There Was a Country: A Memoir

Although this is a personal history, I felt that this was like the fourth part of achebes Africa Trilogy, where he describes what from his point of view went wrong with Africa. Would the Biafra-Nigeria, where a staggering amount of 3 million lives were been avoided or at least had a thorough analysis within the Nigerian society afterwards, The place of Nigeria and Africa on the world stage might be different now. According to Achebe the situation is similar than that of China 500 years ago, where it could have risen to world domination. Instead China went into internal turmoil and through 500 years of relative weakness. Achebe thinks Africa got a similar chance when the Colonial powers left, but painfully did not took the chance. One can only hope that It does not take 500 years for Africa to get on track.

If you choose to, you of course can read this as a highly political peace, but I read this as a poltical testament of a generation that screwed it. Achebe Is not a defender of colonialism but at least it brought some fixes too, like possibility of education, healtcare, infrastructure and so on instead of the fear of terror, corruption, ecologic catastrophies and mediocre apathy right now having the overhand.

*The appendix consists of 1/3 of the books length.