Category Archives: THE CHILDREN

THE CHILDREN

THE WAR DANCERS

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I was born in Gusau but my earliest recollection of life was in Funtua. My father worked for Societe Commerciale d’Outer-Mer Automobile Nigeria (SCOA) as a District Manager responsible for trading and produce-buying, so we lived in different parts of northern Nigeria. He was a respected leader within the Igbo community, and recognized by the Emirate Council as the Igbo man to go to on matters that had to do with communal relations. At that time, the Igbo State Union was very strong in the north and once they took a resolution it was binding on all Igbos across the region.

About a year before the January 1966 coup, my father decided to take an early retirement because a friend of his in the Emirate Council informed him that a political crisis was brewing between Northern and Southern Nigeria which might boil over into violence. His friend advised him to leave because his name was top on the list of Igbos to be eliminated. My mother didn’t want to follow him immediately because she had a bakery, a chemist, and some other businesses, and was reluctant to start all over in an unfamiliar business terrain. However, they reached a compromise that she would move to Zaria, where he had a house, and where a lot more people from my hometown resided. Their thinking was that the large numbers of our people in Zaria would be able to defend themselves in the event of violence better than they would in Funtua.

In January 1966, I gained admission into St. John’s College, Kaduna. In July of the same year, the revenge coup took place, and the massacre of Igbo civilians started. As students, we lived within the relative security of the boarding house but as day students came with horrific stories of what was happening outside, I became deeply concerned about my mother and siblings in Zaria. I went to Father Canty, our Irish Principal, to obtain permission to travel to Zaria but he denied my request. Being a tenacious person, I went again but with a classmate of mine. This time, Father Canty agreed because he felt it was better to allow two people travel rather than one lone boy. He gave us one pound sterling from our pocket money to make the trip.

When we arrived Zaria, all seemed calm, so we set off on foot into Sabon Gari where our parents lived. On our way, an elderly Hausa man stopped us and asked us in Hausa, “My children, where are you going to?” We said we were going to Sabon Gari. He said, “No, no, no. Don’t go into Sabon Gari. What is happening in Sabon Gari is so much evil than I have ever seen in my entire lifetime.” He asked where we were coming from, and when we said Kaduna he said we should go back. My estimate of his age was about 70 years. He had a full white beard and might even have been an angel; I don’t know and may never know.

I wasn’t happy that we had come all the way and couldn’t accomplish our mission. I then suggested to Charles that rather than trek into Sabon Gari we should take a taxi. We boarded the first taxi that came by. As we drove into Sabon Gari, we could see a rowdy group of young men further up the road, armed with clubs, knives, cutlasses, axes, tyres, and other weapons. On sighting them, the taxi driver said he couldn’t continue the journey. I was furious and questioned why he would ask us to come down in the face of danger. He was adamant and said the violent mob will damage his vehicle. I told him he was fearful for his vehicle but not for our lives. When the mob noticed he was making a U-turn, some of them started running to catch up with the car. When we were out of danger, the driver asked us again to alight because he was heading to Kaduna. With great relief, we said we would follow him back.

On our way back to Kaduna, somewhere on the Zaria-Kaduna Road, an army truck was coming in the opposite direction from us. A hand was waving us down but our driver did not notice because he was talking with the man in the front seat with him. The army truck left its side of the road and headed towards us, in an attempt to force us off the road. Charles and I screamed, and our driver swerved into the bush. The army truck stopped, and the soldiers rushed at us. Seeing that the two people in front were northerners they spoke to them in Hausa, “Namu ne, kwo nasu ne—Are you one of us, or are you one of them?” The driver said he was one of them. They said they would have knocked us into the bush believing we were Igbos trying to escape. Then they cautioned the driver to be vigilant because the times were perilous. But before they got to our car, I had asked Charles not to answer any questions since his Hausa was not as fluent as mine. The primary school I attended from classes five to seven was Capital School, Kaduna, which the children of the northern elite and white expatriates also attended. This exposed me to the mannerisms of the children of the northern elite, so I could speak impeccable Hausa and act like them. As they turned to leave, one of the soldiers came back to us. His first question was, “Young boys, who are you?” I replied with a question as children of the elite are likely to do. “What is your problem with us? Are we disturbing you?” He replied that they just needed to know. I retorted, “You can see we are students.” The questioner mellowed down but insisted on knowing our names. I gave them the name of the man who had advised my father to leave the north, claiming he was my father. I reckoned that even if they decided to take us back to Funtua, the man would agree we were his sons, seeing that we were in trouble. My bluff worked because they let us go. Back in Kaduna, we again decided to trek back to our school. On our way, we found dead bodies littering the streets. The killings had taken place after we left Kaduna that morning. That was when it fully dawned on me that we took a very stupid risk.

A few days after this incident, the killer gangs started coming to our school, but our principal, Father Canty, and one Father Wolfe would tell them the Igbo boys had left. Still, they kept coming back. There may have been fellow students telling them we were still in school. This got the principal apprehensive, so he made arrangements for us to be airlifted from Kaduna to Enugu. Early one morning—I think it was in September 1966—at about 4.00 am, he went round the dormitories waking us up because army trucks were waiting to take us to the airport. Before this time, he had been smuggling the older Igbo boys in his 403 Peugeot pick-up van down to the east. He would squeeze many of them at a time into the pick-up, cover them with tarpaulin, and drive to Obollo Afor, the border town between current Enugu state and Benue state. There, he would leave them to find their way home. He did about four or five such runs, using different routes, until he made sure all of them were out of danger. For us younger boys, he bundled us into the waiting big army truck and took us to the airport. Those airlift operations were a tripartite arrangement between the federal government under Col. Yakubu Gowon, the northern regional government under Col. Hassan Katsina, and the Eastern regional government under Col. Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu. The planes used were Airforce cargo planes that had no seats.

Back in Zaria, my mother was in her bakery when the killings started. My siblings were in school so she sent one of her workers to pick them up. But a bigger problem was how to move from the bakery to the army barracks, which was one of the safest places at the time. Eventually, they moved to the house of a Hausa family but word soon went out that a particular Hausa man was hiding Igbos in his house. One day, some young men came to search the house but the man of the house insisted that no such thing would happen, that no one would go into his purdah—kule—to search for anybody. They left. But that night, he moved my mother and siblings to another family and that’s how they kept moving from one family to another until they were able to get to the military barracks from where they were evacuated to the east by rail.

By the time I arrived Enugu there was no news of my mother and siblings. Notwithstanding, I had this insane confidence that they would come back safely. My father had the same confidence as I had. My mother’s relatives were crying and I was saying to them, “Don’t worry, she will come back safely.” Every day, I followed my Auntie Monica to the railway station to find out if a new train had arrived. Each day we went home, disappointed. But about a month after I came back, lo and behold, there was one of my siblings at the railway station. I screamed and said to Auntie Monica, “That’s my sister.” She was just five years old and when she realized it was me, she walked slowly to me and asked that I carry her. I asked her, “Where is Mummy?” She pointed in a certain direction and Auntie Monica followed me in disbelief. There was my mother and all my siblings in tattered clothing. They hadn’t taken their bath in more than two weeks. The emotional scene between my mother and her sister is one I will never forget.

My relatives soon put me in Colliery Secondary Technical School, on the hilltop in Ngwo. The shooting war had started at this time, and Eastern Nigeria was preparing for a war we believed would avenge the genocide committed against Ndi Igbo. Our school was the first to be closed in Biafra because it was on a high altitude and they needed it as a training camp for Biafran soldiers. We became idle and every morning I went with a few of my friends to Independence Layout where the Biafran army had converted some buildings to a Tactical Headquarters. We heard that Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, our hero, operated from there so we went every day to catch a glimpse of him. Sometimes he came by helicopter which landed in an open space not far from the buildings. He usually looked serious but whenever we waved, he would wave back and that made our day. We were going there to stay in touch with what we believed was happening in Biafra because there were so many rumours flying around. There were also adults who came to hear the latest news and view our soldiers come and go.

One day, a 911 lorry arrived with Abiriba War Dancers. Immediately they came down, they started dancing, wielding their machetes and other paraphernalia this way and that. They were reputed to have invisible powers and would even cut off the heads of their enemies in battle. This boosted our morale and people started bragging that the northerners would see hell since the Abiriba war dancers had joined the battle. After dancing, the warriors went to eat. I remember this clearly because we ran after their lorry as it drove them to Okpara square, in front of the Parliament Building. After they were fed, they continued dancing. In the evening, they left for the war front.

About two days later, when we came back to the Tactical Headquarters, a Mercedes-Benz 911 lorry drove in. The driver and motor boys were looking solemn. As one of them was coming down from the back of the lorry, the tail board opened. My God! I saw what I had never seen in my life. Dead bodies were piled up in the lorry. From the way they were dressed we realized they were the Abiriba war dancers we had seen a few days earlier. They had been taken to the Nsukka war front with cutlasses as their only weapons. That sight affected me so much that, for many days, I couldn’t eat. I don’t know what happened to the bodies but they may have been taken back to Abiriba for burial. With the benefit of hindsight after the war, I questioned how any army commander, who is experienced in modern warfare, would allow defenseless people go to war without modern weaponry. Many crazy things happened during the war and this is why we must avoid the temptation of going into another one.

Ozoemena!

–Emma Onyilofo

The Biafran Airlift, THE CHILDREN

LIVING IN SAINT-ANDRE REFUGEE CENTER, GABON – A FORMER CHILD REFUGEE’S ACCOUNT – PART ONE.

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LEAVING BIAFRA

In 1968, just before Enugwu-Ukwu fell to the Nigerian troops, my family took refuge in my maternal grandparents’ home at Egbengwu, Nimo, a neighbouring town. When we got there, my grandparents’ house was teeming with refugees. The distribution center at Nimo was St Mary’s Primary School, and it was also completely occupied by refugees from surrounding towns like Enugwu-Ukwu, Nawfia, and Amawbia. One Irish priest, named Reverend Father Nolan, was in charge of relief distribution, assisted by other people such as Mr. Otie, the headmaster of the school. The Parish church was Assumpta Catholic Church but because of its location on the major road from Enugwu-Ukwu to Nimo it was close to the war front so it was not considered ideal as a relief distribution centre. It was on one of such visits to St Mary’s, in company of my younger sister, Rhoda, that Father Nolan announced that officials of CARITAS were coming to St Mary’s the next day to take sick children to Gabon. He told parents to bring their children who were ill the following day.

