There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (17 page)

In late 1968, I traveled to the United States with Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi
as part of an extensive university tour to bring the story of Biafra to the mainly
progressive American intellectuals and writers. We visited scores of campuses, gave
what seemed to be hundreds of interviews, and met with several very influential American
leaders of thought.

During my visit we were educated about Igbo (Ebo) landing in St. Simons, Georgia.
According to the local lore, “Ebo Landing” was the site where an ill-fated slave ship
called
The Wanderer
had run aground. The valuable cargo—the captured Igbos—were taken onshore while the
crew rescued what they could from the bowels of the ship. While the crew was distracted,
the story continues, the Igbos made a suicide pact, deciding to walk into the ocean
and drown themselves rather than allow the slave merchants to sell them into bondage.
Locals swear that the shores of the tragedy are still haunted, and that on a clear
moon-lit night a visitor who stands really still can hear the howls and agony of death.
⁶

R
EFUGEE
M
OTHER AND
C
HILD (
A
M
OTHER IN A
R
EFUGEE
C
AMP)

No Madonna and Child could touch

Her tenderness for a son

She soon would have to forget. . . .

The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,

Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs

And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps

Behind blown-empty bellies. Most mothers there

Had long ceased to care, but not this one;

She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,

And in her eyes the memory

Of a mother’s pride. . . . She had bathed him

And rubbed him down with bare palms.

She took from the bundle of their possessions

A broken comb and combed

The rust-colored hair left on his skull

And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.

In their former life this was perhaps

A little daily act of no consequence

Before his breakfast and school; now she did it

Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.
¹

Life in Biafra

The Nigeria-Biafra conflict created a humanitarian emergency of epic proportions.
Millions of civilians—grandparents, mothers, fathers, children, and soldiers alike—flooded
the main highway arteries between towns and villages fleeing the chaos and conflict.
They traveled by foot, by truck, by car, barefoot, with slippers, in wheelbarrows,
many in worn-out shoes. Some had walked so long their soles were blistered and bleeding.
As hunger and thirst grew, so did despair, confusion, and desperation. Most were heading
in whatever direction the other was headed, propelled by the latest rumors of food
and shelter spreading through the multitude like a virus. Refugees were on the move
in no specific direction, anywhere, just away from the fighting. As they fled the
war zones they became targets of the Nigerian air force. The refugees learned to travel
nights and hide in the forests by day.

The international relief agencies started responding to the growing humanitarian challenge
quite early in the conflict by establishing food distribution centers and refugee
camps. There were many Biafran refugee camps dotting the landscape, from Enugu in
the north to Owerri in the south, during the thirty-month conflict. Many held between
a few hundred and a few thousand people. At the height of the war there were well
over three thousand such centers and camps, a great number but woefully inadequate
to the actual need.
¹

These camps were often hastily constructed tent villages set up beside bombed-out
churches, in football or sports arenas, or in open fields in the forest. They uniformly
lacked electricity, running water, or other comforts. Occasionally, the more established
camps had sturdier shelters on the premises of abandoned schools or colleges, or built
near freshwater streams or little rivers. Those were few and far between. Most had
rows of mud huts and palm raffia roofs built hastily by the inhabitants themselves.
They were occasionally fenced in by the international agencies, which placed guards
on the camp perimeter to monitor movement in and out of the area. The relief agencies
often hoisted their flags to indicate to the Nigerian officers that they were in neutral
zones that should be protected from assault. That did not always keep the Nigerian
troops from raiding these “safe havens,” or even from bombing them.

Life in the camps varied in quality. Some of the better organized camps provided water,
shelter, food, basic health care—mainly vaccinations for children against the most
prevalent diseases, and treatment of common bacterial infections—and education. Other
camps could only be described as deplorable, epidemic-ridden graveyards. In these
camps the combination of poor sanitation, high population density, and shortages of
supplies created a bitter cocktail of despair, giving rise to social pathologies and
psychological traumas of all kinds—violence, extortion, and physical and sexual abuse.

—

My siblings and their families returned to my father’s house in Ogidi from various
parts of the country. My family did too: Christie and my children at the time, Chinelo
and Ike, left Port Harcourt for my family’s ancestral home.

My village is about six miles from Onitsha, the commercial hub of Eastern Nigeria
and the location of the largest market in West Africa. Onitsha is also where the famous
Niger Bridge is located, and so it serves as the entry point for all travelers entering
the East from points west. The close proximity of Ogidi to Onitsha meant that we were
in the eye of the storm, as it were, right at the border of the conflict. We were
so close to the war zone we could hear the sounds of war—heavy artillery fire, bombs,
and machine-gun fights.
²

By the time I left Lagos to join my family in Ogidi, there were rumors that the Nigerian
army was not that far behind. Casting my mind back, I am surprised at how little pandemonium
there was during the early stages of the conflict. Families casually began to move
deeper into the countryside to prepare for the inevitability of war.

Food was short, meat was very short, and drugs were short. Thousands—no, millions
by then—had been uprooted from their homes and brought into safer areas, but where
they really had no relatives, no property; many of them lived in school buildings
and camps. The Committee for Biafran Refugees, understandably overwhelmed, did what
it could. I found it really quite amazing how much people were ready to give.

Beyond the understandable trepidation associated with a looming war, one found a new
spirit among the people, a spirit one did not know existed, a determination, in fact.
The spirit was that of a people ready to put in their best and fight for their freedom.
Biafran churches made links to the persecution of the early Christians, others on
radio to the Inquisition and the persecution of the Jewish people. The prevalent mantra
of the time was “
Ojukwu nye anyi egbe ka anyi nuo agha
”—“Ojukwu give us guns to fight a war.” It was an energetic, infectious duty song,
one sung to a well-known melody and used effectively to recruit young men into the
People’s Army (the army of the Republic of Biafra). But in the early stages of the
war, when the Biafran army grew quite rapidly, sadly Ojukwu had no guns to give to
those brave souls.

