the introduction, which traces the root causes of the war to the foundations of the Nigerian
national history, surpasses what others have written on the subject, and presages why Great
Britain was hell-bent to aid Nigeria by all means to destroy the Republic of Biafra.[...] the
nightmarish cloud of political uncertainty and debacle, which had hovered over the nation for
long, turned into a torrential downpour of a bloody civil war which no one, on either side of
the conflicts, could stop. The final work of the committee became the Ahiara Declaration …

154 World literature today reviews me from myself.” in both cases, the length of the line is
more than a stylistic tic; it is thematically essential to most of Williams's poems. Matching
length of line to length of life, Williams writes with humor and poignancy about aging, as in
the moving and bold “Salt,” in which he admits to finding it “abashingly eerie that just
because i'm here on the long low-tide beach of age with briny time/licking insidious eddies
over my toes there'd rise in me those mad weeks a lifetime ago.” Many poems in this book …

This book is the latest in the ever-expanding corpus of books on the Nigerian Civil War
otherwise known as the Biafra War. Though biographical in presentation, the book is a study
in nation-building in Africa. Divided into four parts, through the personal experiences and
reflections of the author, the book traces the history of Nigeria from the Berlin Conference
when" Great Britain was handed the area of West Africa that would later become Nigeria,
like a piece of chocolate cake at a birthday party"(p. 1) to contemporary times. In the course …

Focusing on traditional ritual items and objects of power with a practice of gender exclusion,
marginalization, and oppression of categories of women in Igbo societies, this article argues
that such practices are rights issues and consequently a challenge to contemporary women.
This insight derives from Chinua Achebe's 2012 autobiography in which he seems to
suggest that there are matters still outstanding in the fight for women's liberation. Given
imperialist circumstances in the social history of Igbo encounters with a hegemonic …

Here is an intellectually dense reading of Chinua Achebe's personal history of Biafra, which
deconstructs and illuminates the book. Deconstructive components expose elements of
Achebe's narrative that fly beyond the intellectual grasp of his hasty castigators, many of
whom vented without having read the book. In the related vein, the illuminative components
expose the obligation and burden that Achebe discharged in the book as a Biafran. It is
therefore a book whose narrative retraces the responsibility of Achebe's faith vis-à-vis a …

Among the lasting consequences of colonialism is the creation of a hybrid state structure that
replaces the legacies of the precolonial indigenous social authority patterns with new
western paradigms. Notwithstanding the very few exceptions in Africa, postcolonial states
are besieged with conflicts some of which are ethnic-related or struggles to control power
and natural resources. My paper examines the Nigerian conflicts as explored in Chinua
Achebe's 'There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra'(2012). The analytical work …

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Chinua Achebe's attempt to confront the historical and
spiritual roots of Africa's crisis. The author, one of Africa's greatest intellectual giants was
consistent in courageously criticizing the misrule on the continent for decades, stances
which put his life at risk and forced him to flee his native country. His great disappointment
manifests itself in his last and latest book―There was a Country-A personal History of
Biafra‖. Achebe mourns Biafra, but his anger is directed at the failures of Nigeria. This book …