Although I was not suffering from kwashiorkor, I was frail and weak, so I made up my mind to present myself for consideration. I was just seven years old, but I saw it as a life-saving opportunity. My decision was not well received by my mother who reasoned that I was too young to be sprinted out to an unknown country beyond their care and reach. She broke down, saying, “Who is going to care and treat you like the mother who gave birth to you?” My dad, who was not known to give in easily to emotions, approved of my decision and offered to take me to St. Mary’s.

On arrival we saw babies, toddlers, and teenagers with bloated stomachs, swollen legs, and severely shrunken bodies, all looking like living ghosts. Many were too weak to stand, so they sat on the floor. Soon after, Father Nolan and Mr. Otie arrived with the CARITAS representatives. Mr. Igboka, the Catechist, was also there. When the selection started, all the kids in front of me were selected. I was rejected four times even though I buckled my feet on each occasion to create the impression that I was very ill. After my fourth rejection my father went into a tirade. This prompted the officials to call me forward, so I was the last kid to be selected that day.

The next stage was the documentation. The CARITAS officials wrote each child’s first name, surname, parents’ names, village and town, and the processing centre. Then they stuck an adhesive tape with identification number on our wrists. Mine was 492. This was the last documentation in Biafra.

As a green-coloured Austin lorry made its way towards us, my father came to me, shook my hands, and prayed that I would come back to meet them alive. My mother embraced me, sobbing. Other parents watched their children being loaded into the lorry, like cargo, and into an uncertain future. As our lorry slowly revved to drive off, I positioned myself to wave a final good bye to my parents. Years later, I learnt that my mother cried inconsolably for two days after my departure.

As soon as we departed Nimo, our chaperons informed us they were taking us to Ulli airport and from there to Gabon. On the way some children were crying. After some time our lorry stopped by the roadside so we could have lunch. It was either two small pieces of yam or one big piece placed on our palms.

When we got to Ulli airport, our lorry parked in an inconspicuous place waiting for the signal to approach the tarmac. I could see planes landing and taking off in the pitch darkness. After a long wait we drove up to the tarmac where a plane was waiting. For the first time, I saw an aircraft in a stationary position. The size was a far cry from the little bird-like thing we kids usually saw flying across the skies. We all came out of the lorry and a ladder was placed at the foot of the aircraft. Two big men positioned themselves, one at the foot of the ladder and the other at the top. One after the other, we were taken up the ladder into the aircraft. There were no chairs inside but there were blankets spread across the floor. We were given one or two cubes of sugar and asked to lie down. I could not remember when last I saw sugar in those terrible days, and I became excited again after the emotional separation from my parents. The door of the aircraft was shut, the engine started, the lights turned off, and I could sense a slow movement of the plane up to the time we became airborne.

We were woken up at Libreville International airport. My first impression was that this was real ‘obodo oyibo’ – a marvel. There were aircraft of different sizes and shapes, and that gave me the opportunity of seeing these planes at close quarters in broad daylight. Vans pulled up at the foot of our plane, and we all boarded. Those who were too weak to get into the vans were either helped in or carried inside. After a short drive our van pulled into a massive church complex. It was called St. Andre and the priest in charge was Monseigneur Camille.

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The contributor, Johnny Abada, lives in the United States of America.

NB-The image on this post is taken from the internet. It shows St. Marie Cathedral, one of the centers used to house refugees during the Nigeria-Biafra war.

 

 

The Biafran Airlift, THE CHILDREN, THE SOLDIERS

THE JAMAICAN WIFE

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When our ship landed in Lagos most of the foreigners decided they weren’t getting off the ship. This was January 1966. The coup had already taken place. Dad decided we were going in. He had been given a job with the Water Resources in Lagos. So we got a flat at 51 Modupe Johnson Street, off Bode Thomas, Surulere. We were neighbours with the *Obas. They had three boys. And guess what? Their mother was also Jamaican. Six months later, the second coup took place.

One day we were told we had to move next door. And we were like, “Why?” But we packed up and moved next door. Before that my dad had gone out one day and come back with an Opel Record. It was a two door car. My dad was not around a lot. We thought he was going to work. Once in a while he would show up with the car. Sometimes he would leave the car and be gone. Then, one day he went out with mum and when they came back she had this baby in her arms.

Another day, dad was about to leave the house and I followed him. I was slow but when I got to the front window I saw him getting in the trunk of his car. I thought, “Why is dad getting into the trunk?” When I heard the rest of the story as an adult I realized that’s what he had to do to stay alive. I didn’t know where he was being taken. On reflection I think it had happened a few times but that was the only time I saw it.

One day dad shows up with the car and said, “You are going back to your grandparents.” That was the first time I would be going to Eastern Nigeria and I can proudly say I was stepping into Biafra because the Republic of Biafra had just been declared. On our way to the East we were stopped at the Onitsha Head Bridge by Biafran soldiers. They were saying they were not going to let us through. In the argument one of them slapped my dad. My mum grabbed a huge glass jug and jumped out of the car. She was waving it and threatening that the jug could break on his head if he laid a finger on dad. Jamaicans no dey play o. The arguments went on for some time and finally they let us go. From there we proceeded to our village which was not far from Onitsha.  That’s the last image I had coming into Biafra.

Tina – My mum didn’t speak Igbo and she had a foreign accent. The soldiers were cocking their guns as if to shoot us. The soldiers threatened they would throw my parents over the bridge into the water, which was far. I remember peering over the rails and the water seemed so far away. I don’t remember how the argument was resolved. We heard later from my dad that when he joined the army those men on that bridge that day were under his command.

Chinedu: Dad eventually joined the army and we were living with our mum in a flat off Edinburgh Road, Enugu. One time I got sick and mum was crying so much because I was in and out of consciousness. She came out looking for help but nobody was there to help, and tension was in the air.  She took me to Eastern Medical Centre and Dr. Okeke figured out what was wrong with me. Some weeks later, dad came back. He was a Civil Engineer and had gone for Officers Training. He told us we were going to the village, so we took off. That’s where we spent time with my grandparents, uncles and other relations.

Our house in the village was right on the Enugu-Onitsha road. That’s where I got the experience of a mass return. Everyone was heading towards Onitsha. It was a mass migration. Years later I was in America when Rwanda happened. I was watching a TV report about the crisis when I saw the mass of people trooping down the road with their luggage on their head. My body just started to shake because it brought back a lot of memories.

Tina: Another vivid memory I have is that everybody left the compound but my mum refused to leave. She felt that if she left our village my dad wouldn’t know where to find us. So we were sitting on our suitcases in front of my grandfather’s house waiting, and waiting. Dad was at Nsukka at the time but somehow he got a message that we hadn’t left with the others, so he sent his driver, Felix, to get us. We’d be dead now if it hadn’t been for Felix. [Laughter.]  Felix arrived in a station wagon and somebody helped him to bundle my mum into the car. We couldn’t take any of our belongings. We just jumped into the car and sped off. We didn’t realize how much danger we were in. That’s the strange thing about this – I can’t remember feeling frightened. In our escape Felix had to avoid all the major roads so he wouldn’t get caught by the soldiers.

Chinedu: Another memory I have was that dad buried his car during the war. Then he built something over the pit and covered it. After the war he dug it out and that’s what I used to learn to drive in 1973. I was 11 years old. [Laughter]

After our escape Felix took us to Ogbunike. The whole family was there and that was where we started seeing signs of the family not wanting to pay attention to us. It wasn’t blatant but it was happening. They were probably worried about what limited resources they had. When it came time to share food they weren’t including mum.

[Tina turns to Chinedu.] What was it about a bag of sugar?

Chinedu: Nicky was the size of a bag of sugar. That was the argument Dad gave Mum to convince her to leave. Nicky had not been fed well and therefore not grown to the normal size of a one year old, but she continued to stay in spite of all we were going through not getting enough food for five of us. He said it was better for her to take us back to England where we would be better cared for.

My grandfather also told me he didn’t like the way his children were treating us. They were doing it because they were looking out for themselves and we were foreigners. My mother, being Jamaican and her first time in the country, not able to speak the language, felt isolated, and my dad was not around.

Vivian: Maybe they felt you all were privileged, or they thought you should not have come back home.

Chinedu: Daddy was the reason they were getting all that salt and tinned food. Had it not been for him they wouldn’t have had anything. When you are not seen as part of a group you are treated as an outsider. Those things happen. To be accepted we had to work really hard. I remember the fight my mum had with my grandmother. She was dealing with that stress of not being given her own share of things. A knife was drawn but a lady who lived in the same compound separated the fight.

Dad’s division was under Cornel Achuzia. They used to refine oil so they always had fuel which they’d sell to buy food. My dad always sent someone to drop off the food, so we seemed to have food even when others didn’t. I remember eating a lot of crabs. Today, I do not like crab meat.

I remember we had five chickens which traveled with us as we moved from place to place. Each of us owned one and assumed ownership of it. The eggs were a steady source of protein. If my uncle Emeka felt like eating chicken he’d murder one of the chickens at night. [Laughter] He would come in the morning and say, “Nnaa, this chicken all of a sudden died.” And we’d have to cook it.

Tina – I remember thinking at the time that if the chicken had died of a disease and we cooked and ate it then whatever had killed the chicken would affect us too.  To be honest I don’t think I eat any of those chickens that had died in mysterious circumstances. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was my Uncle doing it.

