There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. For more than forty years Achebe was silent on those terrible years, until he produced this towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful events. A marriage of history, remembrance, poetry and vivid first-hand observation, There Was a Country is a work of wisdom and compassion from one of the great voices of our age.
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra is a personal account of the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), also known as the Biafran War by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. There Was a Country is considered one of the defining works of modern African non-fiction.
The work got the author reviews from great persons; one of whom is the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela who said “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down.
For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.
