The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma review – a brutal journey

The victims of Nigeria’s bloody civil war are given a voice in this tale of a man’s quest to find his estranged brother

‘This war has not merely grown out of the dark desires of evil men who had set upon their Igbo neighbours in the north, killing and wreaking destruction,” thinks Kunle, the protagonist of Chigozie Obioma’s third novel The Road to the Country. “Instead, it seems the war sprangled out of the natural soil of society and has been growing for many thousands of years in the blood of mankind itself.” He is trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless onslaught of violence in which he finds himself trapped, conscripted into a war he has no desire to fight.

“All wars are fought twice,” wrote Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” War has always produced literature; rarely, though, is the response immediate. In the wake of a civil conflict, especially, the proximity in which perpetrators of violence and victims, winners and losers are forced to live can result in an enforced silence. Twelve years after the end of the Nigerian civil war in 1970, Buchi Emecheta, an Igbo woman, published her response, Destination Biafra. The grandfather of Nigerian letters Chinua Achebe’s memoir of the time, There Was a Country, did not reach the public until 2012.