English · Chapter 7
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"Civil Peace" is a short story by Chinua Achebe (1930 to 2013), the Nigerian novelist best known for Things Fall Apart (1958) and often called the father of modern African literature. The story was written in 1971, soon after the Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970), also known as the Biafran War, in which the Igbo dominated eastern region tried to break away as the Republic of Biafra. It was collected in Girls at War and Other Stories (1972). Achebe, himself an Igbo who lived through the war, writes here not about the fighting but about the uncertain peace that followed and the resilience of ordinary people rebuilding their lives.
Jonathan Iwegbu counts himself extraordinarily lucky after the war. "Happy survival!" is the greeting on everyone's lips, and Jonathan means it with all his heart. He has come out of the war with five inestimable blessings: his own head, the head of his wife Maria, and the heads of three of their four children. Their fourth child has died, but Jonathan accepts this with his favourite saying, "Nothing puzzles God."
As a bonus he also has his bicycle. During the war an officer, dressed in rags with a pair of army boots as his only sign of rank, had tried to commandeer it. Jonathan suspected the man was not genuine and bribed him with two pounds to let him keep it. Then he buried the bicycle in the little clearing where he had buried his son, in the camp of the refugees. A year later, when the war ended, he dug it up, wiped it with palm oil and found it almost as good as new. He turned it into a taxi, carrying people and goods for a fee, and in a fortnight he earned a small fortune of one hundred and fifteen pounds.