After we left for Ogbunike there was a battle in our town, Ifite Dunu. It was known as Ifite-Ukpo then. Most people know about the battle that took place in Abagana, the town next to ours, but not the one in Ifite-Dunu. When the Nigerian soldiers came in to our town most houses were mud houses. They saw this big structure and moved in. It was my Uncle Cyril’s house. He had won the Jamaican Sweepstakes before the war so he was like a millionaire. He had houses in Onitsha and Enugu. After Enugu fell, the Biafran army made their way back and regrouped. Dad and his group decided they were going to attack my uncle’s house and dislodge the Nigerians. They succeeded, but the house was riddled with bullets. Even in 1973 when we came back from the UK we could still see casings all over the place. Uncle Cyril refused to fix the metal bars or repaint the walls. He just patched the holes.  He wanted a reminder of what happened because he lost his brother during that war.

Tina: There was a lot of traveling between places. We had to keep moving, sometimes we’d walk, sometimes my dad would send his driver to take us to the new place. Each time we were traveling the driver had to get out of the car to check the roads, because if there was a mound or something unusual on the road they were worried it was a mortar.

One of the places we stayed at was a school, I think. There was a field in front of it, and every foot of this field was covered in sharpened bamboo sticks. Each one was about four to five feet in height and so towered over me. We were told they were put there so that if Nigerian soldiers parachuted from their planes they wouldn’t survive the impact. I remember playing in this field, weaving in between the bamboo sticks oblivious to what they would do to a human being landing on it.

We spent some time at Abatete and Umunze. In one of these places we could stand on our veranda and see the fighting. It looked like a firework display.

There were two bunkers side by side. Our bunker was muddy and hadn’t been built properly so the walls were caving in. On this occasion we had to go to our neighbours bunker during the air raid. Our own collapsed and we were lucky we were not in it when that happened. On another occasion there was an air raid while we were playing away from the house. We hadn’t realized that we were so far away from the bunkers. We tried to run but everybody was shouting at us, “Lie down, lie down, lie down.” So we lay down in that field and we were watching the plane zoom past and come back, with a smoke trail, and then somewhere in the distance there was an explosion, boom, boom, boom, boom. The owner of the house where we were living, a reverend or something, drove down to where the sound came from. He had gone to pick the wounded and take them to where they could get help. When he came back he had to clean out his car. Everybody gathered around the car. I remembered this vividly. I struggled and pushed my head in between somebody’s legs and saw…whooo…I had never seen that amount of blood. That day was something else.

As I recall, I don’t remember fear. I don’t remember being scared. I just remember not liking certain things, not liking being in a different place, not liking how I had to be on the floor, because whenever we slept on the floor our faces would swell up. So if there was anywhere off the floor for me, Chinedu and Ifeanyi to sleep, we slept there, while Indy, Nicky and mum slept on the floor. They didn’t react as badly to sleeping on the floor as we did.

Chinedu: They were Nigerian born, that’s all I can say. [Laughter]

Tina: One of the things I don’t like, even now, is carrying bags when travelling. I make it a point not to. Where possible I check in all my luggage. I think it’s linked to the experience of moving from place to place. It didn’t matter how young you were, you had to carry something. It didn’t matter if your arms were tired you just had to carry things because you would need these things.

I’m sure we were traumatized because there’s no way you go through that experience without sustaining trauma, but you find a way to cope with it probably by blocking things out, because you have no choice.

Chinedu: You know what is Mkpor n’ani? When that thing goes off, my heart still skips. If I know it’s going to happen, then I’m fine, but if it happens unexpectedly I get agitated. And right now I haven’t watched any videos of refugees in the North East. I will watch clips of dead people but haven’t watched clips of people in IDP camps.

Vivian: Tell me how you were evacuated.

Chinedu: I remember the plane at night. I remember everybody hiding. Next thing you know, people were going out to the plane with lanterns. These people running with lanterns, where are they going? I didn’t know they were going to light up the runway. [Laughter] Those pilots, if I ever saw one, the kind hug wey I go give the guy erh? Imagine the planes in that kind of darkness. And African darkness is very dark. There’s no moon light. It is total darkness. And that lantern was just barely giving him light. Everybody rushed to board, but mum was still fighting, saying she wasn’t going. At the door of the plane she was still refusing. She’s a stubborn woman. That’s when we knew daddy wasn’t coming with us.

After the pilot taxied and turned around, na rush o, because there was no time. The Nigerian soldiers were shooting at the plane when we took off. It was a cargo plane. There were no chairs. And we were sitting on a bench. I remember the plane taking off and the benches falling. And once the plane took off it had to fly up at a sharp angle, to get fast above the line of fire. I know it was last week of November or early December, because we spent Christmas in Las Palmas, the Canary Islands. We remember the other people who were in the plane with us. One of our parents was either West Indian, or American or European. We flew to Sao Tome and from there to Equatorial Guinea, then Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and finally London.

My dad never joined us. He had been promoted to a Lieutenant Colonel a few days before the war ended. He was hit in his neck by shrapnel. He spent the last days of the war in hospital, and another six months recovering. After he recovered he came to London to see us.

When everybody was being given twenty pounds my dad sold his wedding suit to a Nigerian soldier for fifty pounds. He hadn’t dug out his car yet. He said if he had dug it out they would have taken it. So, he sold his suit and had some money. And for a guy to say, “I am going to give you fifty pounds for that suit,” that was a lot of money back then. Some of those Nigerian soldiers were not bad people. They were doing a job.

Tina: Another impact I didn’t really know the war made on me until now is that when I go shopping I always buy a lot, usually much more than I need to. I always stock up so that if anything happens we will have something. That experience of not having what you need when you need it, and even when you did have it, it was never really enough. There’s a phrase I use to describe myself, “I am a war baby.” So the way I use that phrase is that no matter how little food or resources I have I’ll share it, not even manage it, I’ll share. I believe that when there are other people around you who are hungry and in need, and you have a little food and a few resources, you will have to share it. I practice this daily and I think that this is as a direct result of my war experience.

Chinedu: For me it’s my phobia for crabs. [Laughter]

Tina: We all went back to Nigeria in 1973, three years after the war ended.

Recently we had my mother’s DNA tested and we found out she’s sixty one percent Nigerian

THE CHILDREN, THE SOLDIERS

BOYS’ COMPANY

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The wounded soldiers were coming back to the village and telling us what was happening at the war front. They were showing us how to dodge bullets. They were carving guns with wood and giving us, teaching us how to do manoeuvres. They were preparing our minds to fight. But nobody told me how to dodge air raids. So, the first day it happened, I didn’t know it was air raid. I was fishing with my friend, Monday Iroegbu, from Amaogudu Otampa,  and I was wearing a red T-shirt. The bomber dropped nine bombs into the river. I was counting the bombs as they were being dropped, out of sheer curiosity. Monday is still alive and can corroborate this story. Some of the bombs exploded but many did not. We started running so they started spraying bullets at us. I got to one big tree and ran behind it. The helicopter lowered and parked in our ama, our village square. It was piloted by a white man. I believe they wanted to catch me alive. They just wanted a prize, a trophy. I ran into the bush and our people who were already taking cover there said, “Oh, remove your red shirt, remove your red shirt. That is why they are bombing this place.” So I removed it and threw it away. At the end of the day we came out and started counting dead bodies.

People were losing their homes because of the advancing enemy, but there was community assistance and collaboration. When they move to another community the people there will accept them. My grandmother took in over twenty people just because they were Ndigbo who were running for their lives. She was a local midwife so she was quite popular. We gave the refugees part of our farm land and they built temporary accommodations on it. We cooked communal food and shared to them. They were with us for almost four months before the war got to us and we became refugees ourselves.

We were hearing about the war on the radio, but majority of the things they were saying were propaganda. So, even when it was getting closer to us we didn’t know. When the soldiers eventually entered our community my mother said she was not going anywhere; that she won’t run from Lagos to the village, and then start running away again. Almost the entire community ran away but my mother was busy frying and selling garri. I said, ‘Mama, ndi mmadu a gba chaala oso – other people have run away.’ She said to me, ‘Nwa m’, ebe ariri nwuru wu ili ya – wherever the millipede dies is its grave.’ My sister came out of the bedroom and said, ‘Mama, if I die my blood is on your head.’ My mother was shocked. She said, ‘Who said that?’ I said, ‘It is Ifeyinwa.’ She said, ‘Ngwa, ngwa, ngwa – hurry, hurry, hurry, let us go.’ That is how we started preparing to leave.

The day our village collapsed, there was an old woman who couldn’t run because she was blind. Her name was Nneoma Ukazim. We used to call her Nne. Her children were in the army. One of them was working with the Nigerians against our people and later became the chairman of the Liberated Isuikwuato Area. So, there was nobody to help her. She was just trying to feel her way around, touching walls and fences. I told my mother that I wasn’t going to leave the old woman. So I took her. We got to a small river where two palm trees were placed across to make a bridge. The old woman couldn’t get on it so I, a ten year old, I carried her on my back to the other side. A Biafran soldier who was running from battle saw me and assisted both of us until we got to a safer place. Surprisingly, she survived the war and I became her confidant, to the extent that she told me her burial plans and gave me the clothes she wanted to be buried in. She died in the 70s.

We slept in somebody’s house the first night. The next day the shelling started in that community so we moved again. We kept moving. We moved about four times. The first place we ran to was a town called Ezere in Isikwuato. Some people ran to a place called Isi-Iyi. The war never got there. They said the deity in that place prevented the soldiers from getting there; that the people who ran there were safe. No bombs, no bullets.

A lot of people got lost due to the sudden movements. My sister, Florence, almost got lost. She went with other family members to Umuobiala, another community in Isikwuato, to visit my aunt, Mrs. Chidinma Ojiaboh. The day she was to come back, the shelling started. That day was what we called Church Ahia, when our market day falls on a Sunday. This happens once in eight weeks, and it is celebrated in a big way, like Christmas or Easter. So she couldn’t come back. And we couldn’t go to her. Even my aunt she had gone to visit, they left her and ran away. So my sister was running alone in a bush between Umuobiala and Afo Ugiri, when the vigilante found her. They were also called Civil Defence and were the liaison between the civilian population and military authorities. When they identify orphans they take them to the Red Cross. They assumed she was an orphan because she said she didn’t know the whereabouts of her parents. They took her to a camp where other children were waiting to be evacuated. But during the documentation one of the soldiers recognized her. He was from our village. That was how he sent us a message across enemy lines. We moved, me and my mother.

