Review of Chinua Achebe's There Was a Country

Dear all,

you will find some reviews for Chinua Achebe's most recent book, There was a country below. This is an interesting and complicated book.

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe Allen Lane, 333 pp, £20.00, September 2012, ISBN 978 1 84614 576 6.



Things Left Unsaid

Reviewed by Chimamanda Adichie

London Review of Books
Vol. 34 No. 19 · 11 October 2012 pages 32-33

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.’

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