After the Tall Timber (32 page)

Surprisingly—since most Ibo members of the Nigerian Army had been technical and administrative personnel, and since Biafra was very lightly armed—the Biafrans nearly won their independence in the first three months. Then the heavy British equipment came in. The Biafrans lost the coast and their major towns, although they had considerable success against the heavy equipment with homemade booby traps manufactured in Professor Nwosu’s Research and Production Directorate. By April 1968, their agricultural and river areas were cut off, and people began to die of starvation in numbers that, at their peak, were estimated at ten thousand a day. Caritas, the World Council of Churches, and the Red Cross began sending in small amounts of food on Biafran mercenary arms flights. On October 12, Dr. Herman Middelkoop, of the World Council of Churches, sent a telegram to Secretary-General U Thant of the United Nations requesting UN humanitarian aid for Biafra. On October 19, the Secretary-General told the press that the telegram had not arrived and that the war was, in any case, an internal affair, in which the United Nations could not become involved.

In July 1968, the Red Cross asked General Gowon for permission to fly specially marked relief planes into Biafra. Gowon replied that Nigeria would shoot them down. They flew anyway, and the churches, having obtained the code for landing at Uli Airport, flew in, too. In June of this year, after endless negotiations over relief routes, with Nigeria arguing alternately that all relief must pass through Lagos and that there could be no relief, since total siege is a legitimate instrument of war (although the idea of total siege has traditionally been applied to cities and not to an entire ethnic population of ten million), the Red Cross plane was shot down. Since the shooting, it has been argued with increasing insistence that the situation has changed entirely, and that it is only the Biafran leadership that is making impossible, at great cost to its own people, the dream of a peaceful and unified Nigeria. Biafrans have come to argue that there never was a Nigeria, except as defined by the British colonial presence; that if the colonial “nations” of Africa were in fact to break up along tribal lines, not much would be lost except some unstable, colonial boundaries; and that a new force—local, indigenous, tribal, unaligned—may yet be brought forth into the world. As for defectors and the charge that the Biafrans are exaggerating their own danger of genocide, Biafrans reply that every ethnic group marked for extinction has had sincere and misguided collaborators with the enemy. Their own experience of tribal slaughters and world indifference or unconsummated sympathy has made them determined not to rely to the last man on Nigeria’s new good faith.

On Sunday, at Owerri market, which is now a little cluster of wooden tables and benches, reached by a thin track of red earth marked by the imprint of sandals and bare feet, in the bush, a five-year-old girl sat on the ground meticulously gathering and blowing sand off each seed of breadfruit she had dropped on the ground. The price of a scruffy, dazed, and twitching hen was eight pounds (nearly twenty dollars); a leg of goat, fifteen pounds; a two-inch bony river fish, a bush snail, or a cigarette, nearly half a pound; a third of a cup of salt, or a cup of
garri
(ground cassava, the only food most Biafrans can get), one pound. The salary of a soldier or a beginning civil servant is fifteen pounds a month. A woman was preoccupied with keeping her entire wares, four minuscule bush snails, from crawling away. No one was buying anything but
garri
, and very little of that.

Suddenly, a shrieking, giggling band of eleven young men and three boys passed through the market, as though carried away by some enervating, mocking joke. These were some of the “artillery cases” one sees all over Biafra—people claiming some local variant of shell shock and traveling always in packs. They were treated by other citizens with a kind of care. Three at Owerri market were given a melon seed or a nut, which sent them into screams of laughter again. Medical comments about them vary. Dr. Fabian Udekwu, head surgeon at a hospital in Emekuku, insists that their disorder is genuine. “The reason their voices are so shrill is that their hearing is impaired,” he said. A young military matron at the Armed Forces Hospital in Nkwerri was less sympathetic. “They are putting it on,” she said. Most of the artillery cases are treated at a psychiatric hospital in Ekwereazu. It takes about two months to cure the symptoms.

At nine-thirty Sunday morning, in a bullet-scarred bungalow of what was once the Advanced Teachers’ Training College in Owerri (Owerri, fifteen miles from the front, was taken by Nigerian forces last September, retaken by Biafra in April; it is now Biafra’s provisional capital), I asked Elizabeth Etuk, who is in her twenties, chairman of the Biafra Youth Front, and a member of the Ibibio, a minority tribe, how many times she had been a refugee since she fled from Lagos just before the war. She began to count.