The Nigerian soldiers were still sleeping when we got to the check point, so we sneaked through their backyard. It was when we were coming back that they caught us. They asked us where we were coming from. They said I was Ojukwu soldier. I denied several times. They were convinced that Biafra was using child soldiers, which was true. They were using child soldiers to steal for the army. I was one of them. They called us Boys Company. They will send us to steal food and clothes. We will wear only our shorts. They will shave off our hair and rub oil on our bodies so that if they catch you, g’a gbu cha pu – you will slip away. We even stole guns and ammunition. Those who did very well in the training were given real guns which they called Ojukwu Catapult. They very small submachine guns and were easier for young boys to carry. The training was two weeks. They taught us manoeuvres, weapons handling, parade, how to recognize the enemy. Those of us who were born outside Igbo land spoke different languages. I was very good in Yoruba so it was an advantage. When the Nigerian soldiers catch you, you speak Yoruba to them and they say, ‘Omo ale, just let him go.’ My uncle was in the BOFF, the Biafran Organisation for Freedom Fighters. The day they caught him he started speaking Hausa. He was very fluent in it. Very fair in complexion. He said he was Dan Kano, that he was from kano. They asked him all manner of questions and he answered correctly, so they went drinking with him. He escaped and came back to tell us the story.

There was even an airstrip in my community where lighter air craft used to land. It was in that vast land between Okigwe and Uturu, right from where you have ABSU up to Ihube. During the war it was called Ugba junction because there was a big Ugba tree there. They camped Nigerian soldiers on that land. But before it was captured by Nigeria, Biafra was using it as an airstrip. Before our place fell we were the ones protecting the airstrip. We used to put pongee sticks all over the fields so that no aircraft will be able to land. At night when our own planes are coming in, because we already know they are coming, we will create a path for them to land. The flights were a collaboration between the Biafran Air Force and some foreign bodies. Some of those journalists who came, came as aid workers. Some were bringing arms and relief materials, and also helping to move children of well-to-do Biafrans out. These are stories that will not make the headlines.

We had uncles and brothers who were working for the Biafran government digging trenches. Those trenches were dug by civilians, not by soldiers. They were using older men who were too old to fight. They were also using them for propaganda. They will go and dig trenches and come back with information about the enemy.

Where you have Stella Maris College at Uturu, there used to be a rehabilitation center for wounded soldiers. They called it Hope Ville. They were making shoes and all manners of crafts during the war.

Biafra was very organised. And everybody contributed. My parents contributed. I contributed. They called it Win the War effort. Everybody made contributions to that war. If you were making baskets, you donate them to the Biafran Government. Anything you can provide – farmland, houses – you give to the government. When they need an office, you vacate yours. Biafra succeeded because of communal efforts and that was why the war lasted for so long. The Nigerian army thought they could over-run the entire South East within days. But Ojukwu miscalculated. You have no arms, no bullets, you say you are waging a war. So those who are talking about Biafra did not witness the war, they are doing it because of the marginalization in Nigeria.

Certain communities were even divided. Nigerian soldiers on one side and Biafran soldiers on the other. People used to sneak across to the Nigerian side to buy food and other things. They call it Ahia attack. I was following my mother to these markets. Some of them were designated as Ahia Ogbe – market for the deaf and dumb. Because of the air raids. These markets were held in the forests and only sign language was used. One day I escorted my mother to a market in Ishiagu to buy yams. We walked the whole day. I was carrying three long native baskets – abo. Inside the baskets I had yams and Adu, which is like cocoyam. My mother was also carrying a basket. Do you know that at every road block Biafran soldiers will take one yam? By the time we got to our village our baskets were almost empty. I cried that day and I said, “God, do not allow Biafra to win this war because if we do we are going to see worse things.” Ojukwu was no longer in control. The soldiers were hungry. They were committing atrocities in the areas they controlled.

The hunger was so much that one day we ate the wild variety of Una, the one called unabiwu. There was nothing else to eat. We said if bullets don’t kill us something else will kill us. After the meal, we slept for four days at a stretch. We didn’t wake up for four days. It probably contains very high levels of cyanide. We were lucky to have even woken up. On another occasion we ate a wild variety of beans. We bought it mistakenly, and it almost killed us. I was the first person it affected because immediately after eating I started having hallucinations. They gave us palm oil and coconut water, and that was what saved us. The only person who wasn’t affected was my sister, Florence, the one who was found in a forest. She had a stronger constitution.

Just like my sister, my father was presumed dead during the war. We mourned him. They put something in the ground and conducted a symbolic burial for him. It was after the war that one of my uncles ran into him in Liverpool, England. He asked him what he was doing in Liverpool and my father said, “They told me my wife and children are dead. What am I coming to do in Nigeria?” My uncle told him we were all alive, that only one of us died. My father said, “What of my wife?” My uncle said, “Your wife is alive.” What happened was that my father was in the navy and Nigeria wanted them to bombard Port Harcourt with the NNS Aradu. He and his colleagues refused. They diverted the ship and abandoned it at sea. They were rescued by a Congolese fishing boat which took them to Congo. President Sese Seko granted them asylum and facilitated their move to England. The Nigerian government recovered the ship but it’s no longer sea worthy. After the war my father came back to the village, but we had to undo the burial we had done. They performed some rites before he could enter the compound. The government arrested him, court marshaled him, and sacked him with no benefits. He eventually became a sailor and that is what he was doing until he retired.

Anyway, after interrogating me and my mother at the check point, the Nigerian soldiers let us go. We brought my sister back. By then we had been liberated.

-Richard Harrison

[Cover photo courtesy internet]

The Biafran Airlift, THE CHILDREN

EQUATORIAL CONSTELLATIONS

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The place and importance of the Biafran Airlift in the history of Sao Tome and, by extension, Portugal, cannot be over written.

For almost three years that the war lasted, this small island located in the Gulf of Guinea saw the influx of individuals from all over the world. Journalists, diplomats, aid workers, missionaries, clergy men, politicians, doctors, military personnel, mercenaries, business men and all sorts of people arrived the island on their way to and from Biafra. Consequently, hotels and guest houses, restaurants, shops and markets, beaches and other leisure spots, the aviation industry, etc, all benefited, in one way or the other, from the upsurge in commercial activity on the island. The governor of Sao Tome even tried to cash in on the windfall by imposing a fee for every child that was brought from Biafra into Sao Tome. But Father Tony Byrne, one of the initiators of the Air lift, resisted the move.

Born in Portugal in 1975, five years after the war and the Airlift ended, Silas Tiny is a Sao Tomean film maker whose interest in this monumental event led him into making a film about the airlift. The film is called ‘Equatorial Constellations.’ According to him, the goal of the film is “… not to narrate a past event but to display that very past through the present inner look of the ones involved in it 50 years ago. The film will, ‘…bring together former child refugees, Sao Tomeans, Joint Church Aid officials and volunteers who created the largest and riskiest relief effort that world has ever seen.’ He goes on – “Hundreds of children had been evacuated from their land, arrived in this island…escaping pain, slaughter and famine. Today, fifty years have passed, that memory remains an open wound, their names, faces and lives forgotten and their remembrances fade away…Where are these children, and what happened in their memories so far? What can they convey? Their stories are part of the universal memory and remain as living testimonies…”

Silas and I are looking for any of these ‘children’ because we think our projects will not be complete without their participation. We will appreciate any leads and references in this regard.

[The cover photo shows Silas Tiny]

The Biafran Airlift, THE CHILDREN

GOOD INTENTIONS by Marie Louise Schipper

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Fifty One years ago, the Nigeria-Biafra war grabbed the world’s attention with its sad, haunting images in newspapers, magazines and television sets. Forty Eight years after it ended, the stories of that tragedy are still being told through films, documentaries, dramas, art works and exhibitions, music, books, in conferences and lectures. One of the people who has documented an aspect of that conflict is Marie Louise Schipper, a Dutch journalist working for OneWorld magazine and de Volkskrant newspaper. She has written a book about ten Biafran children who were evacuated to the Netherlands from Biafra for medical attention. The title of the book is Goede Bedoelingen which translates to ‘Good Intentions.’

In 1968, Marie was a young girl living with her parents. According to her, “It was a big item because it was the first international aids for starvation in Africa and nobody realized what was going on at that time. We didn’t know a lot about Africa and as a matter of fact not much about Nigeria as well. And Africa was an exotic country far, far, far away at that time. So Nigeria came into our living rooms and we could see what happened. The news in the newspaper and television was so overwhelming of these dying children. And my parents – they were devout Catholics – always told me and my sister that we should care about other people. They would tell us to finish our plates and that we should think about the children of Biafra. The images made a big impression on me, as a child. The Dutch gave a lot of money [to the relief effort] because they felt we should do something because in WW2 so many people died, and it was determined that in Biafra far more children died. Another reason these children made such a big impression on me had to do with the war stories in my own family. My father worked as a forced laborer in Germany. He was 17. My mother’s family was on the run and had to live with a family they didn’t know. My grandfather died during a bombardment. He was never found.”

When Marie became a journalist, she was surprised that the stories of these ten children were not written. “I thought there must be somebody who has written this all down. But there was nothing written. It was like when snow has fallen and everything is completely white and nobody has run into it. That was my first impression, that it was completely blank. There was nothing about it, only publications in the newspapers. When I started interviewing people everybody said, ‘No, I don’t remember these children, I don’t remember them.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you remember them, because it doesn’t happen often that ten children from Nigeria, out of a war, come to the Netherlands.’ I felt they were hiding something. And I thought, ‘What are they hiding?’ I discovered that one of the children who was here had epilepsy and he was really ill. He was a bit retarded and was also in a foster home. He needed a lot of attention but people from the Nigerian embassy were very strict and said the children have to go back to Nigeria. The foster parents didn’t want to let them go because they didn’t know where they were sending them to. The foster parents of the sickest child were under so much pressure, so they decided to send him back to Nigeria. He was first sent to Gabon, with enough medicine for half a year, and afterwards sent to one of the rehabilitation centers at Ikot Ekpene. His family didn’t show up, so he was sent to Nung Udoe Orphanage and he died shortly afterwards. And I think that was why all the doctors were saying they didn’t know a thing. That was the reason they didn’t want to talk about it because they sent a boy who was really ill back to a country that was recovering from the war without proper medication.”

