The year was 1966 and he, a bright and ambitious boy of 13 or 14 (no one
could be sure because the European missionaries did not issue birth
certificates to children like him whose parents refused to convert to
Christianity), lived in Akpugoeze, in Nigeria’s southeastern Enugu
state. Tradional marriage in biafra land
It was a town of sprawling cassava farms and towering palm trees –
not a wealthy place, but one where the townsfolk worked together to
build new roads and widen existing ones, to construct schools, churches,
and a primary healthcare centre. Nicodemus saviour
My father had just won a scholarship to study at one of the country’s
finest secondary schools in Port Harcourt, 200km south. But my
grandfather was sceptical. He was scared that the city that opened its
mouth to the sea, would swallow his first-born son.
Soon, school would be the last thing on either of their minds.
In the markets and on the way to the stream, people had started to
whisper tales about pogroms in the north. They said Igbo people – the
ethnic group to which my father belonged – were being rounded up and
killed in Kano, Kaduna and Sokoto, some 600-1,000km away.
When Nigeria had gained its independence from the United Kingdom on
October 1, 1960, a federal constitution had divided the country into
three regions, each run by one of the main ethnic groups: The
Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo in
the southeast.
Less than six years later, there was widespread disillusionment with
the government, which was perceived as corrupt and incapable of
maintaining law and order.
Then on January 15, 1966, a military coup overthrew and killed
Nigeria’s first prime minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a
northerner. As several of those involved were Igbo, and many of those
killed were politicians from the north, it was erroneously labelled an
Igbo coup. Many northerners interpreted it as an attempt to subjugate
the north, which was less developed than the south.
Army commander Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo,
suppressed the coup but took power himself. His plan to abolish the
regions and establish a unitary government further compounded northern
fears that southerners would take over. A counter-coup in July saw
soldiers from the north seize power as Aguiyi-Ironsi was overthrown and killed.
When news of the pogroms first began circulating in the southeast,
people from the towns and villages started to trek to cities like Enugu
and Onitsha, some 70km away, in search of telephones. They carried with
them pieces of crisp brown paper on which their relatives who moved to
the north had scribbled their numbers. They travelled in groups. Those
who could not make it begged others to call the numbers for them.
They returned to their homes distraught, having learned that the telephone lines in the north were down.
Weeks later, mammy wagons began dropping people off at my father’s
town – people with sunken eyes and blistered skin, some of them with
missing limbs.
The homes to which these people returned erupted into squeals of
delight – the relatives they had feared dead were alive. Most had
nothing but near-empty bags with them. A few carried something else –
the remains of relatives who had not survived the pogroms.
About 30,000 Igbo were killed in the pogroms and about one million
internally displaced. Some northerners living in Igbo areas were also
killed in revenge attacks.
In response to the pogroms, on May 30, 1967, Colonel Emeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu unilaterally declared the independent Republic of Biafra in the
southeast of the country.
Then the war began.
My father and his family learned to take cover as the air rumbled
with bombs, shelling, bazookas and, much later on, ogbunigwe, weapons
systems mass-produced by the Republic of Biafra.
Like most boys his age, he volunteered to join the Biafran Boys – a
group of child soldiers trained by the Biafran army. Few of them ever
saw combat, but he never tired of telling me and my siblings about his
mock wooden gun, morning drills and uniform of khaki shorts and shirt.
Decades later he would recall how he and the other boys would go to
the market to bully traders into parting with their chickens and goats,
groundnut and palm oil, with the same boyish excitement with which he
had experienced it. He also remembered the jubilation with which they
received the news that other countries – Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast,
Tanzania and Zambia – had recognised Biafra.
Occasionally, he would wonder what his life would have been like had
the war never arrived and he had made it to that school in Port
Harcourt.
In Nigerian history books, that period between 1966 and 1970 is
called The Nigerian Civil War or The Nigerian-Biafran war. But for those
of us whose families lived through it, it is an erasure of truth not to
name it The Biafran Genocide.
Estimates of the death toll vary – with some putting it at more than
one million and others at more than two million. Some died as a result
of the fighting but most from hunger and disease after the Nigerian
government imposed a land and sea blockade that resulted in famine.
