First time Biafra
Was here, we’re told, it was a fine
Figure massively hewn in hardwood.
Voracious white ants
Set upon it and ate
Through its huge emplaced feet
To the great heart abandoning
A furrowed, emptied scarecrow.
And sun-stricken waves came and beat crazily
About its feet eaten hollow
Till crashing facedown in a million fragments
It was floated gleefully away
To cold shores—cartographers alone
Marking the coastline
Of that forgotten massive stance.
In our time it came again
In pain and acrid smell
Of powder. And furious wreckers
Emboldened by half a millennium
Of conquest, battering
On new oil dividends, are now
At its black throat squeezing
Blood and lymph down to
Its hands and feet
Bloated by quashiokor.
Must Africa have
To come a third time?1
The Republic of Biafra
THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION OF A NEW NATION
For most of us within Biafra our new nation was a dream that had become reality—a republic, in the strict definition of the word: “a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.”1 We could forge a new nation that respected the freedoms that all of mankind cherished and were willing to fight hard to hold on to. Within Biafra the Biafran people would be free of persecution of all kinds.