“How did you eventually find somebody who told you the truth?” I asked.

“I spoke to a lot of nurses and they had memories about these children. They also had photographs and they told me about the foster parents, and I said that must be the reason nobody wanted to talk about it.”

“Why do you think the Biafran authorities decide to take them to the Netherlands instead of Ivory Coast, Gabon or Sao Tome?”

“There reason was primarily because of Abie Nathan, an Isreali pilot. He was also a humanitarian and did a lot of food aid. He tried to mobilize the Isreali people to send in goods and food for the people of Biafra. He was very popular and charismatic, and had a lot of connections in the Netherlands. He was filmed by a television crew asking people to do something about Biafra; that everybody should give a hand. When this documentary was broadcast a lot of people got mobilized. He said he convinced Ojukwu that these children should be sent to the Netherlands where they could get proper help. But Ojukwu said no. Finally they decided to bring the children to the Netherlands as a symbolic gesture where the children in Europe would get acquainted with the Biafran children while the Biafran children would get more knowledge about the world. The decision was made and ten of the children came to the Netherlands.

At the end of the war, eight of the children were taken back to Nigeria. But two remained in the Netherlands. The official documents said the two who remained in the Netherlands had no parents and family back home. But in the 1990’s, one of them decided to look for her family. She discovered she had two villages full of relations. She returned to Nigeria to meet them.”

When Marie started to gather material for her book, she knew she had to make the trip to Nigeria.

“If I didn’t visit Nigeria, the story wouldn’t have been complete.”

“That was very courageous of you. So, how did the journey to Nigeria start?” I asked.

“I went to the African Studies Centre here in Netherlands, in Leiden. And one of the people who was connected to the African Institute, he works nowadays in England, he said to me the best thing I could do was contact *Emeka Anyanwu, an Anthropologist at Nsukka University. I thought it was a better idea the students of Edlyne go on research and try to find out what happened to the children. And it worked fairly well because we found two of them. It was like a needle in a haystack.  When we knew they were traced, we traveled from Nsukka to Owerri, from Owerri to Umuahia, and from Umuahia to Orlu. We visited the hospital in Umuahia [Queen Elizabeth Teaching Hospital] and all the places that were important during the war. I visited the airfield at Uli.”

“Is it still there?” I asked.

“Yes. You can see the traces of the road and there was a man who saw us walking and was curious. It’s not always you see White people there. He told us that was the road and he also knew the Ojukwu bunker. It was a small bunker. Even Edlyne didn’t know there was a smaller one.”

It took Marie Louise Schipper fifteen years to finish the book, and it was published on October 27, 2017, in Amsterdan. Unfortunately, the book is written in Dutch and, at the moment, Marie cannot afford to hire a translator. She said, “I would like to give the opportunity for more people to read it.”

[I spoke to Marie on the 23rd of May, 2018, via Facebook and these are excerpts from our chat.]

 

 

THE CHILDREN

MY INTUITION SAVED ME

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People used to call my father Mallam because he lived in Jos most of his life. During the pogrom it was his Hausa friends who protected him. He was half-dressed when they bundled him out of his house and rushed him to a helicopter. It landed safely at Onitsha.

My only brother was at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, studying Electrical Engineering. When people started returning we did not see him. We were all worried. My grandmother lost hope. One faithful day, as I came out to the front of the house, a taxi stopped and, behold, it was my brother. Everybody started shouting. He started narrating how they were evacuated from the campus and given protection. They were provided with vehicles that helped to evacuate them safely back to the East.

Threats were going on back and forth, so the tension was building up. Some months later, we started hearing that war had broken out. People were calling it police action. Soon, we started hearing that Biafran and Nigerian soldiers were fighting at the war front. Then, the first air raid came. The plane was dropping what Biafrans described as kerosene tins. Months later, the second one came. I was standing outside calling my mother, “Come and see this plane o. It looks like birds are following it. Why are birds following it?” The next thing I heard was an explosion and smoke from the building next to our own. I shouted, “Mama, it is bomb o.” People were shouting. Noise everywhere. I didn’t know that what I was calling birds were bombs.

The night before we left Onitsha there was shooting from night till morning. Red hot bullets being sprayed all over. We didn’t know what to do. The next morning my brother said, “Let us go.” Where are we heading to? Nobody knew. But there was only one direction – towards Owerri, Ihiala, Oba. Each person carried whatever they could carry. I carried my school box that contained my uniform and a few clothes. One of my elder sisters carried my mother’s box of wrappers. She carried it instead of her own. And those wrappers saved us. The only problem was how to convey our grandmother. She had a breakdown because of the trauma, so we were dragging her. We’ll walk and stop, walk and stop. It delayed us but we were still moving. The sound of shelling kept reducing so we knew we were fleeing the battle field. Along the road we met a family we knew and they took my grandmother in their car. They said they’ll drop her where we could pick her up. As God will have it they dropped her at Oba, in a church. It was an open place where people who were tired of trekking stopped to rest. People were still escaping, telling stories about those who could not escape, how they were being killed by soldiers.

We left Oba a few days later. I don’t know who organised the transport. It was a lorry and it dropped us at St. Martins Church, Odata, at Ihiala. It’s one big church. It’s still there.

The following day, directly opposite the church, we found a family who welcomed us into their home; Simon Okoli’s family. I still remember their name. They were very kind to us. They gave us one room in their house. It had a bamboo bed, the type called anaba aghalu. When they saw the room was small for all of us they gave us another one. They gave us pots and allowed us to use their kitchen. They said we shouldn’t pay for the rooms. We gave the bed to our grandmother. We had picked her from a refugee camp where our family friends had dropped her. But even though this family welcomed us they said we were saboteurs, because of Major Ifeajuna. During the war, if you were from Onitsha, there was a stigma attached to you.

We only had that half bucket of rice my sister carried from Onitsha but soon relief materials started coming in. There was nothing like a camp there but we gathered at a particular place and each family got their own share.

There were no jobs, no work, so ideas started coming into our heads. One day my immediate elder sister said, “This meat we don’t eat, let us not start suffering from kwashiorkor.” She would buy native fowls, cut them into parts and take to Nkwo Ogbe – their market – to sell. We would make a little gain. When we didn’t sell the head and legs we’d take them home for our soup.

One fateful day, my mother gave us various assignments and mine was to go to St. Martins and queue up for salt. I refused to go and my mother caned me. Instead, I followed my sister to the market to sell our chicken parts. I think there was only one lap remaining when I said to her, “We are leaving this place right now. Carry this tray let us go away.” She asked why, but I insisted we were leaving. On our way home we saw our brother chatting with a police man. He waved at us. Then I looked in the air and called out, “Ngozi, are you seeing what I am seeing?” She said, “What is it?” I said, “Look up. That plane is not making any sound.” The plane was hovering, turning to one side, turning to another side. I said, “Did they shoot it somewhere and it wants to crash?” Before I finished saying it, we heard an explosive noise. The plane was shelling the market, the meat section, that same spot where we had been standing. Sellers and buyers were mangled. As we watched, the plane moved in the direction of our house, releasing rockets and bullets. We ran into a bushy area and while I was taking cover I was looking and pointing upwards. My sister smacked me and said, “Lie down, lie down,” but I said, “I will not lie down. I want to see who is in that plane.” The plane moved towards the direction of the church, three times, releasing rockets and bullets. The sounds were accompanied with light, like lightning. It was the worst air raid I ever saw. When we got home we heard that that church compound, where I was supposed to line up for salt, was the target. All that maneouvring the plane was doing was to get the most accurate angle to hit the people on the line. As people narrated what happened, my mother looked at me, looked at me, looked at me. I cannot tell you why I refused to go to that church but I have always been intuitive. And I used to be stubborn when I was small. If I didn’t want to do something I wouldn’t do it. After that day, she never asked me to do anything I didn’t want to do.

In 1968, my grandmother died and we buried her in Ihiala. My brother went to one Irish Reverend Father at St. Martins Church, Odata – Father Brady – and told him we wanted to know if our uncle was still in Lagos or not. The Reverend Father made inquiries and found out he had left for Dublin with his wife, when the war started. They sent a packet of Complan milk, through Rev Father Brady, and my uncle later wrote to confirm that we received it. A few days later, the Reverend Father just drove inside the compound and opened the boot. What did we see? A box as high as this, square, sealed. It was filled with all manner of tinned food: meat, corned beef, stock fish soaked in salt granules as big as this, giant tins of corn beef, fish, sardines, bread, assorted tinned foods, seasoning cubes, cheese. It is because of this that I usually tell people that I ate the best of food during the Biafran war. We made a lot of Biafran money from the salt, cloths and Chicken that we were selling then.

Inside that box there was also an envelope with dollars, so somebody advised my brother to start trading in tobacco. We contacted his friend who was working at Ulli airport and through him, a pilot brought back the first bag of tobacco. The women who were trading on it were buying it off him and selling same to soldiers at the war front. We made a lot of Biafran money and that was how we survived. Before then, we were selling my mother’s wrappers, all those costly Georges and Abadas, and people were buying them. We even sold my box. I cried o.

We left Ihiala on January 17. By then the Nigerian soldiers had reached Ihiala. Umuahia had fallen and Ojukwu had left. So the village head and the elders took a decision to make peace with the soldiers. They welcomed them and negotiated with them not to touch anybody in Ihiala. So there was peace in Ihiala. The soldiers used to come to the stream where we used to fetch water. They’ll just give us their water bottles to fill for them and we were always very cautious. When they leave we start fetching again. Thank God for the wisdom he gave the Igwe.

A few days after they arrived lorries appeared. Evacuation. We didn’t waste time. Everybody started going back. Up till today I do not know who arranged for the vehicles. We jumped inside and they dropped us at Fegge, Onitsha.

