There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

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

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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

AIR RAID

It comes so quickly

the bird of death

from evil forests of Soviet technology

A man crossing the road

to greet a friend

is much too slow.

His friend cut in halves

has other worries now

than a friendly handshake

at noon1

The Citadel Press

News filtered in that life approached some semblance of normalcy far away from the immediate arenas of war. A few weeks after my arrival in Ogidi I was informed that there was a job opening in Enugu, so I packed up my family at my father’s house and headed farther east into Igbo land, and, we hoped, away from the war zone.

Christopher Okigbo left his work at Cambridge University Press in Ibadan, where he served as Cambridge’s West Africa manager. He suddenly appeared in Enugu a few weeks after I arrived from Lagos. By the time we all arrived back in Eastern Nigeria, after escaping the massacres across the rest of the country, it became clear to me that it would be beneficial to the cause of Biafra if intellectuals worked together to support the war effort. Christopher came to me and requested that we establish a publishing house. It immediately seemed to me to be a very good idea, for we believed it was necessary at this time to publish books, especially children’s books, that would have relevance to our society.

This was something we felt very strongly about. We felt we wanted to develop literature for children based on local thought, and we set up a firm called The Citadel Press. Biafra declared its independence while we were developing our plans, and we were more confident than ever that what we were doing was good for the cause. Christopher proceeded to get a plot of land in a key area of Enugu off one of the city’s major thoroughfares—today’s Michael Okpara Avenue.