There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

36. Adeyinka Makinde, Dick Tiger: The Cyber Boxing Zone Encyclopedia—Lineal Champion; www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/tiger-d.htm.

37. Robert M. Lipsyte recalls how it happened:

We wrote the letter. . . . “I am hereby returning the M.B.E. because every time I look at it I think of millions of men, women, and children who died and are still dying in Biafra because of the arms and ammunition the British government is sending to Nigeria and its continued moral support of this genocidal war against the people of Biafra.”

Source: Robert M. Lipsyte, “Pride of the Tiger,” in Jeff Silverman, ed., The Greatest Boxing Stories Ever Told: Thirty-Six Incredible Tales from the Ring (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2004), p. 299.

FREEDOM FIGHTERS

38. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe, p. 136.

39. In the years before and directly after the Chinese Communist Party’s ascension to power in 1949, the relationship between the civilian populace and the People’s Liberation Army remained supportive, appreciative, and mutually beneficial. Mao Zedong compared the army to a fish and the people to the water which is its element: The army exists immersed within the populace, and without the support and affection of the people, the army cannot succeed. During the early years of the Communist era, the People’s Army did indeed enjoy the support of the civilian populace.

The PLA was a tool employed by the Communist Party, which implemented egalitarian policies such as division of land and shattered the exploitative system of feudal land tenure, providing a unifying ideology behind which peasants and soldiers alike might rally. It was an army built of volunteers, so peasants did not fear conscription for themselves or their sons when the army was near. Because the PLA was a successful army, and representative of the inspirational ideology of the Communist Party, it became a matter of pride to be a soldier or to have a family member enlist. The People’s Army was a volunteer army, a force of men fighting for their political beliefs, their future livelihood, and their newly claimed land.

Source: People’s Liberation Army; www.people.ucsc.edu/~myrtreia/essays/PLA.html.

40. Zdenek confirms this: “The behind-the-lines guerrilla forays were led by hand-picked members of the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters (BOFF). . . . The recruits were young [and] had been screened for character and high motivation.”

Source: Zdenek . The Nigerian War, 1967–1970: History of the War: Selected Bibliography and Documents (Bonn, Germany: Bernard & Graefe, 1971), p. 141.

Traveling on Behalf of Biafra

1. Introduction of the francophone literary movement known as La Négritude; www.French.about.com/library/bl-negritude.htm.

2. Ibid. Heather Carlberg, “Negritude. Political Discourse—Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism”; www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/negritude/html.

3.La Négritude; www.French.about.com/library/bl-negritude.htm.

4. Based on events I witnessed and some I was told about; also see www.oikoumene.org//.

5. “Another Try at Biafra Talks,” Miami News, May 27, 1968.

6. Local St. Simons, Georgia, lore. Also extensively documented in history books.

REFUGEE MOTHER AND CHILD (A MOTHER IN A REFUGEE CAMP)

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

Life in Biafra

1. Sara S. Berry, George A. Elbert, Norman Thomas Uphoff; reply by Stanley Diamond. “Letters: An Exchange on Biafra,” New York Review of Books, April 23, 1970.

2. The material from the following section is adapted from “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,” Transition, pp. 31–38.

3. Resurgence 2, iss. 11 (1970); see also the editorial, “In the Curve of Africa, Fear, Relief, Surrender,” St. Petersburg Times, January 13, 1970.

The Abagana Ambush

1. “Smash Biafra” was a term used widely during the war.

Sources: “On September 3, Nigeria was preparing an air, sea and land offensive in a drive to smash Biafra”: Ms. Kalindi Phillip on behalf of African Recorder 6 (New Delhi: Asian Recorder & Publication, 1967); also see The Spectator, vol. 244 (London: F. C. Westley: Literary Collections, 1980): “In public the British Labour government claimed that it armed Nigeria to forestall the Russians; in secret a junior British minister wrote to the Nigerians ordering them to purchase Russian siege artillery in order to smash the Biafran army.”

2. Norman Tobias, “A-I Skyraider-Acre, Siege of, 1799,” The International Military Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1992); Colin Legum and John Drysdale, Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents, Vol. 2 (Oxford, UK: Africa Research Ltd., 1970).

AIR RAID

1. Chinua Achebe, Beware Soul Brother, African Writers Series (London: Heinemann, 1972).