There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra By Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, 2012 ISBN-10: 1594204829 ISBN-13: 978-1594204821

In many ways, There Was A Country can be read as a continuation of Achebe's mission. The book approaches the story under the auspices of three genres: memoir, poetry, and academia. Achebe begins with a coming-of-age routine, recounting his early life of scholastics, his passion for literature, his burning desire to elevate African stories to a narrative tradition then burdened with cliché, misrepresentation, and outsider exposition. Tucked in between these and other pages are poems, previously published in some form, conjuring the horrors ordinary Biafrans experienced during their three years at war with Nigeria.

Throughout the chapters, Achebe punctuates the stories with interludes of poetry. They stand as exhortations, as hanging tears, flags, stop signs and as asterisks. Most of the poems are from his past collections. He preserves for generations yet unborn the role played by the likes of Dick Tiger, Gordian Ezekwe and Carl Gustaf von Rosen during the Biafran war.   

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