After the Tall Timber (33 page)

Later, in his office, in what had once been a little classroom, the chief justice remarked that the case should have been tried in 1967, “but the land in question, you see, was disturbed until now. So the matter of ownership was for some time academic.” I asked Justice Mbanefo about the accommodation of British and native law. “We are still in the process of sorting it out,” he said. “Mark you, the native courts consist of local men of impeccable integrity. We would not reverse the ruling of the customary courts unless it was patently against good conscience, equity, and justice.” I asked Justice Mbanefo about the strange history of his two encounters with Chief Enahoro of Nigeria. “Ah, you see, under other circumstances it might have been different,” he said, and he pointed out that a brother of Chief Enahoro is now in exile in Norway, where he makes fervent speeches on behalf of Biafra. “Mind you,” he said, “only yesterday one of my own nephews, who was commanding a company, found some supplies left by Nigerian forces in retreat. Some of the company drank the beer left behind, and it was full of arsenic. Four men are dead. It is tragic, the loss of life. I don’t think the British are acting in this out of a desire to see Biafrans killed. They are like all good imperialists. Human lives don’t matter. Political expediency—this, I think, is really behind it.”

Mr. Onyegbula came in to ask Justice Mbanefo, who is also an official of the Biafran Petroleum Commission, for an allotment of fuel for the Foreign Ministry. Justice Mbanefo could only give him half of what he asked. “I believe the Nigerian soldiers are fighting for the spoils,” the justice said quietly. “You see, our refugees leave everything behind. We are fighting for our homes. With us, oil was never an issue. But now, of course”—he paused and nodded to himself several times—“you cannot ignore it.”

On Monday afternoon, Chinua Achebe, the Biafran novelist (author of
Things Fall Apart
and
No Longer at Ease
), arrived in Owerri several hours late for an appointment because of a broken axle on the road from Oguta, where, having been five times a refugee from a series of disturbed areas, he now lives. Mr. Achebe is chairman of the Biafra National Guidance Committee, a group of Biafran intellectuals who go out and interview the people in the countryside to keep the government in touch with what the people are saying. Ordinary Biafrans speak freely of the Guidance Committee, and freely register their grievances at its meetings, but the government (presumably for fear the committee might acquire an image of repressive interrogation) is extremely reticent about it. The sun was out briefly in Owerri. I asked Mr. Achebe, whose novels are preoccupied with problems of the modern breakdown in Ibo tradition, about Ibo relations with the minority tribes—the Efiks, Ibibios, Ijaws, Annangs, Ogojas, and Cross River people (most of them Christians)—who comprise a bit less than half of Biafra’s population and about half of the Consultative Assembly of Chiefs and Elders. The assembly consists of ten men, six elected and four appointed by the government, from each of the more than thirty districts of pre-crisis Biafra, and it includes, among representatives of labor, business, professional, and women’s groups, such local elders as the Amanyanagbo of Kalabari, the Amanyanagbo of Bonny, Chief J. Mpi of Ikwerre, Douglas Colonel Jaja of Opobo, the Obi of Onitsha, Uyo Clan Head of Okwu Itu-Itam, the Onyiba Enyi of Ohaozara in Abakaliki, and the ninth Eze Dara of Uli. Members of Eastern minority tribes have often been killed along with Ibos, and many of the minorities who once chose to remain in disturbed areas and risk Nigerian occupation have since taken refuge in Biafra. General Ojukwu has frequently asked for a plebiscite, under international supervision, to determine the minority tribes’ view of Biafran independence. “The crisis has now thrown everyone together,” Mr. Achebe said. “It seems a very curious way to forge a nation.”

On Monday evening, Patience Nwokedi, a twenty-two-year-old nurse in the Red Cross hospital at Awomama, hitchhiked the fifteen miles to Owerri to spend her one day off a week with her husband, Ralph, a twenty-eight-year-old civil servant, to whom she has been married for six months. They were going to wait until after the crisis to marry, but after two years decided not to wait. Mr. Nwokedi, who was educated at the Ibo university at Nsukka, used to write advertising for Federal Nigeria, which appeared in newspaper supplements abroad. In Biafra now, he supports his wife’s mother, who was recently caught for some days in the bush behind enemy lines (“We are recuperating her,” he said), his own mother, his own sixty-six-year-old father and his stepmother and their five children, who live in Nimo, two miles from the front, and a friend and five brothers and sisters who now all live in Mr. Nwokedi’s two-room house with him. In good times, he can afford about a cup of
garri
per person per meal. He has four brothers in the army who help. “For a young man not to have served in the army, even if he is on essential services, is very painful to him,” he said. “But without me my poor old dad would starve.”

