There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

I visited the presidential offices the day after my arrival and tried to get the letter from General Ojukwu in my possession to President Senghor. I couldn’t get past the presidential aides. The officials there, all expatriate administrators, responded to my request with looks of incredulity. They could not even imagine anything like opening the door and showing me in to see the Senegalese president. They must have thought I was crazy!

There was one very tall man who spoke very good English, and he said to me that there was no way I could see the president.

“What do you want to see him for?” he asked.

I said that I would like to present my new novel, A Man of the People, to him. I also added that I knew that President Senghor was a great writer and poet, and I thought I should show my appreciation of his writing by presenting my humble effort at writing poetry. Clearly that was not what I wanted to do, but I was not about to disclose my true intentions to this uncooperative gentleman.

“Oh, that is easy enough: You give me the book and poems and I will take it to him, and I am sure he will be delighted,” the official said.

I said that I would like to deliver it myself, that that was the reason I had come all this way. There was nothing more the official could tell me, and I was sent away.

The next day, and the next, I went back and repeated the process in an attempt to see Senghor. Either my tenacity was working or the staff was getting tired of seeing me every morning, because I got a new message five days into this ritual: “President Léopold Sédar Senghor will see you tomorrow.” This message was brought in a black limousine. A member of the hotel staff ran up to my room, knocked on the door, and excitedly relayed that I had a message from the presidential palace. The esteem in which I was held in the eyes of the people and staff in the hotel, you can imagine, rose dramatically. After that my stay was very different. Soon after my arrival I had complained to the hotel front desk that the fan in my room was not working well, but nothing was done about it until the limousine visit from the presidential palace, soon after which I w

as informed that the fan had been attended to.

The next day I had my audience with President Léopold Sédar Senghor, a very extraordinary man. I was guided along a stone path in the gardens of the presidential palace and up the grand staircase to a secluded room. The first thing that struck me was the loneliness. We were standing in a room in this huge mansion, I in my Biafran attire, Senghor in his French suit, and he seemed all alone. He knew that I came from Biafra, in West Africa. I handed Senghor the letter that informed him of the real catastrophe building up in Biafra, and I told him that it was a message from the Biafran head of state, who had asked me to deliver the sealed envelope directly to him. Senghor regretted that I had spent several days in the country trying to reach him and apologized for the treatment I had received. Senghor was a profoundly adept diplomat, and he took on the business I brought: He glanced through the letter quickly, and then turned to me and said that he would deal with it overnight . . . as soon as possible.

Our conversation then turned to other things intellectual—writing, education, the great cultural issues of the day, including the movement he was spearheading called Négritude. La Négritude, as it was called, was already widely known in serious intellectual circles around the world: “The founders of la Négritude, les trois pères (the three fathers) [Léopold Sédar Senghor; Aimé Césaire, from Martinique; and Léon Gontran Damas, from Guyana] met while they were living in Paris in the early 1930s.”1

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It is important not to view Négritude in isolation but in the full context of the black consciousness movements of the first half of the twentieth century, a period that gave rise to a number of ideological and intellectual movements in America, the Caribbean, and Africa and a great deal of cross-fertilization and complexity.

Négritude in Africa can be seen as an extension of the earlier work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and C. L. R. James, among others; they all established black intellectual and political liberation struggles but from very different albeit equally important vantage points in America. In the African context it was a reaction to the colonial experience through literature and political thought. It had powerful political allies in Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and, later, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and Walter Sisulu in South Africa. It is pertinent to note that the independence movement in Africa in turn had a profound impact on the civil rights movement in America.

I found what these intellectuals were trying to achieve—the reclamation of the power of self-definition to recast Africa’s, and therefore their own, image through the written word—incredibly attractive and influential. Here were highly sophisticated individuals who believed in the need for blacks who had been victims of historical dispossession to appreciate and elevate their culture—literature, art, music, dance, etc. They encouraged Africans (in the word’s broadest definition) to celebrate and espouse their culture as not only not inferior to European culture and civilization but equally acceptable even if fundamentally different.

Négritude also held that the rest of the world would benefit from such an intellectual black renaissance, which would at last produce an environment where race, a core fact of our existence, and the negative baggage linked to its definition and meaning, would be effectively deemphasized, liberating the world’s people to work together unencumbered. It was very heavy stuff indeed!2 It is perhaps a great testament to the importance of this new thinking that it drew admirers as diverse and important as Frantz Fanon (who studied with Aimé Césaire), the great French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Haitian writer Jacques Romain, as well as critics such as Wole Soyinka, who famously dismissed it.3

Senghor told me about the education minister who had been trained under him and had submitted a bill to Parliament to abolish the use of all French texts in all institutions of education in Senegal. Senghor smiled and told the young minister, “Thank you for your bill, but that would be too much Négritude.” We both laughed, and then talked for about two hours—discussing his poetry and that of others from the black diaspora—Okigbo, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, etc. He took me to one of the great windows of the presidential palace and showed me two hills; he observed that the mountaintops looked like “a lady lying down.”

