After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  I asked General Effiong to what extent the Biafran Army has been forced to resort to conscription.

  “In a war of this kind,” he said, “our people don’t like it. We tried it for three months and found we had to stop. Our people couldn’t see the point.”

  I asked whether the recent lessening of air raids was due entirely to the weather. “This has been puzzling us for some time,” he said. “Perhaps it is our little homemade rockets popping. And our air force has been up again, nothing to write home to Mummy about but quite a little baby.”

  General Effiong showed me some captured military weapons, British antitank guns used against people (Biafra has no tanks), Russian napalm, machine guns from countries all over Europe, and some marked “U.S. Gov’t Property/Army.”

  “If we fail, you see,” General Effiong said, “then the black man in Africa is going to fail, and the minority man wherever he is. One would think we had done enough against all this to prove that we deserve to live.”

  At noon on Wednesday, in the Armed Forces Hospital at Nkwerre, which is run by Colonel Miller Jaja (who was once a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and who is a descendant of the Jaja of Opobo, who led a revolt against the slave trade in the early 1860s), Major Dennis Umeh, a thirty-one-year-old surgeon who enlisted in the army on the day before the war, said the hospital had been twice strafed and bombed by MiGs. “We didn’t complain,” he said. “This is a military hospital.” There are two thousand patients in the hospital, which was once St. Augustine’s Grammar School, and five thousand more in a large complex across the road. The matron, Major Mary Onyejiaka, is a thirty-four-year-old nurse who once served in the Nigerian Army. She makes the rounds of the enormous complex twice a week.

  “I happen to have had the luck to be in the first unit at Nsukka,” Major Umeh said. “We got the wounded well and back to the war zones very quickly.” He paused and nodded. “Most who are still alive would agree that this is so.” Now, he said, because of the malnutrition, recoveries are slower, but only three or four casualties die per ward per month. “They are a pitiable lot,” he said. “But they linger on and they make it. I think it is battalion pride.” He laughed. “And the food at the front is better.” There are only nine qualified doctors and four medical students at Nkwerre, and only one operating theater, with four operating tables. Quite often, when the hospital has to ease conditions on the heavy fronts, casualties are lined up to wait outside the theater. “It increases the morbidity but not the mortality,” Major Umeh said; that is, patients stay sick longer, but they do not die. I asked how families in Biafra receive word of wounded soldiers, and Major Umeh spoke of Noticas (Notice of Casualties), which sends couriers to the parents and the units of the hurt.

  Major Umeh took me through the huge wards, named for their ailments, and a few tents of wounded outside. Some people in Fractures were singing; Dental seemed rather miserable. He pointed out delicate makeshift operations like Dr. Udekwu’s, and he paused in a little X-ray room to warn a technician not to tell a patient of some harmless mortar particles left in his leg. “They are so sensitive,” he said, “that if you tell them they will suffer.” But he was most proud of the hospital’s pharmacy, in which some young scientists were producing dextrose, extracting painkillers and tranquilizers from mixed pills (for the tetanus and artillery cases), analyzing native remedies (“It is like deciphering a code,” a young scientist said), and making pills in test tubes. The pharmacy cannot produce antibiotics yet, but not, the major emphasized, for lack of knowledge, only for lack of facilities. “Give us two years of peace and we will do it,” he said. “The lowered resistance of our patients to germs sometimes puts us back to square one.”

  I asked whether the pharmacy could produce enough painkillers for the front, and he said, “Oh, yes. Most of them should be asleep when they get here.”

  A major from one of the battle zones was in the hospital, visiting his men. I asked what unit he was from, and how many of his men were in the hospital, and then realized he could not tell me. Major Umeh was preoccupied. “The world ought to see us in our goodness,” he said. “We value life. We have always done well on exams. We only want to have a peaceful life and contribute something to humanity.”

  On Wednesday afternoon, in the office of the Directorate of Research and Production, at Isu, Professor Ben Nwosu, tired and angry, asked me to understate the accomplishments of his team of scientists. “In the white world, they would call them inventions,” he said. “Because we are black, they call them improvisations. Some time before the crisis, a handful of us just thought, If this thing starts, we want to be ready.” Since then, the directorate has produced fuel, soap, rockets, booby traps, armored cars (out of tractors), gunboats, and civilian products of various kinds. People bring all sorts of scrap and spare parts to Professor Nwosu’s directorate, but “the supply problem still advances upon us,” he said. He was extremely bitter about the world’s suspicion of the real intentions of Biafra. “We don’t woolly-woolly. We didn’t have to come back here. I wonder why people in the outside think we came back here. We are struggling because we want to save our lives as a people, and our children’s lives.”

  I asked how his mechanics could possibly manufacture sophisticated arms without having centralized factories, which would be subject to bombings. “It is simple,” he said, abruptly. “If you have ten lathes, you diffuse them in ten places. The result is the same.”

