There Was a Country Quotes

“Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had ever witnessed.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that a Biafran plane landed in another African country, and the pilot and all of the crew came out, and there was not a white man among them. The people of this other country—which is a stooge of France—couldn’t comprehend a plane being landed without any white people. They said, “Where is the pilot? Where are the white people?” They arrested the crew, presuming there had been a rebellion in the air!”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“— The Igbo are a very democratic people. The Igbo people expressed a strong antimonarchy sentiment—Ezebuilo—which literally means, a king is an enemy. Their culture illustrates a clear-cut opposition to kings, because, I think, the Igbo people had seen what the uncontrolled power of kings could do.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today!”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Igbo sayings and proverbs are far more valuable to me as a human being in understanding the complexity of the world than the doctrinaire, self-righteous strain of the Christian faith I was taught.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling, that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty’s empire. If Ghana seemed more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed, expert hands.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Ghana and Nigeria resented each other and competed for supremacy in every sphere—politics, academia, sports, you name it.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level. Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There is constant change in the world.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“whether we look at one human family or we look at human society in general, growth can come only incrementally.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“And it dawned on me that despite her excellent mind and background, she was not capable of teaching across cultures, from her English culture to mine. It was in these circumstances that I was moved to put down on paper the story that became Things Fall Apart.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“cock crow”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Even when there was strong disagreement, one had to remember to be discordant with respect.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“The Igbo are a very democratic people. The Igbo people expressed a strong antimonarchy sentiment—Ezebuilo—which literally means, a king is an enemy.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria’s blockade policies.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir

“[H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir