Tag Archives: Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezigbo

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!!

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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.

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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

The many difficulties of war – Part 1

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“Another thing that added to the difficulties of life for us was our menstruation. When your period was coming you’d be dreading it because there were no sanitary pads. What I did was cut up old wrappers and sew the pieces together. I made up to ten of them. We either put them in our pants or made a loop in them and tied them with a rope around our waist. They would soak so much with blood before I washed them. I had a particular place where I used to dry them so people wouldn’t see them. After the four or five-day cycle I’d keep them neatly until the next one.” – Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo.

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When the war started, I was a school girl at Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls’ School, near Port Harcourt, so I was already knowledgeable about life. There was so much deprivation, and life became cheap and meaningless. I must describe myself as one of the people who were traumatized by that war because I lost a number of relations and classmates, young boys of eighteen – nineteen years who went to fight in that war and died.

AKACHI EZEIGBO PHOTO 3
Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo in her library

Roses and Bullets, my war novel, is dedicated to them: my brother, Joseph Adimora; my cousin, Samuel Ogbuefi; my husband’s elder brother, Nathan Ezeigbo; and other close relatives.

We moved from Port Harcourt to Aba, to Mbano, and finally to our home town, Uga. There was constant displacement and in each place we lost something. When we got to Uga, the Biafran had built an airport there. The one at Ulli was for relief materials while the one in my place was purely for military purposes, where they kept all those Biafran Babies. Because of it, the Nigerian government raided Uga airport and the surrounding villages virtually every day and at nights.

Those air raids were particularly traumatic for me. They were terrible! The sounds would make you urinate in your pants, if you had pants to wear at all. The sound would strike you and paralyze you and leave you almost dead because when it came it would screech and then you had to run to the bunker. I’m sure people who had weak hearts died but we were young so we could withstand the shock. We had a permanent bunker and in the morning when you got up, you ate, if there was food, and then headed for the bunker. My father, who was a District Officer at some point, had a storey building, one of the few in my home town. But we were advised not to stay in the building because Nigeria Air Force was bombing anything they saw. We covered the roof with palm fronds but could not cover it completely. Biafra didn’t have effective air defense so sometimes when the Nigerian planes came for raids they would descend extremely low. In fact, one day, I looked up and saw the figure of the pilot. In the night you didn’t use any light so they wouldn’t see you. There was one woman who lived in the next village who was moving about in the night with a naked light. Immediately they saw the light, they rocketed the place and the woman died.

Uga was never evacuated because it was in the heartland of Biafra adjoining Akokwa and Akpulu. But as Biafra shrank, refugees from Awka, Abagana and other places came crowding into Uga, so the air raids now concentrated in the area and the surrounding towns such as Ekwulobia, Ezinifite, Amesi and Nkpologwu. Markets were now in the forests and were held at night because people were advised not to gather in groups in the day time.

During one particular raid, we ran out of the house and lay flat on the ground because there was no time to run into the bunker. The planes, which used to come in pairs, were releasing canon fire, shooting, rocketing. At the end of it, when I got up, the first thing I saw was eke [python] close to where I was taking cover. I wasn’t so scared because in Uga pythons do not bite. The locals treat them gently and with respect. Then, I saw a severed leg and an arm lying close by. People were groaning. It was horrible the way those planes killed people. It could just chop off the head or the whole trunk of a person. If you witnessed that war you would understand the reality of the fictional accounts in Half of a Yellow Sun, where the body of one of the characters kept running even after his head was cut off.

Then, there was the hunger. Sometimes there was nothing to eat. Most times we didn’t bother to go to the relief centers because one could stay there for a whole day without receiving anything. Some centers didn’t have enough supplies. Reverend Fathers were even accused of using the relief materials to lure girls. Some were accused of selling them to traders, for in the markets traders were selling stock fish, salt and other items. Some were using them politically – giving to certain people and not to others. One or two times I went begging but got nothing. After that I didn’t go again. Perhaps they didn’t want to give the locals, preferring to send the supplies to the refugee camps. Inevitably, people became more resourceful, trying to look for anything edible to assuage the hunger pangs. They would come out en masse to look for Aku – termites – in the early hours of the morning or at night. My family started eating the things we had never eaten before, like Uchakiri. I didn’t know those things were edible but when you see others eating them, you’d do the same. We cooked cassava leaves in soups and ate them with yam or cocoyam. We ate mpoto ede, cocoyam leaves. We dried the pink layer under the outer peel of cassava tubers and use it as food. My mother was making ogbono and okro soup with the tender leaves of the hibiscus flower. People who lived near small streams ate crabs. We would turn the manure in the goat pen and roast the lava we found crawling underneath. People ate rats and lizards. Now I can’t imagine myself eating these things but we relished them then. But many people still died. There was a massive continuous dying of young Children, especially from kwashiorkor. In my mother’s kindred some of the old men died because there was nothing to eat. Younger people survived because they managed to scrounge whatever they could for food.

They were also conscripting children as young as fifteen and sixteen years. My brother was fifteen when they conscripted him. He came back alive because there was a battle in the forest and they dispersed. My frightened brother ran away and came home as an Atimgbo, one suffering from shell shock. The military police was on the lookout for those who went on AWOL, so when he saw a Mami Wagon he would hail the occupant and say, “Driver give me smoke. Carry me. I’m going to Akokwa.” When he returned home, people were trooping in to sympathize with us. Women were exclaiming, “Ewuu, nwa m’o! Agha Biafra.” [Oh, poor child! This Biafra war.] After my mother gave him water to take a bath, she cooked his clothes in an iron pot for twenty four hours even though firewood was scarce. He had kwarikwata [body lice] and that was my first time of seeing them. They’re so flat it was difficult to pick them out from the fabric, so we dumped his clothes inside the pot. I don’t think he even had shoes because when they conscripted him my mum gave me, as young as I was, shoes to take to him. By the time I got there they had moved him to the war front, less than two weeks after they conscripted him. He couldn’t have had more than one week’s training. I wept so much and dropped the shoes with somebody who promised to send them to him. About five months after he came back the war ended.

Another thing that added to the difficulties of life for us was our menstruation. When your period was coming you’d be dreading it because there were no sanitary pads. What I did was cut up old wrappers and sewed the pieces together. I made up to ten of them. We either put them in our pants or made a loop in them and tied them with a rope around our waist. They would soak so much with blood before I washed them. I had a particular place where I used to dry them so people wouldn’t see them. After the four or five-day cycle I’d keep them neatly until the next one.

We had access to water because our house had a gutted roof which filled up our big underground tank during the rainy season. In the dry season we’d be hoarding the water. We also had a well called Umi. That was where we drew water for house hold chores. It was not always clear so we put alum in it. But the well water didn’t last till the next season so we went to streams like Ochi, Agwazi and Obizi. They had their source from the ground so they were there all the year round. It’s from Obizi spring in Uga that the Government provided running water to Aguata Local Government area in the present Anambra State, so you can imagine the size of this beautiful body of water.

It was even risky to be a young girl or woman during that time. After the war, the soldiers invaded everywhere. They came to my village too. They took many girls by force. Some went willingly. Others were enticed with food. They even took away people’s wives and the poor men were helpless. When you’re dealing with a man with a gun, what do you do?

AKACHI EZEIGBO PHOTO 1
Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo

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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.