There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

First time Biafra

Was here, we’re told, it was a fine

Figure massively hewn in hardwood.

Voracious white ants

Set upon it and ate

Through its huge emplaced feet

To the great heart abandoning

A furrowed, emptied scarecrow.

And sun-stricken waves came and beat crazily

About its feet eaten hollow

Till crashing facedown in a million fragments

It was floated gleefully away

To cold shores—cartographers alone

Marking the coastline

Of that forgotten massive stance.

In our time it came again

In pain and acrid smell

Of powder. And furious wreckers

Emboldened by half a millennium

Of conquest, battering

On new oil dividends, are now

At its black throat squeezing

Blood and lymph down to

Its hands and feet

Bloated by quashiokor.

Must Africa have

To come a third time?1

The Republic of Biafra

THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION OF A NEW NATION

For most of us within Biafra our new nation was a dream that had become reality—a republic, in the strict definition of the word: “a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.”1 We could forge a new nation that respected the freedoms that all of mankind cherished and were willing to fight hard to hold on to. Within Biafra the Biafran people would be free of persecution of all kinds.