There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra by Chinua Achebe

 Achebe, the author of the widely read "Things Fall Apart," a novel translated into more than 50 languages and has sold more than 10million copies worldwide recounts the events surrounding the Nigerian Civil War, a three-year battle lasting from 1967-1970 in a new book 'There Was a Country.' This book describes the state of the country prior and post to the war.

There Was a Country has all the elements of an author’s journey through his own life. There is the story of his orphaned father’s conversion to Christianity, Achebe’s education, his own experiences of both western tradition and Christianity.
The book also portrays Achebe and his involvement in the Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Nigeria-Biafra War) of 1967–70, which claimed up to 3 million lives, most of them from the Igbo ethnic group of which he originated from began after the mass slaughter of Igbos in northern Nigeria. The Igbos, inspired by the late Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu fought back to declare an independent state in the Igbo-dominated southeast soon later led to a segregated country.
Forty years on, it is impossible not to see the impact of that civil war on Nigeria and even families today. For many Igbos, the impact is still very personal.
Achebe writes that after the war, “the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country’s continued backwardness, in my estimation.” A trip to the Igbo-dominated southeast reveals abysmal roads, bridges threatening to collapse, and a power grid that is all but entirely useless, all what many Igbos believe is a deliberate policy of neglect as punishment for the sin of secession. The country has suffered as a result of what Achebe calls the evil of tribalism.

Source: Newsweek Magazine