Placed side by side independent accounts of the Nigerian Civil War, Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country is a pot-pourri of deliberate misrepresentations, outright inventions and a one-eyed view of events

A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It is not the business of a writer to side with the powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be thoughtless and wrong. The Nazi party was once a powerless group. A writer should not prefer falsehood to reality just because it serves patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should get out and warn the society that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when they are not properly moderated by higher considerations, they can prove more destructive than nuclear weapons. Four months after America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the dead eventually totalled 240,000. In the ethnic rivalry between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, within two months 500,000 were murdered with ordinary machetes.

Patriotism, when deployed, must always be simultaneously governed by something higher and lower than itself, like the arms of a democratic government. These provide checks and balances so that patriotism does not become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Chinua Achebe’s patriotic autobiography, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, in the light of something higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret, Top Secret US State Department Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967-1969 and something lower: The Education of a British Protected Child by Chinua Achebe himself.

There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be fingered for the cause. Achebe’s logic is neat, but too simple: Africa began to suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is, there was no suffering or inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206 countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation of consciousness, which makes it possible to treat a person as an individual and not basically a member of another tribe. That is the first error of Achebe.

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with every step you make. All the places that should alarm the moral consciousness of any writer, Achebe is either indifferent to or dismisses them outright because the victims are not his people. But in every encounter that shows the Igbo being killed or resented by Nigerians, or by the Yoruba in particular, Achebe intensifies the spotlight, deploying stratospheric rhetoric, including quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in end notes to show he is not partial. Achebe calls upon powerfully coercive emotive words and phrasings to dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore, not only does he take pride in ignoring the findings of common sense, he allocates primetime attention to fact-free rants just because they say his people are the most superior tribe in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is a masterpiece of propaganda and sycophancy. It is not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to lies.

First, let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo. Throughout the book, Achebe presents Okigbo in loving moments complete with tender details: Okigbo attending to Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering opulent room service dishes for Achebe’s wife in a swanky hotel, while millions were allegedly dying of starvation and Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo being a dearly beloved uncle to Achebe’s children and Okigbo opening a publishing house in the middle of the war. Out of the blue, he writes that he hears on Radio Nigeria the death of Major Christopher Okigbo. Major? The reader is completely shocked and feels revulsion for the side that killed him and sympathy for the side that lost him. Unlike other accounts, like Obi Nwankama’s definitive biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips details of Okigbo running arms and ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and also from place to place in Biafra; he omits the fact that Okigbo was an active-duty guerrilla fighter, killing the other side before he himself got killed. Like many other episodes recounted in the book, Achebe photoshops the true picture so that readers would allocate early enough which side should merit their sympathy, which side should be slated for revulsion. Pity, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what is on sale throughout the book. Achebe, of course, is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.

Real Reasons For The Pogroms
To Achebe, the final straw that led to secession was the alleged 30,000 Igbos killed in the North. He carefully structures the narrative to locate the reason for this systematic killing/pogrom/ethnic-cleansing in the so-called usual resentment of the Igbo and not from the fallout of the first coup in the history of Nigeria. Achebe dismisses the targeted assassinations as not an Igbo coup. The two reasons he gives are because there was a Yoruba officer among the coup plotters and that the alleged leader of the coup, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, was Igbo in name only. “Not only was he born in Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo and wore the Northern traditional dress when not in uniform (p79).”

Really? First, it was not mysterious that Azikiwe left the country in October 1965 on an endless medical cruise to Britain and the Caribbean. Dr. Idehen, his personal doctor, abandoned him when he got tired of the endless medical trip. Not even the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, never held outside London, but hosted in Lagos for the first time in early January, was enough incentive for Azikiwe to return, yet he was the president of the nation. In a revelation contained in the American secret documents, it was Azikiwe’s presidential bodyguards that Major Ifeajuna, the coup’s mastermind, used to capture the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Once Ifeajuna and Major Okafor, Commanding Officer of the Federal Guards, tipped off Azikiwe about the planned bloodshed, Okafor, Ezedigbo and other guards became freer to meet 12 kilometres away in Ifeajuna’s house in Apapa to take the plan to the next level. The recruitment for the ringleaders was done between August and October 1965. Immediately Azikiwe left, planning and training for the execution began.
Second, the eastern leadership was spared when others were murdered. Third, the head of state, Major-General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, did not try to execute the coup plotters as was the practice in a purely military affair. Ojukwu told Suzanne Cronje, the British-South African author, that he asked Aguiyi-Ironsi to take over and told him how to unite the army behind him. That was the reason he made him the governor of Eastern Region. Four, when Awolowo, Bola Ige, Anthony Enahoro, Lateef Jakande were imprisoned for sedition, they served their terms in Calabar, away from their regions as it was the normal practice. When Wole Soyinka was imprisoned at the beginning of the civil war, he was sent to Kaduna and Jos prisons, but the ring leaders of the coup were moved from Lagos back to the Eastern Region, among their people on the advice of Ojukwu. Five, during the Aburi negotiations, why was full reprieve for the coup plotters put on the table? Six, a freed Nzeogwu by April 1967, before the secession, joined in training recruits in Abakaliki for the inevitable war with Nigeria. He later died on the Nsukka front, fighting for Biafra. That was Achebe’s Hausa-speaking, kaftan-wearing Kaduna man, who was Igbo in name only. It was an Igbo coup. The same repackaging was attempted for the invasion and occupation of the Midwest. It was called liberation of Midwest from Hausa-Fulani domination when it was simply another Igbo coup for Igbo ends, planned in Enugu and headed by a Yoruba man.