  On Thursday morning at seven, Sister Mary Joseph Theresa, daughter of the Eze Dara of Uli and sister of both a lady barrister and an engineer in Professor Nwosu’s directorate, left the Ihioma Convent and went to the Queen of the Holy Rosary College, a school she had run at Onitsha (now disrupted) and started again at Orlu, with refugee children from all over Biafra. Sister Mary Joseph had also been a refugee, successively, from Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Owerri, and Nguru. “Running from my friends,” she said. “I call them ‘my friends.’ I have nothing against them. We are all human beings. We are fighting because the Devil is there.”

  Sister Mary Joseph comes from one of the finest families in Biafra, and looks it—tall, frail, and radiant with intelligence, dressed somehow, in the mud and still-spattering rain, in a habit of immaculate white. Most children in Biafra have lost two years of school now, and Sister Mary Joseph recruited six teachers out of fifteen from her school in Onitsha (two are in the army, one is in the Directorate of Research and Production, and one in the police) to teach in a section of a refugee camp at Orlu. “The children have a long way to trek,” she said. “Many have heard of us, and they are coming.” Children, some with, some without shoes and umbrellas, were arriving in the chilling downpour of early morning.

  I asked Sister Mary Joseph whether the school could give them any breakfast or lunch. “My goodness, what would I give them?” she said. “What would I give?”

  I asked whether all her students were Catholics. “Now, we don’t ask them about religion,” she said. “We just say Biafra.”

  There was a brief morning assembly, with hymns in English and in Ibo, and Sister Mary Joseph asked her teachers, whom she had called together, whether they had heard the newest Biafran hymn. “I’ve only heard it in the last two or three days,” she said. “It is the best song yet.” One teacher remarked that new songs travel quickly, since most of Biafra is within fifty miles. “It’s more than that,” another teacher said quickly. Sister Mary Joseph was riffling through an attendance book. “I can’t believe that so much of Biafra is still in our hands,” she said. “They’ve all learned now that there is a God. They can’t deny that.”

  Classes began, separated from one another by raffia partitions, and the youngest class, from eleven to thirteen years old (depending on the loss of those two years), was learning geometry and French. “Bonjour, monsieur” and “Asseyez-vous la classe” and Euclid rang through the refugee home, where adult refugees were staring out at the rain from an adjoining room. “Anyone here know a song, any song?” Sister Mar
y Joseph asked the geometry class, and they sang “God, the Creator, Preserve and Guide Biafra.” She asked the second class whether they knew any writers. Jane Austen. Any Biafran writers? Chinua Achebe. Had they read him? Yes. They returned to the study of cell structure and the soil.

  The third class was learning English expressions (“They don’t care tuppence,” “A yes-man”), and Sister Mary Joseph asked them whether they knew anyone in America. One had a “senior brother” in Baltimore. One had a sister-in-law in California. One had a pre-crisis pen pal in Greenlawn, New York. All of them, in all classes, were extremely eager to answer questions, but Sister Mary Joseph said the fourth was the keenest class. They were all girls. Boys of fifteen in Biafra are eligible for the army. The fourth class had written essays, on lined paper the school had found for them, on “The Horrors of the Nigeria-Biafra War.” (“No place is safe. No one is safe.” “We might appeal to God to make both sides see reason.” “It was also at night that one once felt safe in Biafra.”) Sister Mary Joseph, who served her novitiate in Dublin (she has a trace of an Irish accent), recalled that when she was a child her father, Eze Dara of Uli, had insisted that the whole family learn to read, and so she had learned in the same class with her uncles. She thought that if the loss of schooling in Biafra now continued, there might have to be intergenerational classrooms again after the war. She enumerated all the American representatives who had expressed sympathy for Biafra: Candidate Nixon, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Charles Goodell, Senator Edward Kennedy, Representatives Donald E. Lukens and Allard K. Loewenstein, Ambassador C. Clyde Ferguson—even Senator Richard Russell, of the South. She told the story of a young English lady working in Nigeria who had been caught behind Biafran lines. “The Inspector General detained her,” Sister Mary Joseph said. “Mind you, it was right after the Eighteen [fourteen Italians, three West Germans, and one Jordanian arrested as Nigerian spies]. Poor Sally. The Inspector General didn’t know what to do about her.” Sister Mary Joseph had taken care of the English lady, and accompanied her on the flight to Libreville. Sister Mary Joseph asked me, and even an old friend of hers, to sign the inevitable guestbook. She mentioned another old friend, whom she had not seen in a long time. “I would need about two days to look for him,” she said, “since we are all so dispersed now.”

