A Song for the Forgotten

Despite the existing literature, the Biafran war remains a criminally underexplored event. The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma makes that canon a little less bereft. 

The Road to the Country opens in 1967 with its hero, Kunle, at a desk writing. He is trying to ‘free himself’ of a guilt he has carried for a decade. When Kunle was nine, to spend time with his sweetheart, Nkechi, he sends his brother, Tunde, out of the house. This harmless act—throwing a football into the street for Tunde to fetch—results in a car accident that cripples Tunde. The injury severs Kunle’s relationship with Nkechi, tethering her to Tunde, and thrusting Kunle into himself, so that ‘he has no friends and has avoided—as if by some inner protestation—anything that could bring him close to anyone.’ Kunle is a law student at the University of Lagos, but he is so insular he does not know about the war brewing in his country. When he learns Tunde has followed Nkechi into Eastern Nigeria, the region now calling itself Biafra, it is this desire for absolution that propels him into finding his brother. 

This resolution of deep personal guilt amidst harrowing national devastation is an intriguing juxtaposition. In addition to being a war novel, The Road to the Country is also a quest novel, a bildungsroman, a mystical tale. Several realities are running concurrently. The novel’s other point-of-view, its framing device, a seer who is watching the events of the war 20 years in the past, refers to Kunle as Abami Eda, ‘one who will die and return to life’. In parts of the novel, Kunle is referred to as ‘the prominent star’ or more simply ‘the star’.  

In a landscape rife with death and violence, this sort of prophecy takes the focus away from the pressure of whether Kunle will survive—at least until he dies the first time—and allows one to inhabit the full carnage while still maintaining novelistic tension. Through a series of naive mishaps, Kunle finds himself in the Biafran army. Prophecy aside, Kunle is of vital dual heritage: his father is Yoruba and his mother Igbo, opposite sides of this war. By not fully understanding the scale of the situation, everything he experiences becomes an avenue for educating the reader, most of whom might not have context for the war. Kunle’s Yoruba identity means that whatever sympathy he goes on to develop arises out of witnessing the sheer inhumanity of Biafran oppression. In a time where tribal tensions in Nigeria are dangerously rising, it is a perspective that declares objectivity: one need not be tribally affiliated to recognize and decry genocide...