Dimensions
144 x 222 x 32mm
Chinua Achebe is a writer whose moral courage and storytelling gifts have left an enduring stamp on world literature. There Was a Country is his long-awaited memoir of coming of age while witnessing the fragile birth of a new nation, and then watching it fall apart.
The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War of 1967-1970. It became infamous around the world for its impact on Achebe's people, the Biafrans, who were starved to death by the Nigerian government in one of the twentieth century's greatest humanitarian disasters.
Caught up in the atrocities were Chinua Achebe and his young family. Achebe, already a world-renowned novelist, served his Biafran homeland as a roving cultural ambassador, witnessing the war's full horror first-hand. Immediately after the war, he took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for over forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry.
