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There Was a Country
Chinua Achebe
  • Published: 24 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141973678
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

There Was a Country

A Personal History of Biafra

Formats & editions
EBook
24 Oct 2012
Paperback
21 Aug 2013
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From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes this long-awaited memoir recalling Achebe's personal experiences of and reflections on one of his country's most tragic civil wars

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War of 1967-1970. The war was infamous around the world for its savage impact on the Biafran people, who were blockaded by the Nigerian government and starved to death. As a roving cultural ambassador for his government, Achebe absorbed the war's full horror from this unique vantage. Immediately after the war, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for over forty years he maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. After years in the making Achebe presented a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful experiences.
  • Published: 24 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141973678
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

About the author

Chinua Achebe

Born in 1930, Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe is probably black Africa's most widely read novelist. His first work, Things Fall Apart, is regarded as a classic of world literature and has been translated into 40 languages.

Introducer Biography:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria and now lives in the United States. She is the author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sunand The Thing Around Your Neck.

CA

Also by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart
Africa's Tarnished Name
The Education of a British-Protected Child
An Image Of Africa/ The Trouble With Nigeria
African Trilogy, The: Things Fall Apart No Longer at Ease Arrow of God,
Arrow of God
No Longer at Ease
See all

Praise for There Was a Country

Chinua Achebe's history of Biafra is a meditation on the condition of freedom. It has the tense narrative grip of the best fiction. It is also a revelatory entry into the intimate character of the writer's brilliant mind and bold spirit. Achebe has created here a new genre of literature

Nadine Gordimer

Part-history, part-memoir, [Achebe's] moving account of the war is laced with anger, but there is also an abiding tone of regret for what Nigeria might have been without conflict and mismanagement

Sunday Times

A blend of historical overview, personal memoir and political manifesto ... fascinating

Evening Standard

No writer is better placed than Chinua Achebe to tell the story of the Nigerian Biafran war from a cultural and political perspective ... Achebe relays [the war's] horrors ... with stoic brevity; his strongest expressions are his poems, ... scattered between chapters, offering affecting interludes ... [The book] makes you pine for the likes of Achebe to govern ... We have in There Was a Country an elegy from a master storyteller who has witnessed the undulating fortunes of a nation

Noo Saro-Wiwa, Guardian

Long-awaited ... urgently needed

France 24