New York, My Village

by Uwem Akpan

  For some, the saddest part of this war was the beheading and defacing of the tombstones by Biafran patrols. Some of these regal life-sized cement statues mounted on platforms in homesteads or on street corners had spooked the soldiers, especially at night. According to you and the villagers, the Biafran solution was to behead or chop off their arms with machine guns. When the people complained, you said they were told, “We’ve defeated even your ancestors forever! Any kpim from you, and you will join them.”

  Again, I refused to believe any of this, for my sanity. But I saw the pain on the faces of the children who’d gathered to listen to their grandparents tell me about the humiliation of their ancestors. It finally broke me. I gave up, gathered my stuff, and fled to my side of Annangland. I resurfaced the very next day like a bad coin with more questions, apologized for “abandoning you at the warfront,” and explained I was also even tormenting the bishop and messing up his schedule over these matters. “My son, iya uwei, now you can’t sleep anymore!” you said, laughing.

  MRS. INIMFON (EKPENE) AKPAN, you and I go way back, and I thank you for everything. It was during our primary school days that I first heard your mother’s accounts of Biafrans “securing” the maternity ward, while she was in labor, and what it meant for women to bolt in that state. Your mother was still mourning this particular newborn sibling of yours—who died a month later—till the last time I met her before her death in 2012.

  Inimfon, you’ve harassed me for years as I struggled to find a setting for this novel: “Uwem, if you couldn’t pull together a book like this, who then can do it for us? We don’t care whether you set the book in Las Vegas or Beijing or New York! There must be a way for the dead to read … if I read it out loud by my mother’s graveside, she must hear, for, as our people say, the dead are only dead in the eye, never in the ear!”

  I’m also grateful to your husband, Dr. Martin Akpan, pastor and fellow writer, who recounted his experiences of the war as a ten-year-old in the present-day Ini Local Government Area in Ibibioland. He bemoaned the difficulties around minority accounts of the war because “others from the same tribes that oppressed us in this war” have taken over and twisted our narratives, like the white colonial masters did to Africa. Martin, when you shared your memories of Biafrans smoking out your folks like bush animals, I could still see the burning flames in your eyes, the sight of homes popping like well-laid fireworks, your goose bumps like the flies that caked the bodies of the dead. Well, I liked our conversation about what fiction could do and how we must encourage minority writing.

  Thank you, Fathers Tom Ebong and Emman Udoh for your accounts of the Battle of Afaha Obong Junction. Father Tom, I must also commend you for your detailed account of the malfeasance of the Nigerian army. Though you understood my novel was about Biafran atrocities in minority lands, you emphasized that minorities suffered from both sides of this war because of oil. To buttress your point, you talked about the Ikpe Annang man whom Nigerian soldiers executed by tying up and jeep-pulling him on the tarmac à la Patrice Lumumba, for supposedly supporting Biafra. My only consolation was that, at least, Akwa Ibom State government had apologized to the family when it unveiled its Biafran Memorial in 2014. “And what have we benefited sef from remaining in Nigeria?” you asked. “When will the federal government apologize? Look, the Igbo masses, who were being bombed nonstop for three years—people who didn’t know of their army’s bullshit in minority lands—did not and do not deserve the vengeful way Nigeria has continued to massacre them to this day.”

  Father Anselm Etokakpan, I thank you for confiding in me how frightened you were as a child of six seeing what Biafran patrols did to sabos week in, week out in Ikot Etokudo/Otoro axis. Father Gordian Otu, sosongo for taking me out to lunch in Abuja, Nigeria, once I touched down from Atlanta, Georgia, for research in 2016. I appreciate the nuggets of Nsasak and Odoro Ikot war stories and your prayers for me as I set out for Ijawland, Ogoniland, and Ikwerreland.

  IT WAS MY FIRST TIME in Ijawland, and I shall remember it forever!

  I’m grateful to my Isoko friend Anote Ajeluorou, political editor of the Guardian Nigerian, for goading me nonstop to write about this goddamn war. Thanks also for telling me of the war in Isoko/Urhobo region and for sending me an escort, Marcus, at such short notice so I could attend the annual Obe-Benimo-Oge Festival (Regathering or Liberation from Biafra Festival) in Tungbo-Sagbama on October 22, 2016.

