There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

The prime minister of Nigeria, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who had been built up into a great statesman by the Western world, did nothing to save his country from impending chaos. The British made certain on the eve of their departure that power went to that conservative element in the country that had played no real part in the struggle for independence. This was the situation in which I wrote my novel A Man of the People.

Nigerian artists responded to these events in a variety of ways. The irrepressible Wole Soyinka put on the stage a devastating satire, Before the Blackout, which played to packed houses night after night in Ibadan. The popular traveling theater of Hubert Ogunde and his many wives began to stage a play clearly directed against the crooked premier of Western Nigeria. The theater group was declared an unlawful society and banned in Western Nigeria. Things were coming to a head in that region. Violence erupted after an unbelievable election swindle, as a result of the anger and frustration of Western Nigerians. It was in these circumstances that Wole Soyinka was charged with holding up the Ibadan radio station and removing the premier’s taped speech!

Creative writers in independent Nigeria found themselves with a new, terrifying problem on their hands: They found that the independence their country was supposed to have won was totally without content. In the words of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria was given her freedom “on a platter of gold.” We should have known that freedom should be won, not given on a plate. Like the head of John the Baptist, this gift to Nigeria proved most unlucky.

The Role of the Writer in Africa

What then were we to do as writers? What was our role in our new country? How were we to think about the use of our talents? I can say that when a number of us decided that we would be writers, we had not thought through these questions very clearly. In fact, we did not have a clue what we were up against. What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories—prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

When a number of us decided to pick up the pen and make writing a career there was no African literature as we know it today. There were of course our great oral tradition—the epics of the Malinke, the Bamana, and the Fulani—the narratives of Olaudah Equaino, works by D. A. Fagunwa and Muhammadu Bello, and novels by Pita Nwana, Amos Tutuola, and Cyprian Ekwensi.

Across the African continent, literary aficionados could savor the works of Egyptian, Nubian, and Carthaginian antiquity; Amharic and Tigrigna writings from Ethiopia and Eritrea; and the magnificent poetry and creation myths of Somalia. There was more—the breathtakingly beautiful Swahili poetry of East and Central Africa, and the chronicles, legends, and fables of the Ashanti, Dogon, Hutu, Kalanga, Mandingo, Ndebele, Ovambo, Shona, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Tutsi, Venda, Wolof, Xhosa, and Zulu.

Olive Schreiner’s nineteenth-century classic Story of an African Farm and works by Samuel Mqhayi and Thomas Mofolo, Alan Paton, Camara Laye, Mongo Beti, Peter Abrahams, and Ferdinand Oyono, all preceded our time. Still, the numbers were not sufficient.1

And so I had no idea when I was writing Things Fall Apart whether it would even be accepted or published. All of this was new—there was nothing by which I could gauge how it was going to be received.

Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective—in full earshot of the world.

The preparation for this life of writing, I have mentioned, came from English-system-style schools and university. I read Shakespeare, Dickens, and all the books that were read in the English public schools. They were novels and poems about English culture, and some things I didn’t know anything about. When I saw a goo

d sentence, saw a good phrase from the Western canon, of course I was influenced by it. But the story itself—there weren’t any models. Those that were set in Africa were not particularly inspiring. If they were not saying something that was antagonistic toward us, they weren’t concerned about us.

When people talk about African culture they often mean an assortment of ancient customs and traditions. The reasons for this view are quite clear. When the first Europeans came to Africa they knew very little of the history and complexity of the people and the continent. Some of that group persuaded themselves that Africa had no culture, no religion, and no history. It was a convenient conclusion, because it opened the door for all sorts of rationalizations for the exploitation that followed. Africa was bound, sooner or later, to respond to this denigration by resisting and displaying her own accomplishments. To do this effectively her spokesmen—the writers, intellectuals, and some politicians, including Azikiwe, Senghor, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Lumumba, and Mandela—engaged Africa’s past, stepping back into what can be referred to as the “era of purity,” before the coming of Europe. We put into the books and poems what was uncovered there, and this became known as African culture.

This was a very special kind of inspiration. Some of us decided to tackle the big subjects of the day—imperialism, slavery, independence, gender, racism, etc. And some did not. One could write about roses or the air or about love for all I cared; that was fine too. As for me, however, I chose the former.

Engaging such heavy subjects while at the same time trying to help create a unique and authentic African literary tradition would mean that some of us would decide to use the colonizer’s tools: his language, altered sufficiently to bear the weight of an African creative aesthetic, infused with elements of the African literary tradition. I borrowed proverbs from our culture and history, colloquialisms and African expressive language from the ancient griots, the worldviews, perspectives, and customs from my Igbo tradition and cosmology, and the sensibilities of everyday people.