“Mark you,” she said, “I’m now in a village I never heard of before.” Miss Etuk, who received her doctorate in child psychology from Columbia University in 1967, gave up her study of “the intellectual development of our children” (almost all Biafran schools have been closed since the crisis) to form the Youth Front, which so far consists of a few thousand young people in about fifty villages, who administer feedings (“lunch, when there was a lunch”), catch lizards, sausage flies, and snails by night for their protein content, process cassava into
garri
, allot the little salt that is brought in by relief flights, perform and compose songs for the refugee camps, and organize play groups for the children who are not too weak with misery or kwashiorkor.

“They always play war games,” she said earnestly. “Nobody wants to play the Nigerians. Sometimes the play is violent. It is the strain.” She became very cheerful about the new Biafran songs that mix local languages. “The crisis has mixed the country up,” she said. “You find refugees shouting when they hear their language, then other refugees in the same camp shouting when they hear their own.” Her youth group has brought back some traditional dances that were beginning to die off. “Before the crisis, you know, some of us were very worried,” she said. “We knew how to dance the waltz.” I asked her whether women had always had much influence in the Eastern Region, and she became quite grimly militant. She described the Ibo women’s part in the 1929 riots, and a more recent protest. “A committee went to His Excellency,” she said, referring to Ojukwu. “And they told him, ‘
We
are the ones who have lost children. We are the ones who have lost husbands. We are the ones who lost our homes. Some of us are too old to have children again. Ojukwu, give us guns!’ When the women start these things, the men know they are not joking. But they were very adamant. They said it had not come to that.” A friend tried to distract her with a joke about soups from the Ibibio area of Biafra, and she laughingly told him that, since the population mix-up, Ibos would have to acknowledge that Ibibio soups were the best.

At lunchtime, Miss Etuk and her friend having refused to stay, I cooked some canned soup over a kerosene stove in my bungalow in Owerri and then went to a building called the Overseas Press Service, where it turned out two French journalists, who were about to leave Biafra, had run out of food. They ate in the press cafeteria. The menu, headed “Progress Hotel Umuahia” (Umuahia was captured in April by Nigeria) and restamped “Owerri”: Boiled Yam, Mixed Vegetables (apparently a kind of grass), Sliced Pineapple (a quarter of a single slice per guest).

Sunday afternoon, at the Victoria Palace Hotel, a palm-wine bar (Biafra is full of palm-wine bars called, and sometimes serving as, hotels: Hotel de Gabon, Hotel de Tanzania, Hotel de Haiti, Hotel DeGaulle, Hotel Tranquillity), the palm wine, a mildly alcoholic drink with the taste of oiled lemonade, had run out. There was still Biafra Gin, Biafra Sherry, and Biafra Stout Beer (one-half bottle, seven pounds). The place was filled with soldiers, in uniform and armed with pistols made in France. There were also a few civilian women and some artillery cases, who swarmed around the soldiers without shrieking and yet seemed to embarrass them. The aging proprietor of the Victoria Palace said that he had begun, in pre-crisis times, by trading salt, soap, and shoes to accumulate money to buy his hotel but that the “vandals” had looted his hotel when Owerri was disrupted. “Vandals” is the almost universal word in Biafra for Nigerians.

Just after dark on Sunday, in the house of N. U. Akpan, who is Chief Secretary to the Military Government, head of the Biafran civil service, a Presbyterian elder, and a member of the minority Ibibio tribe, the lights went out. The water in Owerri had been shut off some time before. Kerosene lamps were brought in. It was cold, and the rain outside looked bleak. I asked Mr. Akpan whether anyone in Biafra advocated simply giving up. (These questions always seemed to me awful, but Biafrans seemed to mind if they were not asked. Women at markets looked worried if notes were not made of every answer; and one is asked everywhere in Biafra to sign a guestbook, as though simply writing things down—names, comments—would someday give evidence that there had been a Biafra at all.) “If you said that,” Mr. Akpan said quietly about giving in, “you would be beaten up. If I said it, I would be lynched.”

I asked what the politics of Biafra, whose enemy had been armed after all by both the Russians and the British, might be after the war. Mr. Akpan said it would be unaligned in terms of ideology. “Only let us be unaligned,” he said. “Let us look inward.” He paused a long time in the near darkness. “The West brought us good tidings, but it wouldn’t let us expand on them. Now we are suffering this strange mercy killing at the hands of the British, and it has brought out qualities we did not know we had. Nigeria, you see, has mortgaged its future to the Soviet Union, but we would wish after the crisis that they would be stable. We wouldn’t wish a confused and unstable neighbor.” He paused again. “Mark you,” he said, “when Nixon was campaigning, Nigeria became jittery.”

