There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Introduction

1. Author conversation with Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University, April 2010.

2. See “Nigeria: Lugard and Indirect Rule” (June 1991); www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-9347.html; also www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Indirect_rule.aspx.

3. The effects of that imposition are still felt today.

4. Berth Lindfors, ed., “Interview with Charles H. Rowell,” Conversations with Chinua Achebe (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 181.

Part 1

Pioneers of a New Frontier

1. Henry Venn and his colleagues at the Church Mission Society of England had launched a number of successful expeditions throughout Nigeria. The expeditions were led by an Englishman, Henry Townsend, and a remarkable man of Yoruba descent, from Freetown, Sierra Leone, Samuel Adjai Crowther. Later Crowther would not only be consecrated bishop of the Niger Territories in 1864, but he would have a profound influence on the development of the early Christian church throughout Nigeria. See also: Elizabeth Isichei: A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1995), chapt. 5; Toyin Falola and Mathew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 61–85.

The Magical Years

1. The Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria.

A Primary Exposure

1. Translation (roughly): “There will be no fooling around in Okongwu’s school.” Information provided by the Okongwu family. Interview with Nmutaka Okongwu, January 2011.

2. Well-known folklore about Okongwu.

3. His son Sonny Chu Okongwu would become Nigeria’s finance minister from 1986 to 1990.

4. Well-known folklore about Okongwu.

Leaving Home

1. Chike Momah related this story to me a few years later.

2. Herbert M. Cole’s Mbari, Art and Life Among the Owerri Igbo is an excellent resource (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1982).

The Formative Years at Umuahia and Ibadan

THE UM

UAHIA EXPERIENCE

1. Achebe Foundation interviews. Number 33: Professor Bede N. Okigbo in conversation with Professor Ossie Enekwe, Uduma Kalu, and Alvan Ewuzie. August 7, 2006.

2. Master Agambi was the other student who got a major scholarship. Agambi’s alma mater, Government College, Ibadan, has produced a significant number of prominent Nigerians, such as the T. M. Aluko; Dr. T. S. B. Aribisala, Cyprian Ekwensi, Anthony Enahoro, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Kolade, the late Dr. Akinola Aguda, Chief Olu Ibukun, the late ambassador Leslie Harriman, and Victor Olunloyo. Information from Government College, Ibadan, Old Boys Association (GCIOBA).

THE IBADAN EXPERIENCE

3. When I returned to Nigeria after five years of self-imposed exile in the United States, following the Nigeria-Biafra War, I was attracted to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in part because Ezeilo was the university president!

Discovering Things Fall Apart

1. Notes from discussion with Professor Jerome Brooks at Bard College (a version of which was later published as “The Art of Fiction” in the Paris Review, no. 139 [Winter 1994]).

2. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe: A Biography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 62.

3. I was told the story by the late Alan Hill.

4. Katie Bacon, “Atlantic Unbound: An African voice, Chinua Achebe,” The Atlantic, August, 2, 2000.