Ralph and Patience Nwokedi, who are Protestants, found a car for a visit to an old friend, Father Michael Conniff, at the Caritas mission for the Owerri diocese. Father Conniff, like most white men who have served in Biafra since the crisis, has a frantic, nearly crazed look about his bloodshot eyes. There are thirty-one parishes in the Owerri diocese. With the reduced relief flights, Caritas receives a shipment of food only every other night. “We don’t know what we are getting,” Father Conniff said. “Often we have to wonder, Is this worth dividing into thirty-one places? We cater for seven hospitals. The Red Cross used to cater for sixty-four. West German relief has fallen off ninety percent since the Biafran Air Force bombed an oil installation in the Midwest. All day long we are worried by wounded soldiers. Now they have nothing to eat. What are we to do?”

I asked him whether the diocese feeds only Catholic children.

“We take every child that comes,” he said. “The only distinction is a special diet for the sicker ones.” Three children had died in one of his sick bays the night before. Father Conniff patted a mongrel dog named Buster, fed on whatever leaks out of the burlap sacks of fish. “This is not a place everybody would want to come to,” he said, in a voice that was by now cracking. “There are a lot of things to kind of scare a fellow from living here. When the area was retaken, there were a lot of bodies smelling. We buried them. Some of them were not pushed down too far. There’s two in the yard, six under my window, one officer in the flower garden. The bush closed in. That brought mosquitoes bigger than fowl, rats, snakes. A lot of corpses are in this place.”

I asked him what his prayers were like.

“More planes,” he said vaguely. “More planes. Bigger planes. More planes.” Not far from the mission, there was still a billboard reading, “Pepsi, the Big One.”

Ralph Nwokedi’s father had trekked all the way from Nimo for a three-week visit to his son. He would also visit Ralph’s mother, twenty miles farther on. Although Christian, the elder Nwokedi is a polygamist. The elder Nwokedi, a tall, distinguished man, with long bare feet and a long maroon robe over a faded collarless shirt, ceremoniously broke a kola nut for his family and guests, in their dark living room. Kola nuts are full of caffeine, and are supposed to make water drunk after them taste very sweet. The kola nut, about three inches long, broke into six natural pieces, and the elder Nwokedi sliced these into halves and passed them around. He said a prayer, and then everyone chewed, and drank water from the house’s only glass.

“When the first refugees come,” the elder Nwokedi said, “we begin to harbor them, begin petting them, say, ‘Be quiet, be quiet, peace will come.’ Now we have to break off, finished. If I am young, I should go inside the battlefield and fight. Now I see how I try to keep my household together. We take cover each time, and our hearts run each time. I was a big man, but now I shall never weigh ten stone again.” He was silent for a very long time. “When I become a Christian as a boy, I get a small book, and when I have children they should learn to read and write. The war breaks in and it turns my heart. It should be college now. Of all the time of my life, this is the misery.”

Later, at the dinner hour, in the house of Dr. Ifegwu Eke, commissioner of information, who studied at McGill and at Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in economics, with a dissertation entitled “Study of the Productivity of Water,” few of the guests showed up, because of the intensity of the rains. The conversation turned again to the defection of Dr. Azikiwe. “He was with us,” Dr. Eke said. “But when Aba, Owerri, and Okigwe fell in rapid succession, he didn’t want to come back.”

I asked Dr. Eke whether much was known about the history of the Biafran region before modern times, and he said that there was material for research in European libraries but that no one had had time to get at it yet. “I lost all my own manuscripts when Enugu was disrupted,” he said. “But Port Harcourt was the saddest fall. People were weeping that they should leave a town they had so long defended. At the last minute, the roads were full, miles of nothing but people trekking.”

I asked whether Biafrans heard much of the news outside Biafra, and he said that people listened anxiously to any available transistor radio, that it made them feel they belonged to the world. “Ask a small boy about the moon,” Dr. Eke said. “He will rattle off everything.” He spoke of the front. “In many places, the mud comes to your waist in the rainy season, so everybody stays where he is.” I asked about Biafran guerrilla activity in disrupted areas, and he laughed. “Call it infiltration,” he said. “But whatever it is, we are there.”

