There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

The federal troops soon arrived in Okporo and broke our idyllic village existence. With their arrival came the horrendous stories of nurses and local women being raped and violated in unthinkable ways.1

One day the Nigerian soldiers came to the compound, and we hid our daughter, Chinelo, who was eight. I was in the kitchen making bread in the earth (laterite) oven that we had designed. I watched the soldiers from the kitchen window for a while as they pranced around the compound and demanded that its owner hand over a large black-and-white-spotted goat that was tied to the fence, in a corner near a building that served as the storage area. The animal was oblivious of the soldiers’ menacing presence and busy chewing cud, its jaw swaying from side to side in between nibbles of long strands of elephant grass.2

The goat had sentimental importance to the wife of the owner of the residence, we learned from her pleas. It had been a gift from her father, so she refused to hand over the animal to the soldiers. I talked to the soldiers for a while, overwhelmed by the strong smell of Kai Kai, a local gin, on their breath, and in Igbo persuaded the wife of our host to give the soldiers the animal or be willing to lose her life and ours in the process.

A small crowd had gathered to watch this spectacle. The soldiers at this point were showing off, pointing their rifles in our faces. As they marched off they instructed the animal’s owner to take care of the goat for them in their absence, because they were still on duty. If the goat was not there when they came back, they warned, “you will all be responsible.”

As soon as the soldiers left the wife of our host, in a state of panic, untied the goat from the fence with the intention of hiding it in a dry well nearby. I called out to her to leave the goat alone.

“Let them take it,” I said, “and leave you alone.” Fortunately for everyone the soldiers never returned for the war plunder.

—

I had the privilege of having an official car that had been assigned to me by the government of Biafra, which came with a driver. The driver was one of those hyperreligious individuals who wore only white (a sign of purity, apparently) and preached endlessly to his company, condemning everyone and everything “to the damnation that awaitest thee if you don’t repent!” He was a truly curious character but an excellent driver nonetheless.

One morning, as we woke to the greeting of the cock crow in the distance, I walked out to the brisk damp dawn, stretched, and smiled as I glanced around—the villages in Nigeria always had an organic, wholesome, earthy smell to them—and then it struck me: I noticed that the government vehicle had disappeared. Someone in the yard confirmed that the government driver had packed the entire car in the wee hours of the morning and fled with our belongings.

We had traveled up to that point in a two-car convoy—I drove my own car, a Jaguar, and the official car was driven by the chauffeur. Luckily, we still had the Jaguar, and we decided to leave Okporo with our own driver, who we knew was much more trustworthy. We took the other driver’s disappearance as some sort of omen, thanked our hosts for their wonderful hospitality, and departed in the early afternoon with the intention of traveling back to Ogidi, my ancestral home. We headed north toward Onitsha, six miles from Ogidi. It was getting quite dark by the time we got to the outskirts of Oba, a few miles from Otu-Onitsha.

Refined petroleum was available but not always readily accessible, and petrol depots were obvious targets of the federal troops. The driver reported that we had an empty gas tank and we were desperately in need of filling up the tank if we were to make the rest of the trip without incident. Almost immediately we heard the vehicle wobble and then just stop. A deep darkness had enveloped us—there was no moonlight, so it seemed even darker—and our circumstances made the darkness seem even more ominous. We knew that one never ventured into canteens or restaurants for fear of meeting one’s death at the hands of drunken soldiers. We decided that we would spend the night in the car.

In the middle of the night some young men started walking around the car—circling menacingly. They had come out of a restaurant, where they had been drinking, staggering clumsily and laughing and speaking at the top of their voices. We were very frightened. The driver and I got out of the car and started pushing the vehicle, for quite some time, until we encountered some Biafran soldiers in a jeep. The captain recognized me and advised us not to travel any farther this particular night, and he got his men to help us push the car the rest of the way to a petrol depot, where we filled our gas tank, parked the car at the corner, and passed the night there. The next morning we set out very early, gradually, moving in occasional spurts and starts, since the fuel in the car’s tank clearly was adulterated. Not for the last time, we were happy to be unscathed.

VULTURES

In the grayness

and drizzle of one despondent

dawn unstirred by harbingers

of sunbreak a vulture

perching high on broken

bones of a dead tree

nestled close to his

mate his smooth

bashed-in head, a pebble

on a stem rooted in

a dump of gross

feathers, inclined affectionately

to hers. Yesterday they picked

the eyes of a swollen

corpse in a water-logged

trench and ate the

things in its bowel. Full