  Marcus, once I said my plan was to engage as many commoners as possible, you confidently worked out public transportation logistics and how I was to dress and comport myself, to avoid kidnappers. “Remember to speak pidgin only, not Americana o!” you warned. “My oga, your perfume smells too rich na.” As reward, you only wanted me to visit your village and mention your Membe people in my book, that you exist, that you survived Biafra, that you’re surviving Nigeria and the killer Fulani herdsmen. Like other Nigerians, it was so clear to you the federal government was unleashing these herdsmen on the country by staunchly supporting open grazing in the twenty-first century. You were shocked when I said you shouldn’t only pray but save your tithe and “Tray Collection” money to buy your own two sophisticated guns for you and your wife, so you can take turns to protect yourselves. I’m sorry I couldn’t visit your village.

  Marcus and I arrived in the palace of His Royal Highness Amos Poubinafa of Tungbo-Sagbama at ten a.m., to ask for permission to attend the festival. The little peaceful coastal village is set on a sharp corner of the Tungbo River, a village where old men remember playing with crocodiles, their totem animal, like the friendly crocodiles of Paga Pond in Ghana. The shrine of the dreaded village deity—Akpolokiyai—is the last structure between the village and the river, a bulwark of sorts. It’s unforgivable sacrilege to block this god’s view of his beloved brooding brown river. Not even the fruits of the few plantain trees in between are edible.

  Your Royal Highness, I’m grateful for the welcome that you, both as a gentleman and former naval officer, extended to us. Your hospitality included narrating the heartbreaking story of how the Biafrans desecrated the shrine by parking their lounge-boat in front of it, how the standoff between the soldiers and your subjects escalated into their torture and executions and finally the dispersal of the village—and how important it was for the kingdom to institute this Regathering Festival right after the war.

  I really enjoyed the delicious lunch of catfish peppersoup and rice and drinks, the fish fresh from the Tungbo. Carried away by Ijaw spices and the culinary skills of the queen, I ate a bit too quickly, till the pepper went down the wrong pipe. To the embarrassment and scramble of the royal household. You lightened my research work by asking Paul Ebikeseiye, then secretary of the Sagbama Branch of the Ijaw Youth Council, to show me around and explain how the different houses and bloodlines were preparing for the evening’s war boat display on the Tungbo, the climax of the Regathering Festival.

  KOKO KALANGO, I hit your office in Port Harcourt unannounced, straight from the killer-Fulani-herdsmen-infested road network and crowded buses from Yenagoa. You were shocked to see me dressed like a manual laborer and maybe smell even worse. But all I wanted, to decompress, was a bottle of Coke and mmansang-ikpok (boiled peanuts), because the ones I’ve found in American gas stations taste completely different. Thanks for letting me snack in peace.

  I still remember the first time you invited me to your Rainbow Book Club in early 2009 to celebrate my first book, Say You’re One of Them. I remember how happy you were when Oprah selected the book for her book club. But your secret game plan all along seemed to have been to encourage me to write about minority Biafra. You never got the chance to introduce me to Elechi Amadi before he died, the Ikwerre writer and soldier, who rallied his folks to fight against Biafra. I missed the chance to ask him why Governor Nyesom Wike and other Ikwerres—an Igbo-speaking group—insist they’re not Igbo. Though you always prayed for my safety and insight in my crazy research forays, Koko, I avoided you for a few years because each time we m
et, I was drained by our analysis of the latest national misfortune. Blessings for all you’ve accomplished with the Garden City Book Festival, your literacy campaign across Nigeria, and now your “Color of Life” Christian show.

  When I left your office, I roamed the streets of Port Harcourt, eating roasted corn and ube or eben, until I found some chatty minority seller. Once I told him the Igbos were blaming us for the failure of Biafra—and I could prove to him I wasn’t Igbo—he immediately suspended business to call up his grandpa to ask about the war. The narratives of Biafran atrocities that burst forth from this chop-chop chance encounter can’t be printed here. It led to many more interviews in Ogoniland, and Ikwerreland than I’d planned.