-Dr. Mrs. Lillian Chibuogu Ilo

(PHOTOS TAKEN FROM THE INTERNET)

THE CHILDREN

‘AFIA ATTACK’ – A Young Girl’s Account

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Then it started. Bombs and more bombs. At a time, as early as 4 o’clock my mother would wake us up to have our bath and our breakfast, then she would pack our food and send us into the drainage. She had identified where parents were hiding their children. They dropped them in the morning and in the evening they picked them up. They were like gutters and you saw the water gushing out. If it was the bigger ones we’d take kitchen stools and the smaller children would sit, while our bigger sisters would lie down. Sometimes we couldn’t even sit, so we’ll just stretch out. That is where we’ll be from as early as 6.00 am till 6.00 pm. They didn’t have a choice. They had to protect us.

We were living on Asa Road, Aba, a very popular street. We were on the first floor and there were shops on the ground floor. There was a record shop there and, because people were hungry for news, they would gather in front of the shop during the news time. The volume of the radio would be raised to high heavens so that no matter how far away you were sitting or standing, you could hear the news. On one of those days, at exactly 4.00 o’clock, when the signature tune was on signalling that the news was about to start, they bombed our house. I don’t know if they were getting information from saboteurs because they knew when to strike. They were bombing and shelling at the same time- fighter and bomber. Eight Six people were killed that day. Bodies were scattered all over the place. You don’t want to see it. Heads, legs, hands, in different directions. There was brain stuck on our ceiling. One bullet landed on my father’s bed. Luckily for us my father would usually take his siesta but on that day he didn’t take his rest. Instead, he was discussing with his friend at the back of our house. My sister and her fiancée were wounded. The horrifying experience of children seeing dead bodies, not just dead bodies, but mutilated bodies. There was another incident when a petrol station opposite our house got bombed. It ignited so much fire that both the people who were buying and those who were selling perished.

Kwashiorkor became the order of the day. People were eating anything in sight – hibiscus flower, leaves, rats, lizards, cats, everything in sight. But we were lucky because my mother participated in Ahia attack – o zuru ahia attack. If she told you what she went through erh. She spoke a lot of languages so she was able to pass a lot of barricades on her way to Atani to trade. You know it’s a border so people were also coming from the other end to trade. She used to take Singer Machines to the border, the type operated by foot. They were packed in big cases. The Nigerians were buying them a lot. I don’t know why. We had a lot of them in the house. But I didn’t bother to ask her where she was getting them from. Before she went, they would nail narrow pieces of wood around the four sides of the wooden case and fill the gaps with coins, before putting the wooden cases inside cartons. She would set off with my senior brother carrying the machine. When they got to a point they would take a canoe and cross to the other side and follow the apiam way. They usually arrived on markets days. They exchanged the coins for Nigerian money and the exchange rate was quite high. She would use the money to buy plantain and fish, crayfish, garri and everything we needed in our house. Our house became a mecca of sorts because people were coming to our house to buy these things. Then she would go get some more machines. They also used to buy fish and people would come to the house to dry the fish for her. Sometimes, when they had to cross a stream the water would get to her chest. And she couldn’t swim.

One day a woman who knew she was trading in faraway places approached her and asked, “n’o bulu kwa na enwe ndi cholu umu aka ebe anwa, g’enye f’ego ka fa wee nye ndi nke ozo nni – if there were people who would take some of her children and give her money so she could feed the rest.” My mother told the woman she couldn’t do that sort of thing; that she had 9 children who were also suffering. She told the women to endure the hardship and if she was willing she would introduce her to the attack trade. The woman was not doing it out of wickedness. People were having many children at that time and, rather than lose all her children to hunger, she must have felt it was better to sell some and use the money to feed the rest.

Caritas had designated areas where they used to sell food. It was shared family by family. If they did it individually those who had more children would get more, although they needed it more too, but they decided they’d rather deal with families. At the beginning it was well organised because they were distributing the items themselves, but when they left the people working at the directorate started diverting the items. You had to bribe them to get food. People stood in the queues for days and it still didn’t get to them. They were even selling these things in the market. My mum had money so sometimes we bought from the market. But what about those who couldn’t afford it?

Life was unbearable. The trekking we did in those years, I can’t tell you how many million miles we covered. When Umuahia fell we trekked for three days. In the night we entered a bush. My mother would not sleep. My father would not sleep. They would stay awake just watching their children sleep. We left again and got to a place with nothing in sight except an abandoned primary school, without a roof. From there my mother would go out looking for a market or a gathering where she could buy food.

My mum discovered a place called Umunze, also in Mbano. One of the chiefs gave us a place and my mother paid pounds as the rent. From Umunze we went to Umuchu. It was at that time that my sister and I started our period. I woke one morning and when I saw the blood I screamed. I didn’t know what it was. My mother gave me a bath and said, “You’ve become a real woman now. Don’t allow any man to come near you.” She tore her wrappers and gave twelve pieces to me and twelve to my sister.

My father was praying to die. He had nine children. He couldn’t communicate with anybody because he couldn’t speak Igbo. He was an Ijaw man, the only non-Igbo speaking councillor in Aba at the time. If you go to Aba Town Hall you will see his photograph there – Chief Joshua Babala Ketebu. He was a civil servant and was always being transferred from one place to another. So he was not able to pick up languages unlike the rest of us who speak at least two languages. My mum was universal. She spoke Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo and many others.

Eventually we settled at Nkwerre where we had a big house. It was peaceful and we started school again, studying under the trees. But during the rainy season we stayed at home. Sometimes the raids would come and we’d run home. My mother decided we should start generating money so my sister and I started selling oranges. We ate many before we got any sold. My mother also started her business again. It’s an experience you don’t wish your enemy, that is why when people are talking about war-war-war, I guess they didn’t experience it.

On the day the war ended we didn’t believe it had ended. Prior to that day they was a lot of shelling. It was loud and it was clear. We heard people jubilating. Shouts were coming from different directions- “War e bie la. Ha e mechaala war – the war has ended. They have ended the war!” We ran inside because we thought it was a gimmick. We didn’t know the shelling was to signal the end of the war. But my mum was worried. She said, “How will I take nine children back to PH?” She trekked from Nkwerre to Orlu where she met some soldiers. She pleaded with them and they gave her a lorry which carried us from Nkwere to my brother’s house in Port Harcourt. She was a very brave woman. She had no fear. Once you tell her that what she’s looking for is here, she doesn’t need to know anybody there, she’ll go and get it.

Eventually we got our own place and with financial help from her mother, she started her business again and we went back to school. My father died immediately after the war. My mum died 13 years ago. One of my brothers died last year. The rest of us are alive.

-Dr. Mrs. Bekky Ketebu-Igwe

(PHOTOS TAKEN FROM THE INTERNET)

THE CHILDREN

The many difficulties of war – Part 2

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On the 17th of January, 2017, Professor Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo agreed to meet with me and tell me her Biafran story.  On the 23rd of the same month, I traveled to Abakiliki in Ebonyi State to interview her. I felt a bit apprehensive as I had never met her before, but my worry proved to be needless because she was very warm and welcoming. For almost three hours we had a very enlightening discussion. And when we were done, she opened a bottle of wine, and we drank to life and health.

The first part of our discussion was published on May 30th, 2017. The second part is presented here in a question-and-answer format.

Enjoy!!

                                                             ——————–

VO – How did life eventually return to normal for you and your family?

AAE – After the war, I went back to Queen’s school, Enugu. But Queen’s school was destroyed. There was no refectory. The dormitories had no beds, so we placed mats on the floor and slept. Those from more comfortable homes bought mattresses. There were no books and you needed to have money to register for your School Certificate or the Higher School Certificate examination. My father, who had been in government before the war, was retired compulsorily because of his war engagement. Many others were retired like that. My mum sold some of her jewelry and wrappers, sometimes to wives of Nigerian soldiers, in order to raise money for our upkeep. Many women did the same. Sometimes she sold fruits, for any money that came in was useful. Even to pay for my external examination was difficult. When my father eventually got some money – about twenty pounds – they picked his pocket at Onitsha Motor Park. Luckily, one of my teachers in secondary school, an Anglican missionary who had left Port Harcourt when the war started, sent ten pounds to me for the exams. She was very good to me because she saw the potential in me and had told my father I was university material. Else, I would have been married off after the war as many girls were. The thing is, when children have potential it’s good to nurture it. A lot of people came to marry me after the war and my father was criticized by his relations for sending his daughters back to school. But he persisted and in 1971, my sister and I got federal government scholarships purely on merit. This was in spite of the fact that we had just emerged from the devastation of a terrible war. I was even informed that my HSC result was one of the best in the country. It was amazing when the two scholarships came. That’s how we were able to go to university. My father couldn’t have coped.

My parents are late now. My sister eventually became the first professor of Mass Communication in Nigeria. Her name is Chinyere Okunna and she served in Peter Obi’s cabinet as his Chief of Staff, Commissioner for Budget and also for Information. She’s now the Dean of Social Sciences at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Akwa. One of my brothers worked in Shell and took an early retirement to live with his family in Canada. My youngest sister lives in US with her family. The one who was shell shocked is a business man. One just retired last year from the Federal Ministry of Education.

Yes, we survived the war as a family in spite of our losses – human and material.

 

VO – What did the deprivation, constant displacement and other traumas of war do to you?

AAE – What the war did to me was to make me a person whose heart was constantly palpitating, always worried and anxious about what will happen next.

 

VO – Have you been able to overcome those feelings?

AAE – Partially. It’s not as much as it was during the war and being a committed Christian has helped too. When I find myself in a painful situation, I pray and commit it to God. I have also become more mature with age and take things in my stride.

 

VO – What else did the war experience do to you?

AAE – It taught me that there is no situation that doesn’t have a way around it; that no problem is insoluble. You only have to think and decide what to do. Most importantly, death has been demystified. Dying doesn’t worry me anymore because I have experienced the death of many loved ones.

