We Remember Differently
I have
met Chinua Achebe only three times. The first, at the National Arts Club in
Manhattan, I joined the admiring circle around him. A gentle-faced man in a
wheelchair. “Good evening, sir. I’m Chimamanda Adichie,” I said, and he
replied, mildly, “I thought you were running away from me.” I mumbled, nervous,
grateful for the crush of people around us. I had been running away from him.
After my first novel was published, I received an email from his son. My dad
has just read your novel and liked it very much. He wants you to call him at
this number. I read it over and over, breathless with excitement. But I never
called. A few years later, my editor sent Achebe a manuscript of my second
novel. She did not tell me, because she wanted to shield me from the possibility
of disappointment. One afternoon, she called. “Chimamanda, are you sitting
down? I have wonderful news.” She read me the blurb Achebe had just sent her.
We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer
endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. Adichie knows what is at stake,
and what to do about it. She is fearless or she would not have taken on the
intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war. Adichie came almost fully made.
Afterwards, I held on to the phone and wept. I have memorized those words. In
my mind, they glimmer still, the validation of a writer whose work had
validated me. I grew up writing imitative stories. Of characters eating food I
had never seen and having conversations I had never heard. They might have been
good or bad, those stories, but they were emotionally false, they were not
mine. Then came a glorious awakening: Chinua Achebe’s fiction. Here were
familiar characters who felt true; here was language that captured my two
worlds; here was a writer writing not what he felt he should write but what he
wanted to write. His work was free of anxiety, wore its own skin effortlessly.
It emboldened me, not to find my voice, but to speak in the voice I already
had. And so, when that e-mail came from his son, I knew, overly-thrilled as I
was, that I would not call. His work had done more than enough. In an odd way,
I was so awed, so grateful, that I did not want to meet him. I wanted some
distance between my literary hero and me. Chinua Achebe and I have never had a
proper conversation. The second time I saw him, at a luncheon in his honor
hosted by the British House of Lords, I sat across from him and avoided his
eye. (“Chinua Achebe is the only person I have seen you shy with,” a friend
said). The third, at a New York event celebrating fifty years of THINGS FALL
APART, we crowded around him backstage, Edwidge Danticat and I, Ha Jin and Toni
Morrison, Colum McCann and Chris Abani. We seemed, magically, bound together in
a warm web, all of us affected by his work. Achebe looked pleased, but also
vaguely puzzled by all the attention. He spoke softly, the volume of his entire
being turned to ‘low.’ I wanted to tell him how much I admired his integrity,
his speaking out about the disastrous leadership in my home state of Anambra,
but I did not. Before I went on stage, he told me, “Jisie ike.” I wondered if
he fully grasped, if indeed it was possible to, how much his work meant to so
many. History and civics, as school subjects, function not merely to teach
facts but to transmit more subtle things, like pride and dignity. My Nigerian
education taught me much, but left gaping holes. I had not been taught to
imagine my pre-colonial past with any accuracy, or pride, or complexity. And so
Achebe’s work, for me, transcended literature. It became personal. ARROW OF
GOD, my favorite, was not just about the British government’s creation of
warrant chiefs and the linked destinies of two men, it became the life my
grandfather might have lived. THINGS FALL APART is the African novel most read
– and arguably most loved – by Africans, a novel published when ‘African novel’
meant European accounts of ‘native’ life. Achebe was an unapologetic member of
the generation of African writers who were ‘writing back,’ challenging the
stock Western images of their homeland, but his work was not burdened by its
intent. It is much-loved not because Achebe wrote back, but because he wrote
back well. His work was wise, humorous, and human. For many Africans, THINGS
FALL APART remains a gesture of returned dignity, a literary and an emotional
experience; Mandela called Achebe the writer in whose presence the prison walls
came down. Achebe’s most recent book, his long-awaited memoir of the
Nigerian-Biafra war, is both sad and angry, a book by a writer looking back and
mourning Nigeria’s failures. I wish THERE WAS A COUNTRY had been better edited
and more rigorously detailed in its account of the war. But these flaws do not
make it any less seminal: an account of the most important event in Nigeria’s history
by Nigeria’s most important storyteller.