  LIKE IN TUNGBO-SAGBAMA, I learned this terror even contaminated the sacred spheres of Port Harcourt metro. An example was the Catholic Diocese of Port Harcourt, which was run by an Igbo bishop and clergy in 1967 when the war began. While some Igbo priests, nuns, and lay leaders mediated between their Biafran patrols and minority parishioners, others simply behaved like the Biafra secret police.

  For me, a former priest, it was most heartrending to hear that some of the priests had broken the Seal of Confession and leaked minority “sins” to Biafra, which sent its killer squads to disappear the penitents and commandeer their properties. Nothing killed the trust between the Igbos and the minorities more than fucking anwashit like this. This Biafranization of the spiritual life completed the desperation and abandonment of the minorities. It was as though even God had rejected them.

  You could only imagine the huge relief and feverish vengeance of these minorities against their Igbo brethren when Nigeria recaptured Port Harcourt in May 1968. The shameful killing of Igbos—sometimes aided by the Nigerian army, like during the 1966 genocide—and despoilation of their properties weren’t restricted to here. Moreover, after the war, the minorities insisted they were better off without the Sacraments than to allow Igbo clergy to continue to run their diocese. I learned these folks would rather burn down Corpus Christi Cathedral. In 1973, Pope Paul VI appointed Bishop Edmund Fitzgibbon, a white man, as compromise.

  THERE’S A SPECIAL PLACE in my heart for all my research contacts and interviewees and guides in Igboland.

  I was quite afraid of visiting your villages to ask about the 1967 killings and harassment of our minorities and the Igbos who protected them. Initially when I revealed I was challenged by Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country to present our side of the war, some of your IPOB* members wanted to expel me from Igboland, to say the least. Ashamed that tribalism, like the whiteness of American publishing or Catholicism, might deny this minority of minorities access to research, I allowed you to scold me for daring to critique Achebe, “our Igbo genius and Father of African Literature.” My Owerri guides also soaked your gra-gra as you branded them traitors, sabos. You only relented when I stepped forward and lied that I was still a priest and Google yielded an old photo. You listened when I spoke about the kindness of your people in my last parish in Nigeria, Christ the King Church in Ilasamaja, Lagos, which was ninety percent Igbo. You cocked your ears when I shared how generous and inspirational Achebe himself was to me in 1997 when Father Dave Toolan (of America magazine) arranged for me to call him at Bard College, New York, for advice on how to become a writer. You were touched to hear how, in spite of his very poor health and doctor’s advice, he’d answered that phone, as promised, and shared a few words of wisdom with this nonentity. “Well, they say a writer writes in spite of his fears and handicaps!” Achebe had said. “After all the exposure to good writing, you still have to want it, perhaps, more than anything else, to stand a chance.”

  Now, as I explained to you, my Igbo interviewees, beyond the IPOB madness, you have the right to fight for an Igbo country. But, most importantly, you must continue to rid your forests and farms and homesteads of these Fulani militia masquerading as herdsmen. If you allow them to surround you, where would you run to during the next Igbo genocide? And, yes, your diaspora also have a right to send you weapons and/or bring your case before the international community. There’s no other way to put this, having seen some of the gruesome photos of your slain relatives … though you didn’t like my advice that reconciling with the Yorubas could actually help you negotiate for a better future, some of you hoped that my writing might even bring an understanding to Nigeria’s history. Well, as your ancestors say, egbe belụ, ugo belụ.

  Special thanks, too, to you my Fulani contacts, who’re rightly worried about the evil things your Fulani government is dreaming for Nigeria. I encourage you to raise your voices in the mosques and everywhere against these current invasions and massacres done in your name. If white people could join Black Americans in Black Lives Matter protests, why can’t Fulanis fight on the side of our indigenous compatriots, especially the Igbos whose pre-war genocide you masterminded?

  AND, TO YOU ODIA OFEIMUN, poet and journalist—who told me how you became a war journalist at age seventeen, because the Nigerian army thought you were too young to enlist—I praise you for broadening my knowledge, not just of war, but of life. I learned a lot that hot day in November 2016 in your apartment in Lagos about the Biafran invasion of the Edo-Esan axis and the needless killing of Igbos by the Nigerian army once they chased out Biafra. It gave me the background to Biafra’s using of minorities as human shield in three bloody days as they retreated toward Asaba in September 1967. Though history has detailed the Biafran massacre of minorities in the Urhonigbe Rubber Plantation, their drowning of more than three hundred adults and children in Ossiomo River,† etc., you were able to contextualize these events down to the more publicized four hundred Igbo men stripped and shot in Asaba by the Nigerian army.

