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.
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.