However, the January coup did not foment a much more visceral response in the Western Region since their assassinated political leader was viewed as part of the corrupt, troublesome, election-rigging class. To Westerners, the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish. But to the Northerners, who were feudal in their social organisation, it was a different matter. Sardauna was their all in all; he was the heir to the powerful Sokoto Caliphate and descendant of Usman dan Fodio. More than Azikiwe and Awolowo, Sardauna was the most powerful politician in Nigeria (pg 46). Murdering him was murdering the pride of a people. Achebe chooses to ignore this perspective and more importantly the fact that the Igbo in the North were widely taunting their hosts on the loss of their leaders. Celestine Ukwu, a popular Igbo musician, released songs titled Ewu Ne Ba Akwa (Goats Are Crying) and others celebrating “Igbo power”, the “January Victory.” Posters, stickers, postcards, cartoons displaying the murdered Sardauna begging Major Nzeogwu at the gates of heaven or Balewa burning outright in pits of hell or Nzeogwu standing St. George-like on Sardauna, the defeated dragon, began to show up across Northern towns and cities. These provocations were so pervasive that they warranted the promulgation of Decree 44 of 1966 banning them. The Igbo did not stop. Azikiwe is more honest than Achebe. In his pamphlet, The Origins of the Civil War, he writes: “Some Ibo elements, who were domiciled in Northern Nigeria taunted northerners by defaming their leaders through means of records or songs or pictures. They also published pamphlets and postcards, which displayed a peculiar representation of certain northerners, living or dead, in a manner likely to provoke disaffection.” These images and songs eventually led to the so-called pogroms/ethnic-cleansing/genocide, not the coup. The coup was in January, the pogroms started late in May and the provocations were in between.
However, the Igbo in the East did not sit idly by. They started the massacre of innocent Northerners in their midst. Achebe chose to ignore this account since it does not serve his agenda so we return to Azikiwe: “Between August and September 1966, either by chance or by design, hundreds of Hausa, Fulani, Nupe and Igala-speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria origin residing in the Eastern Nigeria were abducted and massacred in Aba, Abakaliki, Enugu, Onitsha and Port Harcourt.” It is worthy to note that these Northerners never published nor circulated irreverent or taunting pictures of Eastern leaders unlike the Igbo of the North; they were just massacred for being Northerners. The government of Eastern Region did not stand up to stop these massacres. Neither did the Igbo intellectuals. Ojukwu, the military administrator, even made a radio broadcast, saying he could no longer guarantee the security of non-Eastern Nigerians in the East and that Easterners, who did not return to Igboland, would be considered traitors. This was the time Professor Sam Aluko, who was the head of Economics department at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and personal friend of Ojukwu, fled back to the West. Azikiwe continues in his book: “Eyewitnesses gave on-the-spot accounts of corpses floating in the Imo River and River Niger. Radio Cotonou broadcast this macabre news, which was suppressed by Enugu Radio. Then Radio Kaduna relayed it and this sparked off the massacres of September – October 1966 [in the North].”

I Above Others
Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and goes on to pivot the “pogrom” on the fact that the Igbo were resented because they were the most superior, most successful nationality in the country. He claims (on pg 233) that they were “the dominant tribe,” “led the nation in virtually every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the arts (pg 66),” which included having two vice-chancellors in Yorubaland; they the Igbo are the folkloric “leopard, the wise and peaceful king of the animals (pg177),” they “spearheaded (pg 97) the struggle to free Nigeria from colonial rule.” “This group, the Igbo, that gave the colonising British so many headaches and then literally drove them out of Nigeria was now an open target, scapegoats for the failings and grievances of colonial and post-independent Nigeria (pg 67).” An Igboman, Achebe writes, has “an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots…Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies…Although the Yoruba had a huge historical headstart, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950 (pg74).” Besides the fact that this has a language consistent with white supremacist literature, Achebe, to demonstrate he is not partial or a chauvinist, based himself on a 17-page report in Journal of Modern African Studies, titled Modernisation and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the Ibos by Paul Anber.

I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this “scholar” was designated as “a member of staff of one of the Nigerian universities.” Why would a scholar hide his place of work in a journal? I checked the essays and book reviews in all the 196 issues of Journal of Modern African Studies, from Volume 1 Issue 1 of January 1963 to the last issue Volume 49 November 2011, there was nowhere a piece was published and the designation of the scholar vague or hidden. Also, this Anber never published any piece before and after this article in this or any other journal. I wanted to start checking the academic staff list of the five universities in Nigeria then until I realised again that it says “he is a staff of a Nigerian university.” The truth is: Paul Anber is a fake name under which someone else or a group of people, possibly Igbo, is masquerading. And he/they never used this name again for any other piece or books. So that this ruse would not be found out was the reason he/they hid his/their university. And this piece, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has been the cornerstone of books and widely quoted by other journals over a period of 45 years. It is the cornerstone of the chapter, A History Of Ethnic Tension And Resentment, which Achebe used to skew the motive for Igbo people’s maltreatment from the fallout of January1966 coup and the inflammatory provocations they published to resentment for being allegedly the most successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.

Achebe deserves the hottest part of hell. Achebe should rot in hell for his misrepresentation. I am sure Achebe is in hell at the moment burning and regretting why he lied and misled millions of people. Achebe left out the atrocities of Biafra Army but wrote about atrocities of Nigerian Army who warned Ojukwu about consequences of war. Achebe is one of the reasons why Nigeria is polarized today. Jonathan is following the script of Achebe thinking he can re-write history by being the macho man for Ibos.

Once again, Achebe should and must rot in hell fire.

Good luck in hell Achebe.