There Was a Country

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War of 1967-1970. The war was infamous around the world for its savage impact on the Biafran people, who were blockaded by the Nigerian government and starved to death. As a roving cultural ambassador for his government, Achebe absorbed the war's full horror from this unique vantage. Immediately after the war, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for over forty years he maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. After years in the making Achebe presented a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful experiences.