An
excerpt from the book has ignited great controversy among Nigerians. In it,
Achebe, indignant about the millions of people who starved to death in Biafra,
holds Obafemi Awolowo, Nigerian Finance Minister during the war, responsible
for the policy of blockading Biafra. He quote’s Awolowo’s own words on the
blockade – ‘all is fair in war and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I
don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder’
and then argues that Awolowo’s support of the blockade was ‘driven by an
overriding ambition for power for himself in particular and for the advancement
of his Yoruba people in general.’ I have been startled and saddened by the
responses to this excerpt. Many are blindingly ethnic, lacking in empathy and,
most disturbing of all, lacking in knowledge. We can argue about how we
interpret the facts of our shared history, but we cannot, surely, argue about
the facts themselves. Awolowo, as de facto ‘number two man’ on the Nigerian
side, was a central architect of the blockade on Biafra. During and after the
war, Awolowo publicly defended the blockade. Without the blockade, the massive
starvation in Biafra would not have occurred. These are the facts. Some Nigerians,
in responding to Achebe, have argued that the blockade was fair, as all is fair
in war. The blockade was, in my opinion, inhumane and immoral. And it was
unnecessary – Nigeria would have won anyway, it was the much-better-armed side
in a war that Wole Soyinka called a shabby unequal conflict. The policy of
starving a civilian population into surrender does not merely go against the
Geneva conventions, but in this case, a war between siblings, people who were
formerly fellow country men and women now suddenly on opposite sides, it seems
more chilling. All is not fair in war. Especially not in a fratricidal war. But
I do not believe the blockade was a calculated power grab by Awolowo for
himself and his ethnic group; I think of it, instead, as one of the many
dehumanizing acts that war, by its nature, brings about. Awolowo was
undoubtedly a great political leader. He was also – rare for Nigerian leaders –
a great intellectual. No Nigerian leader has, arguably, articulated a political
vision as people-centered as Awolowo’s. For Nigerians from the west, he was the
architect of free primary education, of progressive ideas. But for Nigerians
from the east, he was a different man. I grew up hearing, from adults, versions
of Achebe’s words about Awolowo. He was the man who prevented an Igbo man from
leading the Western House of Assembly in the famous ‘carpet crossing’ incident
of 1952. He was the man who betrayed Igbo people when he failed on his alleged
promise to follow Biafra’s lead and pull the Western region out of Nigeria. He
was the man who, in the words of my uncle, “made Igbo people poor because he
never liked us.” At the end of the war, every Igbo person who had a bank
account in Nigeria was given twenty pounds, no matter how much they had in
their accounts before the war. I have always thought this a livid injustice. I
know a man who worked in a multinational company in 1965. He was, like Achebe,
one of the many Igbo who just could not believe that their lives were in danger
in Lagos and so he fled in a hurry, at the last minute, leaving thousands of
pounds in his account. After the war, his account had twenty pounds. To many
Igbo, this policy was uncommonly punitive, and went against the idea of ‘no
victor, no vanquished.’ Then came the indigenization decree, which moved
industrial and corporate power from foreign to Nigerian hands. It made many
Nigerians wealthy; much of the great wealth in Nigeria today has its roots in
this decree. But the Igbo could not participate; they were broke. I do not agree,
as Achebe writes, that one of the main reasons for Nigeria’s present
backwardness is the failure to fully reintegrate the Igbo. I think Nigeria
would be just as backward even if the Igbo had been fully integrated –
institutional and leadership failures run across all ethnic lines. But the
larger point Achebe makes is true, which is that the Igbo presence in Nigerian
positions of power has been much reduced since the war. Before the war, many of
Nigeria’s positions of power were occupied by Igbo people, in the military,
politics, academia, business. Perhaps because the Igbo were very receptive to
Western education, often at the expense of their own traditions, and had both a
striving individualism and a communal ethic. This led to what, in history
books, is often called a ‘fear of Igbo domination’ in the rest of Nigeria. The
Igbo themselves were insensitive to this resentment, the bombast and brashness
that is part of Igbo culture only exacerbated it. And so leading Igbo families
entered the war as Nigeria’s privileged elite but emerged from it penniless,
stripped and bitter. Today, ‘marginalization’ is a popular word in Igbo Land.
Many Igbo feel marginalized in Nigeria, a feeling based partly
on
experience and partly on the psychology of a defeated people. (Another
consequence of this psychology, perhaps, is the loss of the communal ethic of
the Igbo, much resented sixty years ago. It is almost non-existent today, or as
my cousin eloquently put it: Igbo people don’t even send each other.) Some
responses to Achebe have had a ‘blame the victim’ undertone, suggesting that
Biafrians started the war and therefore deserved what they got. But Biafrians
did not ‘start the war.’ Nobody with a basic knowledge of the facts can make
that case. Biafrian secession was inevitable, after the federal government’s
failure to implement the agreements reached at Aburi, itself prompted by the
massacre of Igbo in the North. The cause of the massacres was arguably the
first coup of 1966. Many believed it to be an ‘Igbo’ coup, which was not an
unreasonable belief, Nigeria was already mired in ethnic resentments, the
premiers of the West and North were murdered while the Eastern premier was not,
and the coup plotters were Igbo. Except for Adewale Ademoyega, a Yoruba, who
has argued that it was not an ethnic coup. I don’t believe it was. It seems,
from most accounts, to have been an idealistic and poorly-planned nationalist
exercise aimed at ridding Nigeria of a corrupt government. It was, also,
horrendously, inexcusably violent. I wish the coup had never happened. I wish
