Money Laundering in the Churches

Thieves and robbers are Satan's gifts to the churches.

When a villain has ill-gotten gains, he sometimes needs to have the money "laundered." This is the process whereby stolen money is made respectable by moving it through a number of legal channels designed to camouflage its original illicit source. Sometimes, the stolen money is smuggled out of the country and then brought back in through regular channels, so as to make it seem like it originated from foreign shores whose records are inaccessible domestically.

Another version of this money-laundering process is duplicated in the churches with pastors as the lynchpin. When a contrite Judas brought back the thirty pieces of silver he received for betraying Jesus to the Jewish Priesthood, they refused to put the money in the offering-box: "The chief priests took the silver pieces and said, 'It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood.'" (Matthew 27:6).

This was convoluted reasoning at best, showing the "doublethink" of religion. The priests had no qualms about bringing about the death of innocent Jesus. But they felt it was inappropriate to put "blood money" in the offering-box. However, even such hypocritical qualms are no longer evident today. Today, it does not matter where the money comes from, as long as it is money you can be sure the church will receive it.

Theft sanctification

As I said, pastors operate today an elaborate money-laundering business. You steal the money; you kill for the money; it makes no difference. Just bring the money; we will receive it gladly from you with no questions asked. When you bring the money, we will bless you and pray for you. We will also pray that the source from which you got it will not run dry, so you can go and bring some more.

This goes a long way to assuage the conscience of the wicked. They are encouraged that as long as they give a significant fraction of their stolen money to the church, the theft is sanctified. In effect, the offering is used by the pastor to make atonement for the sin of the theft, thereby releasing the crooked donor from guilt. So doing, we receive and launder stolen money on God's behalf. Indeed, there is an implicit signboard in front of mega-churches, saying: "Thieves and robbers are welcome here, preferably with a tithe of their stolen loot." When they come, we lavish encomiums on them.

When I accused a lawyer with whom I was negotiating a business deal of sharp practices, she retorted: "Dr. Aribisala, I will pay tithe on the amount." Jesus shows nothing but contempt for this kind of thinking. He said to the Pharisees: "Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?" (Matthew 23:19).

Thieves and robbers are Satan's gifts to the churches. Visit the mega-churches in Nigeria and you will discover the people seating in the front-row are the big-time thieves who have robbed the country blind. Everybody knows they are crooks; nevertheless, they have pride of place in the churches. Their seats are reserved. The messages preached are carefully-crafted so they are not offended and remain comfortable in their thievery.

Mega-pastors would hardly operate in the tradition of John the Baptist, calling the Herods of Nigeria to repentance. On the contrary, when Herod comes to church, we give him the microphone to address the congregation. Thus, one Lagos mega-pastor gave Governor Bola Tinubu, a non-Christian, the microphone to address members of his house on the sand, when he was seeking re-election in 2003. Of course, the "ogbologbos" of Nigeria can always address the faithful of Redeemed at Kilometre 46.

Says Ebenezer Obadare: "In a dynamic that works quite well for the state and serves the ends of holders of political power, religious leaders attend their (office holders') birthday ceremonies, bless their respective families, and, at the end of each year, unfailingly prophesy positive things for the country they so spectacularly misgovern."

Robbers' revolt

I was given a fascinating report about a well-known Lagos prosperity pastor. He suddenly saw the light one Sunday, and decided to preach the true gospel for a change. He warned his parishioners that it is righteousness that exalts, but sin is a reproach. He told them if they did not repent, they would miss the kingdom of God.

No sooner had he finished his message than uproar arose. The major financiers of the church were livid and they asked for an emergency meeting with him. They did not mince words. They told him in no uncertain terms that that kind of message was unacceptable. It was very easy for him as a pastor to grandstand with lofty religious sentiments, while living on the money he collects from them. But how did he think they were getting the money they gave him? Let him leave the pulpit and come into the real world so he can see whether it is possible to become a slumdog billionaire through the righteousness that exalts a nation.

The pastor's ears were opened. He quickly went back to his old time-worn prosperity and motivational messages and everyone was happy again. "Preach it, pastor; preach it," they cheer him on, while an attendant dutifully comes forward to wipe his face with a towel.

Stolen offerings

In 2002, it came to light that one Lawrence Agada stole 39 million naira over a period of time from the Sheraton Hotel, Lagos, where he was employed as a cashier. For very strange reasons, he spent very little of the stolen money on himself. Instead, he gave the lion-share of it as tithes and offerings to a parish of Christ Embassy. Clearly, there was witchcraft at work here. The man did not even own a car. Neither did he have a motor-cycle. Nevertheless, he did not use any of his stolen loot to enhance his standard of living. What must they have been telling him at Christ Embassy to lead him to the conclusion he could serve God with stolen tithes and offerings?

His "generosity" so impressed his church that, on occasion, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, the head of the church, wrote him a special letter of commendation read to his entire parish. At no time did anyone deem it necessary to enquire how someone who was only a cashier could have obtained so much money. When the theft was finally detected by his employers, Christ Embassy admitted that Agada had indeed given the stolen money to the church. Nevertheless, the church refused to refund the looted money. You may well ask why a church of God would refuse to refund money it knows was stolen to its rightful owners.

Suffice to say any church which directly or indirectly encourages theft and knowingly receives stolen property cannot be of God. If you steal, it makes no difference if you give all the money to your church, you are still a thief. Your offering might be acceptable to your pastor, but make no mistake about it; it is not acceptable to God. God hates robbery for burnt offering. (Isaiah 61:8). He said: "As your offering to me you bring a stolen animal... Do you think I will accept that from you?" (Malachi 1:13).

........FEMI ARIBISALA/VANGUARD

Bakassi! "How Obasanjo Deceived Us"

A scene during the tense period, in 2006, when the United Nations was deciding whether Bakassi was to be part of Nigeria or Cameroon.Many Efik here still feel Nigerian, though they have been made into Cameroonians.

The Etiyen of Bakassi, Dr. Etim Okon Edet, is not only the paramount ruler of Bakassi but also the Chairman of Cross River State Council of Chiefs. A product of the University of Calabar where he studied political science, the traditional ruler was forced out of his palace in Atabong by the intrigues of concession of his land, which is part of Efik Kingdom, to Cameroon by the Federal Government based on the war time policy of appeasement entered into by Gen. Yakubu Gowon and the late Alhaji Ahmoudu Ahiidjo of Cameroon and Sealed by Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo and Mr. Koffi Ananah, who accepted the ICJ verdict and rushed into implementation of the verdict with the endorsement of the controversial Green Tree Agreement.

Five days to the dead-line of October 9, 2012 to appeal for the review of the ICJ judgment, the Federal Government moved to do the needful on Thursday when it raised a panel to look into the possibility of the review. In this interview, Edet tells Sunday Vanguard that those who ceded Bakassi and threw over three hundred thousand people into destitution should face trial for crimes against humanity.

Can you give us an insight into what is happening in Bakassi?

I think we have done quite a lot on the Bakassi issue, right from the onset of the judgment. We have condemned the judgment. I don't know what we should do and where should go from here. We are approaching the final day of the decision and the country is not doing anything.

What I want to say is that Nigeria should release us, Bakassi, technically, is included in Nigeria, but it is not in Nigeria. People say, technically, that it is included in Nigeria because we are listed as a local government in Nigeria, so, any action we want to take now would be mean a violation of the constitution of Nigeria.

But, for sure, I, as the paramount ruler of Bakassi land that is in existence in this planet earth, we would take back our land. Just as the nation of Israel went back to their land in a miraculous way, I am so convinced that, with or without an appeal to the ICJ, there is another court that is beyond us all, we are all awaiting the judgment of that court.

So, Nigeria should be kind enough to release us. Some people went to the National Assembly to say that Bakassi is not part of Nigeria and therefore it should be deleted from the constitution. I support that call. We now know that we are not legally in Nigeria. We want to be free to confront whoever handed us illegally to anybody unknown to us. We will confront them and then we will be free to do so.

May be at that point, the entire world would then look at us as a crazy people. I don't want a situation where by any cobweb is still moving around us and nobody cares to say anything. But we are assuring everybody that the Bakassi issue is going to be a serious case study of injustice done to people on this earth, and it is going to affect those who are pretending now as if the matter does not concern them.

When you don't want to do something, He (God) does it in a very wonderful and miraculous way. God cannot begin a project that He cannot end. God created us and put us where we are just like all of us.

For instance, if you were born in Maidugri, Borno State, perhaps you would have been a Muslim; not by our choice, not by our making but God wanted us to be there (Bakassi). We are here and we are Christians because that is where we came to be. So God placed us there, gave us the land, named all those areas, the trees, the villages, the shrines, the food, etc, and, after several years, people are coming to make adjustments, people are beginning to be displaced from what God originally made it to be. So God will not start a project, and leave it like that. He has to complete it.

So, I'm assuring, from the bottom of my heart, that we are taking back our Bakassi, I'm not worried. I don't know the year, I don't know the method, but I'm telling our people that we are going to get our land back, we will pray to the Almighty.

