After the Tall Timber (34 page)

And then, very deliberately and grimly:

Most of the children would stay at the orphanage. A few would be sent to Gabon for the duration of the crisis. Some would be sent to São Tomé, to be fed properly for a while, and then returned to Biafra. And Mr. Iloh, who had already adopted one in addition to his own two children, was about to adopt another. “It is wonderful, wonderful,” he said. “You can’t tell the difference.”

We went on to a World Council of Churches sick bay at Isu. A naked child hunkered outside, with the swollen stomach and utter lassitude of kwashiorkor. Mr. Iloh gently pulled down its lower eyelid. The interior was dead white. “Almost a hundred-percent anemia,” Mr. Iloh said. I asked him whether kwashiorkor children were in pain, and he said, “Not unless the liver is affected.”

There were victims of kwashiorkor and scabies, all with somehow intensely old-looking faces, on the beds and mats inside. The “severe” cases were separated by a raffia partition from the less severe, although I could not tell the difference. Some were coughing; some did not seem to have the energy. The matron, a young midwife, apologized that some beds had only one occupant. “We used to admit two in a bed,” she said, “when we could feed them.”

On the road to the Red Cross sick bay at Ezeoke, we passed St. Paul’s parsonage of the Church Missionary Society, a thatched shop called the Live and Let Live Volkswagen House (empty), and another shop, which displayed one small wooden coffin. A notice was posted on the hospital wall: “On admission, girls on duty should find out the following facts: (1) If the child is an orphan; (2) If the child is motherless; (3) If the child is fatherless  . . .” It was nap time, but the children, all of whom were dressed in clothes of the same material, were lying, sometimes two or three to a bed for companionship (there was a bed for every child), silent and wide awake.

A refugee camp nearby, in what had been the Holy Rosary School and Church Hall, had few occupants, although there were hundreds of pallets and bundles of personal belongings on the floor of a single room, with rain coming in through windows without panes. Most of the adult refugees were out looking for food. The ones who remained seemed to come from everywhere in Biafra. Some had moved more times than they could remember. On the wall, in chalk, there were still attendance figures for the last day of school, in 1967. Nobody seemed to know where the nearest children’s feeding center was, except a girl from the local Red Cross detachment, her hair neatly tied in the nine longish pigtails one often sees in Biafra. “We gave out food yesterday,” she said. “So there won’t be any tomorrow.”

On Tuesday evening, in his car on the road to Emekuku, Dr. R. N. Onyemelukwe, who is Biafra’s chief health officer, spoke of his problems when the Biafrans retook Owerri. “Sanitation was a very formidable problem,” he said. “It was all littered with corpses and night soil. The water supply, you may have noticed, was disrupted. All equipment was broken. All wires were cut. I think they were at war with books.” He said that the bush and the snakes had begun to close in, although he himself had not yet seen a cobra. “Before the crisis, we were developing sanitation-consciousness in our people,” he said. “We even anticipated problems of air pollution.” He laughed. “Although, of course, the crisis has now reduced the number of vehicles.” He spoke of burials, sewage, mass immunization. “There was not a single civilian living in Owerri when it was disrupted,” he said. “I had one hundred workers, cleaning up. Of course, there was no market, so I had, ha-ha, to feed them. I imagine the population of night snails was depleted. In two weeks, Owerri was ready for the return of our civilians. Two white Red Cross workers, you know, were shot when Okigwe was disrupted. Every home has lost someone in this war.”

Later that night, at the residence of Dr. Fabian Udekwu, head surgeon of the Teaching Hospital at Emekuku, a game of draughts, on a homemade board, was going on. A chair was littered with cartridge tapes—Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky. Dr. Udekwu, who studied at Johns Hopkins and did his residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, had worked for a time in a hospital in Ibadan, in Western Nigeria, fled through the bush when a friend of his, another Ibo surgeon, nearly lost his hands in a massacre in 1965, returned for some months to Ibadan, and, after another outbreak of killings, returned at last to Biafra. Since then, he has moved several times, as areas were disrupted. “It is terrible, you know,” he said, “to come home and keep on running.” I asked a friend of Dr. Udekwu’s how the mobs had recognized Ibos in the massacres, and the friend replied that they were better dressed and that there was a distinctive Ibo facial structure (Ibos, to me, looked very different from one another). Their names were also characteristically Ibo; to find Ibos in cars, Hausa colleagues often kept checklists of license numbers.

