MEMOIR:There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, By Chinua Achebe Allen Lane, 352pp. £20

CHINUA ACHEBE’S reputation as Africa’s greatest novelist rests largely on his first book, Things Fall Apart, which he wrote aged 28. When it appeared in London in 1958, it was widely (though mistakenly) touted as the first black African novel, a curiosity, of interest chiefly for its sonorous language and its evocation of precolonial life in what is now eastern Nigeria.

This was unfair. Things Fall Apart owes its enduring success to the fact that it is a great work of fiction, skilfully deploying the dramatic tools of character, symbolism, plot, incident, pacing, focus and point of view. A follow-up, Arrow of God, is at least its equal.

The novels find their villain in British colonialism, the insidious force that gradually undermines and then supplants the traditional religious and social structures of Achebe’s Igbo protagonists. But like most well-written villains, this one is not painted in black and white.

The district commissioners and missionaries preach, cheat, bully and, if necessary, shoot their way into Achebe’s Igbo villages, with no respect for ancient law or custom. But their intentions and achievements are not always bad, and the society they supplant is one that gives religious sanction to sorcery, infanticide, ritual murder and communal warfare.

In the defining incident of Things Fall Apart the protagonist, Okonkwo, helps to kill his own foster son on the orders of the local pagan oracle. Okonkwo’s eldest son, already troubled by the cries of babies abandoned in the forest in accordance with custom, is driven by this murder to convert to Christianity. Symbolically, he changes his name to Isaac, the name of Abraham’s sacrificial son; this was also the name taken by Achebe’s own convert father.

Half a century after the publication of his masterpiece, the 82-year-old Achebe is again writing of the Igbo forests, but this time to a different end. Having sailed for most of his life under a Nigerian flag of convenience, Achebe is reverting to the colours of Biafra, the breakaway Igbo state whose bid for independence was crushed by the central government between 1967 and 1970.

When the Biafran war broke out the young Achebe was among hundreds of thousands of Igbos driven back to their homeland by bloody pogroms in the rest of Nigeria. A leading novelist and a director of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, he was co-opted on to Biafran government councils and sent abroad as a special ambassador.

To little avail: few states were prepared to diverge from the official policy of the United Nations, the Organisation for African Unity and the former colonial powers, which held that, in the interests of “stability”, the borders of colonial states, however arbitrarily created, should remain sacrosanct. In Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, the result was – often still is – tribalism, corruption and war.

Nigeria’s three main ethnic groupings – northern Hausa and Fulani, western Yorubas and eastern Igbos – had for centuries lived largely apart from each other, like cats in a spacious backyard. By forcing them together into one colonial state, the British threw all three cats into one bag, and they have been clawing away at each other ever since.

When Biafra tried to escape, the British backed the northern-dominated central government in a bid to protect their own commercial interests, chiefly oil. With British arms, Nigerian forces were able to blockade, starve, bombard and progressively overrun Biafra. In the process, somewhere between one million and three million people died, the bulk of them women and children. It was Africa’s first televised humanitarian crisis.

After 40 years brooding on this traumatic defeat, Achebe now wants to bare his feelings. The result is There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

One of the golden generation of educated young Africans to whom the departing British hurriedly tossed the keys of self-rule, Achebe had a ringside seat for the resulting slide into corruption, coups and chaos. As things fell apart he was variously a senior broadcaster, a fugitive, a refugee and a victim of bombardment.

Yet for the most part he confines his narrative to a steady recitation of things that happened in the past – to him, to his loved ones, to Biafra – rather than shifting pace and focus to bring his story to life for us. This, surely, is what most readers would expect from such a gifted novelist: plenty of books have already been written about Biafra by historians and journalists, many of them deeply sympathetic; what we want an Achebe to tell us is how it felt, what it meant. Instead, he seems at times to lose the thread of his own story.

For example, with the army actively hunting for him, he and his family hide at the house of a sympathetic British official. He writes: “The soldiers located us after we had been hiding about a week. It became clear to me that I had to send my family away.” That’s all. What does it mean? Did he have a dramatic escape? What did the soldiers say or do to him?

Similarly, his old schoolfriend Christopher Okigbo, the noted poet, emerges early on as a major personage in Achebe’s life. Yet when Okigbo is killed – fighting in the field with the Biafran army – Achebe sees no narrative need to slow things down and zoom in on this individual tragedy. He doesn’t even tell us how it happened.

The writerly gifts that illuminate Achebe’s fiction – the shifting focus and pace, the poetry, nuance and human detail – are not sufficiently employed in this late work. There Was A Country seems unsure whether it wants to be a personal memoir, a political history or an ethnic polemic, and does not fully succeed as any of them.

Ed O’Loughlin is a former press correspondent in the Middle East and Africa. His second novel, Toploader, a satire of drone warfare, has just been published in paperback