Whatever the president is doing, or whatever Nigeria is doing, the president should know that he is from the Niger Delta region, the president should know that we voted for him. When the president came, I received him, I campaigned for him, today he is not listening to what we are saying. God is going to judge.

We are not looking at any man again; we are not looking at the president again. I think in the past years, people have died, people have suffered, nobody is going to school; their schools have been abandoned there.This is a grave injustice to a people that was denied education by the colonial powers, a people who are in a hurry to produce educated people to catch up with their kiths and kins.

How do you react to the claim that the National Assembly does not border about sovereignty, lives and security of the country?

I am even surprised that after their long vacation, the Bakassi issue, which they condemned over a period of time, is not seen as a serious issue to deserve their attention. This is a matter they condemned and they said that the treaty had not been domesticated by them.

I personally witnessed two motions, moved in the House of Representatives stopping proceeding and another asking government to go to the ICJ to ask for a review of the judgment because of the overwhelming things that they had seen.

In other areas of the world, such resolutions will not be taken lightly. So, when they returned from their vacation and the matter was not on the front burner, I felt disappointed. They are talking about something else like moving motion for the printing of new naira notes, moving motion on allowances and other issues. Nobody is talking about Bakassi.

They will see the truth and turn over it, a brother will not help a brother, such a situation brings anarchy. I am surprised that a people are even playing politics with this matter, some want to play safe because of the politics of 2O15, they want to be careful with some national issues.

You will know a leader in times of crisis not when things are smooth. I am talking as a leader of Bakassi; I don't mind whatever it will lead to because I am hurt. Nigerians too should be hurt that a part of this country has been lost. I have never seen a nation giving out a territory instead of extending their territory.

The National Assembly is not doing well. Why didn't they impeach former President Obasanjo for breaching the constitution? Why are they talking now? I have received so many visits on Bakassi. They just come around to collect money and play with us. I had to stop some of them from coming to me because I was not ready to receive them. The information they are seeking is all over the internet.

They know that the people of Bakassi went to court in this country. Judgment was given, injunction was placed that the Green Tree should not be implemented but they went ahead to do it. So, what are we talking about? Where would we get justice?

I am completely disappointed in the National Assembly that they are not using their powers. The National Assembly cannot fail Jonathan, yet they took an oath to correct many errors, to do justice.
Look at the power project, corrections are being made at all levels. Look at our constitution, reviews are being made and yet they cannot review a judgment that was made. Why can't they make an attempt on the ICJ verdict review and let it be on record?
The Federal Government said if they ask for a review, the world would laugh at them. Do you agree?

You can even see that Gowon is silent on this issue up till today. Obasanjo joined; the two former military leaders have not made any statement about the mistakes they made.

Like I said, I will continue to pray to God to prolong their lives to see the end so that they can tell the story. Now, we have heard that Nigeria will be a laughing stock if we go back to ask for the review of the judgment by the ICJ. Is it that Bakassi is now made a sacrificial lamb?

They swore an oath to protect the destiny and integrity of this land. They have not done so. But they should understand that the lives of people are involved. Both Gowon and Obasanjo should be tried for war time and peace time atrocities visited on Bakassi land. Our oil and land they have given to Cameroon and made us refugees.

Americans should know that the lives of people are involved. All those who witnessed the signing of the Green Tree Agreement should know that the lives of people are involved and, when you joke with the lives of people, you are joking with God.

If we are the sacrificial lamb for Nigeria to be one, are we not entitled to compensations, are we not entitled to other good things of life? If I am giving out my life for you to be free, I am also entitled to any other thing that you are taking out of my land, but you have not done so. You have not given me another life to live, I am still roving around, and you think it would be well with such people.

When Bakassi people talk about resettlement, what is it that comes to their mind?

We want back our land. At the initial point, we were deceived; we were told that we had to be obedient servants, we had to obey our president. For the president of your country to call you one on one and plead with you:' There are other implications that you are not aware of now. Please you guys should leave the place, we are going to put you somewhere and almost a similar place that you were before.'

We believed him and we moved. First year, second year, what they did was to go and give account and I told them it was not our kind of resettlement. They thought it was an emergency situation.

We have lived in a particular where most of the people are fisher men, they have waited and they continued to wait, now we know that they are not serious, we know that our president lied to us, lied to me in particular. He called me, held me by the hand, the president of my own country held my hand and we discussed.

I told my people to be calm, but, up till this moment, we don't even need resettlement, we don't need anything called resettlement because we don't know what they are going to do. Like you rightly said that money was given but, up till now, this country has not called on the person who collected the money. Is getting people to stay in a camp resettlement? You are talking about putting people in camp, these were people who had their own tradition, everything was fine, they did not complain. Now you are coming to build a camp and you want to put them there.

I told Donald Duke (former governor of Cross River State) who started this process that 'if you want to take these people to another populated area; it means that you want to displace those people who are the original owners who will not allow you to change their name'. So he compounded the issue.

You mentioned Donald Duke that was in government. You also mentioned that the president at that time spoke to you, but why is it that since this problem came up, Cross River State government has kept quiet?

They are playing politics with the lives of people but God himself will visit all those who took part in the Bakassi problem one after the other.

Today nobody is saying he/she did this and it was done wrongly and that he was sorry and nobody is asking any question which means there was coherence from top to bottom.

If you are a minister and you gave out a job and the job was not properly done and the people are complaining and whatever the decision they write to the minister, he suppresses, the minister that did not take part in it would want to know if the job was not properly done if at all it was done.

You spoke about the N4 billion set aside for resettlement, well I don't know about that. And let me say it clearly, it is Bakassi today, tomorrow it may be Bekwara, the day after tomorrow it may be Bayelsa. And it would go on like that. When you become a refugee you become an immigrant in your land.

There is nothing we have not done. We have even written to the United Nations General Assembly. The world today is a global village. Going to court is a serious matter and taking judgment is a very serious matter. Nobody can say he is ignorant of the Bakassi problem and that injustice has been done to a community in Nigeria.

Well, maybe the ICJ was thinking that if justice was done ...... or the area that was given out was a no man's land, whatever they were looking at. But we never participated in the (civil) war. We never knew what was going on at the ICJ. It was in 2001 that I started hearing about the case in the ICJ because we never took part in it; we were not carried along.

But I will tell you that our area is not going over to Cameroon. The ICJ has finished their work; the Attorney General of the Federation recently said so to the president and the foreign affairs minister that they are not going back to the ICJ.

He said they should not revisit the matter. But God will visit all those who are part of this wrong done to us.

Why is the issue of Bakassi only centered on oil and its resources and not the people?

That is the question we should ask the people and the entire world. You know people are just looking at where they can make money even when they steal the money but the money they are already making in Bakassi is blood money. Whoever is making money there now or is trying to make money there in the nearest future is making blood money except the proper thing is done, except justice is done and except the people are no more dying. People are no more interested in the human factor but the oil money. They are looking for blood money.

Nigeria is holding us hostage

We built about three secondary schools in Abana and several primary schools. But these schools are no more there. Each time I attend May 1 Children's Day and October 1 Independence Day celebrations, I kept telling the political leaders that I would not attend the ceremonies again if I don't see the primary schools at Abana and children passing.

The schools are no more, the people are scattered. The people you only see there are the councilors and chairman without a local government. The largest local government has just five councilors and above all I am the only man standing. Iam just standing on the law. I want that law to be taken away so that I can stand firmly on the ground.

Apart from that law in the constitution, there is nothing else. It just exists by name. But must human beings continue to exist just as names and there is nothing to fall back to on ground?

The allocation given to Bakassi is not a hidden thing. It is on the internet. Bakassi still exists in law and the allocation Bakassi is getting is because of that law. That is why I said the law must be removed for us to be able to conduct issues because we existed before Nigeria, we existed before Cameroon and we existed before the local government.

We have been there before the local government was attached to Bakassi. We were known as the Bakassi people and not Bakassi local government. So why have they refused to leave us alone with their laws and allow us to stand how we used to stand? Cameroon had never entered there before. They know they can never enter there ordinarily. We are riverine people and, in that time, to leave Bakassi for Calabar was a long journey that took days.

Nigeria is saying no going back on the issue, 'Bakassi is gone'. Then let them leave us alone. Nigeria is still keeping Bakassi because of the oil. You say these people are not there but you are using them to collect money and to take their resources. Because Bakassi is still in the constitution, we cannot act but if Nigeria removes Bakassi from the constitution, the Republic of Bakassi cannot be in Nigeria or in Republic of Cameroon.

Bakassi cannot be in Cameroon because the ICJ cannot give the land of Bakassi to Cameroon, because they don't know anything about the land. So we need freedom. We need to be left alone. Nigeria, please leave us alone. You don't need the people but you need their resources. Let them release us. If they release us, Cross River will be willing to release us.

So what is your message for Bakassi people?

The message is that very soon, the problem will be over. We have only a few days to go but God will perform His miracle. He can use one day to change an event. He would allow you to flourish in your stupidity and ignorance and just like He told that rich man in the Bible that today was the end.

I am assuring all our people that this whole situation will come to an end and that they should be constant in their prayers that He should do for them just like He did for the children of Israel. Today, Bakassi people are living with enemies surrounding them. So they should pray constantly.