  Egbon, I appreciate your phone calls to monitor the progress of this book. You were thrilled by my plans to create Swiftian ironies between our Nigerian and American histories of violence, and of racism/tribalism in American publishing and religion. But you worried I might not find a publisher.

  Professor Norman Thomas Uphoff, I appreciate our email correspondence in January 2013, sparked by my discovery of your 1970 letter to the New York Times about the glorification of Biafra by certain American writers. Your grasp of the ruthless ethnic politics within that entity and the Lebensraum and Anschluss philosophies of the Igbos surprised me. Your letter is completely different from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” which reduces Biafra to only Igbos, thereby committing literary genocide against our thirty-some minority groups. I believe Vonnegut, my beloved American writer, had set out to show the agony of the Igbos in the last days of the war. But mentioning “Ibo” twice without any hint of the existence of other groups deletes us from that map and dispossesses us of our lands and oil resources. Of course, Professor Uphoff, the coverage of the war in the San Francisco Chronicle, where you suggested I search for what I needed, both gladdened and saddened me. But so did my trip to Ndiya, where your article said Biafra had buried sixty Ibibio people alive.

  On three research visits to Nigeria, I had no heart to visit Ndiya. How do you even begin to ask questions about events like this? And I’d given up, until I ran into the beautiful art of Emmanuel Ekong Ekefrey online and learned he’s from this same Ndiya. But, Mr. Ekefrey, after copious encouragement from your curator Bose Fagbemi in France, it was easier to visit your home in Okota, Lagos, on June 6, 2021, four hundred miles from your ancestral village. Thanks for all you shared about your art and life. I was still thinking about how to broach the war, when you asked what my next project was. As soon as I mentioned Biafra, your pain was so immediate, so complete, I couldn’t resist your plea to visit Ndiya, though I’d already finished my novel.

  To the people of Ndiya, I’ve never seen a Nigerian village with so many paved roads! Your story isn’t easy to tell, like that of Tungbo-Sagbama. I couldn’t process it. Chief Etop Ekefrey and Emmanuel I. T. Udoh, thanks for the trust even though I have no words to describe the logistics of such burials or what the general atmosp
here was like as Biafra fought two wars in one—battling the Nigerian army and suppressing the Niger Delta minorities. I also have no words for our minorities’ raw anger and bottomless angst that today’s Biafran agitators, without consultations, have already included minority lands in the map of their dream Biafra. How could this Biafran attitude be the foundation of a new or better country? And I didn’t know what to make of the fact that—unlike many Igbos—you didn’t want to let your grandchildren know the details of these burials, to spare them the trauma. When should they know? How much should they know? I couldn’t say anything because I felt overwhelmed, lost.

  It was the last atrocity site I visited.

  I MUST ALSO THANK all of you former soldiers I spoke to—ex-Biafran soldiers, of Igbo and minority extractions, and ex-Nigerian soldiers. Over the years, meeting you in Abuja, Umuahia, Ikot Ekpene, Eleme, Yenagoa, Lagos, Ossiomo Leper Colony, Owerri, Kaduna, Onitsha, Aba, Calabar, Badagry, in the U.S., Kenya, Benin, Zimbabwe, England, wherever, has been an unqualified honor. That simple question Where were you during the war? or Where was your father during the war? opened so many doors.

  My heart goes out to those who’re still bitter about being conscripted by Biafra. For soldiers who now regret what they did in our minority lands, I pray you let go of the guilt. I respect your plea for anonymity, for some of you, in retrospect, don’t think what you did or didn’t do in war could heal our country today. And it wasn’t difficult for some on the Nigerian side to share the futility of it all, of feeling, most days, your sacrifices were in vain because of the pain and growing divisions today in our blessed country. Well, I was touched when a few of you mentioned how you still visited the families of fallen colleagues: to all of you, then, I say your struggles to handle the traumas are in themselves an interplay of sin and grace.