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    There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
    Unavailable
    There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
    Unavailable
    There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
    Audiobook9 hours

    There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

    Written by Chinua Achebe

    Narrated by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a longawaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war

    The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967-1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe's people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a roving cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war's full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world literature.

    Achebe masterfully relates his experience, both as he lived it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria's birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country's promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfully reminded that artists have a particular obligation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, should be committed writers-they should speak for their history, their beliefs, and their people.

    Marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and forty years of research and reflection. Wise, humane, and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe's place as one of the most vital literary and moral voices of our age.

    "1966", "Benin Road", "Penalty of Godhead", "Generation Gap", "Biafra, 1969", "A Mother in a Refugee Camp", "The First Shot", "Air Raid", "Mango Seedling", "We Laughed at Him", "Vultures", and "After a War" from Collected Poems by Chinua Achebe. Copyright © 1971, 1973, 2004 by Chinua Achebe. Used by permission of Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc. and The Wylie Agency, LLC.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 11, 2012
    ISBN9781101579374
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for There Was a Country

    3.5/5

    52 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The pain and horror of the loss of his country pervade Chinua Achebe's personal and historical account of the Biafra War in Nigeria.FRIENDS: Ivory Coast, Gabon, Tanzania, Netherlands (?), MLK and NAACP, France, Pope Paul VI and Italy (oil interests excepted),Carl Gustaf von Rosen, Haiti, and a few othersNEUTRAL: The United State of America until Nixon (!!!) stood up for the peopleFOES: LBJ, Great Britain, Soviet Union, Portugal, The United Nations(It would be good to update maps to show missing locations.)
    • 5/5
      "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." Chinua Achebe's writing presents human power abused, and then encourages possibility...his faith never seemed to give up, though his horizon of hope lengthened. "Why don't people fight back? ...the oppressive process effectively strips away from the minds of the people the knowledge that they have rights. ... And they tried to construct all kinds of arrangements to whittle down the menace of those with the will to power. ... A new patriotic consciousness has to be developed, not one based simply on the well-worn notion of unity...and faith..., but one based on an awareness of the responsibility of leaders to the led. ... It is from this kind of environment that a leader, humbled by the trust placed upon him by the people, will emerge, willing to use the power given to him for the good of the people." ~ "There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra"This book describes the Nigeria Civil War in the late 1960s, brought to the present. It adds to my readings on empire building and breaking; something that seems to be a continual process of those with "the will to power." Sometimes I wonder if places of power aren't the worse place from which to lead.
    • 2/5
      I generally love Chinua Achebe's work, but sadly the great man must have simply grown too old by the time he sat down to pen this highly uneven autobiography.
    • 3/5
      It is a weird book. It is not personal enough to be a personal story; it is not objective enough to be a story. It has its good parts but it also has passages that are too dry even for a history book, let alone the type of this story. Achebe decided to tell his story 45 years after the facts happened and instead of writing a memoir, he went for a mix of a story and poetry - he peppered the book with his poems, the ones that match the times and the story. I am not much for white and free verse poetry and even though I liked a few of the pieces, it just is not my thing. The prose parts of the story is weird - he shares a few personal stories here and there (more at the start, less and less as the story progresses) and those parts of the story are the bright points in the book. The rest... when he is not reciting a history overview, he is giving so many historical details that the book feels overwritten. I expected a one-sided story - Achebe was part of Biafra and believed in it; he had always claimed that the Igbos were persecuted because of jealousy and were innocent at all times. History is a hard thing - we may never know why some things happened - too many people from those times are still alive and the history is written by the winners (although in this case it seems like not only the winners did write histories). I read this book almost by chance - after reading Forsyth's autobiography earlier this year, I decided that I want to read his other non-fiction book - the story of Biafra. And when I was looking for the book on my kindle, I realized I have another book about it - Achebe's. And decided to start with it. I did learn new things from the book - some of the facts I will forget (too many names that ended up irrelevant) and I still will be looking for a more balanced account (Forsyth's probably will not be but I plan to read it). I am not sorry that I read this one - but I think that it was a lost opportunity - it could have been so much more powerful. The few glimpses of story though were enough to convince me to find his fiction - I somehow never got around to it before now.
