Chinua Achebe and the Biafran Saga 3: My apprciation of Usman Zainab’s point of view.

 Zainab’s Analysis

Achebe and the Myth of Nigerian Exceptionalism

Professor Chinua Achebe

It has been only a few weeks since the prolific and renowned author,
Professor Chinua Achebe’s personal account of the 1967 Nigerian Civil
War, “There Was a Country” was published, yet the firestorm it has
generated in the Nigerian public sphere still rages on. Admittedly,
many, including yours truly haven’t read the book, but the little we
have gleaned of it, from the book’s synopsis in the UK Guardian, has driven many into a frenzy and is further straining Nigeria’s fractious unity.

My intention here is neither to review nor critique the book, as
others have done a better job of critiquing, deconstructing and
disputing some of Achebe’s alleged inaccurate depiction of events and
personalities of the Nigerian Civil War. Max Siollun a Nigerian historian questions Achebe’s claims of non-integration of Igbos in Nigeria, Ibraheem A. Waziri disputes Achebe’s jihadist colouration of events, Jumoke Verissimo writing for African Arguments points out the ethnocentric slant to Achebe’s book, Chris Ngwodo
analyses the disconnect between Achebe’s generation and the “post-civil
war generation” and many others have written or cited credible evidence
to dispute a number of Achebe’s claims and one-sided portrayal of
events.

However, my particular grouse with Achebe’s latest treatise is that
it disappointingly feeds into an increasingly disturbing trend in public
discourse on national issues in Nigeria, of a perceived Nigerian exceptionalism,
and the deployment of such to excuse the failures of nation-building,
socio-economic development and social cohesion in Nigeria.

Proponents of this view of Nigerian exceptionalism (defined as
the perception that a country or society is unusual or extraordinary in
some way and thus does not need to conform to normal rules or general
principles) believe Nigeria occupies a unique place in the world stage
because it is an artificial British creation, from an amalgamation of
the Northern and Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria for
administrative purposes in 1914. This artificial creation is chiefly
responsible for the present dysfunction of the Nigerian state, according
to this view, and thus, social cohesion and national unity will forever
remain elusive as Nigerians are “not one”.

The advocates of this view also assert that certain events in
Nigeria’s immediate post-colonial history, especially the 1967 Civil
War, its intrigues and aftermath of creating a unitary-federalism have
and are still holding Nigeria back, and therefore, it’s necessary to
regularly exhume the debris and the horror of these events, as Achebe
has done. Thus, we are now in 2012 inundated daily with news clippings
of the 1960s Nigeria-Biafra War, sad pictures of emaciated starving
children in Biafra over four decades ago and many other horror stories,
because the war according to this view was a monochrome event between
the forces of “good” and “evil” and nothing else in-between.

These two historical events according to proponents of this view,
mostly but not exclusively account for why Nigeria is so “different”
from other countries in the world and for its continuous dysfunction.

Sir Frederick Lord Lugard.

On closer examination though, Nigeria is certainly not different and
this perception of exceptionalism for all intents and purposes smacks of
intellectual escapism of shying away from Nigeria’s most pressing
problems, shirking away from complicity in Nigeria’s present challenges
and the otherness syndrome that characterizes who we blame for
Nigeria’s development challenges. It’s the 1914 Amalgamation, the
post-independence elites, key instigators and participants of the Civil
War many of whom are now deceased, or as Achebe has recently done, its
everyone else’s fault in Nigeria for marginalizing his own ethnic
group.  It doesn’t matter who it is, so long as it is someone else, the
finger always points away somewhere.

Looking at the basis of this “uniqueness”, Nigeria is obviously not
the only “artificial” colonial creation based on arbitrary drawing-up of
boundaries. The boundaries of much of Africa, with the exception of
countries like Ethiopia and Liberia were artificially created by
Britain, France, Germany, and other European colonial powers. The case
of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is particularly appalling as
it was not just a colony, but at some point, it was the personal
property of King Leopold II of Belgium.

Most countries that make up today’s Middle East and North Africa were
carved out of the defunct Ottoman Empire from the 1920s by Britain and
France after the latter’s defeat in World War I. It’s the same story in
much of South America and South-East Asia and most of these countries
are till date grappling with their own nation-building challenges. Take
for example, the case of the Kurds in Iraq who have for years, been
agitating for their own sovereignty.

