There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (20 page)

There was a child in a corner who was being fed a white meal—the relief meals were
almost always white, I thought—and it was a concoction that meant the difference between
an early grave or another day to see the sun. On this day, at least, this reed-thin
child, with a skull capped with wiry rust-colored tufts of hair and a body centered
on a protuberant stomach, provided a toothy smile. I spent a short while smiling back
at her, and she reached out to touch my hand. Her touch was as light as feathers.

Dr. Aaron Ifekwunigwe, now a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of
California, was the director of health services for Biafra at the time of the war
.
He performed extensive and important clinical research and treatment during this
time. He studied the impact of starvation on the Biafran population. One of his most
compelling research projects, in March 1968, found during this early period of starvation
that 89 percent of those affected were children under five years of age. The remaining
11 percent were age five to fifteen.
^3
,
4

[On] an early fact-finding mission in 1968, conducted by ICRC [International Committee
of the Red Cross], Doctor Edwin Spirgi found that at least 300,000 children were suffering
from kwashiorkor . . . and three million children were near death.
⁵

There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion
of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality
disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on
a scale none of us had ever witnessed. One of the saddest images of the war was not
just the dead and the physically wounded but also the mentally scarred, the so-called
mad men and women who had been psychologically devastated by the anguish and myriad
pressures of war. They could often be seen walking seemingly aimlessly on the roads
in tattered clothes, in conversation with themselves.

W
E
L
AUGHED AT
H
IM

We laughed at him our

hungry-eyed fool-man with itching

fingers that would see farther

than all. We called him

visionary missionary revolutionary

and, you know, all the other

naries that plague the peace, but

nothing would deter him.

With his own nails he cut

his eyes, scraped the crust

over them peeled off his priceless

patina of rest and the dormant

fury of his dammed pond

broke into a cataract

of blood tumbling down

his face and chest. . . . We

laughed at his screams the fool-man

who would see what eyes

are forbidden, the hungry-eyed

man, the look-look man, the

itching man bent to drag

into daylight fearful signs

hidden away from our safety

at the creation of the world.

He was always against

blindness, you know, our quiet

sober blindness, our lazy—he called

it—blindness. And for

his pains? A turbulent, torrential

cascading blindness behind

a Congo river of blood. He sat

backstage then behind his flaming red

curtain and groaned in

the pain his fingers unlocked, in the

rainstorm of blows loosed on his head

by the wild avenging demons he

drummed free from the silence of their

drum-house, his prize for big-eyed greed.

We sought by laughter to drown

his anguish until one day

at height of noon his screams

turned suddenly to hymns

of ecstasy. We knew then his pain

had risen to the brain

and we took pity on him

the poor fool-man as he held

converse with himself. “My Lord,”

we heard him say to the curtain

of his blood, “I come to touch

the hem of your crimson robe!”

He went stark mad thereafter

raving about new sights he

claimed to see, poor fellow; sights

you and I know are as impossible for this world

to show as for a hen to urinate—if one

may borrow one of his many crazy vulgarisms—

he raved about trees topped with

green and birds flying—yes actually

flying through the air—about

the Sun and the Moon and stars

and about lizards crawling on all

fours. . . . But nobody worries much

about him today: he has paid

his price and we don’t even

bother to laugh any more.
¹

The Media War

The Nigeria-Biafra War was arguably the first fully televised conflict in history.
It was the first time scenes and pictures—blood, guts, severed limbs—from the war
front flooded into homes around the world through television sets, radios, newsprint,
in real time. It probably gave television evening news its first chance to come into
its own and invade without mercy the sanctity of people’s living rooms with horrifying
scenes of children immiserated by modern war.

One of the silver linings of the conflict (if one can even call it that) was the international
media’s presence throughout the war. The sheer amount of media attention on the conflict
led to an outpouring of international public outrage at the war’s brutality. There
were also calls from various international agencies for action to address the humanitarian
disaster overwhelming the children of Biafra.
¹

Said Baroness Asquith in the British House of Lords, “[Thanks to the miracle of television
we see history happening before our eyes. We see no Igbo propaganda; we see the facts.”
²
Following the blockade imposed by the Nigerian government, “Biafra” became synonymous
with the tear-tugging imagery of starving babies with blown-out bellies, skulls with
no subcutaneous fat harboring pale, sunken eyes in sockets that betrayed their suffering.
³

Someone speaking in London in the House of Commons, or the House of Lords, would talk
about history happening all around them, but for those of us on the ground in Biafra,
where this tragedy continued to unfold, we used a different language . . . the language
and memory of death and despair, suffering and bitterness.

The agony was everywhere. The economic blockade put in place by Nigeria’s federal
government resulted in shortages of every imaginable necessity, from food and clean
water to blankets and medicines. The rations had gone from one meal a day to one meal
every other day—to nothing at all. Widespread starvation and disease of every kind
soon set in. The suffering of the children was the most heart wrenching.

Narrow Escapes

At another stop, in the town of Okporo, we met a very pleasant gentleman who took
my entire family in. He offered Christie and me the only finished room in the mud
house he was still building. The rest of the floors were yet to be plastered. He moved
out his belongings from the finished room and moved our things into it. We argued
with him, but he would not hear it, and insisted that we stay in his most comfortable
room. We more or less settled in.

One was not sure where the war was headed, so we decided to stay in Okporo for as
long as our hosts would have us. There was a great deal of confusion about the status
of the republic. This was at the tail end of the conflict. At that point in the hostilities,
both sides were really exhausted. One noticed it in the shuffling gait of the soldiers,
in the less than chipper drill-song choruses, in the number of stories of army desertions.

