– A REVIEW
By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
At
last, the world is hearing from Professor Chinua Achebe, Africa’s
foremost writer, distinguished intellectual and author of the classic, Things
Fall Apart, on the Nigeria-Biafra war. In a new book (There
Was a Country – A Personal History of Biafra, New York: Penguin,
2012), Achebe presents a detailed
account of what is widely regarded as the ‘genocidal Biafran war’ prosecuted
forty-two years ago in which about 3 million people (mostly, unarmed civilians,
including women and children) were brutally killed.
When
you talk about genocide in Africa, most people would eagerly prefer we all look
towards Rwanda or Darfur, or even the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and
not Biafra which happened about twenty years earlier and which Herbert
Ekwe-Ekwe, professor of history and politics, in his review of Achebe’s memoir, describes as “Africa’s most expansive and
devastating genocide of the 20th century.”
Indeed,
Biafra is a problematic subject. It readily
stirs up a lot of discomfort and debilitating guilt in not a few quarters as it
throws up memories of grossly disreputable decisions and actions which had far-reaching, disastrous effects on too many innocent and harmless people, from which the originators and
perpetrators would so much wish to distance themselves. The genocidal Biafran war and the horrible pogrom that preceded it are, without doubt, recent occurrences (only some four decades ago), but the strong determination of their guilt-ridden perpetrators, foreign collaborators and local
sympathizers, to hastily consign this monumental tragedy to pre-history and
shout down anyone trying to remind the world of it has been quite overwhelming.
But
in his new book, There Was a Country – A Personal History of Biafra, which TIME magazine in its August 27, 2012
edition classified as one of the twelve “most anticipated” books this fall
(2012) and Newsweek (of the same date) in its “Fall Books Preview 2012” placed among the “15 Books To Read,” Achebe unwraps
Biafra before the world again, letting everyone into gruesome details of wanton
massacres of unarmed civilians, including women and children, and the horror of
mass deaths caused by unspeakable starvation and sicknesses due mainly to the
inhuman blockade zealously imposed upon Biafra by the Nigerian government, with
the overwhelming support of the British government, despite outcries from several parts of the world.
