There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

From time to time, one could hear the artillery shelling as the federal government troops tried on multiple attempts to obliterate the Uli airport, which was near Oguta. The federal troops at that point had not discovered that there were two airports—Uli was the earlier one, which was very close to Oguta and the nerve center of Biafran relief efforts. A second, smaller airport, less well-known, was in Nnokwa and was also used for military missions.

Nnokwa is a little-known ancient village that played a vital role in Igbo cosmology and in the development of its civilization. The townsfolk were particularly noted for their role in the transmission of the knowledge of Nsibidi, an ancient writing first invented by the Ejagham (Ekoi) people of southeastern Nigeria, and then adopted and used widely by their close neighbors—the Igbo, Efik, Anang, and Ibibio. The very existence of this alphabet, dating back to the 1700s without any Latin or Arabic antecedent, is a rebuke to all those who have claimed over the centuries that Africa has no history, no writing, and no civilization! But we always knew of the beauty of our culture, and one can understand why Nnokwa was a place to be protected by the Biafrans at all costs.

In Oguta, we moved into my friend Ikenna Nzimiro’s uncle’s house—a huge mansion. Some joked that it was as large as Buckingham Palace. One could see that the mansion was virtually empty, as those who lived there, including the staff, had all fled. The “mother of the house,” if you like, Nzimiro’s elderly auntie, stayed behind with one or two of her attendants; she seemed ill and did not appear very often. Nzimiro’s uncle had died several years before the conflict. With her blessing we were given luxurious quarters and had quite a comfortable stay.

It was during our sojourn in Oguta that Christie started a school to keep the children of our hosts and the Achebe children engaged in their studies. Christie had books that she had bought from shops, and she used these to teach the children, with Chinelo, our first child and daughter. Each child started from the last class they were in before the war broke out, and then graduated after they completed the lesson plans. Despite the chaos and madness all around, some privileged children, at least, still went to school.

From Oguta we would be driven out to the Shell compound, aka Shell Camp, in Owerri after the city had been recaptured by the Biafrans. In the colonial era Shell Camp was the residential quarters of some colonial officers and Shell senior officials, before Royal Dutch/Shell BP moved their permanent quarters to Port Harcourt in present-day Rivers state, in the Niger River Delta area. Shell Camp in those days was a fairly lovely part of town, a neatly manicured estate with well-maintained bungalows and lawns, telecommunications facilities, good roads, and a reliable water supply.

Christie was expecting a baby and was ill during this time. She was moved to a Roman Catholic hospital of high repute in the regio

n, admitted by the physician on staff, and cared for by the nursing sisters, a number of whom were from Europe. We heard during her hospital stay that the Nigerians had finally broken through the blockade mounted by the Biafran soldiers, rearmed, and launched a second offensive, pushing closer to Owerri. It clearly had become quite serious when we noticed Biafran soldiers coming into the hospital to warn the clinical staff to leave and evacuate all the patients. Christie was summarily discharged.

When we returned to Shell Camp we saw that the area had been infiltrated by the Nigerian army, some wearing mufti, who watched us closely. We noticed that the entire estate was almost deserted. The main roads were jammed with civilians trying to escape before the Nigerian troops arrived. Some of the federal forces who had already entered Owerri would snicker at the civilians; some would wave cynically. It was eerie and frightening.

We picked up the few belongings we had in the house and jumped back into the car. During the war years one never really unpacked; one always had the belongings in the trunk of the car and took only the absolute necessities into the temporary shelter that you found yourself in. We decided to get off the major thoroughfares, so we meandered through the rural areas, villages, and hamlets and arrived in the village of Okporo. This pleasant community holds a special place in Biafran lore, because it was the site of a special hospital for children run by Caritas, and it was one of the sites chosen to gather sick babies for the famous airlift of Biafran babies to Gabon and Ivory Coast organized by international relief agencies.

I recall visiting a clinic that had been hastily set up by one of the many foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGO) during this time. They had chosen an abandoned secondary school complex and set up shop in what must have been the cafeteria. There were bullet holes in the limestone and concrete walls and pieces of glass shattered on the floor, suggesting a recent gun battle. The patients were strewn on the shiny red laterite floor on bamboo and raffia mats—the adults in one section and the children in the other. It was raining on that day, and the holes in the corrugated iron roofs provided a steady stream of water that dripped directly on some patients (who appeared not to care) and collected in puddles throughout the building. The visitor was greeted by the strong smell of vomit, diarrhea, and other bodily fluids that are kept private in sunnier times. In the distance one could hear the screams of pain from what appeared to be a makeshift operating room, where surgeons performed procedures with woefully limited anaesthesia.

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.

WE LAUGHED AT HIM

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