But the most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was that they were finally in
a safe place . . . at home. This was the first and most important thing, and one could
see this sense of exhilaration in the effort that the people were putting into the
war. Young girls, for example, had taken over the job of controlling traffic. They
were really doing it by themselves—no one asked them to. That this kind of spirit
existed made us feel tremendously hopeful. Clearly something had happened to the psyche
of an entire people to bring this about.

Richard West, a British journalist, was so captivated by the meticulous nature with
which Biafrans conducted the affairs of state that he wrote a widely cited article
in which he lamented: “Biafra is more than a human tragedy. Its defeat, I believe,
would mark the end of African independence. Biafra was the first place I had been
to in Africa where the Africans themselves were truly in charge.”
³

—

Soon after I arrived in Ogidi we were told that Nigerian soldiers, led by Murtala
Muhammed, were trying to cross the Niger Bridge from Asaba into Onitsha, and were
being kept at bay by the Biafran colonel Achuzia (aka “Air Raid” Achuzia). Shuwa’s
troops were marching into Igbo land across the Benue River in the north at the same
time. There was quite an overwhelming sense of anxiety in the air.

We had all gone to bed on one particular night—my family, Augustine and his family,
and Frank and his family. We did not realize that Biafran soldiers had set up their
armory outside my father’s house, on the veranda, the porch, and outside in the yard.
The house was in a choice location, atop a small hill, and was clearly chosen by the
army as a perfect site from which to shell the advancing Nigerian army and to surprise
them with sniper fire.

By this time in the war we—at least some of us—had gotten used to sleeping with the
sound of shelling and explosions, and occasional howls of pain and what some villagers
called “the stench of death.” Others would recount that they did not sleep a wink
through the war, an exaggeration of course, but a valid point nonetheless; sleeplessness
was endemic. On this particular night we were oblivious to what was going on outside
our father’s house. While we were sleeping the Biafran army was turning our ancestral
home into a military base of sorts. No one asked us for permission. They did not knock
to ask or to inform. In hindsight, what happened next was enough to have caused sudden
cardiac arrest in some people. We all were awakened violently from sleep by a loud
ka-boom!, followed by the rattling of the house foundation and walls, indeed of the
entire house. A number of people who were asleep fell off their beds, violently ushered
back into reality by the vibrations, the shock, and the noise of the artillery fire
outside. It was awful.

The men in the house went outside to find out what was going on. A colonel who was
in charge of this exercise explained that they had decided to use our home as a tactical
base because it provided them a logistical and strategic advantage as they shelled
the encroaching federal troops. Surely it was time for us to leave.

The Abagana Ambush

On March 25, 1968, the Second Division of the Nigerian army finally broke through
the Biafran resistance and entered Onitsha. (The federal troops had failed the first
attempt to cross the Niger, suffering great casualties at the hands of Achuzia’s guerrilla
army; this was the second attempt.) Their plan following this development was to link
up these federal troops with the forces of the First Division, led by Colonel Shuwa,
that were penetrating the Igbo heartland from the north. The amalgamation of these
two forces, the Nigerian army hoped, would then serve as a formidable force that would
“smash the Biafrans.”
¹
Colonel Murtala Muhammed hastily deployed a convoy of ninety-six vehicles and four
armored cars to facilitate this plan on March 31, 1968.

Biafran intelligence was swift to respond, and it informed Major Johnathan Uchendu,
who formulated an elaborate plan. He arranged a seven-hundred-man-strong counterattack
that essentially sealed off the Abagana Road. He commanded his troops to lie in ambush
in the forest near Abagana, waiting patiently for the advancing Nigerians and their
reinforcements. Major Uchendu’s strategy proved to be highly successful. His troops
destroyed Muhammed’s entire convoy within one and a half hours. All told the Nigerians
suffered about five hundred casualties. There was minimal loss of life on the Biafran
side.

Very few federal soldiers survived this ambush, and those who did were found walking
dazed and aimless in the bush. There were widespread reports of atrocities perpetrated
by angry Igbo villagers who captured these wandering soldiers. One particularly harrowing
report claimed that a mob of villagers cut their capture into pieces. I was an eyewitness
to one such angry blood frenzy of retaliation after a particularly tall and lanky
soldier—clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali—wandered into an ambush of young men
with machetes. His lifeless body was found mutilated on the roadside in a matter of
seconds. “Gifts” of poisoned water–filled calabashes were left in strategic places
throughout the deserted villages to “welcome” the thirsty federal troops.

My elder sister’s family took refuge in Nnobi during all this commotion, the town
where I was born. My father had settled there as a catechist and a teacher half a
century earlier. The hosts of my sister and her family began to tell them that it
was from my father that the people of that village learned to eat rice about fifty
years before his children returned to this bucolic town as refugees. The host, a man
of great consideration and taste, proclaimed that he was, therefore, going to cook
rice for my sister’s family to salute my father. There were attempts to humanize our
existence despite the horrors that surrounded us all. Life went on as much as the
people could manage it.

Through it all, there was a great deal of humor. I remember one occasion after an
air raid—and these are really horrible things—somebody saw two vultures flying very
high up, and he said, “That is a fighter and a bomber,” and everybody burst into laughter.
It was a very poor joke, I know, but laughter helped everyone there keep their sanity . . .
that is, if you wanted to survive.

I did not realize how I was being affected by living under those circumstances until
I traveled out of Biafra on a mission to England. I heard planes taking off and landing
at Heathrow Airport, and my first instinct was to duck under safe cover.
²