A Required Reference for Understanding Contemporary Africa

Abstract

Just a few months before his twenty-eighth birthday in 1958, Chinua Achebe writes Things Fall Apart, the classic restorative narrative of African affirmation that subverts the European conqueror’s frantic efforts to construct a historiography of African-memory erasure in the wake of a devastating conquest. This is the foundational opus inwhich theAfricanworld’s reply to Europe and theworld and a redefinition of itself and subsequent aspirations is codified. Chinua Achebe’s achievement is incomparable. Fifty-four years later, just a couple ofmonths before his eighty-second birthday in 2012, the perceptive and literary interventionist genius publishes There Was a Country, an indefatigable reminder to an oft-complacent world of the Igbo genocide, May 29, 1966–January 12, 1970, the foundational genocide of post(European)-conquest Africa, and the incredible survival of Igbo people. A quarter of this nation’s population, 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered by Nigeria and its allies during forty-four months of indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the German genocide of the Herero people of Namibia in the early 1900s. There Was a Country is a priceless gift to a