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Work on this series began on October 20, 2020, precisely coinciding with the unfortunate events of the Lekki Shooting. I live a mere five minutes away from the tollgate where the Nigerian government dispatched armed soldiers to kill peaceful protesters. The government denies the shootings; I–and everyone who heard the gunshots echo in the air for seven hours–know otherwise. I held my younger brother tightly that night, fearful that a stray bullet might pierce our
window and hurt him. This is the grim reality our country has devolved into: a land of fear.
I had never heard gunshots before.
For my generation, we’d read about these people, these atrocities, these governmental failures, in books, and so to witness it unfold live on our phones altered the trajectory of our collective thinking irrevocably. It’s no surprise that soon after, coupled with more economic and societal failures, one of the biggest
waves of emigration hit Nigeria was spurred, “japa”, and suddenly we had workplaces, friendships, and families being torn apart simply because the country couldn’t, or perhaps, wouldn’t work. And yet, despite this crippling and failing system, I couldn't quite shake the image I had personally witnessed at the tollgate just days before the shooting: people of all tribes, class and religion together in one place, coexisting peacefully. That was something that even as a young person, I had thought impossible, but there it was in front of me–A new Nation built atop the old, refashioning its people and itself into something greater than the sum of its parts. I didn’t know it at the time, but while the air was still heavy with grief, pain, and sadness, I had begun work on what I knew would become one of my greatest artistic proclamations.
In There Was A Country, Achebe was mourning a nation he held close to his heart. To watch the rise and fall of something so pure, so beautiful, so honest, would have been a herculean task, especially being at the center, where things couldn’t, or again, perhaps, wouldn’t hold. This was a massacre, a genocide of the Igbo people, that he, as a writer, an artist, and an emissary of that young nation was forced to watch and document. As that is the writer’s role, maybe, in the best and worst of times: to observe. As an Igbo man myself, to read his work is to be reminded, painfully, of the past that he and I share, of a people, of a nation, of a place that was.
The words in my own title would not come to me until two years later, when Peter Obi, a man who within a year had galvanized the youth in a way my generation had never seen before, ran for president. This man, from a tribe that has suffered so much over the course of Nigerian history, a tribe that I myself am from, a tribe that Chinua Achebe wrote representing 10 years ago, rose to heights we’d never seen and inspired me in a way I never knew possible. My previous writing has extensively explored the cruel and unfair system that lies within Nigeria, even going so far as to write against the university I was in, fighting a corrupt organization with nothing more than art and. Surrounding Peter Obi were the youth and with them, was hope. And that hope fell on everything else in my life, and is what led me to make the statement: There Is a Country.
It bears mentioning that Achebe and I are talking about two different things, separate entities, when we say “country” and this is also due to our backgrounds. I, as an Igbo person, whose parents came from Delta State, was born and raised in Lagos, a majority Yorùbá speaking state with its own separate language and culture. My father, an Igbo man, speaks Yorùbá fluently and going to school I was exposed to the culture and language with the same, if not at a higher frequency than my own mother tongue. Due to colonial influence, my work and tongue are also lined with traces of the Western cultures that raised me, and so while Achebe grew up closer to home, my home is completely different to where I’m from, and yet, that does not dilute my heritage, or demean it, I still contain what it is I am. And that is part of the heart of my collection and what I am trying to say: that the country, and what we consider it to be, has changed, and moved, and evolved. Culturally, religiously, and ethnically, we have entered, almost imperceptibly, into a new era of confluence not just within Nigeria, but with the rise of the internet and social media, all around the world. What it means to be a Nigerian, what Nigeria itself is, is no longer what it was and it is up to us, this new, younger generation to define it for ourselves.
And that is what I mean when I say There Is A Country: I am saying that despite the corruption, the maiming, the killing, woeful ineptitude of our leaders– in my mind and heart, that image of the Lekki tollgate still remains, of a people willing to fight and die for the country they believe in. One I believe in. One brimming with hope, culture and history. The only home I have ever known. Despite it all there is still a story that must be told, for those within and without, native and diaspora, western and African, present and future, a story for all the people of Nigeria and those from all the nations of the world. It is a story of us, my people, and the place we call home. There Is A Country, truly, and it is here and now.
