There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (Achebe)

Chinua Achebe's memoir of the Nigerian Civil War, published by Penguin Press in 2012. Achebe, the Igbo novelist, argues that the 1966 pogroms against Igbo civilians, most of them Christian, in Nigeria's Muslim-majority north, which he holds were tolerated or abetted by federal authorities, constituted a campaign of ethnic and religious persecution that made Biafra's 1967 secession an act of communal self-preservation rather than an ordinary political rebellion, and that the war's conduct, especially the federal blockade's mass starvation, continued that same intent by other means. Its strength is Achebe's own position as an Igbo eyewitness and a major literary figure of the period. Its limit is that it is a personal memoir by a participant with a direct stake in the conflict, not a work of professional historiography, and its persecution reading is one identifiable side of a live debate over how far religious identity, against ethnic and political rivalry, explains the war.