Free There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe

going to be received.
    Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation.
     A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that
     dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story
     from an African perspective—in full earshot of the world.
    The preparation for this life of writing, I have mentioned, came from English-system-style
     schools and university. I read Shakespeare, Dickens, and all the books that were read
     in the English public schools. They were novels and poems about English culture, and
     some things I didn’t know anything about. When I saw a good sentence, saw a good phrase
     from the Western canon, of course I was influenced by it. But the story itself—there
     weren’t any models. Those that were set in Africa were not particularly inspiring.
     If they were not saying something that was antagonistic toward us, they weren’t concerned
     about us.
    When people talk about African culture they often mean an assortment of ancient customs
     and traditions. The reasons for this view are quite clear. When the first Europeans
     came to Africa they knew very little of the history and complexity of the people and
     the continent. Some of that group persuaded themselves that Africa had no culture,
     no religion, and no history. It was a convenient conclusion, because it opened the
     door for all sorts of rationalizations for the exploitation that followed. Africa
     was bound, sooner or later, to respond to this denigration by resisting and displaying
     her own accomplishments. To do this effectively her spokesmen—the writers, intellectuals,
     and some politicians, including Azikiwe, Senghor, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Lumumba, and Mandela—engaged
     Africa’s past, stepping back into what can be referred to as the “era of purity,”
     before the coming of Europe. We put into the books and poems what was uncovered there,
     and this became known as African culture.
    This was a very special kind of inspiration. Some of us decided to tackle the big
     subjects of the day—imperialism, slavery, independence, gender, racism, etc. And some
     did not. One could write about roses or the air or about love for all I cared; that
     was fine too. As for me, however, I chose the former.
    Engaging such heavy subjects while at the same time trying to help create a unique
     and authentic African literary tradition would mean that 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 worldviews, 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. 2 We were clearly engaged in what Ode Ogede aptly refers to as “the politics of representation.” 3
    This is another way of stating the fact of what I consider to be my mission in life.
     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. 4
    There are