Dr. Udekwu took me on a quick tour of the Emekuku hospital, where six hundred patients, mostly wounded soldiers, lay in kerosene-lamp-lighted wards, on beds and on pallets on the floor. They greeted the doctor cheerfully as he pointed out the results of operations; a Steinmann pin, consisting of a sterilized nail through an injured limb, with a bag of pebbles for traction at the foot of the bed; a splint made of scrap metal and screws for bad fractures. “We are born to improvise,” he said. Most of the patients at Emekuku arrive at night. It takes them about forty-six hours’ travel from the farthest front. The hospital’s four senior surgeons and twenty doctors perform between fifty and a hundred operations a day.

“We need plastic surgeons, orthopedists, neurosurgeons, pediatricians,” Dr. Udekwu said. “Then, of course, there’s no sense operating on them if we can’t feed them. And storage and malnutrition of donors creates a problem with blood donations. But the worst are the victims of the white phosphorus bombs. Have you seen one? Some of them are still smoking on the operating table.” He said that he was able to treat them with hydrogen peroxide, and that he hoped never to see war again.

At Dr. Udekwu’s dinner table, with several guests—including Dr. Onyemelukwe; Dr. Anezi Okoro, a dermatologist turned surgeon; and Mrs. Bede Okigbo, wife of the head of the Land Army (Mrs. Okigbo is in charge of food at Emekuku)—Dr. Udekwu said, “Let us pray.” Dinner consisted of vegetable
ukwa
soup (rich, somebody said, in sulfur-bearing amino acids), a paté called
moi-moi
(“Why do we call it
moi-moi?
” Dr. Okoro said. “That is the Yoruba word. The Ibo is
mai-mai
”), and chicken, the bones of which, even in the half-light, were picked clean. Dr. Udekwu was worried about Biafran medical students whose education had been interrupted by the crisis. He favored rotating them for study abroad, in crash programs. “There are already eighty Biafran doctors abroad,” he said. “But one must consider the overall situation. Forty-five percent of our population is under fifteen. We don’t want to run the risk of losing our students. If we die, they can carry on.” Dr. Udekwu began to talk about the work of the Biafra Relief Services, of New York, in resettling two Biafran leper colonies whose area had been disturbed. “The lepers are like the prisoners,” he said cheerfully. “When an area is disrupted, they will flee and report to the next prison along the line.”

After dinner, over glasses of palm wine, a young guest told a story of trying to get a job with Shell BP, the major oil company in the Eastern Region, before the war. He had been selected, out of hundreds of candidates, for one final interview. They asked him what he thought of Shell BP. He told them he thought the company was taking more out than it was putting into Nigeria. They did not hire him. (It seemed somehow characteristically Biafran to find this funny and surprising.) Dr. Udekwu began to talk about recent studies of starvation. “We used to think that people lived for a while off their fatty tissue,” he said. “But now we realize it attacks the vital organs. Brain damage, of course, is irreversible. Mercifully, the worst cases will pass on.”

Dr. Onyemelukwe and Dr. Udekwu bantered a bit about peptic ulcers, and Dr. Okoro shyly brought out a sheaf of poems. The first line of the first poem was “It was high tide in casualty.” Later, as his guests left, Dr. Udekwu said, “I hope you don’t think we eat like this every night. I am embarrassed.” His guests thanked him and said they were embarrassed, too.

On the drive back to Owerri, Dr. Onyemelukwe initiated a discussion of the new government recommendations for cooking cassava leaves. Plucking the leaves kills the tubers, which creates problems for the survival of cassava. Boiling the leaves, which are hairy, for only fifteen minutes, as recommended, conserves their vitamin content but does not quite eliminate the cyanide they contain. A dilemma. “Just watch a goat,” Dr. Onyemelukwe said, as we passed one. “And whatever a goat eats, you won’t die. Pluck it and eat it.” Before going to his own home, the chief health officer spent some time pushing a young man’s stalled car through the rain.

