Chimamanda Adichie's new book Half of A Yellow Sun is a Biafra Story. I can't wait to read it and review it. The Biafran War is something that still invokes emotion and political strife in Nigeria. It has been described by some as genocide. Many of us also grew up hearing stories from our parents and relatives about what and what did not happen during the war. As I was told my parents met during the war when my dad was a soldier and my mom a Red Cross 'Nurse Eliza' (I guess that's what they call volunteer because she was not a certified nurse) What stories have you been told or do you remember. I am sure you have great ones. Don't hold back because you feel you don't want to sound or be seen as tribalistic ( because I know we were not all told the same stories or in the same way). While we are at it, do you think Nigeria has really dealt with this 'ugly' past and what should be done because it remains the invisible elephant in the living room, especially where politics is concerned. How should the future generation deal with this issue as well. Do we ignore it, pretend that it did not happen or do we consider it as one of the casualties that we had to experience to have a 'ONE' Nigeria. Is 'ONE' Nigeria a realistic or a mere utopia. Below are some pictures from 'The Biafran War' that I found online. What do these images invoke. For me it's practically Darfur in a previous century. I would like to here what you smart and witty readers have to say. Let's start a dialogue or discussion here my friends or is Biafra too sensitive to be discussed?
Here are some links and stories online on Biafra
Phillip Emeagwali's Reflections on Biafra
Fred Cuny's Disaster Relief Analysis and Pictures
Global Security Biafra Background
The Civil War: Nigeria Vs Biafra
Surviving Biafra Photos
Posts
24 comments:
It really hurts me when Nigerians dont acknowledge Biafra for what it was. Like many other Igbos, I too lost multiple relatives, still have some with war injuries, who were young able men and women in their 20s, and are now blind and in wheelchairs. My aunt lost her son and her husband was taken away by the Nigerian military in lagos because he was Igbo and head of a big sec schl. His leg was cut off, and he eventually died. My parents lost 4+yrs of schl (secondary schl/college), and a handful of their own close friends died. The war criminals are many of the so called high ranking military people in Nigeria right now. Not naming names but everyone knows the atrocities that were committed, like Aba boy just stated.
I am Nigerian but I will not forget Biafra, it is still a part of me. When my mom pulls out her sec schl pics, and starts counting those that were lost to the war, I remember. When she talks about hiding in the roof so that they wouldnt be raped by the soldiers, or dressing as a boy, I remember. When my dad talks about his near misses that killed and maimed his colleagues, I remember.
Its hard for those of my parents generation to forget and I dont blame them, because which one of us would offer food to his brother's murderer. Many Nigerians in schl dont even know exactly what happened in Biafra, they just see it as the Igbos being stubborn and thats what they get. Unless we address the issues of the past, we will never be able to move forward. Why was Aguiyi Ironsi killed? So many questions. I've heard many Nigerians of our generation brush it off because "it didnt affect them" but no Biafra was real, and like an internal disease it continues to permeate through the naija society, thats why the old folks could care less for a 1 naija. After all prior to Nigeria, thousands of Igbos lived especially in the north, folks like my mom who learned Hausa as a first language, everyone had to flee back. Where is the Nigeria that the Chiefs hoped for: MI Okpara, Tafawa Belewa and Awolowo are all shaking their heads in disgust in their graves.
"It's practically Darfur in a previous century" --I would like you/someone to expand on that statement. Maybe what I've been told or what I read in social studies was not the complete truth...But I have never heard of the Biafran war being thought of as a genocide on anybody and I want to know who exactly are the people who ‘metted’ it out. While we are on the subject...Is this a choosing sides thing...as in argue from the point of view or your opinion...or is this an all encompassing view of what led up to and happened during the war and the aftermath of the war? I would like to be informed and know the guidelines for this discussion before I put my own opinion up.
As to all wars, there are war criminals on both sides...the only difference is that the winners get to write history..
@Aba boy, please expand on the "victims are still under subjugation" and the "injustices"?
"It's practically Darfur in a previous century" --I would like you/someone to expand on that statement. Maybe hat I've been told or what I read in social studies was not the complete truth...But I have never heard of the Biafran war being thought of as a genocide on anybody and I want to know who exactly are the people who ‘metted’ it out. While we are on the subject...Is this a choosing sides thing...as in argue from the point of view or your opinion...or is this an all encompassing view of what led up to and happened during the war and the aftermath of the war?
I want to know the guidelines for this discussion is before I lay down my view on the whole thing...If not, this can breakdown and get ugly.
@Aba boy, just curious, what do you mean "the victims are still under subjugation" and the Injustices? I want to know if its the same ones I was told.
@Oyinkan... read the previous sentence
"Below are some pictures from 'The Biafran War' that I found online. What do these images invoke. For me it's practically Darfur in a previous century"
There are no guidelines to this... it is all FREESTYLE and freespeech. Setting guidelines will be restrictive so this is going to be an open conversation. Feel free to throw in your opinion, theory, facts, fiction(because we know there are a lot)and rebutals. If you want to take sides on the matter feel free. Think of this as a 'Round Table Dialogue'
@ oyinkan, when 3 million people are killed, thats a genocide to me. Its also widely known that even Biafra isnt mentioned appropriately in Nigerian history book or even much at all.
I've read so many articles about the Biafra war and am yet to make up my mind. However, i believe that nothing was/will ever be achieved by violence. There are different ways of solving problem such as DIALOGUE!!
Personally,I believe that saying the the Biafra war was 'Darfur in a previous century' is a bit over the top. Ibos living in the north were killed likewise the Hausas living in the east. There were heavy casualties on both sides.
Can Nigeria really move on without forgiveness from and reconciliation with both sides? I don't think so.
But i feel that this problem of Biafra/Nigeria will be solved if the problem (a)is openely disscused and people learn from it (b)Re-dressing the present Nigerian system, whereby the south-eastern and eastern Nigerians take part FULLY in running the country and that means addressing the Niger-Delta problem.
@Confessions of a Crab... please see my response to Oyinkan. I asked what the pictures invoke and for me, looking at them they look like Darfur, of starved and emaciated women and kids. I never drew a parallel just saying that's what the images invoke for me.
Whether it is Genocide or not is debatable. Some argue that it is and others say it is not. The claim was investigated and declared not to be Genocide. But we know for fact that between 1 -3 million died most of them from the strategic blockade of the food supply and eventually poisoning the food, which come under the UN definition for genocide.(See
Prevent Genocide link for the break down.
It is very true that many Nigerian text books don't exactly paint a true picture of the war. Many of our teachers also are very biased and cannot be balanced when teaching the topic. I remember being very upset and highly arguementative when my Government teacher in secondary school got to subject and more or less presented it as 'the young igbo soldiers led the coup, hence the retaliation served them right' or at least that's the way i heard it. The only time that I have gotten a balanced presentation of the facts was from reading books/article on the war that were written by non-nigerians. Depending on who is writing, facts and elements are not accurate or are misrepresented. I think for me sometimes I wonder 'what is the true story of Biafra' because it doesn't add up. How can one person's account of the same thing be so entirely different from another. There is no balanced view because in our youth it is all left not to qualified academicians to teach us, but our parents who either have their own prejudices and biases fed to us, don't tell us the entire truth because they want to shield us or feed us with hate. Perhaps this is why we tend to avoid it because we each have our own versions and God forbid someone tells us we are wrong.
Indeed, until it is openly discussed and dealt with in the manner that APARTHEID was with the truth and reconciliation hearings, issues acknowledged and redressed can we begin to have a sense of understanding and room for forgiveness and truly move on. It all boils down to how can you forgive someone who doesn't acknowledge they have offended. And since no party is blameless where do we start and who goes first.
The 40th year is coming up in 2007, I thik it would be a great opportunity for us as a country(perhaps literary/social think-tank groups)to take on the issue preferably not as POLITICS. But that's easier said than done afterall isn't this Nigeria we are talking about.
I just read a great review of half of a yellow sun at www.dibussi.com. According to the review,
"Although the Biafran secession and civil war serve as a backdrop to the novel, Half of a Yellow Sun is not a history of those events. Neither is it a classic war novel. Although the Biafran story is ever-present in the novel, it does not intrude, distort, or overwhelm the central story. Even when the characters are caught in the maelstrom of war, it is still their individual stories that are at the forefront. This is a story of love, betrayal, infidelity, forgiveness, hope, loss, grief, survival, resilience and broken dreams".
while i'm not trying to take away from the devastation that occurred in biafra, for God's sake, other people died and were affected during that war besides igbo people. it's not like igbos cannot be partially blamed for what happened to them either, especially considering that a lot of the atrocities committed against the igbos were committed by the igbo forces themselves, especially during the latter part of the war. at the end of the day, we need to realize that we are all to blame for it, and to learn from it. however, it's clear that nigerians (like the rest of mankind) don't learn from their mistakes. MASSOB feels like wreaking havoc is the way forward and other nigerians are only too happy to feed the fire with the fuel of finger-pointing and rumor-mongering. and people get mad when i say that we are a sick people.
thanks all for your comments, and postings. As a Nigerian in the diaspora myself, I am sad that I never really thought or knew anything about Biafra. All I knew about it was that it was a war for cessation, or something like that. To hear that millions of Nigerians died, as close as 40 years ago, with the generation still alive, shocks me. I think it is a shame that many of us, know more about American history than Nigerian history. I had to read, the article on wikipedia on Nigeria, to even know anything about the country, even though i schooled in Nigeria, up till middle school. Having said that, how are we supposed to not make the same mistakes, if we can't even remember or acknowledge the past.