VO – Most survivors I’ve spoken to seem to have adjusted so well psychologically and emotionally, in spite of all the traumas they experienced. I do not sense any bitterness in most of them.  And it isn’t as though they went through therapy afterwards. What do you think accounts for this? Is it the much talked about Igbo spirit or a hardiness peculiar to Nigerians as a people?

ANSWER – Maybe it’s a Nigerian thing but most of all it’s the Igbo spirit. Igbos are very optimistic and nothing can keep them down. No matter how bad a situation is, they hope it will get better. Even the twenty pounds they gave to people after the war didn’t get to my family. My father went a number of times but the crowds were so much he decided not to depend on it. My mother never bothered. She had been a successful business woman and had a lot of money in the bank. This was the experience of many families. Yet people survived. They started struggling afresh and bounced back.

VO – What was your own personal journey to healing?

AAE – As a secondary school girl, I had written my first novel, “Tainted Custom”. Even at that time I didn’t know much about creative writing but I had a literary ambition. I still have the manuscript and even though it hasn’t been published, people conducting research about my work or phases in African writing usually ask to examine it. Also, after the war, I told myself I was going to write about that terrible experience. And my PHD thesis was the first thing I wrote about the war. It was based on the literature of the Nigerian civil war and published as a book in 1991. Its title is Fact and Fiction in the literature of the Nigerian Civil war and it explores the fictional accounts; the non-fictional accounts written by the generals; the speeches by Odumegwu Ojukwu and Yakubu Gowon; the books by Green, Forsythe, Uwechue, Mezu, etc, and, of course, other imaginative literatures on that war. While writing that thesis, I was weeping. I was remembering my own experience and all those children who died of Kwashiokor. Roses and Bullets is the latest book I have written on the war. I don’t have any pain any longer. It has become totally purged and I only look at it as a historical experience which I have learned some lessons from. I have another novel, Children of the Eagle, and a short story, The war’s untold story. So, writing was a purgation and very therapeutic.

 

VO – Do you think enough literature has come out of that crisis? And what do you think about the quality of what has been written?

AAE – If there’s any aspect of Nigerian history that has been properly documented in writing, especially literature, the Nigerian civil war is the one. There’s been so much in terms of books, novels, short stories, plays, poetry collections, memoirs and essays. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Gabriel Okara, John Munonye, Elechi Amadi, Femi Osofisan, Chimamanda Adichie, Ben Okri, Mabel Segun and her daughter, Omowunmi Segun, Kole Omotosho and many others have all written works based on the war. More books are still coming out. People have been organising conferences and seminars about the war. Some are collecting eye witness accounts such as the one you’re working on now.

VO – Do you think this body of work truly represents the narratives of that war?

AAE – Yes, especially because people are writing from different perspectives – gender, historical, political, pro-Biafra, anti- Biafra, and so on.

 

VO – Are people reading these works? Do people even know they exist and if they do, are they easily accessible?

AAE – Nigerians are not reading enough. I am in the habit of asking people if they have read certain books I feel they ought to have read. So I mention a title and ask, “Have you read this book?” and the response will be, “No, I haven’t.” “How could you not have read this book?” I ask further. It’s disheartening. The reading culture in Nigeria is nothing to write home about.

 

VO – Let’s go back to the post-war years. In your opinion, how did the war affect the Igbo society, culturally and otherwise?

AAE – In the pre-war Igbo society, there was a lot of honesty, integrity and hard work. But the war swept away our culture, our values and morals. Many young men went into armed robbery. People had become extremely poor and Biafran money was useless. Even the twenty pounds they promised, how many got it? It was also at this time they declared the indigenisation policy where other ethnic groups bought shares in companies as foreigners withdrew. Most Igbos didn’t have money to make such investments and that is the root of the lack of industrialization we see in our society, for example. We also had more Igbo women becoming promiscuous. Some went away with soldiers just to survive. Only few families who were working and receiving salaries were able to send their children back to school.

VO – The Afia Attack was very important during the war because it ensured that supplies of scarce commodities found their way into Biafra which was blockaded by the Nigerian government. Many of the traders were women because many adult men were either fighting in the war or in hiding.  Some people have said that this helped to set the Igbo woman on the path of becoming more emancipated, assertive and business minded. Do you think this claim is correct? Again, in what ways do you think the Afia Attack affected the women who took part in it?

AAE – I don’t agree with that assertion because Igbo women have always been very vibrant traders. N’obodo anyi, onwere ihe a n’a kpo ‘o jebere afo lo nkwo.’ It describes women who go to trade in other towns and return home after several days. These would be mature women who didn’t have babies or young children at home. This was also one of the reasons men were polygamous so that when one woman is not there, another will be. My mother was an astute business woman in the 50’s and 60’s. Even in the early traditional agrarian societies, when a man was planting yam his wife would be planting cassava or melon seeds or vegetables. So Igbo women have never folded their hands in idleness.

However, what the Afia Attack might have done was to open women’s eyes to wider circles and types of businesses. But it was not the catalyst. And again, some people have said it affected morality because some of these women were said to have been sleeping with the soldiers they met on the way. Others were no longer willing to subject themselves to being wives, preferring to live independently and make their own money. This is the impression you get based on the literature that has come out of that war such as Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra or Flora Nwapa’s Never Again. You’ll also see that in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace, where a woman called Juliet abandoned her husband and went into business.

                                                                           ———-

AKACHI EZEIGBO PHOTO 1

Akachi Ezeigbo, PhD, FNAL, FLSN, FESAN is a Professor of English, Department of Languages, Linguistics, Literary Studies & Theatre Arts, Federal University Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo, Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, Nigeria.

 

 

THE CHILDREN

My Biafran Eyes, by Okey Ndibe

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*My Biafran Eyes was published by Guernica on August 12, 2007.*

“My father’s decision to stay in Yola nearly cost him his life. He was at work when one day a mob arrived. Armed with cudgels, machetes and guns, they sang songs that curdled the blood. My father and his colleagues—many of them Igbo Christians—shut themselves inside the office. Huddled in a corner, they shook uncontrollably, reduced to frenzied prayers. One determined push and their assailants would have breached the barricades, poached and minced them, and made a bonfire of their bodies. The Lamido of Adamawa, the area’s Muslim leader, arrived at the spot just in the nick…He scolded the mob and shooed them away. Then he guided my father and his cowering colleagues into waiting vehicles and spirited them to the safety of his palace. In a couple of weeks, the wave of killings cooled off and the Lamido secured my father and the other quarry on the last ship to leave for the southeast.” – Okey Ndibe

                                                                  ————-

My first glimpse into the horror and beauty that lurk uneasily in the human heart came in the late 1960s courtesy of the Biafran War. Biafra was the name assumed by the seceding southern section of Nigeria. The war was preceded—in some ways precipitated—by the massacre of southeastern (mostly Christian) Igbo living in the predominantly northern parts of Nigeria.

Thinking back, I am amazed that war’s terrifying images have since taken on a somewhat muted quality. It requires sustained effort to recall the dread, the pangs of hunger, the crackle of gunfire that once made my heart pound. It all now seems an unthreatening fog.

~~~

As Nigeria hurtled towards war, my parents faced a difficult decision: to flee, or stay put. We lived in Yola, a sleepy, dusty town whose streets teemed with Muslims in flowing white babariga gowns. My father was then a postal clerk; my mother a teacher. In the end, my father insisted that Mother take us, their four children, and escape to safety in Amawbia, my father’s natal town. Mother pleaded with him to come away as well, but he would not budge. He was a federal civil servant, and the federal government had ordered all its employees to remain at their posts.

My mother didn’t cope well in Amawbia. In the absence of my father, she was a wispy and wilted figure. She despaired of ever seeing her husband alive again. Our relatives made gallant efforts to shield her, but news about the indiscriminate killings in the north still filtered to her. She lost her appetite. Day and night, she lay in bed in a kind of listless, paralyzing grief. She was given to bouts of impulsive, silent weeping.

Then one blazing afternoon, unheralded, my father materialized in Amawbia, stole back into our lives as if from the land of death itself.

“Eliza o! Eliza o!” a relative sang. “Get up! Your husband is back!”

At first, my mother feared that the returnee was some ghost come to mock her anguish. But, raising her head, she glimpsed a man who—for all the unaccustomed gauntness of his physique—was unquestionably the man she’d married. With a swiftness and energy that belied her enervation, she bolted up and dashed for him.

We would learn that my father’s decision to stay in Yola nearly cost him his life. He was at work when one day a mob arrived. Armed with cudgels, machetes and guns, they sang songs that curdled the blood. My father and his colleagues—many of them Igbo Christians—shut themselves inside the office. Huddled in a corner, they shook uncontrollably, reduced to frenzied prayers. One determined push and their assailants would have breached the barricades, poached and minced them, and made a bonfire of their bodies.

The Lamido of Adamawa, the area’s Muslim leader, arrived at the spot just in the nick. A man uninfected by the malignant thirst for blood, he vowed that no innocent person would be dealt death on his watch. He scolded the mob and shooed them away. Then he guided my father and his cowering colleagues into waiting vehicles and spirited them to the safety of his palace. In a couple of weeks, the wave of killings cooled off and the Lamido secured my father and the other quarry on the last ship to leave for the southeast.

~~~

Air raids became a terrifying staple of our lives. Nigerian military jets stole into our air space, then strafed with abandon. They flew low and at a furious speed. The ramp of their engines shook buildings and made the very earth quake.

“Cover! Everybody take cover!” the adults shouted and we’d scurry towards a huddle of banana trees or the nearest brush and lay face down.

Sometimes the jets dumped their deadly explosives on markets as surprised buyers and sellers dashed higgledy-piggledy. Sometimes the bombs detonated in houses. Sometimes it was cars trapped in traffic that were sprayed. In the aftermath, the cars became mangled metal, singed beyond recognition, the people in them charred to a horrid blackness. From our hiding spots, frozen with fright, we watched as the bombs tumbled from the sky, hideous metallic eggs shat by mammoth mindless birds.