I had been told by several Ibos that Dr. Eke’s time in America had not been happy, but he did not speak of it. He only spoke rather skeptically of the Red Cross and starvation (“They always overestimate or underestimate,” he said. “When they needed two million dollars, they said two million children would die by February”) and of the general indifference of the world. “You know how it is with any tragedy,” he said. “After the first two floods, contributions will decline. People will simply say, ‘Why don’t they move?’ ”

Before dawn on Tuesday morning, a State House car, which had already nearly run over several hitchhikers who tried, with a kind of limp-wristed motion, to flag it down on the road to Mbano, picked up A. Kalada Hart, the young Biafran secretary of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Supplies. “I don’t seem to have any now,” he said. The day was hot and not rainy for a change, and at Angara Junction, of the Okigwe, Owerri, Umuahia, and Orlu roads, there were trekkers who looked particularly desolate. The driver looked rigidly at the road. “Sympathy is such a silly sentiment,” he said. At a compound in Mbano, Dr. Bede Okigbo, who was once dean of agriculture at the University of Nsukka, who studied at Washington State University and Cornell, and who is now coordinator of a farming directorate called the Land Army, discussed the problem of raising poultry in the part of Biafra that is left. “First, we have to see how much maize there is,” he said. “We must minimize the competition between human beings and poultry for the maize.”

Each community in Biafra must now donate a piece of land for farming by the Land Army, and each member of the community must spend a day each week on the Land Army farm. Half the produce remains with the community; the other half must be sold to the government. Land under dispute in the courts is frozen until after the crisis and planted. “Food scarcity here is not new,” Dr. Okigbo said. “Before the war, there was often near famine. It is the soil, storage problems, and the insects.”

I asked Dr. Okigbo how Biafran farmers reacted to the Land Army.

“The people are very individualistic,” he said. “Each little farm used to grow a little of everything—twenty farms for twenty families. It is very hard to mechanize. First, we sent in boys to teach the local people, but the people were not much impressed. Now we are hoping to get them to ask for the experts.” All the agriculture experts from Dr. Okigbo’s faculty at Nsukka are now in the regular army, except the wounded or people with administrative jobs, who now work on the land. Dr. Okigbo looked at a government memo datelined “Enugu/Mbano.” “We are studying plants which will not tempt people to eat the seedlings,” he said. “We are studying the wild local vegetables for identification.” A member of Dr. Okigbo’s staff mentioned a soldier of the Madonna Commandos, who had volunteered to serve as a guinea pig for any vegetation the soldiers were afraid to try. (Biafran commandos, who are among the most respected Biafran soldiers at the front, travel along the roads in trucks with gray skull and crossbones on the windshields, quite unlike the more cheerfully decorated trucks other units travel in.) “We have learned we cannot establish targets for our farms,” Dr. Okigbo said. “We have found our local pullets thrive better on less, on kitchen refuse, than imported pullets. But each time we plant, the enemy comes in. No matter how much target you establish, you see, you may not attain it.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Moses Iloh, National Secretary of the Biafra Red Cross, sat in his headquarters in the bush at Abba, in a trailer with a broken wheel. “We have been disturbed so often,” he said. “I don’t see how we can move again.” He spoke of people who had died from trekking, mothers who had miscarried, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, orphans too young to know their names found with people moving in the bush. “And so many have lost their minds,” he said. “The worst time was last year—May, June, July, August, September. Now the kwashiorkor is beginning again. A child who has had this thing twice shrinks. There is the brain damage. We have lost a hundred thousand people over fifty-five from shortage of bulk carbohydrates. You cannot fly in bulk carbohydrates. What will happen when there is nobody to tell us of the past, nobody to inherit the future?”

Mr. Iloh and I went to a Red Cross orphanage near Abba, where about twenty children were sitting quietly on their beds, which consisted of metal frames and bamboo pallets, some covered with blankets, some not. The children were led outside under a frangipani tree, a baby was placed on the ground in the center, a nine-year-old girl put her hands together in an attitude of prayer, a five-year-old clung to the hand of a matron, and the children began to sing, to the tune of “O Du Lieber Augustin,” “When we are together, together, together, when we are together, the happier we will be. On your face, on my face, on your face, on my face  . . .” Suddenly, the children switched to a song in Ibo, and I asked what the words meant. “They are asking Gowon to stop killing them,” Mr. Iloh said. The children switched to English again: