William Leith
11 July 2013
Chinua Achebe, who was born in Nigeria and died earlier this year, tells us a story from his childhood. He was at school. It was the 1930s. The teacher had taken the blackboard outside. He was teaching the young Achebe and his classmates about “the geography of Great Britain”. “Then the village ‘madman’ came by”, wiped the blackboard, and started telling the kids about Nigeria. Achebe is a very clear thinker who writes with great power. Here, he tells us his own story, the story of Nigeria, and the story of the Nigerian Civil War, which took place in the 1960s. People think they know what will happen when they start wars, and they never do.