria into a state of shock for a long time.

  —

  Nigeria was not ready or willing to face her problems. If her leaders had approached their duty with humility, they all might have realized long before the coup that the country was in deep trouble. Nigeria was rocked by one crisis after another in the years that followed independence. First the Nigerian census crisis of 1963–64 shook the nation, then the federal election crisis of 1964, which was followed by the Western Nigeria election crisis of 1965—which threatened to split the country at its seams. At that point most of us, the writers at least, knew that something was very wrong in Nigeria. A fix was long overdue.

  When the artist’s imagination clashes with life’s very reality it creates a heavy conundrum. The story Nigeria had of herself was that something like a military coup would never happen; Nigeria was too stable for that. We were utterly unprepared for such an event, and for the magnitude of the dislocation that ensued.

  Despite my fictional warning I never expected or wanted the form of violent intervention that became the military coup of January 15, 1966. I had hoped that the politicians would sort things out for our new nation. Any confidence we had that things could be put right was smashed as we watched elements from the military take control. The coup was led by a group of junior officers, most of them Igbo, and it would be known widely as the Nzeogwu coup after Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, the ringleader, who was from the northern city of Kaduna. That night of January 15, 1966, is something Nigeria has never really recovered from.

  The Dark Days

  On January 16, 1966, the day after the Nzeogwu coup, my wife, Christie, took our first child, Chinelo, to the movies to catch the matinee. Chinelo was full of energy—always running all over the place. My wife’s doctor, Dr. Okoronkwo Ogan, who became our daughter’s godfather, called her “quicksilver.”1 On their way home, my wife decided to drop by and see me in the office, so that our daughter could tell me all about the movie they had watched. I believe it was the Disney classic Dumbo, about the flying elephant. As they approached the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation they saw the soldiers around but did not know what was happening. They were not scared, even though they found the commotion a bit peculiar.

  As they walked to my office someone yelled at my wife: “Where are you going? Don’t you know what is happening?” So she walked more briskly, because she wanted to find out whether I was alive. A soldier stopped them and asked them to leave. They returned home and tuned into the radio station to find out what was going on.

  People were standing on the streets in small groups, listening to the radios of street newspaper vendors. There had been a coup, the radio announcers said, at which point there was an initial period of spontaneous, overt jubilation. The story of the coup and how it happened started leaking out, first from the military barracks and then from the international media. There was a great deal of anxiety among the general populace. Everyone wanted to find out exactly what had happened in Kaduna, Lagos, Ibadan, and elsewhere the night before, though apparently not much action had been seen in Enugu, the capital of the Eastern Region. The initial vacuum of information was filled with gossip, innuendo, and fabricated accounts that magnified the confusion throughout the country. A second story got around that the military coup, which at first had been so well received, was in fact a sinister plot by the ambitious Igbos of the East to seize control of Nigeria.

  In a country in which tribalism was endemic, the rumor of an “Igbo coup” began to find acceptance. Before long many people were persuaded that their spontaneous jubilation in January had been a mistake. A Nigerian poet who had dedicated a new book “to the heroes of January 1966” had second thoughts after the countercoup of July, and he sent a frantic cable to his publishers to remove the dedication.

  Those who knew Nigeria were not very surprised, because part of the way to respond to confusion in Nigeria is to blame those from the other ethnic group or the other side of the country. One found some ethnic or religious element supporting whatever one was trying to make sense of. This angle grew stronger and stronger as the days passed, mainly because the state of confusion was not really dispelled satisfactorily by the authorities.

  The weeks following the coup saw Easterners attacked both randomly and in an organized fashion. There seemed to be a lust for revenge, which meant an excuse for Nigerians to take out their resentment on the Igbos who led the nation in virtually every sector—politics, education, commerce, and the arts. This group, the Igbo, that gave the colonizing British so many headaches and then literally drove them out of Nigeria was now an open target, scapegoats for the failings and grievances of colonial and post-independence Nigeria.

  It was a desperate time. Soldiers were being used by elements in power to commit a number of crimes against Igbos, Nigerian citizens. Military officers were rounding people up and summarily executing them, particularly in the North, we were told by victims fleeing the pogroms. There was a story of hoodlums looking to hunt down and kill Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, who was the chairman of the Nigerian Coal Corporation.2 Dr. Ikejiani escaped the grasp of these thugs by dressing up as a woman and crossing the Nigeria border to Dahomey (today’s Republic of Benin)!

  In Lagos, where we lived, soldiers were also used in targeted raids of certain people’s homes, including our own. It happened that my wife and I had moved recently from Milverton Street to Turnbull Road, after my promotion to director of external broadcasting. Fortunately for us the soldiers went to Milverton Street, to our old house, to search for me.

  Some may wonder why soldiers would be after me so fervently. As I mentioned, it happened that I had just written A Man of the People, which forecast a military coup that overthrows a corrupt civilian government. Clearly a case of fact imitating fiction and nothing else, but some military leaders believed that I must have had something to do with the coup and wanted to bring me in for questioning.

  Eventually my family and I left our Turnbull Road house, a painful decision. We had moved into it after we were married. It was located in Ikoyi, a nice section of town, overlooking the lagoon. I remember receiving important visitors in our home, such as the great African American poet Langston Hughes, who stopped by during one of his famous African tours. I have a favorite picture of the two of us from that period, standing near a palm tree on the lawn of that lovely residence.

  We found refuge in an old friend’s house—Frank Cawson, the British Council representative in Lagos, whose intervention literally saved our lives. He housed us for a number of days. Mr. Cawson had been the British Council representative in Accra, Ghana, and had invited me to give a lecture there before he came to Lagos. I delivered a lecture, entitled, “The African Writer and the English Language.” So when Mr. Cawson was transferred to Nigeria, he was already known to me.

  He was monitoring local and international radio and newspapers to get a sense of what was happening. He took a number of precautionary steps to enhance our safety. First he took his car out of the garage and put our own there instead, so that no one would see it. It was a very tense, anxiety-plagued period for my wife and me and our two children, Chinelo, who was five years old, and Ike, who was two. Making matters worse was the fact that Frank Cawson was quite ill—I think with malaria.

  For about a week, lying hidden in Mr. Cawson’s house in Lagos, I still simply thought that things had temporarily gotten out of hand, and that everything would soon be all right. Then, suddenly, I discovered that I had been operating on a false and perhaps naïve basis all along. The soldiers located us after we had been
hiding about a week. It became clear to me that I had to send my family away.

  As many of us packed our belongings to return east some of the people we had lived with for years, some for decades, jeered and said, “Let them [Igbos] go; food will be cheaper in Lagos.” That kind of experience is very powerful. It is something I could not possibly forget. I realized suddenly that I had not been living in my home; I had been living in a strange place. There were more and more reports of massacres, and not only in the North, but also in the West and in Lagos. People were hounded out of their homes, as we were in Lagos, and returned to the East. We expected to hear something from the intellectuals, from our friends. Rather, what we heard was, “Oh, they had it coming to them,” or words to that effect. There were many others from other parts of Nigeria who did not jeer but suffered with us at this sudden discovery that a section of the large, diverse Nigerian family was not welcome in this new country.

  A lot of this hot-blooded anger was fanned by British intellectuals and some radical Northern elements in places like Ahmadu Bello University. They were aided by a few in the expatriate population from outside Nigeria, who easily influenced the mostly self-satisfied and docile Northern leadership to activate a weapon that has been used repeatedly in Nigeria’s short history—a fringe element known as “area boys” or the “rent-a-crowd types”—to attack Igbos in an orgy of blood.

  As we reached the brink of full-blown war it became clear to me that the chaos enveloping all of us in Nigeria was due to the incompetence of the Nigerian ruling class. They clearly had a poor grasp of history and found it difficult to appreciate and grapple with Nigeria’s ethnic and political complexity. This clique, stunted by ineptitude, distracted by power games and the pursuit of material comforts, was unwilling, if not incapable, of saving our fledgling new nation.