My baby brother died from kwashiokor and I would have joined him if not for my grandmother’s quick thinking.
She came to our house (in the neighboring village) one morning, took one look at my swollen and yellowish feet, and shouted at my mother: “Marit, what are you doing here? You want this one to die too?”
“Here” was my paternal grandfather’s compound. My grandfather was the richest man in our village as well as the traditional ruler. He was also a very selfish man, and too busy acquiring wives to have time for his first son’s impoverished family.
My father had been caught in the crossfires of the war and was believed dead. My mother refused to return to her parents’ home even as her father-in-law and husband’s brothers were giving her heck and refusing to give us any support whatsoever. My mother did not believe her husband was dead. She would have dreamed about it, she said. She would tell her in-laws and mother: “Mine (what they called each other) left me in this house. I will be here when he returns.”
That morning, my grandmother said to her daughter: “Stay here if you want to die but I’m taking my grandchildren with me.” That’s how my brother and I ended up being raised by our maternal grandparents for much of our early years. I didn’t venture back to my father’s homestead until well into my teens.
My mother did join us later, tired of the daily trek to visit my brother and me while “jetfighters” were flying over our heads. Since we had fallen to Biafra and then recaptured by Nigeria (or was it the other way round?), my folks could never tell if the UFOs coming down too close for comfort were friends or foes. We did only one thing: we ran “for cover!” as my mother’s younger brother would yell at me … before he too got drafted. He decided it was better to be the chaser than the runner. That saved his life. At least then.
My father did return eventually, long after the war had ended on a day my mother was cooking a full pot of coconut rice. I was salivating at the thought of having enough food to eat for the first time in a long while. When I was told the skeletal (one-foot-in-the-grave) spectre standing in front of my grandparents’ house was my father, my first thought was: “The rice won’t be enough for me!”
Someone asked if my father was in the Biafran Army. Here’s what I know.
He worked in Elele, in present-day Rivers State with the Eastern Nigeria Development Corporation and that’s where I spent the first years of my life. We had all traveled to my village (n present-day Akwa Ibom) for my his mother’s funeral. He returned to Elele and the plan was that he would be back soon to take us back with him. Instead, it took him more than three years to find his way home.
To your question, I can’t say for sure. He’s been dead for 13 years now and so I can’t ask him. My understanding is that he got entangled in both armies in the course of making his way home. He was captured, detained and drafted to fight by both armies at different times depending on where he was and which side was in control at the moment. He was a civil servant and young father/husband trying to make his way home. By the time he did, the war had ended my area was fully Nigerian. His affiliation — strategic or coerced — became a moot point.
The part of the Civil War that remains untold is how it affected those of us in the Southeastern Region who were neither Biafrans or Nigerians. We just were. And so we became pawns and throaways for both sides. We were indeed the proverbial grass that suffered woefully when two elephants fought. But that’s a story for another day — and perhaps, it has already been told by those who were more aware. I was 3-4 years old when the war broke out and seven when it was “formally” over. However, for those of us — the grass — the end took a lot longer.
Someone wrote: “it is not historically accurate to say that you were neither Biafrans nor Nigerians, even as you seek to be politically correct, you must take heed to be historically accurate.
Biafra was not an Igbo project, neither was Nigeria an Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa project. In the latter, we were conquered and put together by a superior force, so we are Nigerians, for the former, Biafra, a consultative council made up of both elected officials from all the administrative zones of then Eastern region as well as career technocrats decided unanimously and mandated Ojukwu to proclaim a separate republic (note that non-Igbos had a greater per capita representation in that assembly than Igbos), so, you were always Nigerian of Biafran depending on dates, never neither.”
Trust me, Sir, this is not about “political correctness.”
Rather, in that short narrative, I wanted to avoid the problem that I see in many accounts of the Civil War: inserting later knowledge/information into recalled experiences/memories. Ake is an example of a narrative in which the adult voice interprets and explains the experiences of the child self while insisting it is the child’s memory. Still, Ake is my favorite Soyinka book.
Back to the subject, I was between 3-4 and 7 years old during the Civil War. If I ever write the story of that period, it will be based unapologetically on my recollection of the sights, sounds and smells of that period rather than an objective historical account. On the question of whether we were Biafran or Nigerian, I can say that we were both depending on who was “winning” the war at a given time.
I recall that many times, we ran “for cover” into the bushes. And then one day, we had to leave the village completely for refuge in another town. My grandparents’ house was by the main road and soldiers (Biafran or Nigerian, it doesn’t matter) came ransacking the village. I remember my grandmother had my younger brother on her back, a basin (filled with whatever she could grab in a hurry) on her head and one hand holding mine and dragging me along as she ran. She held onto me so tightly that I started to cry. My mother’s younger brother (the one who became a soldier), removed his shoe and threatened to hit me with it if I didn’t stop crying. Crying meant discovery. To this day my people still say to a crying child: “Go ahead and cry. There is no war.”
I recalled that even in the faraway place that we had run to, we again had to run for cover from there too. One woman was frying garri on that big wide black pot. When the soldiers came, we all ran. She left the garri in the pot on the fire. When we returned later in the day, the garri had turned black and had a distinct smell — and a smell that my memory brings back as I write this.
I don’t know how long we were refugees with people who themselves were also running away from somewhere else. When we eventually returned, my grandmother’s goats and chickens were gone. The plantain trees in the back of the house were stripped bare. My grandmother cried. She wasn’t one to cry. She did. It turned out we were the lucky ones. In the house across the road from ours, the soldiers not only took over everything the people had, but they occupied the house. I didn’t mind because the soldiers always had food. I would go over there and hang around staring at them as they ate meat from the livestock that they took from the families in the village. Every now and then one of them would be tired of my unwavering “long throat” stare and give me some leftover food.
As I think about it: was it the Biafran solders who chased us out of our home and stole our things? Or the Nigerian soldiers who liberated us by occuping the homes of people who had already suffered enough? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. My people were the grass and we suffered regardless of which was the elephant of the week.
That was the point of my comment and this is the perspective that I’ll take if I ever write about that period in my life. It will not be an academic project (with the burden of historical accuracy and political analysis) though I certainly have the skills to do that too — if that interested me. It does not.