Adure: The comments left here show the need for serious discussion by all Nigerians on Biafra. There is still today much misunderstanding and bitterness. Death and Genocide are not competitions. Of course other people died besides Biafrans prior to the war, during the war and in the aftermath. Thats the whole point of the disucssion - it affects all of us. Many of us speaking here where young children at the time some not even born but it is our history and we need to know the truth. I want to know what happened, I want to hear the experiences of those in Biafra who lived through it. MY home town was divided over Biafra and those divisions are still remembered today - we need to heal those divisions.
Once again thank you for bringing this topic to the blogoshere.
I am so excited to see this post! I saw Chimamanda Adichie at her Toronto book launch yesterday and it was such a thrilling experience to hear her speak. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into this book and learn something about the Nigeria-Biafra war. I hope you don't mind that I linked your blog to mine.
Thanks.
It's really no wonder why there is so much bitterness about Biafra in the East of Nigeria if some of the comments from Oyinda and others from outside the theatre of the civil war could be so casual about a horrible event in the history of this country that altered the trajectory of the development of many families in Igboland. I'd excuse anybody who, being truly ignorant of what transpired in Biafra, genuinely wishes to be informed and educated. But for someone to belittle the extent of the tragedy in Biafra with the irritatingly doubtful poser about compararisons with Darfur or that non-Igbo people were equally killed in the East just as Igbos were in the North makes you really wonder if the amnesia isn't deliberate. What was the scale of the pogroms on both sides, if indeed there were killings in the East of non-Igbos? Why conveniently leave out the mass murders in Lagos by Yorubas of Igbos, some of whom had been their friends and neighbours? It strikes me as hypocritical each time Igbos, including the MASSOB activitists are made to look like insurgents or rebels(the cliched term) because they ask to be left alone since Nigeria is unwilling to accommodate them. You don't want a people as your policies over the decades have manifestly shown and when the same people ask to be allowed to be on their own, you call them names. Until Nigerians are ready and brave enough to engage with the Igbos, withourt the prejudices that the name alone inspires in others, the unresolved state of the Biafra conundrum will continue...
What has been written so-far about the Biafran Genocide or even Genocaust (Genocide + Holocaust) is a tip of the iceberg. In Lagos, Hausa (and Yoruba soldiers) went to schools, hospitals, buses etc. They seperated Igbo from non-Igbo. Led the Igbo into bushes and massacred them. In Benin, they went on a house-to-house search, flushed out Igbo residents and massacred them etc.
Someone wrote that Biafra was declared not to be a genocide. Yes, why not? After the "war" the Nigerian government hired Burson Masteller, the world's largest PR firm and paid them with oil money to obscure all evidence of genocide in Biafra. But nobody is deceived.
The Yoruba always downplay the atrocities against Igbo people because of guilty feelings. They feel that if they tell lies often enough it would become the truth. They would rather sweep the whole event under the carpet.
But the Biafran Genocide was committed in the 20th century in full view of the world press. It is the most documented and archived genocide in history.
The Yoruba committed some of the most horrible atrocities of the "war". For example one of them Gbadamosi King(under clear orders from Obasanjo) wilfully shot down a Swedish Red Cross Plane and murdered all crew members over Eket in 1969. The plane -DC 10 Reg No SE-ERP- was clearly marked as Red Cross plane flying food and medicines to the starving people of Biafra. In that disaster, five Swedish crew members were killed. Here are the victims of that atrocity:
David Brown - captain,
Stig Carlson - first officer,
Kiell Pettersen - flight engineer,
Harry Axelsson - loadmaster
Even the makeshift graveyard constructed in memory of the perished relief workers at Uli was maliciously vandalized and demolished by the nigerian army when they entered Uli Airport in 1970 with obasasnjo.
Curiously, the people behind these atrocities have never been punished. The western world has looked the other way. Some of the war criminals are still strutting around Nigeria as leaders while Charles Taylor et al are hounded by the Western world. Why? Because Liberia has no oil.
Olayinka's is a typical Yoruba attitude to the Biafran genocide question. To him, the murder of over 2 million Igbo was not a genocide. That is what he has been taught in social studies and "history" books. The would rather talk about genocide in Darfur, Rwanda while trying to cover their own acts of genocide (1966-70). Of course that is what the nigerian regime intended to achieve when it hired the world's biggest PR firm Burson Masteller in 1970 to help it cover its genocidal tracks.
When Sony Pictures recently made a firm Tears of the Sun wchich touched on aspects of the genocide, the Yoruba wre up in arms complaining to the company. They would rather the whole thing is swept under the rug and forgotten. They are living in denial. But to their chagrin, the Biafran genocide represent the worst atrocity in African history committed on the eve of the multi-media revolution. IT WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.
