auspices. However, as was the case with many former African colonies that achieved political independence in the mid-twentieth century, Nigeria was prepared for unitary nationalist government on the European nation-state model. That is important because African tradition was antithetical to that model. By custom and practice that predated colonialist incursion the peoples, or tribes, of Africa constituted a patchwork of nations that were not accounted for sufficiently by the nation-state planners late of the foreign service. Boundaries were drawn because of power structure then existing in Western civilization, without sense of indigenous tribes or peoples but rather with a sense of which country's official infrastructure could demand what on the Anglo-European nation-state model.
In Nigeria the principal boundaries of tension were between the Ibo, or Igbo, and Yorube, or Urube, tribes. When the boundaries split the Ibo, the tensions ran highest in the section of eastern Nigeria called Biafra. Between 1967 and 1969, Biafra seceded from Nigeria and attempted to secure additional territory, but at great human cost; at one point large-scale famine was a feature of the conflict. By 1969 the Nigerian national government had retaken control of all the area. Despite various coups and countercoups since that time having varying degrees of violence and success, Nigeria tended toward evolution as a unitary nation-state, with its precarious economy buttressed by oil-exporting activity in the last decades of the 20th century.
The relevance of Nigeria's modern history is in the background of Achebe's career, both in Africa and out of it. Beginning in 1967, Achebe adhered to Biafra, which was to lose its bid for independence from Nigeria, as a diplomat in the Ministry of Information. When the civil war was over, Achebe briefly took a senior fellowship at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. However, from 1972 to 1976 he and traveled abroad as a v...