The news about surrender was already in the air. Tragically, there were many false
rumors that the war had ended. Some people who had survived the war lost their lives
that week because they had heard that people were being asked to come back to Enugu,
that everything was over and returning to normal. Some of them were killed by Nigerian
troops on the way.

The federal troops soon arrived in Okporo and broke our idyllic village existence.
With their arrival came the horrendous stories of nurses and local women being raped
and violated in unthinkable ways.
¹

One day the Nigerian soldiers came to the compound, and we hid our daughter, Chinelo,
who was eight. I was in the kitchen making bread in the earth (laterite) oven that
we had designed. I watched the soldiers from the kitchen window for a while as they
pranced around the compound and demanded that its owner hand over a large black-and-white-spotted
goat that was tied to the fence, in a corner near a building that served as the storage
area. The animal was oblivious of the soldiers’ menacing presence and busy chewing
cud, its jaw swaying from side to side in between nibbles of long strands of elephant
grass.
²

The goat had sentimental importance to the wife of the owner of the residence, we
learned from her pleas. It had been a gift from her father, so she refused to hand
over the animal to the soldiers. I talked to the soldiers for a while, overwhelmed
by the strong smell of Kai Kai, a local gin, on their breath, and in Igbo persuaded
the wife of our host to give the soldiers the animal or be willing to lose her life
and ours in the process.

A small crowd had gathered to watch this spectacle. The soldiers at this point were
showing off, pointing their rifles in our faces. As they marched off they instructed
the animal’s owner to take care of the goat for them in their absence, because they
were still on duty. If the goat was not there when they came back, they warned, “you
will all be responsible.”

As soon as the soldiers left the wife of our host, in a state of panic, untied the
goat from the fence with the intention of hiding it in a dry well nearby. I called
out to her to leave the goat alone.

“Let them take it,” I said, “and leave you alone.” Fortunately for everyone the soldiers
never returned for the war plunder.

—

I had the privilege of having an official car that had been assigned to me by the
government of Biafra, which came with a driver. The driver was one of those hyperreligious
individuals who wore only white (a sign of purity, apparently) and preached endlessly
to his company, condemning everyone and everything “to the damnation that awaitest
thee if you don’t repent!” He was a truly curious character but an excellent driver
nonetheless.

One morning, as we woke to the greeting of the cock crow in the distance, I walked
out to the brisk damp dawn, stretched, and smiled as I glanced around—the villages
in Nigeria always had an organic, wholesome, earthy smell to them—and then it struck
me: I noticed that the government vehicle had disappeared. Someone in the yard confirmed
that the government driver had packed the entire car in the wee hours of the morning
and fled with our belongings.

We had traveled up to that point in a two-car convoy—I drove my own car, a Jaguar,
and the official car was driven by the chauffeur. Luckily, we still had the Jaguar,
and we decided to leave Okporo with our own driver, who we knew was much more trustworthy.
We took the other driver’s disappearance as some sort of omen, thanked our hosts for
their wonderful hospitality, and departed in the early afternoon with the intention
of traveling back to Ogidi, my ancestral home. We headed north toward Onitsha, six
miles from Ogidi. It was getting quite dark by the time we got to the outskirts of
Oba, a few miles from Otu-Onitsha
.

Refined petroleum was available but not always readily accessible, and petrol depots
were obvious targets of the federal troops. The driver reported that we had an empty
gas tank and we were desperately in need of filling up the tank if we were to make
the rest of the trip without incident. Almost immediately we heard the vehicle wobble
and then just stop. A deep darkness had enveloped us—there was no moonlight, so it
seemed even darker—and our circumstances made the darkness seem even more ominous.
We knew that one never ventured into canteens or restaurants for fear of meeting one’s
death at the hands of drunken soldiers. We decided that we would spend the night in
the car.

In the middle of the night some young men started walking around the car—circling
menacingly. They had come out of a restaurant, where they had been drinking, staggering
clumsily and laughing and speaking at the top of their voices. We were very frightened.
The driver and I got out of the car and started pushing the vehicle, for quite some
time, until we encountered some Biafran soldiers in a jeep. The captain recognized
me and advised us not to travel any farther this particular night, and he got his
men to help us push the car the rest of the way to a petrol depot, where we filled
our gas tank, parked the car at the corner, and passed the night there. The next morning
we set out very early, gradually, moving in occasional spurts and starts, since the
fuel in the car’s tank clearly was adulterated. Not for the last time, we were happy
to be unscathed.

V
ULTURES

In the grayness

and drizzle of one despondent

dawn unstirred by harbingers

of sunbreak a vulture

perching high on broken

bones of a dead tree

nestled close to his

mate his smooth

bashed-in head, a pebble

on a stem rooted in

a dump of gross

feathers, inclined affectionately

to hers. Yesterday they picked

the eyes of a swollen

corpse in a water-logged

trench and ate the

things in its bowel. Full

gorged they chose their roost

keeping the hollowed remnant

in easy range of cold

telescopic eyes. . . .

Strange

indeed how love in other

ways so particular

will pick a corner

in that charnel house

tidy it and coil up there, perhaps

even fall asleep—her face

turned to the wall!

. . . Thus the Commandant at Belsen

Camp going home for

the day with fumes of

human roast clinging

rebelliously to his hairy

nostrils will stop

at the wayside sweetshop

and pick up a chocolate

for his tender offspring

waiting at home for Daddy’s

return . . .

Praise bounteous

providence if you will

that grants even an ogre

a tiny glowworm

tenderness encapsulated

in icy caverns of a cruel

heart or else despair

for in the very germ

of that kindred love is

lodged the perpetuity

of evil
.
¹