There Was a Country, Chinua Achebe
There Was a Country, Chinua Achebe
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There Was a Country
A Personal History of Biafra

Author: Chinua Achebe

Narrator: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

Unabridged: 9 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 10/11/2012


Synopsis

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a longawaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe’s people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a roving cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war’s full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world literature.

Achebe masterfully relates his experience, bothas he lived it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria’s birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country’s promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfully reminded that artists have a particular obligation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, should be committed writers—they should speak for their history, their beliefs, and their people.

Marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and forty years of research and reflection. Wise, humane, and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe’s place as one of the most vital literary and moral voices of our age.

"1966", "Benin Road", "Penalty of Godhead", "Generation Gap", "Biafra, 1969", "A Mother in a Refugee Camp", "The First Shot", "Air Raid", "Mango Seedling", "We Laughed at Him", "Vultures", and "After a War" from Collected Poems by Chinua Achebe. Copyright © 1971, 1973, 2004 by Chinua Achebe. Used by permission of Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc. and The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Author Bio

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was a prominent Nigerian writer who is famous for his novels describing the effects of Western customs and values on traditional African society. Achebe's satire and his keen ear for spoken language made him one of the most highly esteemed African writers in English. He published novels, essay collections, poetry, short stories, and juvenile fiction. Among his works are Things Fall Apart, Anthills of the Savannah, A Man of the People, Arrow of God, and the notable collections Morning Yet on Creation Day and Hopes and Impediments. A recipient of the Man Booker International Prize, he was the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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