    • 4/5
      I Loved the book, it was detailed and it helped to understand that part of my history better which I believe is very important. But I could not help but cringe everytime the narrator pronounced an Igbo word. It was horrible I even had to scream at my device sometimes. It clearly shows that the narrator did not do his research or simply took it for granted. It's so bad that I wish it could all be redone. Thank you.
    • 5/5
      Finally a Nigerian book narrated by a Nigerian. This book brought a lot of sadness. I have a lot of questions with no hope of getting answers. Nigeria has blood of innocent civilians on her hands and its no wonder Nigeria is still a laughing stock, instead things keep getting worse. I am particularly appaled about the intentional leaving out of history from the Nigerian education. I wasn't taught history in school except state and capital and former head of states.
    • 5/5
      Great book. A must read in understanding the Nigerian political crisis of the 1960s and even till date.
    • 4/5
      A brief primer for those unfamiliar with Biafra: the west African nation of Nigeria (like much of Africa) is a colonial creation. The British ruled Nigeria for about 150 years, first using an economic company, and later forming a protectorate. Prior to the arrival of the British, Nigeria had seen a series of cultures rise and fall. Many of these cultures had very advanced artistic and religious cultures. Immediately prior to the British, much of modern Nigeria was controlled by the Sokoto Caliphate, an Islamic state that had risen following the collapse if Songhai Empire. The Sokoto Caliphate had begun north of Nigeria and had gradually spread southward.The rise and fall of multiple cultures in Nigeria left the country full of numerous groups that were very different from one another. To use broad stereotypes, northern Nigeria is primarily populated by the Hausa people. The Hausa people are predominately Islamic and share many cultural similarities with peoples north of modern Nigeria. The Yoruba people primarily inhabit southwestern Nigeria. Many Yoruba practiced an indigenous religion although that religion has diminished greatly over the past 100 years as Christianity and Islam have become the primary religions. In the southeast of Nigeria are the Igbo people. Like the Yoruba, the Igbo primarily practiced an indigenous religion but that religion has largely been subsumed by Christianity. This is a broad brush view of Nigeria, in truth something close to 500 ethnic groups are recognized and there are many religious factions many of which blend traditional faiths with Christianity and Islam.The Igbo people were perceived to have "benefited" the most from British rule having taken advantage of educational opportunities and securing important government positions. When British rule ended in 1960, the differences between the ethnic groups began to boil over. Following military coups in 1966 and 1967, the ethnic tensions exploded into the Biafran Civil War (also called the Nigerian Civil War) which involved the southeastern (predominately Igbo) part of the country declaring independence.There Was a Country is a Achebe's (an Igbo) account of his own experience during that conflict. Achebe describes the initial confusion around the military coups and his own efforts to stay ahead of the expanding conflict as he, his friends, and his family flee into Igbo territory. Already famous on account of Things Fall Apart, Achebe is used by the nascent Biafran government to help draft constitutions and later to serve as a diplomat. Achebe describes his hopes for the new country and how those hopes are dashed as Biafra slowly collapses against the better armed and equipped Nigeria army. Achebe also discusses the many atrocities of the conflict. It is Achebe's view point that the conflict amounted to genocide with the deliberate killing and dispossession of Igbos because of their ethnic group. There is room for debate on this point because Igbo populations outside of Biafra, such as in Lagos (the economic capital) were not systematically destroyed (although many Igbo fled Lagos and other major cities as the conflict developed). That said, it is clear that the Nigerian army took efforts to wipe out the Igbo that resided in the newly declared Biafra. The federal government of Nigeria also made it a policy to use starvation as a weapon of war. As such, they blockaded Biafra and made efforts to prevent food from getting to the people. This resulted in widespread famine and disease which is turn led to massive casualties (1 to 3 million) of the Biafrans, many of whom were children. In many ways, the discussion of whether the war was genocide obscures the point that the Biafran war was aimed as much at the civilian populace as it was military targets. Consequentially, the suffering was enormous. Nevertheless, Achebe clearly believes that the conflict was properly classified as genocide. His point being that the war was not simply a civil war and thus an internal issue for Nigeria but a conflict that the entire world had an obligation to halt.Achebe describes some of the fear and suffering in Biafra although it is clear that he and his family were shielded from the worst of it because of his fame. He also discusses, at length, the international reaction to the war and how various nations took stands for and against Biafran independence and how those positions changed over time. Finally, Achebe talks about the collapse of Biafra and goes on to attribute much of Nigeria's problems today as the legacy of the conflict. I am not in a position to evaluate the merits of Achebe's arguments but it is clear that Achebe believed that had Biafra survived as an independent state it would have become a model country far removed from the corruption and conflict of modern Nigeria.Ultimately, There Was a Country is a very personal look at a horrendous conflict, one that Achebe clearly believes had broad consequences for modern Nigeria and all of west Africa.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A fascinating work of memoir and history. I found Achebe's discussion of the Nigeria-Biafra War particularly enlightening as knew little about the conflict.