When I asked whether de Gaulle’s expression of sympathy might have been a case of enlightened self-interest, he denied it vigorously. “France spoke for us when we had lost the oil, when we were nearly finished,” he said. “Some of us, you see, thought last September was the end. But here we are.”

At the dinner hour on Sunday, I again saw Elizabeth Etuk, with Austin Ogwumba (head of Biafran Security), Dr. Pius Okigbo (a Biafran economist, and former representative of Nigeria to the European Common Market), and some other guests, at the home of Godwin A. Onyegbula, the former Nigerian chargé d’affaires in Washington, now permanent secretary of the Biafran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Relations. (The word “Commonwealth” in the title of Mr. Onyegbula, who is essentially the Biafran foreign minister, dates from a time when Biafrans still had hopes for the British, but it now refers only to “the commonwealth of nations.”) I asked whether Biafrans felt comfortable with recognition by, of all nations, Haiti. François Duvalier went to school with several young Ibos in Michigan, long before he became Papa Doc, when he was still a young liberal medical student. Mr. Onyegbula laughed, averted his eyes, and entered that tangle of reasoning with which Biafrans express their loyalty to any of the strange partners with whom they now find themselves.

“Well, you know, when Haiti recognized us, I began to doubt all the things I had ever heard about it,” he said. “I have never been there myself, but, you see, Haiti was, after all, the world’s first black republic. Perhaps when your brother is suffering you have a telepathic experience.” Mr. Onyegbula seemed relieved to let the subject drop. Conversation turned to the failure of Biafra to capture the imagination of black Americans. “Yes, yes,” Dr. Okigbo said. “How can we get to them?” The guests began a very informed discussion about American black leadership, and whether it might be better to have the support of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and Jesse Jackson or to enlist the “crisis mentality” of black radicals, who now seem to seek their identity with the descendants of Muslim slave traders—most recently at the Pan-African cultural conference in Algiers.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Okigbo said, laughing. “After all, we are all on the same train without a ticket.”

Late Sunday night, a Biafran rock group called the Fractions, who had brought their own generator for their guitars and against the darkness, were playing to a very crowded dance floor in the hall of the Advanced Teachers’ Training College. Most of the young people were dancing Western style, some were doing the Highlife, and a few were discussing the news of Dr. Azikiwe’s defection in Lagos. “In war, you always have Lord Hawhaw,” a bearded young man said. “It doesn’t reflect the core, the generality of opinion.” Many of the dancers were soldiers. Two were solemn workers from Caritas. After the dance, in a rain that seemed almost total, on the Owerri-Orlu road, among the trekkers, almost all of whom were barefoot and shivering, and many of whom were naked children carrying basins or articles of furniture on their heads, a little boy put a large machete on top of his head to free his hands to rub his eyes. The driver of a State House car, who had already nearly hit a goat and a chicken, almost ran him down.

On Monday, at 9 A.M., in Owerri, the High Court of Biafra was in session in what was once a school, under Chief Justice Sir Louis Mbanefo, a former judge of the World Court, who as an Ibo justice in Nigeria in 1962 had reduced the sentence, for treason, of Chief Anthony Enahoro, whom he faced again last year in unsuccessful negotiations for peace in Biafra. All the judges and attorneys wore black robes and curled, yellowing wigs. On the table nearest the attorneys was a gray volume,
Reports of the High Court of the Federal Territory of Lagos
. The steps by which messengers climbed to the justices’ bench consisted of rusted mortar containers, still marked “Explosives/UK.” On the docket was an appeal of a sentence of murder (
Chief Amagwara Achonye v. the State
), but the case under discussion was a complicated one, which had already passed through native and higher courts, concerning the right of a man to build on the communal land of his family. The appellant had been in possession of the land since 1921, planted fruit trees and constructed a fence, but there were legal issues that entailed a distinction between “possession” and “ownership,” and also issues of tribal law, which elicited phrases like “By native custom, My Lord, a man may not build on the ruins of his father’s house unless the line has become extinct” and “If a man should have a house, My Lord, and what is commonly called a yard . . . .” The appellant and members of his family were in attendance, but silent. At one point, Justice Mbanefo asked one of the attorneys, a bearded young man with a severe cold and with thumbprints on his glasses, whether the case might be adjourned until Wednesday. “I don’t know, My Lord,” he replied. “I have to come all the way from Ihiala for these appeals. The problem of transportation will be—that is, unless my learned friend can  . . .” Finally, the court did adjourn. An usher cried, “Court!” Everyone rose, and the justices left the room.