I spent the rest of Tuesday night, with a flashlight, rereading Frederick Forsyth, and a report by some British anthropologists and diplomats familiar with the Eastern Region very quietly asking that the West reconsider its position on Biafra. I was scared in the dark, not of violence (I had not really seen any) or of disease (I had only a kind of muzzy cold from the rain) but of not being able to get out. I was convinced that there would be no planes, or no room for me on them. I became obsessed, like other journalists and Biafrans, with the question of the Telex. Biafra does have a radio connection with Gabon, and finally access to a real Telex in Geneva, but the insistence that there was one right
there
, in Biafra, was quite comprehensible in the dark, and seemed by its own logic to explain more serious questions: for example, censorship. There is, in effect, no censorship in Biafra, but Biafrans have to give some reason why journalists cannot take their cables directly to the Telex office. They claim they must censor the cables, and then they simply radio them, altering perhaps a word or two, to Gabon. They prefer the idea of censorship to the idea that there is no wire, no solid link to the world outside. So did I. One of the two other reporters left in Biafra that night (two weeks later, there were none), imagining that he heard a snake or a person rustling in his food, had thrown his jackknife, frightening himself more with the sound.

Just before dawn on Wednesday, a small congregation was attending a Mass at St. Paul’s in the village of Isu. After Mass, an elderly woman pressed something into the hands of Father Gerard Gogan, a white priest, with the characteristic vagueness and despair about his eyes. “What is this?” he said, apparently startled by being approached or spoken to at all. “It is a letter for you,” she replied. “I will read it,” he said, more calmly, and put it in his cassock. In a black kettle, over a very smoky fire in a little thatched hut, some workers were boiling ten stockfish to feed over a hundred children. A kettle of medicinal leaves was being boiled for an eighteen-year-old malaria victim who stood nearby.

A little later, in the office of Major General Philip Effiong, an Efik, who is Chief of the General Staff, at Defense Headquarters (a camouflaged location in the bush), a copy of
The Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
lay on the table. On the walls were pictures of the mangled victims of Nigerian bombing raids. A young government worker was talking intensely about the problems Biafra might face after independence. “It will be freedom won through blood,” he said. “There will be this background of sorrow, violence, and hatred. What will be the expectations? There will be a second struggle, for order and the fundamental freedoms. Will the people say, ‘Where is it, the goal?’ Will they have the energy?”

General Effiong walked in, a humorous, most unmilitary-looking man. He went to a wall map stuck with pins and wood slivers (round or square, orange, red, blue, pink) and gave a short briefing about the front. “Onitsha, active. Okigwe, off and on. Ikot Ekpene, changed hands half a dozen times. Umuahia, static, lots of raids by our guerrillas. At Onitsha, they are trying to break through to Nnewi, His Excellency’s hometown, but we are almost inside Onitsha to the Savoy Hotel. Port Harcourt, all these areas must begin to feel the pressure. Many of our men at the front are without boots, but when there are gaps we do go through. At the beginning, we had no artillery and no mortars, not a single piece. We had a few helicopters and our famous B-26 [an old plane, from which a mercenary pilot used to kick bombs through a door]. Mark you, between August and October last year we had our most precarious moment. The fall of Umuahia was very depressing. I think we revived very well. There is optimism, and not without reason. You know, they lost three thousand men on the road to Onitsha. I know they have suffered terribly. It is a colossal war,” he said. “It is a very, very colossal war.”

I asked General Effiong to what extent the Biafran Army has been forced to resort to conscription.

“In a war of this kind,” he said, “our people don’t like it. We tried it for three months and found we had to stop. Our people couldn’t see the point.”

I asked whether the recent lessening of air raids was due entirely to the weather. “This has been puzzling us for some time,” he said. “Perhaps it is our little homemade rockets popping. And our air force has been up again, nothing to write home to Mummy about but quite a little baby.”

General Effiong showed me some captured military weapons, British antitank guns used against people (Biafra has no tanks), Russian napalm, machine guns from countries all over Europe, and some marked “U.S. Gov’t Property/Army.”

“If we fail, you see,” General Effiong said, “then the black man in Africa is going to fail, and the minority man wherever he is. One would think we had done enough against all this to prove that we deserve to live.”

At noon on Wednesday, in the Armed Forces Hospital at Nkwerre, which is run by Colonel Miller Jaja (who was once a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and who is a descendant of the Jaja of Opobo, who led a revolt against the slave trade in the early 1860s), Major Dennis Umeh, a thirty-one-year-old surgeon who enlisted in the army on the day before the war, said the hospital had been twice strafed and bombed by MiGs. “We didn’t complain,” he said. “This is a military hospital.” There are two thousand patients in the hospital, which was once St. Augustine’s Grammar School, and five thousand more in a large complex across the road. The matron, Major Mary Onyejiaka, is a thirty-four-year-old nurse who once served in the Nigerian Army. She makes the rounds of the enormous complex twice a week.