There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

The Citadel Press

1. Ernest Emenyonu, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Ache

be (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003).

2. Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,” Transition, pp. 31–38.

Staying Alive

1. Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor, eds., Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978).

2. Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,” Transition.

3. In a story by Tony Edike on June 29, 2009, in the Nigerian Vanguard, we are informed:

About 183 different types of unexploded explosives recovered from nine states affected by the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War were yesterday detonated by the Ministry of Defense, 39 years after the war ended.

Two of the bombs dropped during the war were recovered from the residence of a renowned author, Chinua Achebe, according to the experts.

The exercise, which took place at Onyeama Hills on Enugu-Onitsha Expressway and witnessed by the Minister of Defense, Dr. Shettima Mustafa, the Enugu State Deputy Governor, Sunday Onyebuchi, and members of the armed forces and representatives of the United Nations, was handled by a team of experts under the Humanitarian De-Mining project.

4. Achebe and Okafor, Don’t Let Him Die.

Death of the Poet: “Daddy, Don’t Let Him Die!”

1. Achebe and Okafor, Don’t Let Him Die.

2. Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,” Transition.

3. Ibid.

4. Achebe and Okafor, Don’t Let Him Die.

MANGO SEEDLING

1. Chinua Achebe, Collected Poems (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

Refugees

1. Interview with Professor Christie Achebe, Brown University, Rhode Island, April 2010.

2. A wild-game hunting enthusiast’s information guide provides this startling information about hunting bullets:

The [VLD wild game bullet] penetrates up to 3 inches before it starts to expand. This delayed expansion results in a wound channel that is deep inside the vital area of any big game. After the bullet starts to expand it will shed 80% to 90% of its weight into the surrounding tissue, traveling as deep as 18 inches. This results in a massive wound cavity that creates the greatest possible amount of tissue damage and hemorrhaging within the [organs]. This massive and extensive wound cavity results in the animal dropping fast.

Source: Long Range Store, Best of the West Productions; www.longrangestore.com/Berger_VLD_Hunting_Bullets_p/70100000.htm.

3. A Time journalist who toured the children’s hospitals at Okporo and Emekuku had this to say:

In villages that are nearly deserted, old men and women, along with sickly children, die quietly in their huts. At the missionary hospital in Emekuku, a mob of starving children gathers at the door. The hospital has room for only 100 of them: the strongest-looking children are taken in, and the least hopeful cases turned away. “This started out as an epidemic in March,” says a London-trained Biafran doctor, Aaron Ifekwunigwe. “Now it is a catastrophe.”

Source: “A Bitter African Harvest,” Time.

4. Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

5. Goetz, “Humanitarian Issues in the Biafra Conflict”; see also Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 615–16.

WE LAUGHED AT HIM