When the Biafran state collapsed in January 1970, there was no longer any organized state structure to present the Biafran viewpont to the world. The nigerian government banned Christian missionary groups from occupied Biafra and behind the news blackout, unleashed the most devastating islamist-inspired repression against Ibo people. They had international oil intersts and PR firm Burson Masteller to cover their tracks.These repressions has now led to the re-birth of the Biafran freedom movement among the 50-million Igbo people.
And to the chagrin of Biafran Genocide deniers, there are over 100,000 web pages dealing with the subject today. In addition there are over 1.6 million web pages dealing with the subject of Biafra. With the birth of the information age, certainly more, a lot more will be heard about the single greatest atrocity in African history which has hitherto been swept under the carpet- The Biafran Genocide (1966-70).
I have just read the book and done some research on the internet and I can't believe how ignorant I am. I must find out more. I am from Delta/Edo State (in case my ethnicity matters to you)
I think the reason why ppl say that the atrocity carried out against the Igbos was not genocide is because the term carries such serious moral and legal meaning. As far as I understand, it usually refers to a (usually central) govt policy to wipe out a race of ppl-not drive them away, enforce deportation, oppress or subjugate them-wipe out from the surface of the earth. I read a book that argues that there were "only" 3 genocides in the 20th century - Turkey/Armenia conflict, the Jewish holocaust and the Rwandan crisis in the 1990's. The author, citing Biafra as an example, stated that even though other acts such as mass murder have caused as many or even more deaths, the lack of intent to wipe out the Igbo race distinguished it from genocide.
His arguments made sense to me at the time although I think there is a very fine line between the mass killings or pogroms really that took place in the north prior to the war (while the Nigerian authorities stood by idly and even participated) and genocide. What happened after the war, although it involved severe atrocities and oppression of the Igbos, wasn't in my opinion genocide. Put it this way, if the Nazis had won the war, I don't think there would be any Jews in Europe now.
One question though - why did the starvation affect the children the most (try and answer my question without hostility, remember I've only just started researching, I'm not trying to offend) This is something I notices from the photographs - Was it because children are more susceptible to malnutrition, was the food that was available being kept for soldiers (reprehensible but I would understand the argument that the soldiers had to eat to fight), was it a case of adults taking priority in food distribution or (and this is the worst accusation I've heard against the Igbos) were some children being deliberately starved as a propaganda tool by the Biafran government.
Another question - did all the Igbos in Nigeria flee to Biafra after the pogroms in the north and other parts of the country? or did some stay in other parts? What happened to them - were they simply killed?
Miss T
My experiences about the war - I was born after the war but in my household I remember the casual prejudice against Igbos. Of course, my parents had loads of Igbo friends and when speaking seriously would express real regret and sympathy about what happened to Igbos during the war. But, loads of visitors and relatives would 'joke' about how Igbos would eat anything - cockroaches, rats, human meat. I didn't think anything at the time but that was of course a legacy of the war when they was nothing else to eat. I remember a young child, trying to charm her parent's visitors (I can't remember if the visitors are Igbos or not) stood up and recited "Igbos eat cockroaches, rats, snakes..." before her embarassed parents swiftly and harshly told her to to shut up! Obviously, she got that from her parents.
So my 'experience' of the war is casual prejudice against Igbos.
Miss T
"and this is the worst accusation I've heard against the Igbos) were some children being deliberately starved as a propaganda tool by the Biafran government."
After doing some more research, I take back this question. I realise it is completely wrong and could cause deep offense.
Cheers,
Miss T
Miss T, I realise you are quite earnest in your postings about the whole issue of Igbos and their perception in Nigeria by 'others' given the backdrop of the civil war. There are many like you who were born and grew up years after the booms of the guns had gone silent but who nonetheless were unconsciously brainwashed, ever so subtly, by parents and other older relations into perceiving the war as either a good comeuppance for the troublesome Igbos or a justified punishment for a rebellious people. For such adults, it is a way of justifying their support of a gangup by the entire nation against a section of it for purely unjustifiable reasons and portraying them as beastly and savage-like in tales to their children was all fair game. I am Igbo and there are several streaks in the Igbo makeup that I personally deplore but I consider justification by anyone of the deliberate action of waging war against the East of Nigeria in the '60s, so much that starvation was deliberately employed as an instrument of war, as a display of human sensitivity and a total lack of empathy. And so children like you quickly grew up on a rich diet of ignorance about an entire people or else were conditioned to believe a tale of national bigotry against them. Like some have said, the problems that led to the war persist and until Nigeria is prepared to open up the cupboards and bring out all the stinking skeletons, the country would remain as morally and physically fractured as it had also been.
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