Will there still be a country?

Aliyu Musa

Last week Nigeria mourned one of the soundest scholars whose contributions to the world of literature will for a long time remain unforgettable. But what will be more indelible in the minds of Professor Albert Chinualumogu Achebe’s audience are the controversies his writings have drawn.

Recently his most controversial narrative, ‘There was a country: A personal History of Biafra’ drew a chain of reactions in support of or opposed to his postulations. Over the period the debate dragged I deliberately opted not to write because I was quietly probing my own perception of two filaments: First, does Achebe’s choice of title convey his disappointment in the failure of Biafra to become the great nation they had wished for in spite of their determination? Second, is the title being predictive of the possibility that one day we would look back and say “there was Nigeria”?

The plausibility of the first point comes in all his writings, from ‘Things Fall Apart’, ‘Arrow of God’ down to ‘There was a Country’, in which he paints the uniqueness of the Igbo people, their culture and resilience despite years of what he sees as engineered domination and extinction attempts.

In ‘Things Fall Apart’, for example Professor Achebe richly portrays an Igbo culture, which in spite of its own struggles, profoundly endured until the encroachment of colonialists/missionaries, from which point Christianity largely dislodged the traditional beliefs.

It was the same game plan, he suggests, that worked in the making of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria up until the 1967 civil war in which at least one million Nigerians died (which in his estimation and those of most Igbo writers the victims were entirely their people regardless of others’ fatalities).

Perhaps the biggest influence for his choice of title comes from the frustration of Biafra not succeeding in seceding; thus, foiling the emergence of what he thought would be a powerful black nation, richly endowed with enterprising people and vast natural resources, united by a common culture and religion and safely shut away from the ever ‘volatile’ and ‘less intelligent’ North hindered by a ‘wary religion’ and a Southwest deterred by its ‘traditional hierarchies’.

On the other hand Achebe sounds clairvoyant in saying there was a country. Nigeria’s current situation gives enough reason for one to be less optimistic of its future. Here’s a country where none of the ethnic groups feels confident of its artificialness to the extent that some of its own leaders have at various times dismissed it as a contraption that is self-destruct. Here’s a territory whose wealth is sufficient for its survival but greed and corruption have made it practically impossible for the benefit to be reaped by all. Here’s a country whose future clearly hangs in the balance because it does not and will not invest in future generations.

When a country continues to live as if it does not believe there will be tomorrow it is unmistakably planning its own sudden end. The endless bombings in the North, kidnappings and armed robberies in the South and many other vices that now serve as means of holding the country by its jugular are manifestations of that collapse, which Achebe might be implying in his last book.

But what I find disagreeable is the suggestion that the Igbo people have been singled out for extinction. Following last week’s bomb attacks on Kano it was claimed that the victims were entirely from this tribe. One man who claims to be speaking for them even threatened another civil war and there were reports of reprisal attacks on Northerners living in the Southeast. Then Professors Wole Soyinka and JP Clark, arguably the country’s surviving most accomplished scholars, came up with the bizarre idea that the Kano assault might have accelerated Achebe’s death.

All that has since been debunked. If the list the Kano State government later made available is anything to rely on most of the victims were not from the Igbo ethnic group. Nonetheless they were human beings for whom there should be sympathy and justice.

Even after his death Professor Achebe’s literary legacies will continue to draw debates. ‘There was a country’, especially, will continue to serve as a sort of parameter in the intellectual parlance for measuring how closer Nigeria has moved to the brink or how further it has moved away. But in the end we might be able to stand at some point and say whether there is or there was a country.