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

some who believe that the writer has no role in politics or the social upheavals
     of his or her day. Some of my friends say, “No, it is too rough there. A writer has
     no business being where it is so rough. The writer should be on the sidelines with
     his notepad and pen, where he can observe with objectivity.” I believe that the African
     writer who steps aside can only write footnotes or a glossary when the event is over.
     He or she will become like the contemporary intellectual of futility in many other
     places, asking questions like: “Who am I? What is the meaning of my existence? Does
     this place belong to me or to someone else? Does my life belong to me or to some other
     person?” These are questions that no one can answer.
    Ali Mazrui famously restated this position in his novel
The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
in which he takes my friend, the great poet, to task for, as Mazrui believes, “wasting
     his great talent on a conflict of disputable merit: ‘The Nigerian Civil War and all
     its ramified implications [can be] compressed in the single poetic tragedy of the
     death of Christopher Okigbo.’” 5 In Mazrui’s fiction Christopher Okigbo finds himself charged with “the offence of
     putting society before art in his scale of values. . . . No great artist has a right
     to carry patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential.” 6
    Christopher Okigbo believed, as I do, that art and community in Africa are clearly
     linked. African art as we understand it has not been distilled or purified and refined
     to the point where it has lost all traces of real life, lost the vitality of the street,
     like art from some advanced societies and academic art tend to be. In Africa the tendency
     is to keep art involved with the people. It is clearly emphasized among my own Igbo
     people that art must never be allowed to escape into the rarefied atmosphere but must
     remain active in the lives of the members of society.
    I have described earlier the practice of
mbari
, the Igbo concept of “art as celebration.” Different aspects of Igbo life are integrated
     in this art form. Even those who are not trained artists are brought in to participate
     in these artistic festivals, in which the whole life of the world is depicted. Ordinary
     people must be brought in; a conscious effort must be made to bring the life of the
     village or town into this art. The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There
     is constant change in the world. Foreign visitors who had not been encountered up
     to that time are brought in as well, to illustrate the dynamic nature of life. The
     point I’m trying to make is that there is a need to bring life back into art by bringing
     art into life, so that the two can hold a conversation.
    In a novel such as Amos Tutuola’s
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
you can see this vitality put to work on the written page. There is no attempt to
     draw a line between what is permissible and what is not, what is possible and what
     is not possible, what is new and what is old. In a story that is set in the distant
     past you suddenly see a telephone, a car, a bishop—all kinds of things that don’t
     seem to tie in. But in fact what you have is the whole life of the community, not
     just the community of humans but the community of ancestors, the animal world, of
     trees, and so on. Everything plays a part.
    —
    My own assessment is that the role of the writer is not a rigid position and depends
     to some extent on the state of health of his or her society. In other words, if a
     society is ill the writer has a responsibility to point it out. If the society is
     healthier, the writer’s job is different.
    We established the Society of Nigerian Authors (SONA) in the mid-1960s as an attempt
     to put our writers in a firm and dynamic frame. It was sort of a trade union. We thought
     it would keep our members safe and protect other artists as well. We hoped that our
     existence would