/ 6 November 2007

A painful past on the page

Until the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the post-colonial world had never witnessed, in terms of primitive brutality, a tragedy in which a million people (Tutsis) were killed in just 12 weeks by their foes (Hutus). Yet, a lesser known, equally harrowing war took place between 1967 and 1970 following the decision by Nigeria's south-eastern region to secede from the federal state.

Until the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the post-colonial world had never witnessed, in terms of primitive brutality, a tragedy in which a million people (Tutsis) were killed in just 12 weeks by their foes (Hutus).

Yet, a lesser known, equally harrowing war took place between 1967 and 1970 following the decision by Nigeria’s south-eastern region to secede from the federal state. After breaking away, the Igbos established a separate republic in their ancestral homeland they called Biafra. The brutal war that followed has inspired the literary imagination of a generation of writers in the West African state.

After a lull of about three decades, the theme is back again in literature coming out of Nigeria. Most of the writers, such as Helon Habila who was born in 1967, were either too young to have experienced the war, or not yet born, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, winner of this year’s Orange Prize. Although born seven years after the war, Adichie’s account is fresh and subtly didactic, without being pedantic.

This resurgence follows poetry and prose that was written by Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Elechi Amadi, Flora Nwapa, Frederick Forsyth and many others in which they relived the brutality and absurdity of a war that claimed about a million people, mostly Igbos.

I first became aware of Biafra at about 14. What I remember is my mother telling me about the images of the starving and malnourished. These fictional works relive the war’s most abiding images of malnourished babies with distended bellies, their hair falling out, who ate omnivorously, including lizards, shrubs and anything that they thought was not poisonous.

Some of the million who died succumbed to federal force’s fire, many more died from bombs falling from planes supplied by Nigeria’s allies in the West. But the majority simply starved to death. Nigeria just made it difficult for relief supplies to get to those needing them.

Evoking the spirit and vibe of the 1960s, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) shows how the war began with the butchering of thousands of Igbos killed mostly in the Muslim north and elsewhere. Those lucky to escape fled to the south-east part of Nigeria and, led by Christian Ojukwu, declared themselves an independent republic: Biafra.

“Northern soldiers put him in a cell in the barracks and fed him his own shit. He ate his own shit … then they beat him senseless and tied him to an iron cross and threw him back in his cell. He died tied to an iron cross. He died on a cross.” This is Kainene, one of the central characters in Half of a Yellow Sun, recounting the death of a friend in the Nigerian army, killed by his erstwhile colleagues.

Olanna, Kainene’s twin sister, running away from the same killing fields in the north, is so overcome by the horror of seeing a woman carrying a disembodied head in a bowl that afterwards she is unable to walk for some time. A distinguishing feature about Adichie is her eye for the unusual: for instance, one imagines that this woman should be wailing to the skies. But instead she says of her bodiless daughter: “Do you know … it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair.”

Olanna herself is saved by a former boyfriend — a northerner — who hides her from the marauding blood-thirsty mobs who, after butchering Igbos, would exclaim: “We finished the whole family. It was Allah’s will!”

The Igbos are being killed because “they are so clannish, uppity and [for] controlling the markets. Very Jewish really. And to think that they are relatively uncivilised; one couldn’t compare them to the Yorubas, for example, who have had contact with the Europeans on the coast for years.”

The tragedy of the war in Biafra might not only be the multitudes upon multitudes who perished. Ojukwu really was not any better than the Nigerian system he detested so much. As the war is being waged some soldiers complain that “Ojukwu is having an affair with [a] man’s wife and has had the man arrested for nothing.” Some of the soldiers are even contemplating removing him from office soon after they emerge victorious from the war.

Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso, author of The Combat and other books, agrees. “Biafra did not represent an advance on what was going on in Nigeria at all,” he says in an interview with the Mail & Guardian, adding “there was no moral superiority to Ojukwu’s advocacy.”

