Part One

First, there was a country; then there wasn’t. To anyone who has read Chinua Achebe's last book, There Was a Country, this statement that serves as the title of the reflections in this essay might seem to refer to Biafra. Indeed, Achebe's book is a powerful and harrowing account of the crises that led both to the creation and the destruction of the secessionist republic. But I am also referring to Nigeria in this statement. For implicitly but implacably, Achebe's new book also hints at a Nigeria that once was – or at least was on the verge of becoming – but is now vanished, seemingly forever, leaving only the trace of a national desire that is now completely in ruins. Not since Wole Soyinka's The Man Died has a book so grippingly taken us back to the very foundations of how our country came into being, only to be almost immediately faced with the possibility of being stillborn with only very vague hints at how – if we are courageous, truthful, and fortunate – we might yet realize the Nigeria that we desire.

Thus, Achebe's book is almost at every turn aware of itself as the work of a writer, an intellectual addressing other writers and intellectuals and challenging them on such fundamental issues as the relationship of the writer to ethics and justice and the responsibilities of the true, humanistic intellectual to racial, national, and ethnic others. Indeed, as much as Achebe's new book is conscious of the general reader, it is for the most part mainly addressed to the international community and the world at large. It is much like Soyinka's 1972 book, which was a direct challenge to Nigeria's community of writers and intellectuals, especially those who saw themselves in the progressive and humanistic traditions of intellectualism. At any rate, this is the point of departure for the reflections on Achebe's memoir in this essay.

Chinua Achebe was, of course, one of the world's pre-eminent writers and intellectuals. For members of my generation of Nigerian and African writers, critics, and academics, as we came to intellectual and political-activist maturity, Achebe was a figure who exerted a powerful, authoritative fascination for us, even if there were the inevitable occasional small disagreements and quarrels.