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I also made an extensive trip to Scandinavia on behalf of the people of Biafra around this time. The Scandinavians had made great humanitarian gestures to alleviate the suffering in Biafra. I was also curious to visit the land of one of the most legendary of all the Europeans who came to our aid—the Swedish aristocrat Carl Gustaf von Rosen. On this trip I visited Sweden, Finland, and Norway.

I remember Norway vividly. Even though I visited during the winter, it appeared a lovely country– subdued, calm, and temperate. The people seemed very serious-minded, and businesslike, and very progressive in their thinking. My hosts took me almost immediately after I arrived to the Parliament. What struck me about this particular day was the importance the Norwegians place on time, even more than I had encountered in England. Here was a people that knew that time was critically important, and it was to be used judiciously. Another observation of significance had to do with the items on the program. It appeared to be like a service—a hymn or anthem was sung, followed by deliberations and readings—all in Norwegian, so I can’t tell the reader exactly what was being said, but it sounded almost like a religious service. When they were done, I was ushered into this wonderfully built, ornate Parliament room, and a gentleman said to me: “Now Mr. Achebe, you can tell us what you came for.” And I spent about twenty minutes telling my hosts about the humanitarian disaster that was Biafra. I received a warm round of applause and promises of continued humanitarian support.

The other thing that happened during my trip to Norway was, unfortunately for millions around the world, very sad. As I walked back to my hotel with my hosts, I was able to tell from the conspicuous news flashing on a huge screen that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. I was able to figure out the devastating news from the flashing words, even without help from my hosts, and it struck me how bad news is so much more easily recognizable across languages than good.

My trip to Canada was very different from the others. I was invited to speak about the Biafran tragedy by the World Council of Churches and the Canadian Council of Churches. The World Council of Churches was one of the most magnanimous supporters and suppliers of humanitarian relief for the suffering and dying of Biafra, so I felt deeply obliged to attend their gathering. The general secretary of the WCC, Eugene Carson Blake, and the honorary president of the WCC, Willem Visser ’t Hooft from The Netherlands, were very decent men. Blake, an American, was an ardent supporter of the American civil rights movement and a coauthor of the WCC’s antiracism policies. Hooft helped set up the Ecumenical Church Loan Fund for the poor around the world.4

It is important to point out that the Protestants did not hold a monopoly on generosity during the war. Several Jewish groups and Roman Catholic orders also came to the aid of the destitute.

Reverend Father (Dr.) Georg Hüssler, former president of Caritas International, is particularly celebrated till this day by former Biafrans for his towering role in providing humanitarian and other aid during the conflict.

In any case, our hosts, the Canadian Council of Churches, organized a dinner in my honor and invited a number of very distinguished Canadians and religious leaders from around the world. When they brought out the first course—smoked salmon with steamed spinach—Eugene Carson Blake announced to the guests that we were about to eat a piece of Uli airport at night, which, many of them at the table were aware, was famously and effectively camouflaged with palm fronds and leaves to hide it from Nigerian air force reconnaissance missions. That statement was greeted with boisterous laughter. It occured to me once again how different Biaf

ra had become from other places, where laughter was still available.

In May 1968, I was part of the Biafran delegation that attended the Kampala, Uganda, talks—one of the world’s failed attempts (in this case, the British Commonwealth and the OAU) to forge a peace between Nigeria and Biafra. President Milton Obote of Uganda hosted the deliberations that also involved Commonwealth secretary Arnold Smith.5 Sir Louis Mbanefo was the leader of that delegation, which also included Professor Hilary Okam, Francis Ellah, and a few others. It was at that meeting that I met Aminu Kano for the first time. As the Nigerian delegation, led by Anthony Enahoro, espoused their resolve to “crush Biafra” unless there was a complete surrender, Aminu Kano seemed very uneasy, often looking through the window. This was a man who was not pleased with either side or how the matter was being handled. That meeting made an indelible mark on me about Aminu Kano, about his character and his intellect.

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

REFUGEE MOTHER AND CHILD (A MOTHER IN A REFUGEE CAMP)

No Madonna and Child could touch