In The Republic, Amarachi Iheke gives a detailed analysis
of the case for and against classifying it as a genocide, arguing that
whether or not you believe it to have been a genocide, the conflict
exposes “blind spots in our application of international human rights
norms” and that “moving forward, as part of a national reconciliation
project, it is necessary we embark on critical truth-seeking around
Biafra’s genocide claim”.
But the foundations of the Nigerian government’s denial were planted
on January 15, 1970, when Biafra agreed to a ceasefire and the war
ended. Nigeria’s Military Head of State General Yakubi Gowon declared
the conflict had “no victor, no vanquished”.
But there was clearly a victor – the Nigerian government, which had
regained control of the oil-rich region – and a vanquished – the people
of the now-defunct Republic of Biafra, on whose land the war had been
fought, whose homes had been destroyed, whose relatives had died of
starvation and disease, and their descendants who would have to navigate
the world with the weight of their trans-generational trauma.
Still, in keeping with Gowon’s mantra, the government began to craft its own story; one echoed in school textbooks.
In school, I learned no details of what happened in Biafra. The
reality was tactfully erased from the curriculum, while those
responsible were depicted as national heroes who had fought to preserve
Nigeria’s unity. I tried to reconcile the colourful pictures of these
“national heroes” in my Social Studies books (history was removed from
the basic curriculum in 2007) with my father’s experience of the war.
When I told my classmates my father’s stories, they would look at me,
their mouths open in disbelief, as though they were hearing these
things for the first time. When the topic came up in class, the teacher
would gloss over it as though it was something from the distant past,
then conclude with a tone of “happily ever after”.
The result is a new generation of Nigerians who are either unaware of
the country’s true past or have normalised it as a small price to pay
to maintain the nation’s unity.
This ahistoric
I often think of Mourid Barghouti, who in his autobiography I Saw
Ramallah writes, “It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic
trick: start your story from ‘Secondly’.” By carefully omitting the real
spark of the conflict in 1966 – the pogroms – we change the whole truth
of it.
Yet sadly, this is how most Nigerians tell the story of the Biafran
Genocide; disregarding its cause and pretending that it was a war to
protect Nigeria’s territorial integrity instead of one fuelled by years
of ethnic tensions and concerns over resource control.
But in Nigeria’s quest to erase and amend its history, it has
forfeited the opportunity to learn from it – and this is something that
continues to haunt us. Decades after Biafra, we have witnessed this past
replicate itself in mini-episodes such as the Odi Massacre in 1991 and
Zaria Massacre in 2015. And just like the Biafran Genocide, the memories
of these gruesome incidents are forgotten quickly, erased and
distorted, downplayed by the media, and the perpetrators are never held
accountable.
ism follows us around in the physical and virtual
worlds. Recently, during a Twitter brawl, Bello el-Rufai, the son of
Kaduna State governor Nasir Ahmed el-Rufai, threatened
a user he perceived to be Igbo, saying he would pass the Twitter user’s
mother around to his friends, while Bello’s own mother appeared to
defend her son, declaring that all was “fair in love and war”.
But for Biafrans, it is not so easy to delink his words from history.
After all, 50 years ago, Igbo women were being passed around in the
military camps set up in captured Biafran towns, in open-air markets, on
the street or in their own homes, as their children and husbands were
made to watch.
But the truth is, it is impossible to erase the past, at least not
completely. We may try to distort it, pretend that it never happened,
but it will always be there. And for people like my father, the war will
forever give shape to their lives – splitting it into a before and
an after.
Immediately after the war, the Nigerian government made it a point of
duty to instil a spirit of nationalism in the hearts of schoolchildren
like my father. But these children had already seen first-hand what
comes with challenging the notion of one Nigeria. So it was not a
patriotism borne of love for one’s country but of fear. Unconsciously,
my father passed this fear on to his children.
We have learned to perform our nationalism in public, to avoid speaking our languages, to show our most Nigerian selves.
My father died last year, after years spent battling health problems
in a country where he could not access quality healthcare. But his life,
and the memories he shared with me during years of conversations in our
parlour, has left behind glimpses of a history we must never forget.
What he gave me with his stories is the knowledge that it is
imperative to talk about the past, to teach it, to confront it. In that
way, we learn from it, and can tell when it is being erased and
distorted, or about to be recreated.
