There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

the poor fool-man as he held

converse with himself. “My Lord,”

we heard him say to the curtain

of his blood, “I come to touch

the hem of your crimson robe!”

He went stark mad thereafter

raving about new sights he

claimed to see, poor fellow; sights

you and I know are as impossible for this world

to show as for a hen to urinate—if one

may borrow one of his many crazy vulgarisms—

he raved about trees topped with

green and birds flying—yes actually

flying through the air—about

the Sun and the Moon and stars

and about lizards crawling on all

fours. . . . But nobody worries much

about him today: he has paid

his price and we don’t even

bother to laugh any more.1

The Media War

The Nigeria-Biafra War was arguably the first fully televised conflict in history. It was the first time scenes and pictures—blood, guts, severed limbs—from the war front flooded into homes around the world through television sets, radios, newsprint, in real time. It probably gave television evening news its first chance to come into its own and invade without mercy the sanctity of people’s living rooms with horrifying scenes of children immiserated by modern war.

One of the silver linings of the conflict (if one can even call it that) was the international media’s presence throughout the war. The sheer amount of media attention on the conflict led to an outpouring of international public outrage at the war’s brutality. There were also calls from various international agencies for action to address the humanitarian disaster overwhelming the children of Biafra.1

Said Baroness Asquith in the British House of Lords, “[Thanks to the miracle of television we see history happening before our eyes. We see no Igbo propaganda; we see the facts.”2 Following the blockade imposed by the Nigerian government, “Biafra” became synonymous with the tear-tugging imagery of starving babies with blown-out bellies, skulls with no subcutaneous fat harboring pale, sunken eyes in sockets that betrayed their suffering.3

Someone speaking in London in the House of Commons, or the House of Lords, would talk about history happening all around them, but for those of us on the ground in Biafra, where this tragedy continued to unfold, we used a different language . . . the language and memory of death and despair, suffering and bitterness.

The agony was everywhere. The economic blockade put in place by Nigeria’s federal government resulted in shortages of every imaginable necessity, from food and clean water to blankets and medicines. The rations had gone from one meal a day to one meal every other day—to nothing at all. Widespread starvation and disease of every kind soon set in. The suffering of the children was the most heart wrenching.

Narrow Escapes

At another stop, in the town of Okporo, we met a very pleasant gentleman who took my entire family in. He offered Christie and me the only finished room in the mud house he was still building. The rest of the floors were yet to be plastered. He moved out his belongings from the finished room and moved our things into it. We argued with him, but he would not hear it, and insisted that we stay in his most comfortable room. We more or less settled in.

One was not sure where the war was headed, so we decided to stay in Okporo for as long as our hosts would have us. There was a great deal of confusion about the status of the republic. This was at the tail end of the conflict. At that point in the hostilities, both sides were really exhausted. One noticed it in the shuffling gait of the soldiers, in the less than chipper drill-song choruses, in the number of stories of army desertions.

The news about surrender was already in the air. Tragically, there were many false rumors that the war had ended. Some people who had survived the war lost their lives that week because they had heard that people were being asked to come back to Enugu, that everything was over and returning to normal. Some of them were killed by Nigerian troops on the way.