.......HUGO ODIOGOR - A VANGUARD INTERVIEW

N351 Million Drugs Hidden in Balls Intercepted at Lagos Airport

Officials of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) yesterday impounded three consignments of heroin hidden inside balls and woollen carpets at the Nigerian Aviation Handling Company (NAHCO) Shed, Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos worth N351million.

The consignments of drug, imported from Pakistan, were detected through the help of the agency's sniffer dogs weighing a total of 29.260 kilogrammes.

The rug consignment containing 14 kilogrammes of heroine came as cargo on KLM flight while the other two consignments of balls weighing 10.230 kilogrammes and 5.030 kilogrammes were imported on Saudi Arabia Airline.

Chairman of NDLEA, Ahmadu Giade, vowed to incapacitate drug trafficking syndicates in the country through counter measures.

"Every drug seizure is important to us because of the value of the drugs and the fact that every seizure made advances the anti-drug campaign. This seizure is important to the country because the damage the drug would have caused cannot be quantified. Drug trafficking cartels may be sophisticated in drug concealment, but the seizures are indicators of Nigeria's counter efforts. We will not relent in protecting the country from the activities of drug traffickers", Giade stressed.

According to Giade, investigation is on-going to unravel the cartel behind the shipments of narcotics.

Meanwhile, the NDLEA Airport Commander, Mr. Hamza Umar, pointed out that the goods were abandoned by the importers as soon as they arrived the airport, adding that the officials of the agency had to tear the consignment to uncover the drugs.

"The drug was factory packed in the cartons containing the balls. The rug concealment was also factory packed because we had to tear and unfasten to recover the drugs. Four rugs were found to contain heroin. So far, no arrest has been made but the cases are under investigation" Hamza explained.

.........DANIEL ETGHE/VANGUARD/NIGERIA

Chinua Achebe: Peaceful world my sincerest wish

Chinua Achebe speaks about his works and his life at his home on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York where he is a professor. Date: January 22, 2008. Image: Craig Ruttle/Associated Press

By Nasrin Pourhamrang, The Africanist


Recently, the classic African novel “Things Fall Apart” by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was translated into Persian by Ali Hodavand and released in Iran. Nasrin Pourhamrang, Editor-in-Chief of Hatef Weekly Magazine interviewed the author on a wide range of topics from Art, culture and literature; politics, cultural and linguistic preservation to the legacy of colonialism and his forthcoming book there was a Country-A personal history of Biafra.

Nasrin Pourhamrang: Technology has come to the help of the borderless world of art and literature and has eliminated the geographical frontiers. How do you feel about the fact that your novel has been translated into Persian and that Iranian readers can read some of your works for the first time and make an acquaintance of Chinua Achebe?

Chinua Achebe: I received the news of the Persian translation of Things Fall Partwith great joy! Of course, one of the goals of any writer is to connect with his or her readers. Things Fall Apart in particular, indeed all my books, have enjoyed a warm readership. I am particularly grateful for the effort of the translators of my work. They extend the reach of Art, in this case stories, to more people who may not have encountered them in the original English. I am told with this Persian translation that Things Fall Apart now exists in nearly 60 world languages! It is a wonderful blessing and I am deeply, deeply, grateful! So, the fact that readers in Iran can also read my work is very important to me.

NP: Are you familiar with Iran, its culture and civilization? Have you ever heard of the artworks of Iranian artists as well as the work of her authors and writers?

CA: I am a life-long student of Literature, History, Art and Culture. I can’t, however, claim to be an authority on Iranian history and culture. Let me also confess that I was caught looking through my Encyclopedia Britannica before this interview – my grandchildren insist that no one does that anymore!

Nevertheless, I am aware of the writings of Herodotus on the Persian Empire and the spectacular golden art work of the Achaemenid period. I have always wanted to see the ruins of Thachar palace and Persepolis ;the Quajarid reliefs, paintings from Iranian antiquity and the beauty of Persian calligraphy up-close. Of course, Persian carpets, as you are well aware, are adored the world over. In university, we encountered stories about great Persian emperors like Cyrus the Great who Alexander the Great revered. Also Darius the Great…and the later emperors.

As a writer, as you might expect, I have a special interest in the ancient scrolls of Persian philosophy. I have also been taken with the medieval poetry of Rumi, Hafez, Sa’adi, Khayyam, Farrid Attar; as well as epics such Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi. Modern Iranian classics such as The Blind Owlby Hedayat and Sin by Farrokhzad should be required reading around the world, in my opinion. On my desk is Cypress Tree by Kamin Mohammadi, who I understand, is a very talented young female writer.

NP: What will you say if I ask you to talk directly to the Iranian audience and discuss your concerns and wishes with them?

CA: “Peaceful co-existence between all racial and religious groups is my sincere wish for mankind” After the ancient civilizations of Africa, there are no peoples older than those that inhabit what the British first called “the Middle East.” The great world religions come from this part of the world. Islam and Judaism are considered Abrahamic religions because they are believed to descend from God through Abraham. We would not have Christianity without Judaism and the Jewish people. The three religions share many values and tenets and beliefs. There are parts of the Quran that integrate Jewish history.

I wish to highlight lessons from Iranian history that should be championed by Iranian people in today’s precarious world. It is important for all of us to remember that the Iranians and the Jewish people have enjoyed a very long, mutually beneficial and fruitful relationship. It dates back to 727 B.C. and the deportation of the Jewish people to Media and Persian from Samaria…that is nearly three thousand years ago! Cyrus the Great, who we have mentioned in this conversation, through a decree later known as the “Cyrus declaration” allowed the Jewish people who lived along the Babylon river to return to Judea to rebuild their lives. Many, however, who had lived in Persia for a few generations, decided to remain and formed permanent Jewish settlements of intellectuals, merchants and artisans for centuries.

Jewish scholars (something I am told can be confirmed in the Talmud – a revered Jewish book of rabbinical postulates), teach us that the environment was so tolerant for Jews in ancient Persia during this period that in a mark of their own magnanimity towards the Persian people, there was a call by Rabbis of the time for a picture of Susa the capital of Persian Kings to be engraved on the eastern gate of the temple of Jerusalem!

My appeal, therefore, is to the ancient virtue of Iranian hospitality, tolerance and peace. It is vitally important that the educated classes in Iran point out this glorious history which is central not just to the Middle East; but to all of mankind.

Finally, I would like to see the Dialogue of Civilizations proposed by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami become reality–bringing together representatives of all of the earth’s people to Tehran in an environment of freedom of creative, intellectual, cultural and religious expression.

NP: Your new work There was a Country-A personal history of Biafra is due from Penguin Books next month- September, 2012 – in the United Kingdom. Can you tell Iranian readers what it is about?

CA: The Nigerian-Biafran war raged from 1967-1970 and claimed nearly three million lives. The conflict wiped out twenty percent of my people – the Igbo and other Easterners- who were known as Biafrans. In There was a Country- A personal history of Biafra, I tell three interweaving stories – using an autobiographical prism to recount two broader stories – the story of pre and post-independence Nigeria, and the story of Biafra and its aftermath.

I have been asked why it took me over 42 years to write about Biafra…The answer is that I was not ready… I had to find the right vehicle that could “carry our anguish, our sorrow… the scale of dislocation and destruction…our collective pain.”In many ways, I can say that I have been writing this book for about four decades – at least in my head and the very scribbling on paper almost as long – particularly the research, interviews, data collection etc. I discovered while working on the book, quite interestingly, that it would not be a straight forward work. I found that I had to draw upon prose, poetry, history, memoir, and politics and that they were independently holding conversations with each other – perhaps because no one genre or art form could bear the weight of the complexity of our condition. You see, the Biafran war was such a cataclysmic event that in my opinion changed the course, not only of Nigeria, which has not fully recovered from that conflict; but of all of Africa. I hope your readers pick up a copy!

NP: It is interesting to me that your first novel, “Things Fall Apart,” which is also your most widely read and translated book was published by a British publisher (William Heinemann LTD). Why did you offer it to a British publisher while it depicted the difficulties and cultural contradictions which the people of your country have suffered as a result of the colonial presence of the British in the past decades?

CA: That is a timely question…… In my new book, There was a Country-A personal history of Biafra, I point out that when a number of us [i.e. African writers] decided to pick up the pen and make writing a career there was no African literature as we know it today. There were many that preceded my time, but still, the numbers were not sufficient. And so I had no idea when I was writing Things Fall Apart whether it would even be accepted or published. All this was new- there was nothing by which I could gauge how it was going to be received.

In those days one had very few avenues to get published…we had very few choices. My first novel was rejected by a number of publishers before providence led it into the hands of Alan Hill at Heinemann after Donald McRae, another Heinemann executive with extensive experience in Africa encouraged Heinemann to publish the novel with a powerful recommendation: “This is the best first novel I have read since the war.” So, you can tell that I had a good beginning and was only too pleased to have Heinemann publish the work. Later, Alan Hill and James Currey and I developed the African Writers Series (I served as first General Editor for the first one hundred titles). The African Writers Series ended up publishing many of the well-known writers of the era from Africa. In many ways, without the intervention of Alan Hill and Heinemann, many of the writers from that generation may not have found a voice.