the premiers and other casualties had been arrested and imprisoned, rather than
murdered. But the truth that glares above all else is that the thousands of
Igbo people murdered in their homes and in the streets had nothing to do with
the coup. Some have blamed the Biafrian starvation on Ojukwu, Biafra’s leader,
because he rejected an offer from the Nigerian government to bring in food
through a land corridor. It was an ungenerous offer, one easy to refuse. A land
corridor could also mean advancement of Nigerian troops. Ojukwu preferred
airlifts, they were tactically safer, more strategic, and he could bring in
much-needed arms as well. Ojukwu should have accepted the land offer, shabby as
it was. Innocent lives would have been saved. I wish he had not insisted on a
ceasefire, a condition which the Nigerian side would never have agreed to. But
it is disingenuous to claim that Ojukwu’s rejection of this offer caused the
starvation. Many Biafrians had already starved to death. And, more crucially,
the Nigerian government had shown little regard for Biafra’s civilian
population; it had, for a while, banned international relief agencies from
importing food. Nigerian planes bombed markets and targeted hospitals in
Biafra, and had even shot down an International Red Cross plane. Ordinary
Biafrians were steeped in distrust of the Nigerian side. They felt safe eating
food flown in from Sao Tome, but many believed that food brought from Nigeria
would be poisoned, just as they believed that, if the war ended in defeat,
there would be mass killings of Igbo people. The Biafrian propaganda machine
further drummed this in. But, before the propaganda, something else had sown
the seed of hateful fear: the 1966 mass murders of Igbo in the North. The scars
left were deep and abiding. Had the federal government not been unwilling or
incapable of protecting their lives and property, Igbo people would not have so
massively supported secession and intellectuals, like Achebe, would not have
joined in the war effort. I have always admired Ojukwu, especially for his
early idealism, the choices he made as a young man to escape the shadow of his
father’s great wealth, to serve his country. In Biafra, he was a flawed leader,
his paranoia and inability to trust those close to him clouded his judgments
about the execution of the war, but he was also a man of principle who spoke up
forcefully about the preservation of the lives of Igbo people when the federal
government seemed indifferent. He was, for many Igbo, a Churchillian figure, a
hero who inspired them, whose oratory moved them to action and made them feel
valued, especially in the early months of the war. Other responses to Achebe
have dismissed the war as something that happened ‘long ago.’ But some of the
people who played major roles are alive today. We must confront our history, if
only to begin to understand how we came to be where we are today. The Americans
are still hashing out details of their civil war that ended in 1865; the
Spanish have only just started, seventy years after theirs ended. Of course,
discussing a history as contested and contentious as the Nigeria-Biafra war
will not always be pleasant. But it is necessary. An Igbo saying goes: If a
child does not ask what killed his father, that same thing will kill him. What
many of the responses to Achebe make clear, above all else, is that we remember
differently. For some, Biafra is history, a series of events in a book, fodder
for argument and analysis. For others, it is a loved one killed in a market
bombing, it is hunger as a near-constant companion, it is the death of
certainty. The war was fought on
Biafrian
soil. There are buildings in my hometown with bullet holes; as a child, playing
outside, I would sometimes come across bits of rusty ammunition left behind
from the war. My generation was born after 1970, but we know of property lost,
of relatives who never ‘returned’ from the North, of shadows that hung heavily
over family stories. We inherited memory. And we have the privilege of distance
that Achebe does not have. Achebe is a war survivor. He was a member of the
generation of Nigerians who were supposed to lead a new nation, inchoate but
full of optimism. It shocked him, how quickly Nigerian fell apart. In THERE WAS
A COUNTRY he sounds unbelieving, still, about the federal government’s
indifference while Igbo people were being massacred in Northern Nigeria in
1966. But shock-worthy events did not only happen in the North. Achebe himself
was forced to leave Lagos, a place he had called home for many years, because
his life was no longer safe. His crime was being Igbo. A Yoruba acquaintance
once told me a story of how he was nearly lynched in Lagos at the height of the
tensions before the war; he was light-skinned, and a small mob in a market
assumed him to be ‘Igbo Yellow’ and attacked him. The Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Lagos was forced to leave. So was the Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Ibadan. Because they were Igbo. For Achebe, all this was deeply personal, deeply painful. His house
was bombed, his office was destroyed. He escaped account from him is a
remarkable failure of empathy. I wish more of the responses had acknowledged,
real experiences like Achebe’s must have left behind. Ethnicity has become, in
Nigeria, more political than cultural, less about philosophy and customs and
values held by which ethnicity, which revered leader must be turned into a
flawless saint. We cannot deny ethnicity. they were mutually exclusive; I am as
much Igbo as I am Nigerian. I have hope in the future of Nigeria, mostly (We
could start, for example, by not merely teaching Maths and English in primary
schools, but also teaching For some non-Igbo, confronting facts of the war is
uncomfortable, even inconvenient. But we must hear one of our different
experiences, we remember differently. Biafrian minorities were distrusted by
the Igbo majority, particularly in the Midwest, suffered at the hands of both
Biafrian and Nigerian soldiers. ‘Abandoned property’ changed after the war,
creating “Rumu” from “Umu.” Nigerian soldiers carried out a horrendous massacre
in Some Igbo families are still waiting, half-hoping, that a lost son, a lost
daughter, will come home. All of these Achebe has told
his story. This week, he turns 82. Long may he
live.
Chimamanda
Adichie.
