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The pain of losing a country ...
FIRST there was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And now there is Chinua Achebe with his recollections of the tragedy of Biafra. Achebe, who died in March this year, presents perhaps the more poignant of stories in There Was A Country. It is the title of the book that haunts you, indeed speaks to you of what was and what might have been. Biafra was a dream for Africa's Igbos, a portrayal of the future they envisaged for themselves outside the Nigerian federation into which they had been placed by the British colonial power. In essence, Biafra for Achebe was but a revolt against a second colonialism, this one imposed by Nigeria on its eastern region, the first one being the struggle for freedom from British rule.
The story of Biafra has come, for people outside Africa, wrapped in the mysteriously unknown. In truth, it has remained by and large a forgotten chapter in the latter half of the twentieth century. The few who remember the leadership Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Oxford-educated leader of Biafra, provided to his people between May 1967 and January 1970 are generally inclined to consider the Igbo move to break
away from Nigeria as an instance of secessionism. The rest of the world has not quite known of the millions — three million, by certain credible estimates — who died during the war and of the particular conditions which led to the rise of Biafra in the first place.
All of that vacuum is what Achebe seeks to fill in a work he subtitles A Personal History of Biafra. And Achebe should know, for he was a well-known Igbo (as the writer of the groundbreaking Things Pall Apart and as a media man) in Lagos, the national capital. Nigeria's problems, like those of other nations which stepped into freedom in the years following the emergence of Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana into freedom in 1957, were basically rooted in the long years under foreign rule. Nnamdi Azikiwe may have spearheaded the struggle for Nigeria's independence, but the glaring fact remained that the new country was fundamentally a tenuous mosaic of tribalism. Personalities such as Sir Ahmedu Bello and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, among others, dominated the political scene, with hardly any one among them in a position to assert authority as a national figure. Power went into the hands of the prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Achebe's statement on Balewa's place in the new country's politics is significant, not to say caustic: 'The prime minister of Nigeria, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who hadbeen built up into a great statesman by the Western world, did nothing to save his country from impending chaos.' The British, says Achebe, made sure before they left that political power in independent Nigeria went into the hands of conservative elements who had played no part in the movement for freedom.
The Igbos, more educated and therefore more enlightened than other Nigerians, soon became targets of hate and envy in the country. Anyone who knows of the pogrom which led to the killings of Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s and even before that will have a good idea of what happened to Nigeria's Igbos, especially those who lived and worked in the capital and elsewhere in the early years of independence. Worse was to follow. Following the coup d'etat involving midlevel Igbo officers in the army in mid-January 1966, Nigeria went into a nosedive. The prime minister was murdered. Similar was the fate of other politicians, including the formidable Ahmedu Bello.
And then hundreds, followed by thousands, of Igbos were killed in the north. They were guilty of 'complicity' in the coup simply because the plot-ters were Igbos. The c o u p -makers were sent packing in May 1 9 6 6, when a senior Igbo officer, Major General Aguiyi Ironsi, took charge. He too would be murdered and replaced by a n o n - I g b o , Yakubu Gowon . It would be asignal for Igbos to flee to their own territory in eastern Nigeria. With little guarantee of security or a proper federal system developing in the country, Colonel Ojukwu, the military governor of the province, declared the independence of Biafra in May 1967.
It was secession, of course. But Biafrans, including Achebe, were enthused by the idea of
freedom. The writer was part of the team around Ojukwu which spoke for their new country at home and abroad. People in the West, though not their governments, sympathized with and offered support to a nation that soon found itself at war with Yakubu Gowon's Nigeria. Idealism was at work and hardly anyone believed that Biafra would in less than three years find itself defeated in battle by the eventually superior Nigerian military. By January 1970, Biafra was a considerably shrunken country. Three million people, mostly children pushed to ill health by a Nigerian blockade, had died in the course of the war. The decisive moment was reached when Uli airport came under severe air and land assault by Nigerian soldiers led by Olusegun Obasanjo (who would one day be Nigeria's president). A dejected Ojukwu went on air, to let his people know that he was 'leaving the People's Republic of Biafra to explore alternative options for peace.' He turned up in the Ivory Coast, where President Felix Houphouet-Boigny granted him political asylum. Ojukwu would die in 2011 in Nigeria, long after Biafra had become a footnote in history.
The last word on a world lost perhaps for good is certainly Chinua Achebe's:
We had spent nearly three years fighting, fighting for a cause, fighting to the finish . . . for freedom. But all that had collapsed, and Biafra with it. A very bitter experience had led to it in the first place. And the big powers prolonged it.