NP: Over 50 years have passed since you wrote the book “Things Fall Apart.” Have your viewpoints and approaches toward the presence of a colonial power in the soil of your country changed since that time? Would you make changes and edits if you were to decide to write such a novel or rewrite it now and especially reconfigure the personality and reflections of the main characters such as Okonkwo?

CA: Every thinking person, if you consider yourself a serious intellectual grows…Intellectual evolution and growth does not mean, however, that all of a sudden horrendous things in our shared history appear less appalling. It means that greater knowledge and understanding help place the best and worst of events in clearer perspective.

The legacy of colonialism is not a simple one but one of great complexity, with contradictions- good things as well as bad. We do not have enough time to outline every aspect of the colonial and post-colonial condition…So, one cannot talk about making changes or edits to a book that was written to speak to a condition that existed and continues to exist in different forms and different guises.

In many ways, the world is a much different place today than it was in 1958 when Things Fall Apart was published. Some may say a better place – women’s rights are improving around the world, race relations perhaps can be said to have improved as well. In other ways, many things can also be said to have either remained the same or become worse. So the struggle to make the world a better place must continue!

NP: Your books and novels are considered to be the representative of modern African literature. In your view, what are the most prominent features and attributes of the modern African literature?

CA: Yes, well…remember that there was an entire movement, a whole group of us… There was a country, I discuss this in greater depth.

Things Fall Apart, I believe, now has a life of its own. I think it is now more famous than I am! (Laughter). The fifty plus translations are a big indication of its impact. I feel like a parent watching a child succeed from the sidelines. The other books have also been successful. It feels good. I am very grateful. What was the second part of the question?

NP: What are the most prominent features and attributes of the modern African literature?

CA: Yes…I have stated elsewhere that one cannot cram African literature into a small, neat definition. I do not see African literature as one unit but as a group of associated units – in fact the sum total of all the national and ethnic literatures of Africa.

National literature in my definition is written in national languages and has a potential audience throughout the countries that speak that language. Ethnic literature, by contrast is available to a particular ethnic group within that country or sub-region.

I have often been asked why I choose to write in English rather than in my native language. That is a flawed question and a false choice, because most of us think and write in and speak both our ethnic language and the national languages we were taught in school. Context is very important…Those that ask this question fail to understand my goal and the goal of several other pioneers of modern African writing. When I picked up the pen to make writing a career, African literature did not exist as it does today…the numbers were not there. One of the consequences of colonialism was the loss of the many traditions of Africa.

Many of us engaged Africa’s past, stepping back into what can be referred to as the “era of purity” before the coming of Europe. What we discovered we put in books and that became known widely as “African Culture.” Some of us would decide to use the colonizer’s tools: his language, altered sufficiently to bear the weight of an African creative aesthetic, infused with elements of the African literary tradition. I borrowed proverbs from our culture and history, colloquialisms and African expressive language from the ancient griots, the world views, perspectives, and customs from my Igbo tradition and cosmology, and the sensibilities of everyday people.

It was important to us that a body of work be developed of the highest possible quality that would oppose the negative discourse in some of the novels we encountered. By “writing back” to the West we were attempting to reshape the dialogue between the colonized and the colonizer. Our efforts, we hoped, would broaden the world’s understanding, appreciation, and conceptualization of what literature meant when including the African voice and perspective. We were engaged in what the Nigerian literary scholar Ode Ogede terms “the politics of representation.”

NP: So your choice of writing in English was as much a political choice as a practical one?

CA: Yes. And this requires some further clarification…My books appear in English because it is Nigeria’s national language and the language through which I can reach the most readers, both in Nigeria and world-wide. Many of the national languages, as you are aware, are inherited languages from our colonial history that were “shoved down our throats.”Within Nigeria’s borders, there are two hundred and fifty (250) ethnic groups and distinct languages – note I said distinct languages not dialects – and this requires emphasis because Nigeria with 160 million people, exists in an area of Africa that is one of the most populous, as well as genetically, linguistically, and culturally diverse regions of our planet. A national language in such an environment despite its problems, serves both a practical as well as a logical way to communicate across this diversity, effectively.

Let’s be clear – there are areas of Africa where colonialism divided peoples…But on the whole it did bring together many peoples…And it gave them a language with which to talk to one another…The only reason why we can even talk about African unity is that when we get together we can have a manageable number of languages to communicate in. Indeed we would not be able to hold this conversation if we both did not speak English. We would not be talking about the influence of Things Fall Apart and its impact without this strategic choice.

So there were many practical reasons to write in a National Language: I have already mentioned the fact that I could reach many Africans across languages, but also I could reach others across the world as well, like you. But I have also stated multiple times that it is neither necessary nor desirable for an African writer writing in English to attempt to write like a native speaker…he or she must attempt to find a way as I mentioned earlier to alter the language sufficiently to bear the weight of an African creative aesthetic, infused with elements of the African literary tradition…reinventing the language of the colonizers to tell our stories and retell our collective histories.

NP: There is, however, the problem of the disappearance of native or indigenous cultures and languages…

CA: Yes, the “beating down” of older African cultures and languages, traditions, and philosophies must be halted. We must continue to recapture, revive these endangered cultures, languages and traditions… and this will require large scale intervention…This is a real emergency, and in my opinion requires bold action.

There are two levels to this solution. Economists often talk about the micro and macro levels.On the individual level…I have already spoken about African writers engaged in the retelling of their own stories and recasting their image and the image of their people through novels, children’s books, poetry etc. There are those that write solely in their native languages. I write a lot of poetry in Igbo and edited a literary journal Uwa NdiIgbo for several years – for a focused Igbo readership. I have given full scale lectures to upwards of 20,000 people at a time – the two most recent The Odenigbo lecture and the Ahajioku lectures in 1999 and 2009 respectively; in Igbo land in Nigeria.Thatkind of effort isimportant, but I am afraid itonly scratches the surface of the problem… the sheer scale of the crisis demands big solutions, large scale intervention.

Let me let you in on a well-guarded secret…For several decades, the Achebe foundation –an organizationthat is now run by my son Dr. Ike Achebe and on whose board I serve as Chairman-has been working quietly on the Igbo Language project. This initiative was developed to create a language dictionary, a vast array of language tools and educational and linguistic guides, as well asa data base of phonetics, syntax, grammar etc.- to preserve Igbo, a fast disappearing language.

NP: What you describe is quite remarkable but sounds so incredibly daunting…

CA: Yes, in many ways it is…but one must not let despair crush our resolve! There is another layer of complexity that I would like to point out that makes this work so vitally important: Literacy in African traditional languages – the number of people who can read and write in a given language – is very low. This is not unique to Africa, indeed it also true in all places around the world where we find the problem of linguistic extinction. The building blocks of literary and linguistic fluency (equally important) – the alphabet, phonetics, penmanship, diction, syntax, grammar etc. must be also captured and widely taught. It is also important to state that language does not exist in a cultural vacuum…in cultural isolation. The ‘Omenani’ of a people – their belief system, customs, cosmology, values, and worldview – are channeled through a people’s language. Now, these are aspects of a people’s culture (and there are other vital components) that should be captured as well, if one is to attain the goal of preserving a people’s language effectively.

NP: How do you avoid the perception that you are imposing your will on others- something that your work has so eloquently highlighted?

CA: That is an excellent question…The Achebe foundation’s Igbo project does not and will not practice cultural imperialism. We do not impose artificial structures on the languages (a subject of my Odenigbo lecture of 1999), but will strive to preserve what is on the ground and respect linguistic dynamism. That means having the people themselves lead the way and having members of our team approach the work with humility…not with the “I am here to save the world” mentality, but with a “how can we, together, accomplish this incredibly important task!” spirit. Another way to protect indigenous cultures is to make sure you have present local representation and a diversity of workers and perspectives on the project.

A small army of experts and partners from around the globe – linguists, computer scientists, statisticians, literature professors, linguistic historians, educators, etc. – have been working on this for several decades. It is all very exciting, but it also means that no one group can exert an undue influence or pressure on the work. There is also a major push to capture what has been termed “linguistic idiosyncrasies” – speech patterns and accents that may have been lost to history. For instance, in the dictionary there is a list of several versions of a single word (in various dialects) rather than one standardized version.

We intend very soon to present our work to the local schools and provide teachers, students, parents, communities, women’s groups and others with tools to preserve, engage with, and propagate Igbo language and culture.

NP: Your work with the Igbo Language project is incredibly important. Do you intend to spread your effort to other parts of Africa, other endangered languages of the world?

CA: Yes and I hope that the funding will be available. There are many other languages that UNESCO and others have placed on the endangered list. We would like to provide a helping hand in confronting the problems facing several other African languages in much the same way we have tackled the Igbo Language project, to protect them from extinction… but we cannot do it alone. This project has been very expensive and has required personal expenditure on my part…and I do not consider myself a wealthy person. Thankfully, it has also been supported by several foundations and universities in America, but more funding is needed.

International NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] and African governments should tackle this alarming problem as well. African governments have a lot of work do -there are stumbling blocks to reading that we have discovered – poor eyesight for example. There is a great need for reading glasses in the millions – it is quite alarming.

You can see from what I have described and how long it is taking in just one instance that language and cultural preservation is a painstakingly difficult process that requires an army of dedicated workers and a great deal of resources and effort. This is not a simple problem but one of great complexity. And we need well-funded, large-scale projects to tackle this problem before it is too late.

NP: You’ve experienced living in what you have termed the “poorer addresses of the planet” – in African nations – as well as in developed Western countries. What’s your evaluation of the relationship between wealth, technology and culture?

CA: In my opinion, good art can come from any culture and background. Great Art does not cluster in one part of the world or the other. We are living in interesting times. Globalization is our reality, for good or ill… and I can talk about the problems for hours! There are also good things – technology: the internet, television, emails; other tools– have made our world smaller. Many of the best artists and writers are global citizens – they move constantly. Today, there exists a significant degree of cross-fertilization of cultures, ideas, values, stories, art, music, languages – you name it, on a grand scale across the globe. Many artists might have come from former less developed colonies but now they operate on the world stage. So the times have changed.

Having said that, I still feel that before we can announce the arrival of the Great World Story, or Universal culture, we should hear all the stories… appreciate all that the world has to offer. We should hear more stories and revel in the Art from indigenous societies of Africa, Australia, from the Middle East, from Eastern Europe, from Native Americans, from China ,India, Brazil and under-represented cultures of Latin America-countries like Ecuador, Uruguay-the Caribbean, and Oceania etc.

Artists from the developing world do no one a favor by blindly copying Western styles and forms. And let me be clear, because I am often misunderstood: I am not decreeing how a writer should write. I am not suggesting that artists should not or cannot be influenced by other artists from different parts of the world. That is welcome. I am suggesting that an artist should be true to who and what they are and should aspire to produce the best art that they can …that is when the magic in art is released. What I am calling for is an environment where freedom of creative expression is not only possible but protected… where an artist from any part of the worldcanacquire and develop their unique voice and then express themselves on the Great Cultural Stagein full ear shot of the world!

NP: You are now based at Brown University – an American Ivy League University, where you hold the David and Marianna Fisher University Professorship and spearhead the Achebe Colloquium. Tell me a bit more about this initiative.

CA: Yes… well the eminent Ruth Simmons, the former President of Brown recruited me to Brown in 2009,to start a new project in keeping with my life’s work. The Achebe Colloquium on Africa as it is called annually brings together an international group of scholars – Africanists, officials from African governments, the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and other organizations – for two days of intense deliberation and exchange of ideas on the importance of strengthening democracy and peace on the African continent. We have had three gatherings since its inception and discussed topics like Corruption, the leadership crisis in Africa, the Rwanda Genocide, the Crisis in the Congo, Nigeria’s myriad problems, the Arab Spring etc. This year’s conference will focus on Governance, Peace and Security in Africa.

NP: Let me end on a lighter note. Why have you attempted to write books for the children while you’ve been mostly focused on writing serious novels for the adults? How is it possible for you to shift your concentration from the complex and problematical world of adults to the simple and happy world of children? Which type of writing is more enjoyable to you?

CA: I decided to write for children as a matter of urgency and necessity. I first noticed there was a problem when I had my first child Chinelo and went to the bookshops to buy books for her. This was soon after independence from Great Britain. The books about Africa for children were, to put it mildly, not appropriate. So I decided that if I did not like the content of the children’s books, I would write my own. Now, around the same time, my friend Christopher Okigbo – Africa’s greatest modern poet – was the Cambridge University Press’ representative for the entire West African region. He also wanted to create a body of work that was based on local thought and African values for our children. Okigbo was a phenomenal publisher. He was so busy with the world and life and yet he got Cyprian Ekwensi to write a Passport of Mallam Ilia. He then came to me and said “Chinua you must write a children’s book.”

So, in many ways, Chike and the River was a mandated work by Christopher Okigbo. Okigbo had a way of “getting you to do something that you want to do.” He had a saying that the books he published must be first rate or he wouldn’t bother at all. He outlined the Cambridge University Press ‘culture’ – their expectations for a certain number of pages, for a particular moral code, for a particular standard of writing etc. When I accepted to write the book, I already had an inspiration in my life from which to draw for this particular story. I shared in Okigbo’s desire to mold young children into good citizens through good story telling. It sounds heavy, but in fact, good writing has a heaviness of its own – like the moral purpose that pervades Shakespeare or the work of Charles Dickens.

So when I took my manuscript in 1966 to Okigbo, he sent it immediately to the Cambridge publishers and they said they liked it but it was too short, to which Okigbo said in good humour to me: “go and read Ekwensi’s children’s book to get a sense of what we want.” So I went back to work and increased the length of the book. It wasn’t something I was planning to get done immediately, but Okigbo gave it an urgency. We were both concerned that African literature for children as it was formulated up to that point, had numerous stories in our oral tradition, but nothing in published form, so I too understood that there was work ahead of us to do, and quickly!I later published other books for children How the Leopard got its Claws, the Flute; and the Drum.

I think writing is very serious work and very important. All writing for me is a privilege and a joy. I do not have a favorite genre and I have written novels (prose), poetry, children’s books, essays, non-fiction works and political commentaries.

I will leave you with a passage from my new book There was a country-A personal history of Biafra, that I feel encapsulates my sentiments about writing:

The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into familiar and occasionally unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, towards a deeper understanding of self, society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.

Nasrin Pourhamrang is an Iranian journalist and the chief editor of Hatef weekly magazine, a local publication based in the northern Iranian province of Guilan.

Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan. His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad. For over fifteen years, he was the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He is now the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana studies at Brown University.

Chinua Achebe has written over twenty books – novels, short stories, essays children’s books and collections of poetry. His latest work There was a country – A personal history of Biafra will be available from Penguin publishers in September. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honorary doctorates from more than forty colleges and universities. He is also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award; the Peace Prize of the German Book trade (Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels) in 2002; the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in 2007; and the Gish Prize in 2010.

Achebe’s “There Was a Country” risks opening old wounds

By Michael Holman

There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra

Chinua Achebe

Allen Lane, 318pp £20.00

The author is one of Africa’s finest novelists, the subject is one of Africa’s greatest tragedies, the accusations he makes could not be more serious, and his prognosis for Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is grim indeed. The combination should make for a compelling read. Instead the result is a quirky mix of opinion and autobiography, history and polemic, uneven in quality and partisan in perspective.

It has been more than forty years since Nigeria’s civil war over the breakaway state of Biafra ended and Chinua Achebe, its best known son, has at last broken his silence on the subject: “It is for the sake of the future of Nigeria, for our children and grandchildren, that I feel it is important to tell Nigeria’s story, Biafra’s story, our story, my story.”

The story he tells has all the elements that were to become so familiar across the continent: ethnic divisions, religious rivalries and regional tensions, a problematic colonial legacy, and an elite of venal politicians and ambitious soldiers who plundered national resources.

This volatile combination came to a head in January 1966 when an Igbo-led coup overthrew Nigeria’s civilian government. Achebe, an Igbo himself, describes the coup as “naively idealistic”. Idealistic or not, the outcome changed Nigeria forever.

In May government plans to abolish regional autonomy, which would have allowed the better-educated Igbos to dominate the civil service, triggered a counter coup in July. It was a ghastly time, with many thousands of Igbos, who are mainly Catholic, slaughtered by the northern Hausa, almost entirely Moslem. Achebe calls the killings as “pogroms”, evidence that the “the northern military elite” had a “jihadist obsession”. Time and again he insinuates that religion played a big part in the civil war – yet General Jack Gowon, the Nigerian military leader, was a Christian from the Middle Belt region, as were several of his senior generals. And far from pursuing a “jihadist obsession”, the same northern elite backed Gowon’s “no victor, no vanquished” policy at the end of the war.

Whatever the merit of Achebe’s claims about the role of religion, no-one disputes the fact that as many as a million Igbos from around the country fled to the sanctuary of their homeland in eastern Nigeria. On May 30, 1967, the Oxford-educated Igbo general, Emeka Ojukwu, declared the independent state of Biafra.

Achebe argues that the roots of the ensuing civil war go back to well before the January coup. They can be traced to Britain’s encouragement of “inter-ethnic tensions” which were, he alleges, a key element in the “rigging” of the 1960 independence election to ensure that the north would dominate the new administration: “Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule”.

The Biafran civil war triggered by Ojukwu’s announcement might well have been dismissed as an obscure conflict in a far-off country but for two factors: the country’s huge oil reserves, which were in Biafra territory; and it was the first war of the television era. Having calculated that the Nigerian regime would emerge the victor, Britain sold it the weapons that helped bring this victory about, the arms reinforcing an economic blockade imposed by Nigeria, including a ban on relief flights. The result shocked the world. Newsreels of skeletal, saucer-eyed starving children, victims of what Achebe calls genocide, appeared on television around the world.

