Exploring genocide, commitment and identity narratives in Chinua Achebe’s There was a country: A personal history of Biafra

Abstract

Before Chinua Achebe took a literary excursion into the events of the Nigerian Civil War, a large body of literature had emerged from the ugly experience that temporarily tore Nigeria apart. While some were factual narratives, some others were mere fictive tales. One major issue which the historical debacle thrust up was the role an artist should play in tragic circumstances such as the Biafran War. Should he detach himself from the conflict or should he get involved, literarily or otherwise? While a school of thought holds that the artist should, as an integral part of his environment, get involved in its affairs, whatever they may be, some others argue that the artist should be detached from the events around him. While the former emphasizes the imperative of commitment in art, the latter frowns on it, insisting that the artistic endeavour is such a sacred calling that must not be tainted by the mundane, everyday happenings around the artist. Another contentious issue in the Biafran story which many artists and writers that dealt with the subject matter before Achebe glossed over is the vexed issue of genocide. A seemingly unresolved aspect of the Biafran story revolves around whether the federal government of Nigeria committed genocide against Biafran citizens in the course of the war. This paper attends to these disputations around Biafra as presented by Chinua Achebe in the book understudy. Relying on historicism as an analytical tool, the paper aims at resolving these contentious issues especially from the point of view of the author. It establishes that art is commitment and that any artist who wants to be taken seriously cannot, therefore, afford to insulate himself from his environment. The paper further establishes that genocide is an indispensable adjunct of the Biafran story. It tries to resolve the issue around allegations or charges of genocide against the federal government of Nigeria. It throws light on whether the Biafran conflict was a normal civil war or whether its prosecutors engaged in any form of war crimes. It distills the arguments around this issue and concludes that the civil war was, more or less, a genocidal gambit.