It was important to us that a body of work be developed of the highest possible quality that would oppose the negative discourse in some of the novels we encountered. By “writing back” to the West we were attempting to reshape the dialogue between the colonized and the colonizer. Our efforts, we hoped, would broaden the world’s understanding, appreciation, and conceptualization of what literature meant when including the African voice and perspective.2 We were clearly engaged in what Ode Ogede aptly refers to as “the politics of representation.”3

This is another way of stating the fact of what I consider to be my mission in life. My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this universal storytelling before we can say, “Now we’ve heard it all.” I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, “The novel is dead, the story is dead.” I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.4

There are some who believe that the writer has no role in politics or the social upheavals of his or her day. Some of my friends say, “No, it is too rough there. A writer has no business being where it is so rough. The writer should be on the sidelines with his notepad and pen, where he can observe with objectivity.” I believe that the African writer who steps aside can only write footnotes or a glossary when the event is over. He or she will become like the contemporary intellectual of futility in many other places, asking questions like: “Who am I? What is the meaning of my existence? Does this place belong to me or to someone else? Does my life belong to me or to some other person?” These are questions that no one can answer.

Ali Mazrui famously restated this position in his novel The Trial of Christopher Okigbo in which he takes my friend, the great poet, to task for, as Mazrui believes, “wasting his great talent on a conflict of disputable merit: ‘The Nigerian Civil War and all its ramified implications [can be] compressed in the single poetic tragedy of the death of Christopher Okigbo.’”5 In Mazrui’s fiction Christopher Okigbo finds himself charged with “the offence of putting society before art in his scale of values. . . . No great artist has a right to carry patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential.”6

Christopher Okigbo believed, as I do, that art and community in Africa are clearly linked. African art as we understand it has not been distilled or purified and refined to the point where it has lost all traces of real life, lost the vitality of the street, like art from some advanced societies and academic art tend to be. In Africa the tendency is to keep art involved with the people. It is clearly emphasized among my own Igbo people that art must never be allowed to escape into the rarefied atmosphere but must remain active in the lives of the members of society.

I have described earlier the practice of mbari, the Igbo concept of “art as celebration.” Different aspects of Igbo life are integrated in this art form. Even those who are not trained artists are brought in to participate in these artistic festivals, in which the whole life of the world is depicted. Ordinary people must be brought in; a conscious effort must be made to bring the life of the village or town into this art. The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There is constant change in the world. Foreign visitors who had not been encountered up to that time are brought in as well, to illustrate the dynamic nature of life. The point I’m trying to make is that there is a need to bring life back into art by bringing art into life, so that the two can hold a conversation.

In a novel such as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard you can see this vitality put to work on the written page. There is no attempt to draw a line between what is permissible and what is not, what is possible and what is not possible, what is new and what is old. In a story that is set in the distant past you suddenly see a telephone, a car, a bishop—all kinds of things that don’t seem to tie in. But in fact what you have is the whole life of the community, not just the community of humans but the community of ancestors, the animal world, of trees, and so on. Everything plays a part.

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My own assessment is that the role of the writer is not a rigid position and depends to some extent on the state of health of his or her society. In other words, if a society is ill the writer has a responsibility to point it out. If the society is healthier, the writer’s job is different.

We established the Society of Nigerian Authors (SONA) in the mid-1960s as an attempt to put our writers in a firm and dynamic frame. It was sort of a trade union. We thought it would keep our members safe and protect other artists as well. We hoped that our existence would create an environment in Nigeria where freedom of creative expression was not only possible but protected. We sought ultimately through our art to create for Nigeria an environment of good order and civilization—a daunting task that needed to be tackled in a country engulfed in crisis.

The notion of beneficent fiction is simply one of defining storytelling as a creative component of human experience, human life. It is something griots have done in Africa from the dawn of time—pass down stories that have a positive purpose and a use for society, from generation to generation. Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society, thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn’t be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound. Still I think that behind it all is a desire to make our experience in the world better, to make our passage through life easier. Once you talk about making things better you’re talking about politics.

I believe that it is impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest. In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint. Even those early novels that loo

k like very gentle re-creations of the past—what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past. That was the protest, because there were people who thought we didn’t have a past. What I was doing was to say politely that we did—here it is. So commitment is nothing new. Commitment runs through my work. In fact, I should say that all of our writers, whether they’re aware of it or not, are committed writers. The whole pattern of life demanded that one should protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your traditions, your religion, and so on.7 The question of involvement in politics is really a matter of definition. I think it is quite often misunderstood. I have never proposed that every artist become an activist in the way we have always understood political activity. Some will, because that’s the way they are. Others will not, and we must not ask anyone to do more than is necessary for them to perform their task.

At the same time it is important to state that words have the power to hurt, even to denigrate and oppress others. Before I am accused of prescribing a way in which a writer should write, let me say that I do think that decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.8 If one didn’t realize the world was complex, vast, and diverse, one would write as if the world were one little county, and this would make us poor, and we would have impoverished the novel and our stories.

The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood. The writer is often faced with two choices—turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.9