By admin
Greetings dear readers, hope you all had a good week ! apologies for the delay in bringing you another book to look out for –Â but life and its struggles happen – but hopefully i’ll improve my vacillations about which book to actually review.
As you all know, there are quite a lot of books written on the Biafran war/Nigerian civil war, some very popular and and some not quite so. This book by Prof Soyinka is popular, but for a different reason, which is that it is his Memoirs written years after winning the coveted Nobel prize for Literature and so encompasses his life story plus the Gen Abacha saga parts of the book tend to overshadow other narratives of this great and thrilling book.
For Biafran war historians though, this book is very important because, it has a small part riddled with absolutly riveting, nail-biting, heart-rending, revealing and intriguing stories on the early part of the civil war war in Nigeria. And for the Biafrans, there is a coitus-interruptus part as well – i’ll leave it up to the readers to find it and please leave a comment below when you do.
I can’t deny that I love prof Soyinka’s style of writing – I do. Many don’t, I have seen write ups in the past criticising his writings as too verbose etc, but “I like the smell of verbose in the morning”, and he makes my day with his style and I hadly put this book down once I started reading it, because word for word or tale for tale, he holds the reader in a compositional vice-like grip.
Only Part 2 of 8 in this book deals with the Biafran war saga, but it carries a lot of revelations, especially of how the Yoruba joined the war on the Nigerian side and how Col Victor Banjo – Gen Ojukwu’s best friend, discharged his duties during the foray into the West of Nigeria enroute Lagos – I’m trying not to give away too much (no spoiler alerts) – you must buy and read this book for the sake seeing for yourself and settling a lot of puzzles of the civil war.
My favourite part of the book, is where he runs into his best friend Christopher Okigbo (The greatest African Poet) by accident and how Okigbo didn’t have time to waste – he was in the Biafran army and then he disappeared in a puff of dust forever, Listen ! I’m trying not to ruin it for you as reading it yourself is much better.
You Must Set Fort at Dawn is not a direct Biafran war book, but trust me, what you’ll learn from it is a lot. The rest of the book is quite thrilling and cinematic as expected from the Memoirs of the great Professor.
Go get a copy at:https://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Must-Set-Forth-Dawn/dp/041377628X
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