For the supporters of Biafra, the heart-breaking pictures were enough to win their sympathy. For opponents of Biafra’s bid for independence, a dangerous genie had to be put back in the bottle. If it succeeded, secessionist movements would be inspired by a precedent that would undermine the territorial integrity not only of Africa’s most populous state, but could threaten arbitrary, fragile and disputed borders across the continent.

At the time of the January 1966 coup Achebe was working in the talks department of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, and describes how he and his wife went into hiding in Lagos before heading east. There he had a unique vantage point as an emissary who put Biafra’s case to governments around the world, drawing on his first-hand experience of conditions on the ground, and mourning the children who were victims of a “genocidal obsession.”

Thirty months later the breakaway state surrendered. It was, writes Achebe, “something Nigeria has never really recovered from”. Nor, it appears, has Achebe, now 84 and living in the United States. His pain and his grief are as raw as ever, his anger abides. A third of the way through the book, he offers a further reason for telling his story.

“The moment has come for Nigerians and the world to ask the proper questions and draw the right inferences about what happened in those terrible years.” Yet it is far from clear just what those questions and inferences are. And as he compiles his indictment he gets careless. On one page he writes that “over two million” Biafrans died; on the very next page it has risen to “perhaps three million dead.” He claims that “more small arms were used in Biafra than during the entire World War”, which seems unlikely, but is nevertheless cited by Achebe as further evidence of the genocidal intentions of the military regime.

Had post-Biafra Nigeria proved a success, Achebe might at least be reconciled to his memories. But on the contrary, there has been a disastrous succession of military coups, followed by civilian rule, both corrupt. Billions of dollars of oil revenue have been squandered, and sleaze remains endemic.

Achebe’s fear for contemporary Nigeria has the same prophetic ring as his prescient novel, A Man of the People, published on the eve of the 1966 coup. Some four decades later he warns: “Corruption in Nigeria has passed the alarming and entered the fatal stage, and Nigeria will die if we continue to pretend that she is only slightly indisposed.”

But when he deals with what he calls the “endless cycles of inter-ethnic violence, mindless carnage” his anger spills over and his language verges on the intemperate, even inflammatory: “For over half a century the federal government has turned a blind eye to waves of ferocious and savage massacres of its citizens – mainly Christian Southerner, mostly Igbo or indigenes of the Middle Belt – with impunity.”

By this stage however Achebe’s story has become a harangue, one that risks opening old wounds and reviving old scores, and failing to provide the fresh insights into the African tragedy that was Biafra.

Michael Holman, brought up in Zimbabwe, is a former Africa editor of the Financial Times. His satire on aid, the Last Orders at Harrods trilogy, is published by Polygon.

This Review was first published at The Africanist and The London Literary Review

The Dr. Joseph & Bootsie Howard Instrument Gallery

The Howard Instrument Collection of the Watts Towers Arts Center is a permanent, revolving installation of musical instruments from around the world. It was assembled by Dr. Joseph H. Howard and donated to the center in 1989. The collection at the watts Towers Arts Center, about a quarter of Howard's total collection, consist of 144 instruments, the majority of which are non-Western.

Book Review: There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra -- Chinua Achebe

"Things Left UnSaid" By Chimamanda Adichie/London Review of Books

Nigeria, at independence from British rule in 1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large population, an educated elite and many natural resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a government model, was closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’

It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all. The amalgamation was an economic policy; the British colonial government needed to subsidise the poorer North with income from the resource-rich South. With its feudal system of emirs, beautiful walled cities, and centralised power systems, the North was familiar to Lord Lugard – not unlike the Sudan, where he had previously worked. In the South, the religions were more diverse, the power systems more diffuse. Lugard, a theorist of imperial rule, believed in the preservation of native cultures as long as they fitted his theories of what native cultures should be. In the North, the missionaries and their Western education were discouraged, to prevent what Lugard called their ‘corrupting influence’ on Islamic schools. Western education thrived in the South. The regions had different interests, saw each other as competitors, and became autonomous at different times; there was no common centre. A nation is, after all, merely an idea. Colonial policy did not succeed in propagating the idea of a nation: indeed, colonial policy did not try to. In the North colonialism entrenched the old elite; in the South it created a new elite, the Western-educated. This small group would form the core of the nationalist movement in the 1950s, agitating for independence. They tried to establish the idea of ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ as binary, in opposition to each other, a strategy they believed was important for the exercise of nation-building. But the politicisation of ethnicity had already gone too far.

After independence a vicious regional power struggle ensued. The ‘fear of domination’ of one region by another was everywhere. Elections were rigged. The government was unpopular. Only six years later a group of army majors carried out a coup and murdered top government officials. In the North the coup was seen as an Igbo coup, a plot by the southern Igbo to gain dominance. It didn’t help that the new head of state, in a clumsy attempt to calm the nation, instituted a unitary decree. Instead of regional civil services Nigeria now had a single civil service. A second coup by northern officers saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered. Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’ may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who were killed between May and September 1966, their homes ransacked and set on fire: Nigerian civilians killed by Nigerian civilians. The numbers are still disputed, but most agree that at least seven thousand died. The federal government seemed incapable of stopping the killings. Had the massacres not occurred, or had they been dealt with differently, the south-eastern region would not have seceded and declared itself the independent nation of Biafra.

The darkest chapter of Nigeria’s history: the Nigeria-Biafra war that left a million people dead, towns completely destroyed and a generation stripped of its innocence. On the Biafran side, intellectuals actively participated in the war, buoyed by their belief in the secessionist cause. They drafted press releases, served as roving ambassadors, made weapons. The best known and most influential African poet in English, Christopher Okigbo, joined the Biafran army. He was a romantic, unsatisfied with the administrative or diplomatic roles his fellow intellectuals took on; Chinua Achebe, his close friend, describes him as a man about whom there was a certain inevitability of drama and event. Mere months into the war, he died in battle. Achebe’s recollection of Okigbo’s death in There Was a Country is brief, and no less moving for that. Achebe hears the announcement on his car radio and pulls up at the roadside:

The open parkland around Nachi stretched away in all directions. Other cars came and passed. Had no one else heard the terrible news?

When I finally got myself home and told my family, my three-year-old son, Ike, screamed: ‘Daddy don’t let him die!’ Ike and Christopher had been special pals. When Christopher came to the house the boy would climb on his knees, seize hold of his fingers and strive with all his power to break them while Christopher would moan in pretended agony. ‘Children are wicked little devils,’ he would say to us over the little fellow’s head, and let out more cries of feigned pain.

In the years since the war, Okigbo has become an icon to writers throughout the continent: venerated, enmeshed in myth, his death a striking example of the great tragedy of the war. Achebe almost died too. Before the war started, when Igbo people were under siege in Lagos, soldiers raided his house and only just missed him. Later, his home and his office were bombed, and later still the Biafran army set up an armoury in his porch overnight; his family woke to the sound of shelling and knew it was time to flee. His story is a story of near-misses, of deep scars left by what could have been. After an air raid in Enugu at the beginning of the war, Achebe stares at the ruins of what had been the office of Citadel Press, a publishing company he had started with Okigbo, and thinks: ‘Having had a few too many homes and offices bombed, I walked away from the site and from publishing for ever.’

Achebe is the most widely read African author in the world, and was already a known and respected writer in 1967, when he joined the Biafran war effort. He served as an ambassador for Biafra, travelling to different countries to raise support for the beleaguered nation, and participating in various committees, one of which came up with the Ahiara declaration, a moving if starry-eyed document that was the new nation’s intellectual foundation. He has written poems and short stories about Biafra – Girls at War (1972) is a magnificent collection of stories set there. But many have waited and hoped for a memoir, for his personal take on a contested history. Now at last he has written it. Although it is subtitled ‘A Personal History of Biafra’, There Was A Country is striking for not being very personal in its account of the war. Instead it is a Nigerian nationalist lament for the failure of the giant that never was; Achebe is mourning Nigeria’s failures, the greatest and most devastating of which was Biafra.

This is a book for Achebe’s admirers, or for those not unfamiliar with his work. Parts are similar to passages from previous essays, and interspersed in the narrative are poems which, even if tweaked here, have been published before. Keen followers of Achebe will be interested in some of the new material about his life in the first section of the book. But the second section, about the war itself, mostly forgoes personal memory. In writing about the major events, Achebe often recounts what he was told rather than what he felt and the reader is left with a nagging dissatisfaction, as though things are being left unsaid. There are a few glimpses. On a visit to Canada as a Biafran ambassador, one of his hosts at the Canadian Council of Churches made a joke, and in the middle of the loud laughter that followed, it occurred to Achebe that Biafra had become different from other places, where laughter was still available. And, later, hearing a plane take off from Heathrow, he instinctively wanted to dive for cover. There are other small details, but all tantalisingly brief, sometimes oblique. I longed to hear more of what he had felt during those months of war – in other words, I longed for a more novelistic approach.