Originally published in 1972, two years after the end of the war, The Combat is a memorial to the war. It recounts the tale of the fight of two friends over the welfare of a street child one of them could have fathered. It has recently been reissued as part of the Penguin Modern Classics series. Omotoso argues that the return of the Biafra motif in new literature shows that the “issues have not been resolved”.

Indeed they still live on and the Nigerian state is at risk. Again. Latter-day would-be secessionists have arisen. “My political ambition is to see to the winding-up of the Nigerian state,” Mujahid Asari Dokubo, a militia leader in the restive Niger Delta, has stated boldly.

The National Intelligence Council of the United States released a report in 2005 in which it predicted that Nigeria could collapse within the next 15 years. Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo dismissed the report as authored by “prophets of doom”.

At times the writer’s literary imagination finds itself unable to deal with the gloom and doom and gropes meaningfully among the thousands and thousands of anonymous corpses. Perhaps the most eulogised of those who fell is poet Christopher Okigbo, writer of Labyrinths and Heavensgate, both collections of poetry.

Achebe has described him as “one of the most remarkable” poets and in a foreword to a poetry anthology written in his honour, Achebe argues that Okigbo “had taken good care to ensure that he [does] not die”.

Indeed he lives on in Helon Habila’s recently published Measuring Time (Hamish Hamilton). In this book there is an imaginary scene that conjures up Okigbo. “What if the poet isn’t really dead?” Mamo, the central character, asks.

Mamo is fascinated by Okibgo, the poet who threw away his career as an artist to become a soldier. Mamo’s uncle, Haruna, had been recruited as a teenager to fight for the Nigerian federal forces in the Biafran war and comes back from the war only seven years after its end.

In Mamo’s reveries Haruna is taken prisoner by Okigbo’s battalion after a failed operation. The poet tells Haruna: “My name is Chris Okigbo. In real life I am a poet.” He adds: “You picked a wrong moment to get caught … we have no resources to deal with a prisoner. The easiest thing would be to put a bullet through your head and get it over with …”

Thereafter the two simply walk away, find themselves in Cameroon and continue walking until they pitch up in East Africa — and from there continue across Africa. When Haruna comes back from the war his mind has been so scarred that a few months later he commits suicide.

Senayon Olaoluwa, a scholar of Nigerian literature at Wits University, says Habila’s novel is an attempt to show that suffering because of the war was limited not only to the south east, but that “northerners also suffered the brunt of the war … even if one party bore the greater suffering”.

Taking up the Okigbo metaphor, Half of a Yellow Sun has Okeoma, who Adichie admits was inspired by Okigbo’s own life and Labyrinths. In the quiet optimistic days that followed independence in 1960 Okeoma used to read poetry at Odenigbo’s house. Odenigbo, then Olanna’s boyfriend, would be so struck by the poignancy and the resonant poetic sensibility of Okeoma’s writing that he would shout: “The voice of our generation.”

One such reading was after the killings of the Igbo had begun in the north and Okeoma read: “If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise.” The emblem of the state of Biafra was half of a yellow sun.

The occasion of Okeoma’s death on the front was, for me, a high point; it is written so movingly with a softly insistent mournful pathos.

Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (Heinemann) has Ikem Osodi, a poet and newspaper editor also modelled on the character of Okigbo, murdered by a military junta.

Born in 1961, journalist Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (The New Gong) came out in 2005; it cleverly uses the voice of Cheche, a child narrator, who suddenly is denied the comforts he is used to and who listens, incredulously, to the older people discussing the merits of the war. He can’t quite understand why food that used to be plentiful has suddenly become scarce.

The narrator and his friends go out to hunt for lizards and, when they become scarce, they turn to yet another newly discovered delicacy: frogs. Cheche and his friends roast these and, licking their lips, remark that “they tasted very much like chicken, if not better”.

This might well explain why a figure like Okigbo has become the most recognisable metaphor in a war where lizards came to be regarded as delicacies by a people who previously never ate them. And there was another tragic consequence: the war seemed to vindicate the sentiments of the racist regimes in South Africa, Rhodesia and in the Portuguese colonies — and their basic premise that black people were not ready for self-rule and freedom.