Similarly, Nigeria is not the only country in the world to experience
a terrible Civil War. Many countries, even the “developed” ones have
gone through particularly bloody civil wars at some point. The American
Civil War of 1861 to 1865 between the American federal government and
the secessionist southern states (ring any bells?) led to the death of
over 750,000 soldiers and yet to be determined civilian casualties;
Britain, Spain and France had their shares of bloody civil wars and in
the developing world, much of South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia
have gone through tumultuous wars with the particularly bloody ones
including but not limited to China, Russia, Cambodia, Burma, Yugoslavia,
Sudan, DRC, Liberia and Sierra Leone with in most cases, millions of
lives lost. These wars significantly scarred each of these countries,
though I doubt the stirring up events of the past is a key task those
which are now more politically stable frequently embark upon.

Since Nigeria is not the only “artificial creation” neither is it the
only country to have experienced a civil war, one wonders why some of
our “intellectuals” thrive on exhuming buried sentiments of decades past
and why they obstinately insist on invoking demons of a traumatizing
past of which no side can claim to be wholly innocent or wholly guilty.
Why are they fixated on distracting Nigerians from more relevant issues
of the present with direct bearing on the future? Well, Achebe states
that his “aim” of rousing such emotions “…is not to provide all the answers but to raise questions and perhaps to cause a few headaches”.

One truly wonders if this is really a “headache” Nigeria needs at
this juncture when many parts of Nigeria still lack electricity, quality
healthcare and education, and other basic infrastructure that many
countries have for long overcome; when Nigerian youths are having a
crisis of self-discovery in the absence of sufficient jobs, economic
opportunities and worthy role models and when none of these ills
discriminate among Nigerians on the basis of religion or ethnicity. Yet
Achebe’s contribution is to pitch young Nigerians against one another as
we squabble over events we neither witnessed nor participated in, and
which we cannot change.

The faces of the Nigerian Civil War

The truth is people like Achebe greatly traumatized by a painful past
have been perpetually subjected to view the world through a
two-dimensional lens of black and white, preventing them from realizing
that Nigeria has considerably evolved with all shades of grey in
between. When Achebe claimed for instance that his Igbo ethnic group “…were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria…”
and haughtily refers to this marginalization, as the primary source of
Nigeria’s backwardness, one wonders if the American-based Professor has
in the last two decades or so, been to the section of Kaduna Central
Market where Igbo women selling crayfish and the finest palm oil are
comfortably nestled close to the Hausa butchers. One wonders if Achebe
has ever wandered around Park road in Zaria or Ahmadu Bello Way in
Kaduna where hundreds of Igbo dealers sell a vast array of Japanese,
Taiwanese and lately Chinese manufactured electronics; curtains, cooking
gas, furniture and apparel. Max Siollun provides further evidence of Igbo “integration” in politics and the economics in Nigeria.

So far Nigeria is not unique for having these problems but will
attain an “exceptional” status when she gets her act together, becomes a
strong nation built on the richness of her diversity, has a robust
middle class riding on the back of a roaring industrializing economy,
provides moral and socio-economic leadership and well-springs of
business opportunities to Sub-Saharan Africa and indeed the black race,
and provides equal opportunity for her citizens irrespective of religion
and ethnicity. Then Nigeria will truly become exceptional, not when she
lacks basic infrastructure, when almost 70% of the population wallow in
abject poverty in the face of stupendous wealth of the mostly decadent
few, when monumental corruption persists, and the mostly young citizenry
are further polarized and engaged in futile squabbles stoked-up by
intellectuals like Achebe who should otherwise be beacons of social
cohesion. Then Nigeria remains another African country that just can’t
get it right.

After all is said and done, Achebe is entitled to his opinion, no
matter how prejudiced or ethnocentric it may seem. One hopes that
Nigerians and foreigners alike remember that this remains a personal
opinion, and just one piece of the intricate puzzle of Nigerian
historical dynamics. Importantly, Achebe’s is one side of a story, that
of Biafra and for those interested in the complete story, the Nigerian
side deserves attention as fundamentally, there are two sides to every
story just as there are two belligerents in every war.

”The truth might be hard to say, painful to bear or even drastic for the truth sayer but still needed to be said”. ALISON.