One day, my siblings and I were out fetching firewood when an air strike began. We threw down our bundles of wood and cowered on the ground, gaping up. The jets tipped in the direction of our home and released a load. The awful boom of explosives deafened us. My stomach heaved; I was certain that our home had been hit. I pictured my parents in the rumble of smashed concrete and steel. We lay still until the staccato gunfire of Biafran soldiers startled the air, a futile gesture to repel the jets. Then we walked home in a daze, my legs rubbery, and found that the bombs had missed our home, but only narrowly. They had detonated at a nearby school.

~~~

At each temporary place of refuge, my parents tried to secure a small farmland. They sowed yam and cocoyam and also grew a variety of vegetables. We, the children, scrounged around for anything that was edible, relishing foods that in less stressful times would have made us retch.

One of my older cousins was good at making catapults, which we used to hunt lizards. We roasted them over fires of wood and dried brush and savored their soft meat. My cousin also set traps for rats. When his traps caught a squirrel or a rabbit, we felt providentially favored. Occasionally he would kill a tiny bird or two, and we would all stake out a claim on a piece of its meat.

While my family was constantly beset by hunger, we knew many others who had it worse. Biafra teemed with malnourished kids afflicted with kwashiorkor that gave them the forlorn air of the walking dead. Their hair was thin and discolored, heads big, eyes sunken, necks thin and scrawny, their skin wrinkly and sallow, stomachs distended, legs spindly.

Like other Biafrans, we depended on food and medicines donated by such international agencies as Catholic Relief and the Red Cross. Sometimes I accompanied my parents on trips to relief centers. The food queues, which snaked for what seemed like miles—a crush of men, women, children—offered less food than frustration as there was never enough to go round. One day, I saw a man crumble to the ground. Other men surrounded his limp body. As they removed him, my parents blocked my sight, an effete attempt to shield me from a tragedy I had already fully witnessed.

Some unscrupulous officers of the beleaguered Biafra diverted food to their homes. Bags of rice, beans and other foods, marked with a donor agency’s insignia, were not uncommon in markets. The betrayal pained my father. He railed by signing and distributing a petition against the Biafran officials who hoarded relief food or sold it for profit.

The petition drew the ire of the censured officials; the signatories were categorized as saboteurs. To be tagged a saboteur in Biafra was to be branded with a capital crime. A roundup was ordered. One afternoon, some grave-looking men arrived at our home. They snooped all over the house. They turned things over. They pulled out papers and pored over them, brows crinkled half in consternation, half in concentration. As they ransacked the house, they kept my father closely in view. Then they took him away.

Father was detained for several weeks. I don’t remember that our mother ever explained his absence. It was as if my father had died. And yet, since his disappearance was unspoken, it was as if he hadn’t.

Then one day, as quietly as he had exited, my father returned. For the first—and I believe last—time, I saw my father with a hirsute face. A man of steady habits, he shaved every day of his adult life. His beard both fascinated and frightened me. It was as if my real father had been taken away and a different man had returned to us.

This image of my father so haunted me that, for many years afterwards, I flirted with the idea that I had dreamed it. It was only ten years ago, shortly after my father’s death, that I broached the subject with my mother. Yes, she confirmed, my father had been arrested during the war. And, yes, he’d come back wearing an unaccustomed beard.

~~~

Father owned a small transistor radio. It became the link between our war-torn space and the rest of the world. Every morning, as he shaved, my father tuned the radio to the British Broadcasting Corporation, which gave a more or less objective account of Biafra’s dwindling fortunes. It reported Biafra’s reverses, lost strongholds and captured soldiers as well as interviews with gloating Nigerian officials. Sometimes a Biafran official came on to refute accounts of lost ground and vow the Biafrans’ resolve to fight to the finish.

Feigning obliviousness, I always planted myself within earshot, then monitored my father’s face, hungry to gauge his response, the key to decoding the news. But his countenance remained inscrutable. Because he monitored the BBC while shaving, it was impossible to tell whether winces or tightening were from the scrape of a blade or the turn of the war.

At the end of the BBC broadcasts, my father twisted the knob to Radio Biafra, and then his emotions came on full display. Between interludes of martial music and heady war songs, the official mouthpiece gave exaggerated reports of the exploits of Biafran forces. They spoke about enemy soldiers “flushed out” or “wiped out” by gallant Biafran troops, of Nigerian soldiers surrendering. When an African country granted diplomatic recognition to Biafra, the development was described in superlative terms, sold as the beginning of a welter of such recognitions from powerful nations around the globe. “Yes! Yes!” my father would exclaim, buoyed by the diet of propaganda. How he must have detested it when the BBC disabused him, painted a patina of grey over Radio Biafra’s glossy canvas.

~~~

In January 1970, after enduring the 30-month siege, which claimed close to two million lives on both sides, Biafra buckled. We had emerged as part of the lucky, the undead. But though the war was over, I could intuit from my parents’ mien that the future was forbidden. It looked every bit as uncertain and ghastly as the past.

Our last refugee camp abutted a makeshift barrack for the victorious Nigerian army. Once each day, Nigerian soldiers distributed relief material—used clothes and blankets, tinned food, powdery milk, flour, oats, beans, rice, such like. There was never enough food or clothing to go around, which meant that brawn and grit decided who got food and who starved. Knuckles and elbows were thrown. Children, the elderly, the feeble did not fare well in the food scuffles. My father was the sole member of our family who stood a chance. On good days, he squeaked out a few supplies; on bad days, he returned empty handed. On foodless nights, we found it impossible to work up enthusiasm about the cessation of war. Then, the cry of “Happy survival!” with which refugees greeted one another sounded hollow, a cruel joke.

Despite the hazards, we, the children, daily thronged the food lines. We operated around the edges hoping that our doleful expressions would invite pity. Too young to grasp the bleakness, we did not know that pity, like sympathy, was a scarce commodity when people were famished.

One day I ventured to the food queue and stood a safe distance away watching the mayhem, silently praying that somebody might stir with pity and invite me to sneak into the front. As I daydreamed, a woman beckoned to me. I shyly went to her. She was beautiful and her face held a wide, warm smile.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Okey,” I volunteered, averting my eyes.

“Look at me,” she said gently. I looked up, shivering. “I like your eyes.” She paused, and I looked away again. “Will you be my husband?”

Almost ten at the time, I was aware of the woman’s beauty, and also of a vague stirring inside me. Seized by a mixture of flattery, shame and shyness, I used bare toes to scratch patterns on the ground.

“Do you want some food?” she asked.

I answered with the sheerest of nods.

“Wait here.”

She went off. My heart pounded as I awaited her return, at once expectant and afraid. Back in a few minutes, she handed me a plastic bag filled with beans and a few canned tomatoes. I wanted to say my thanks, but my voice was choked. “Here,” she said. “Open your hand.” She dropped ten shillings onto my palm.

I ran to our tent, flush with exhilaration. As I handed the food and coin to my astonished parents, I breathlessly told them about my strange benefactor, though I never said a word about her comments on my eyes or her playful marriage proposal. The woman had given us enough food to last for two or three days. The ten shillings was the first post-war Nigerian coin my family owned. In a way, we’d taken a step towards becoming once again “Nigerian.” She’d also made me aware that my eyes were beautiful, despite their having seen so much ugliness.

~~~

Each day, streams of men set out and trekked many miles to their hometowns. They were reconnoiterers, eager to assess the state of life to which they and their families would eventually return. They returned with blistered feet and harrowing stories.

Amawbia was less than 40 miles away. By bus, the trip was easy, but there were few buses and my parents couldn’t afford the fare anyway. One day a man who’d traveled there came to our tent to share what he’d seen. His was a narrative of woes, except in one detail: My parents’ home, the man reported, was intact. He believed that an officer of the Nigerian army had used my parents’ home as his private lodgings. My parents’ joy was checked only by their informer’s account of his own misfortunes. He’d found his own home destroyed. Eavesdropping on his report, I imagined our home as a mythical island of order and wholesomeness ringed by overgrown copse and shattered houses.

The next day my father trekked home. He wanted to confirm what he’d heard and to arrange for our return. But when he got back, my mother let out a shriek then shook her head in quiet sobs. My father arrived in Amawbia to a shocking sight. Our house had been razed; the fire still smoldered, a testament to its recentness. As my father stood and gazed in stupefaction, the truth dawned on him: Some envious returnee, no doubt intent on equalizing misery, had torched it. War had brought out the worst in someone.

My parents had absorbed the shock of other losses. There was the death of a beloved grandaunt to sickness and of a distant cousin to gunshot in the battlefield. There was the impairment of another cousin who lost a hand. There was the loss of irreplaceable photographs, among them the images of my grandparents and of my father as a soldier in Burma during WWII. There was the loss of documents, including copies of my father’s letters (a man of compulsive fastidiousness, my father had a life-long habit of keeping copies of every letter he wrote). But this loss of our home cut to the quick because it was inflicted not by the detested Nigerian soldier but by one of our own. By somebody who would remain anonymous but who might come around later to exchange pleasantries with us, even to bemoan with us the scars left by war.

~~~

At war’s end, the Nigerian government offered 20 pounds to each Biafran adult. We used part of the sum to pay the fare for our trip home. I was shaken at the sight of our house: The concrete walls stood sturdily, covered with soot, but the collapsed roof left a gaping hole. Blackened zinc lay all about the floor. We squatted for a few days at the makeshift abode of my father’s cousins. Helped by several relatives, my father nailed back some of the zinc over half of the roof. Then we moved in.

The roof leaked whenever it rained. At night, rain fell on our mats, compelling us to move from one spot to another. In the day, shafts of sunlight pierced through the holes. But it was in that disheveled home that we began to piece our lives together again. We began to put behind us the terrors we had just emerged from. We started learning what it means to repair an inhuman wound, what it takes to go from here to there.

In time, my father was absorbed back into the postal service. My mother returned to teaching. We went back to school. The school building had taken a direct hit, so classes were kept in the open air. Even so, our desire to learn remained strong. At the teacher’s prompting, we rent the air, shouted the alphabet and yelled multiplication tables.

OKEY NDIBE PHOTO 4

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Okey Ndibe is the Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada, Las vegas. He is the author of Arrows of Rain, Foreign Gods Inc., and Never Look An American In The Eye.