War and Peace Theme Analysis

Chinua Achebe’s “Civil Peace” begins with the main character, Jonathan, expressing his joy about the end of the Nigerian civil war, which raged from 1967 to 1970 between Nigeria and a failed secessionist state called Biafra. The cost of the war was terrible, illustrated by the fact that Jonathan feels lucky to have lost only his youngest son out of his six-person family, and by his astonishment when he discovers that his little house survived the destruction of the war. After the war, Jonathan is optimistic and excited to rebuild, but over the course of the story, it becomes clear that peacetime has its own dangers. One night, Jonathan and his family are robbed by thieves, who declare during the robbery that now that the civil war is over, they are in a “civil peace.” The phrase “civil peace”—which is also the title of the story—is a kind of oxymoron that captures the new dynamic of Nigeria after the war, in which the official war is over but there is still a battle between citizens for survival.

Throughout the story, Achebe makes clear the horror and danger of war and its lasting devastation on the country. The clearest example is that Jonathan considers himself lucky to have only lost one child to its violence, which clearly implies that many other families lost more. The danger of the war is also shown in a flashback in which Jonathan nearly loses his bicycle when it is requisitioned by a possibly corrupt soldier. This is the only scene of the actual war that appears in the story, and it is tinged with the threat of violence, as Jonathan is almost forced to give up one of the few resources he has left. It is never made clear which side the soldier is on, and by leaving that detail out, the story suggests that this environment of threat and plunder is simply the nature of the war. Even after the war, war’s devastation defines the land. When Jonathan returns to his native city of Enugu, a massive concrete building nearby has been destroyed, and Jonathan counts himself lucky that his own small house has merely been badly damaged. The remnants of death from the war are also repeatedly present in the story. Jonathan buries his bicycle just next to the cemetery where his dead son is buried, and later his children pick mangoes from nearby a military cemetery. The fruit is then sold to soldiers’ wives, some or all of whom are presumably widows. The dangers of war linger everywhere in the setting of the story.

However, the end of the war does not mean the end of difficulty for Jonathan and his family and neighbors, as it soon becomes clear that peace presents its own struggles. When Jonathan attempts to return to his pre-war job as a miner, there is no work to be had. Other former miners are less lucky than Jonathan and don’t even have a home to return to. The peace that Jonathan and others find themselves in is not one of easy rebuilding, but rather of lack of money and other resources. This lack of money leads to conflict that is smaller than the destruction wrought by the war, but nevertheless is ever-present and life-threatening. For instance, after Jonathan gets his $20 egg-rasher for turning in his Biafran money, he understands that he must quickly put the money out of sight and avoid interacting with any other people to make sure he doesn’t get robbed. Another man, who is less careful, does get robbed before he can even get out of the crowd around the egg-rasher line. The climax of the story, in which a group of thieves surround Jonathan’s home and attempt to rob him, shows that danger and violence are not unique to the war. Much like the soldier during the war, the thieves threaten violence (in this case, by firing guns into the air) to get what they want from Jonathan. The thieves themselves make clear that the current “peace” shares attributes with the war when they call it a “civil peace”—the “civil” suggests that just as the war was a battle between the people of Nigeria, the peace also may end up being a battle of citizen against citizen.