Eneh Akpan Writes: Fact Imitating Fiction

There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe

When the writer, Chinua Achebe wrote his novel, A Man of the People he didn’t exactly know he was wading deep waters at least, not until he found himself in a compromising situation.

In his latest book, There Was a Country, A Personal History of Biafra which is a memoir of sorts, the late author spins a soul-searching tale of rut within the political class, the lust for power and the tragedy of a people’s indifference to a gradual national autolysis.

Beneath an undertone of grave urgency the voice of a savvy writer goes through the roof on a well-oiled, jet-propelled craft that hypes up the intuitive muse within. It doesn’t just arouse but nurtures his muse into an orderly and consistent relation with his own practical consciousness in a setup where it becomes difficult to indulge the one and skip the other.

Death toll peaked at a couple hundreds per day and most Igbos in Lagos hightailed it when violence against the ethnos came to a head. Achebe (an Igbo man, himse) couldn’t bring himself to accept the detail played out in his eyes; his job, his life as he knew it was done and over with. One day, while snooping around on his office grounds, he bumped into his boss.

“Badejo (Victor Badejo then director general of Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation) confirmed a story I had heard of drunken soldiers who came to my office ‘wanting to find out which was more powerful their guns or my pen.’”

Chinua Achebe,

There Was a Country

If you can remember our previous talk of a book within this bigger book; a novel with the name, A Man of the People, I assume you wouldn’t find it difficult to wrap your fingers around the author’s peculiar dilemma.

“Some may wonder why soldiers would be after me so fervently… it happened that I had just written ‘A Man of the People’ which forecast a military coup that overthrows a corrupt civilian government. Clearly a case of fact imitating fiction and nothing else, but some military leaders believed that I must have had something to do with the coup and wanted to bring me in for questioning.”

Chinua Achebe,

There Was a Country

Achebe had sent a copy of ‘A Man of the People’ to a writer friend of his to read and review before the official publication date came around. Said friend was the famous Nigerian writer, poet and anthologist J.P. Clark. Inside the building where their little writing community rendezvoused, a community with a roll-call which boasted great names like Wole Soyinka, Onuora Nzekwu amongst others, Clark would arrived much later than Achebe uttered words (about the book and its author’s insight) that Achebe didn’t quite get over until his passing on several years later.

“It happened that my new novel, ‘A Man of the People,’ was about to be published in London, and I was communicating with my publisher, Heinemann. I knew the book was going to be problematic for me because of its criticism of Nigerian politics—very severe criticism. The novel after all, climaxes in a military coup.
“I had sent one copy of the novel to J.P. Clark on a Wednesday, two days. When J.P. arrived at the meeting his voice rang out from several hundred feet away. ‘Chinua, you know, you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a coup!’

Chinua Achebe,

There Was a Country

Unbeknownst to both writers, they were sitting on the lip of a horrendous drop into the pit of the first military coup in Nigeria—the cold calculation and diabolic art of tactless men which has tainted the course of the nation’s upward mobility almost for all time. The evening of the same day this discussion took place recorded the successful execution of a military coup.

“When the artist’s imagination clashes with life’s very reality it creates a heavy conundrum.”—Achebe.

The job of a writer, contrary to traditional belief is one of the most dangerous though all he (or she) crafts are fictional works.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan