A duty to protest

A few years ago, in West Africa, a woman came up to me and said, ‘You know what’s wrong with our men? They go crazy once they get power. Crazy and bad.’ Chinua Achebe’s saving has been the fact that he never sought power, at least not of the kind that leads to conflict and the cutting off of heads. His curse has been to observe things that most of us should be happy never to have seen.

Now 82, Achebe has done what many elderly people do when they have seen remarkable things: he has borne witness and set down his version of the rise and fall of the short-lived state of Biafra.

Achebe’s masterpiece came early in his writing life: Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 when he was still in his twenties, has since sold some 12 million copies and is one of the key texts of any mid-century literature course.