The book’s first section is much more satisfying in this respect: more involved and personal. There is his happy childhood, his close-knit family, with portraits of his father, an upright missionary teacher, and his mother, about whom he writes: ‘It is her peaceful determination to tackle barriers in her world that nailed down a very important element of my development – the willingness to bring about change gently.’ The first section is also a celebration of the richness of Igbo philosophy and cosmology and its inclusive culture. In recounting his memory of how welcoming his people were to early white missionaries, he writes about ‘how wholeheartedly they embraced strangers from thousands of miles away, with their different customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo religion, which he found more ‘artistically satisfying’. Much of his work is rooted in this tension between old and new, between the Christian religion of his parents and the retreating older religion of his ancestors.

He began to write Things Fall Apart after a British lecturer told him an earlier story he had written lacked ‘form’, but was then unable to explain to him what form meant. ‘I was conscripted by the story,’ he writes, ‘and I was writing at all times – whenever there was any opening. It felt like a sentence, an imprisonment of creativity.’ He is, famously, one of the writers who ‘wrote back’ to the ‘West’, who challenged, by writing his own story, the dominant and reductive Western images of his people. In his essay ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ he wrote that he would be happy if his work did nothing more than show his people that theirs had not been a life of darkness before the advent of the Europeans. ‘The writer,’ he says, ‘is often faced with two choices – turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.’ On the other hand, his work never sinks under this burden of responsibility.

He describes the situation in eastern Nigeria in the months leading up to war. In Nigeria’s urban mythology, the war would not have happened had it not been for the personal ambition of the Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an overambitious man who had engineered the secession and manipulated his people into supporting him. Many others have repeated this view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe that following the pogroms, or rather, the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred over the four months starting in May 1966, which was compounded by the involvement, even connivance, of the federal government … secession from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.’ To him it is self-evident that an ethnic group known for its independence of mind could not easily be manipulated into supporting a war. He writes about the reaction among Igbo people after the Northern massacres:

One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not know existed, a determination in fact. The spirit was that of a people ready to put in their best and fight for their freedom … But the most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was that they were finally in a safe place … at home. This was the first and most important thing, and one could see this sense of exhilaration in the effort that the people were putting into the war. Young girls, for example, had taken over the job of controlling traffic. They were really doing it by themselves – no one asked them to. That this kind of spirit existed made us feel tremendously hopeful.

One gets the sense from Achebe’s memoir of a man who is effortlessly himself, who will keep silent rather than say what he doesn’t believe. He is meticulous and sincere in his expressions of praise and gratitude – to fellow writers, to people who helped him or helped Biafra. He has a sense of humour, but very little cynicism. Today, when many Western male writers of a certain age are mythologised for their bad manners – rudeness, selfishness etc – as though great male talent must be accompanied by boorishness, it is refreshing to encounter a great male talent of a certain age who feels no need for posturing.

Achebe has sometimes been characterised as a writer lacking ‘style’, that word often used by people for whom prose, to be noteworthy, must be an exercise in flashy phrasemaking. If style is that, a form of pyrotechnics, then this is a fair characterisation of his work. But if style is a distinctive way of writing prose, whatever that may be, then Achebe’s style is quite evident. His sentences are confident. He writes a Nigerian, and sometimes a distinctly Igbo English. His writing is quiet, and in this regard he is similar to writers like William Trevor and Okot p’Bitek. He is free of literary anxiety.

My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this universal storytelling before we can say, ‘Now we’ve heard it all.’ I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead, the story is dead.’ I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.

His prose, which often has the cadence of spoken Nigerian English in his fiction, is sometimes plainly conversational here. I was reminded of my father, a contemporary of Achebe’s, telling stories of his past, in the circuitous storytelling tradition of the Igbo, each story circling in on itself, revelling in coincidence. I imagine Achebe would tell the stories in this book in much the same way as he writes them, with an elegiac, gentle vagueness, a lack of interest in adhering to hard fact. He ‘came first or second’ in an exam; his wife’s father died ‘in the mid-1980s’. There are many repetitions, school friends are introduced more than once, there are digressions, and he casually uses quaint words like ‘lad’ and ‘serpent’. There is more of what writing teachers call ‘telling’ and less ‘showing’. Sometimes, his stories are fable-like, with the simplicity – and simplifications – of that form. In Nigeria under colonial rule, he could travel from Lagos to the south-east at night without worrying about armed robbers. This, he argues, is because the British managed their colonies well. His simplification is rooted in disappointment. He is a member of Nigeria’s generation of the bewildered, the people who were fortunate to be educated, who were taught to believe in Nigeria, and who watched, helpless and confused, as the country crumbled. He was a Biafran patriot, as were most of his Igbo colleagues, because they no longer felt they belonged in Nigeria. He still seems surprised, almost disbelieving, not only at the terrible things that happened but at the response, or lack of response, to them. ‘As many of us packed our belongings to return east some of the people we had lived with for years, some for decades, jeered … that kind of experience is very powerful. It is something I could not possibly forget.’ Later:

I was one of the last to flee Lagos. I simply could not bring myself to accept that I could no longer live in my nation’s capital, although the facts clearly said so. My feeling toward Nigeria was one of profound disappointment. Not only because mobs were hunting down and killing innocent civilians in many parts, especially in the North, but because the federal government sat by and let it happen.

Achebe mourns Biafra, but his anger is directed at the failures of Nigeria. His great disappointment manifests itself in a rare moment of defiance towards the end of the book:

There are many international observers who believe that Gowan’s actions after the war were magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of treatises that talk about how the Igbo were wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have news for them: the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country’s continued backwardness, in my estimation.

Book Review: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe - review

Memoir and history are brought together by a master story-teller, writes Noo Saro-Wiwa

NOO SARO-WIWA, THE GUARDIAN

Achebe: an exhortation to better governance. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

No writer is better placed than Chinua Achebe to tell the story of the Nigerian Biafran war from a cultural and political perspective. Yet, apart from an interview with Transition magazine in 1968 and a book of Biafran poems, Nigeria's most eminent novelist has kept a literary silence about the civil war in which he played a prominent role – until now. In his engrossing new memoir, There Was A Country, Achebe, now 81, finally speaks about his life during the conflict that nearly tore Nigeria apart in the late 60s.

In many ways, the early part of Achebe's life mirrors the story of early Nigeria. Nicknamed "Dictionary", Achebe was a gifted Igbo student and enthusiastic reader, a member of the "Lucky Generation" of young students who rubbed shoulders at top institutions under the tutelage of Oxbridge colonials. They were effortlessly absorbed into the media, industry and civil service, serving a Nigeria driven by optimism on its way to freedom from British rule.

By independence in 1960, Igbo people dominated commerce and the public sector in a land where the three biggest ethnic groups (the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo) were jostling for supremacy. Achebe attributes Igbo domination to their self-confidence, inherent democratic values and adaptability, which were suited to Nigeria's modernising economy. But many Nigerians resented it, and Achebe admits that the Igbo could be cocky, brash and materialistic, though he rejects the popular suspicion that there was a pan-Igbo agenda to control Nigeria – his people have too strong an "individualistic ethic".

Six years after independence, corruption and electoral rigging preceded a military coup that overthrew Nigeria's first prime minister, the Muslim northerner, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Although most of the coup-plotters were Igbo, Achebe disputes that it was an "Igbo" coup, partly on the basis that its leader, Major Nzeogwu, had grown up in the north and was Igbo in name only. Nevertheless, the murder of Nigeria's northern leaders led to pogroms in which 30,000 Igbos living in the north were killed. The bloodshed culminated in General Emeka Ojukwu's declaration in 1967 that the Igbos' south-eastern region would secede from a country in which his people "felt unwanted".

Fearing the disintegration of Nigeria, the government blocked the secession with military force, backed by a UK government keen to protect its oil interests. Profoundly disappointed by this turn of events, Achebe left his job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Lagos and returned with his family to the south-east, now calling itself the Republic of Biafra. The Nigerian army launched a three-pronged attack to subdue the Biafrans, who fought back assiduously despite being out-resourced. Achebe describes a wartime spirit that inspired Biafran engineers to build army tanks out of reinforced Range Rovers and to invent the infamous ogbunigwe (bucket bomb) with devastating effect. Though he abhors violence, Achebe cites these as evidence of the quality of the Nigerian people, and he laments the corruption that strangled such ingenuity.

In the middle chapters, memoir gives way to largely neutral historical analysis, with Achebe citing a range of voices, media reports and books. There are interesting insights into the war's two central players: Biafra's leader Ojukwu and Nigerian president, General Yakubu Gowon, both Sandhurst-trained young men. Rivalries between them and within their teams "confounded political science models". Possessing little administrative experience, the two men pursued ego-driven policies, and missed opportunities to end the conflict sooner. Achebe cites Biafran diplomat Raph Uwechue, who accused Ojukwu of choosing ideology over pragmatism when he rejected relief supplies from the British.

In the following chapters, Achebe's personal story re-emerges. Despite the war, he lived a remarkably productive life. Driven by his belief in the political obligations of the writer, he became Biafra's international envoy, promoting the cause in Canada, Europe and Senegal. He set up a publishing company with his close friend Chris Okigbo, and became Biafra's communications minister, writing a manifesto for the republic. He describes being part of an intellectual elite that came together to recreate a Biafran microcosm of Nigeria's early spirit, their ideals drawn from a mix of traditional Igbo philosophy, US-style liberalism and socialism.

As the federal army closed in, Achebe and his family moved from town to town before settling in his father's village. The atrocities proved inescapable: at a market, Achebe's wife Christie saw a bomb split a pregnant woman in two. Achebe relays such horrors – including the deaths of his mother and friend Okigbo – with stoic brevity; his strongest expressions of sorrow are his poems, such as the famous "Refugee Mother and Child". Reproduced from his 1971 Biafran poetry book Beware, Soul Brother, these verses are scattered between chapters, offering affecting interludes.

As the conflict dragged on, Biafra buckled under a blockade so brutal it provoked an international outcry: mass starvation, kwashiorkor and mental illness devastated the Igbo landscape, where vultures, those "avian prognosticators of death", circled overhead. Biafra was the world's first properly televised conflict, and millions across the world were appalled by the horrors flickering on their screens. Such people as Joan Baez, John Lennon, Martin Luther King and Karl Vonnegut galvanised international responses to the tragedy, in an age before "Africa fatigue" had set in.

By the time hostilities ended in 1970, three million Biafrans had died, in contrast to 100,000 casualties on the federal side. Igbos weren't mere casualties of war, Achebe insists, but victims of calculated genocide. Ojukwu, meanwhile, escaped to live in exile in Côte d'Ivoire, inviting accusations of cowardice. Achebe rationalises this move on the basis that if the Biafran leader had stayed in Nigeria, Gowon would have been less magnanimous and conciliatory towards Igbos after the war.

Igbos were reintegrated into Nigerian society, but still faced economic discrimination. Achebe offers an excerpt of an interview in which Gowon tries to justify the crippling £20 flat fee given to every Biafran wanting to convert their Biafran currency back to the Nigerian naira. This sense of persecution still persists today: Achebe believes that Igbo people are the engine of Nigeria's advancement, stifled by a corrupt elite that prefers power and mediocrity to meritocracy. Igbo ostracisation, he says, is "one of the main reasons for the country's continued backwardness". Some might call this supremacism, but Achebe is ultimately a Nigerian patriot who sympathises with ordinary Igbos, rather than any broad Igbo power structure.

The final chapter is an exhortation to better governance, in which he examines corruption, ethnic bigotry, state failure and the steps Nigeria must take to rehabilitate itself. This prescriptive wish list reminds us of the gap between theory and practice in Nigerian politics; it makes you pine for the likes of Achebe to govern. But sadly, he's not writing a manifesto; instead, we have in There Was A Country an elegy from a master storyteller who has witnessed the undulating fortunes of a nation, which – unlike young "Dictionary" – has yet to fulfil its potential.

• Noo Saro-Wiwa's Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria is published by Granta.

Emmanuel Morah, Others Arraigned For Fuel Subsidy Fraud

Emmanuel Morah and George Ogbonna, Rocky Energy; Ngozi Ekeoma, Chief Executive, Nepal Oil & gas; Ifeanyi Anosike, Anosyke Group of Companies; Adamu Aliyu Maura and eight other suspects were arraigned Friday, October 5, 2012 by Nigeria's Eco nomic and Financial Crimes Commission in connection with part of a multi-billion dollars fraud involving the fuel subsidy program before the Justice Habeeb Abiru Federal High Court sitting in Ikeja, Lagos. The suspects have been accused of being involved in a $23.57 million fraudulent activities while working for five companies. The companies involved are Anosyke Group of Companies, Dell Energy Limited, Downstream Energy Sources Limited, Rocky Energy Limited and Nepal Oil & Gas Company. Nigeria pays twice as much for gasoline and fraudulent deals cost the treasury a whopping $6.8 billion between 2009 and 2011, a parliamentary inquiry found.

‘Surrendering A struggle’: Biafran Lessons To Tamil Eelam

In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, famed novelist Chinua Achebe, who hails from the Igbo community in Nigeria, opines that decades after Nigeria’s genocidal war on the short-lived state of Biafra, the Igbo people still face monumental problems under Nigerian rule. The Nigerian-Biafran war ended after the internationally aided Nigerian offensives on the Igbo people, which resulted in the death of around 2 million, compelled the leaders of the armed resistance for Biafra to capitulate. Whether the Solheim clique in the Western establishments who now claim that they could have saved civilian lives by facilitating the ‘surrender’ of the LTTE leadership in 2009 had the same intentions for the Eezham Tamil nation, ask Tamil political activists.

After the internationally forced capitulation, the political and economic situation of the Igbo worsened, while Nigeria paraded superficial improvements to the world.

Prof. Achebe, who is most known for his novel ‘Things Fall Apart’, is also poet, academic and postcolonial literary critic. Prof. Achebe had been a strong advocate for Biafran sovereignty when the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria to form a de facto state in 1967.

After a brutal civil war, which saw the deliberate targeting of civilians by the Nigerian forces, imposed starvation, and cutting off medical supplies to the Biafran territory, the Nigerian government retook the region after the surrender of the leadership of the Biafran resistance in 1970. The death toll among the Igbo during this period is said to range anywhere between two to three million.

In its war on the Igbo, Nigeria was assisted by a confluence of world powers, most notably the UK, which had strong economic relationships with the Nigerian regime. On the other hand, the political demands of the struggle for Biafra were not recognized by any major power in the world, though issues of their human rights violations touched Western media.

The parallels with Tamil Eelam are obvious, but for the fact that the LTTE leadership did not surrender the cause despite the compulsions by the International Community of Establishment (ICE) that in practice abetted the genocidal war against the Eezham Tamils.

Tamil political activists say ‘surrender’, as envisaged by some journalists, intellectuals and those in Western establishments, cannot just be taken as a humanitarian action that may have saved thousands of lives. They argue that it would have severe moral and political consequences that would affect the life, politics, and culture of the resisting people for generations to follow as a mortal blow to the idea of resistance and justice.

The current ramifications of the ‘surrender’ of the Biafran armed movement more than four decades ago have been elucidated by Prof. Achebe’s article in The Guardian through the questions he raises.

“Did the federal government of Nigeria engage in the genocide of its Igbo citizens – who set up the republic of Biafra in 1967 – through punitive policies, the most notorious being "starvation as a legitimate weapon of war"? Is the information blockade around the war a case of calculated historical suppression? Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, more than 40 years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the errors of the past because we are too stubborn to learn from them?”

“Supporters of the federal government position maintain that a war was being waged and the premise of all wars is for one side to emerge as the victor. Overly ambitious actors may have "taken actions unbecoming of international conventions of human rights, but these things happen everywhere". This same group often cites findings, from organisations (sanctioned by the federal government) that sent observers during the crisis, that there "was no clear intent on behalf of the Nigerian troops to wipe out the Igbo people ... pointing out that over 30,000 Igbos still lived in Lagos, and half a million in the mid-west".”

“But if the diabolical disregard for human life seen during the war was not due to the northern military elite's jihadist or genocidal obsession, then why were there more small arms used on Biafran soil than during the entire second world war? Why were there 100,000 casualties on the much larger Nigerian side compared with more than 2 million – mainly children – Biafrans killed?” Despite world establishments lauding Nigeria for reintegration and rehabilitation of the Igbo, Prof. Achebe notes that these have been but superficial cases that the Nigerian regime parades to the world to rehabilitate its own image.

“There are many international observers who believe that Gowon's actions after the war were magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of treatises that talk about how the Igbo were wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have news for them: The Igbos were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country's continued backwardness.”

“Borrowing from the Marshall plan for Europe after the second world war, the federal government launched an elaborate scheme highlighted by three Rs – for reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reconciliation. The only difference is that, while the Americans actually carried out all three prongs of the strategy, Nigeria's federal government did not.”

“What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war – ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery. Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today.”

Colombo’s Defence Seminar of 2012, that also saw the participation of military personnel from countries that abetted the genocidal war on the Eezham Tamils, harped on five Rs – rehabilitation, reconstruction, reintegration, resettlement and reconciliation. With the aid of powers that that have vested interests in the island, such grand terms are used to only to reconcile unitary Sri Lanka with the world community.

It can be deciphered through Prof. Achebe’s poignant article that the forced surrender of a struggle fighting for a just cause might appear as saving a few thousand lives at that particular moment, but in the long run, it only causes a systematic depredation of the resisting people at the hands of the oppressive system, the latter having gained more legitimacy owing to the surrender.

Tamil activists wonder whether this was the solution that those like Solheim had in mind when they claim now that they could have arranged a ‘negotiated surrender’ of the LTTE leadership to the Sri Lankan government.

At the height of the Vanni war, a representative of the Biafra struggle sent a message to TamilNet. He wanted the Eezham Tamils to remember that in his view they were fighting not merely for them, but for the cause of an array of nations and peoples like them all over the world. If the Eezham Tamils fail they fail the world of liberation he had said.

In The Guardian article, Prof. Achebe writes “As a writer I believe that it is fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our neighbours. Where there is justification for further investigation, justice should be served.”

It is high time Eezham Tamils and their supporters pose hard questions to the world establishments and international bodies like the UN, demanding justice for the internationally-abetted genocide through a restoration of their lost sovereignty in the clearest of terms.

.........TAMIL EELAM