When things fall apart ...
By Adam Nossiter |
November 4, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
RUMORS of Nigeria's demise have been somewhat exaggerated. This turbulent and magnetic African megastate endures despite its intense regional, religious and other divisions (the country has an estimated 250 ethnic groups and more than 500 languages).
Nigeria did fracture once, however, and it is this story that Chinua Achebe, a giant of African letters, tells. His memoir of the moment describes when the country, yoked together artificially by British colonizers, split apart at a cost of more than a million lives.
Nigeria is the Texas of Africa: It's big and loud and brash, a place of huge potential, untapped talent, murderous conflict and petroleum riches. It also has a singular capacity for irony and self-reflection that is both cultural habit and survival tactic. It is difficult and often dangerous to get by in Nigeria unless you are a fortunate member of the infinitesimally small and mostly oil-fed elite. Awareness of your surroundings is a necessity; along with another Nigerian trait, thinking and dreaming big.
All these characteristics were in play when the nightmare for weak nation-states became reality in 1967. Seven years after Nigerian independence, the prosperous Igbos, dominant in the eastern part of the country and targets of persecution and pogroms, declared their independence. Led by the charismatic Oxford-educated, Shakespeare-loving Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the fledgling nation called itself the Republic of Biafra. Achebe, an Igbo himself and the new country's pre-eminent intellectual, a product of Nigeria's finest English-style schools and author of "Things Fall Apart" - soon went to work at Biafra's Ministry of Information, serving as special envoy and chairman of a committee charged with writing a constitution for the new country.
The architects of Biafra were correct in their frustration with the Nigerian government, which did not intervene as thousands of Igbos were massacred. But they were deluding themselves that Biafra was viable. The nascent state had virtually no chance once the authorities in Lagos decided they were going to stamp out the secession. Was Biafra ever really a "country?" It had ministries, oil wells, a ragtag army, an often-shifting capital, official cars and a famous airstrip. But as a "country," it was stillborn.
Nonetheless, for over two brutal years, the Biafran war dragged on as Ojukwu refused to give up. The death toll was estimated at between one and three million people.
We get glimpses of this immense human tragedy in Achebe's characteristically plain-spoken narrative: the men and women driven mad by the grinding, endless war who "could often be seen walking seemingly aimlessly on the roads in tattered clothes, in conversation with themselves."
But mostly Achebe's account is tinged with odd nostalgia for the ephemeral moment when Biafra seemed to birth a national culture. "One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not know existed, a determination, in fact."
Yet when Achebe praises Ojukwu's "gift for oratory" or the colors in the new nation's flag it is at odds with the haunting images of suffering brought by the war: the famine, the bodies "rotting under the hot sun." His nostalgia seems jarring and misplaced.
For judgments on Biafra, perhaps we should rely on Nigeria's other great man of letters, Wole Soyinka, whose blunt appraisal is that secession was "simply politically and militarily unwise."
Nigeria did fracture once, however, and it is this story that Chinua Achebe, a giant of African letters, tells. His memoir of the moment describes when the country, yoked together artificially by British colonizers, split apart at a cost of more than a million lives.
Nigeria is the Texas of Africa: It's big and loud and brash, a place of huge potential, untapped talent, murderous conflict and petroleum riches. It also has a singular capacity for irony and self-reflection that is both cultural habit and survival tactic. It is difficult and often dangerous to get by in Nigeria unless you are a fortunate member of the infinitesimally small and mostly oil-fed elite. Awareness of your surroundings is a necessity; along with another Nigerian trait, thinking and dreaming big.
All these characteristics were in play when the nightmare for weak nation-states became reality in 1967. Seven years after Nigerian independence, the prosperous Igbos, dominant in the eastern part of the country and targets of persecution and pogroms, declared their independence. Led by the charismatic Oxford-educated, Shakespeare-loving Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the fledgling nation called itself the Republic of Biafra. Achebe, an Igbo himself and the new country's pre-eminent intellectual, a product of Nigeria's finest English-style schools and author of "Things Fall Apart" - soon went to work at Biafra's Ministry of Information, serving as special envoy and chairman of a committee charged with writing a constitution for the new country.
The architects of Biafra were correct in their frustration with the Nigerian government, which did not intervene as thousands of Igbos were massacred. But they were deluding themselves that Biafra was viable. The nascent state had virtually no chance once the authorities in Lagos decided they were going to stamp out the secession. Was Biafra ever really a "country?" It had ministries, oil wells, a ragtag army, an often-shifting capital, official cars and a famous airstrip. But as a "country," it was stillborn.
Nonetheless, for over two brutal years, the Biafran war dragged on as Ojukwu refused to give up. The death toll was estimated at between one and three million people.
We get glimpses of this immense human tragedy in Achebe's characteristically plain-spoken narrative: the men and women driven mad by the grinding, endless war who "could often be seen walking seemingly aimlessly on the roads in tattered clothes, in conversation with themselves."
But mostly Achebe's account is tinged with odd nostalgia for the ephemeral moment when Biafra seemed to birth a national culture. "One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not know existed, a determination, in fact."
Yet when Achebe praises Ojukwu's "gift for oratory" or the colors in the new nation's flag it is at odds with the haunting images of suffering brought by the war: the famine, the bodies "rotting under the hot sun." His nostalgia seems jarring and misplaced.
For judgments on Biafra, perhaps we should rely on Nigeria's other great man of letters, Wole Soyinka, whose blunt appraisal is that secession was "simply politically and militarily unwise."
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