  At a checkpoint on a particularly bad road full of stalled cars twenty miles from Owerri, an official of State House gave the code word in Ibo for General Odumegwu Ojukwu, and was told by the guard, in English, “He passed here at a quarter to eight.” Driving on, the official recalled the circumstances of His Excellency’s delivery, on June 1 this year, of a speech on the second anniversary of Biafran independence, in the town of Ahiara. The speech, now referred to as “the Ahiara Declaration,” or “Ahiara,” or even just “June First,” had an enormous impact in Biafra. It is twenty-one dense pages long. It includes thoughts as complicated in their expression, and as characteristic of General Ojukwu, as the dedication to his first book (which will be published in November): “To the many sons and daughters whose fathers toiled and tramped with me, and are gone.” Another sort of leader might have said, “To the Biafran orphans.” The Ahiara Declaration recounts some of Biafra’s recent history and concludes that the reason the two-year war has not won more of the world’s unambivalent sympathy is that the Biafran people are black. But it deplores insufficient idealism within Biafra, and its political philosophy might be endorsed by anyone from Thomas Jefferson through Fidel Castro to Senator John Sherman Cooper (“The Biafran revolution believes in the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person . . . the reign of social and economic justice, and the rule of law”). And yet there is the sense of something new, something genuinely humanist and indigenously African about it. Also pride, religion, and despair.

  In a military compound, heavily camouflaged, about fifteen miles from Owerri, several chiefs and elders, in long robes and still engaged in conversation, were coming out of the office of General Ojukwu, past a sentry at the door. In a reception room with a blue rug, flowered curtains, red chairs, green walls, and a little white Madonna on a coffee table (altogether more like a room in an inn, made livable by transients, than like part of a military installation), a few young associates of General Ojukwu were waiting for him. Some of them seemed abject and ingratiating, others full of high spirits and a sense of argument. General Ojukwu himself, thirty-six years old, bearded, not slim, educated at Oxford and, much later, at Warminster, came in and slumped in a chair. He looked sad, ready for a joke, and thoughtful, with a brooding gentleness pushed to an extreme that could make a war leader out of a doubting, nonviolent man. He seemed to have the quality of the sort of person who can make people in a church sit still and be decent when all the exits are burning. His father, Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, who began in poverty, became a small investment banker, and died one of the richest men in Nigeria, had objected to almost every stage in his son’s career, from his two years of work as a lower-echelon civil servant in the Eastern Region to his insistence on going to military school. The Nigerian Army was one of the few regionally integrated institutions in Federal Nigeria. When, after the coup of January 1966, military governors were appointed for all the regions of Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu was appointed governor of the Eastern Region. After the massacres of May 1966, still believing in a unified Nigeria, he appealed to Eastern refugees from the Northern Region to go back, assuring them that their lives and property were now safe. He has regretted this decision, in view of the massacres that followed, ever since.

  I asked him what the meeting that had just dispersed had been about. “It’s my regular powwow with the chiefs,” he said. “A morale-boosting session.” I asked him how often he met with them, and he said as often as he could. I asked him what they talked about. “Everything from air raids to the distribution of salt,” he said. “The war situation. The internal situation. Their own personal problems, what the people are thinking, how much of government policy has got down, ways this war has to be fought. Everybody wants to have said something.” He smiled. “Chief Mpi held the floor.”

  I asked how the morale actually was, and he said, “Generally, this is the time for low morale. The rains. The cold. The war usually crawls. People ask, ‘What’s wrong with the army, is it food they want? Is it possible they enjoy this war? Tell me what they need.’ Another position is ‘Is there nothing else we can do, is there no other way?’ Of course, there are those who are more angry than yourself.”

  I asked him whether he felt that the returned intellectuals were rediscovering their own people, and he nodded. “They used to look outside themselves,” he said. “There was even a conscious effort to obliterate their own origin, looking down on those who stayed at home. Now it’s time to come down to earth a bit.”

  He felt the Ahiara Declaration had expressed the real feelings of the people only as “an articulation in international terms.” “I’ve always been aware of one thing, that I’ve never really stood an election,” he said. When I asked him why he thought the Ahiara Declaration had not had much of an impact, particularly among American radicals, abroad, he said it was not the sort of speech to invite “that sort of dramatic response.” He laughed, and said that people had told him they were surprised that “you have managed to mean so much to everyone at the same time.” He spoke of the black “secret admirers” of Biafra, who feared the great unknown and could not believe that Biafra might succeed. I asked him how this compared with the white liberal position, and he said he thought white liberals were more openly sympathetic. “They say, ‘This would be wonderful if it really succeeded.’ They don’t say we won’t succeed.” I asked whether by success he meant the establishment of the first viable black republic, able to compete on an equal basis with white nations of the world, and he said that was exactly what he meant.

  I wondered what the postwar politics of Biafra might be in the world, and he said, “There is no doubt in my mind that to survive we must remain u
ncommitted.” He said he believed that little nations either existed as ideological vacuums or opened up to let the two great ideologies flood them, and that he hoped, in sequels to the Ahiara Declaration, to establish a bulwark position that would do neither. “All conflict, of course,” he said, “arises from the desire to dominate. The way to avoid conflict is to accept the rights of other men. But I do not believe that another ideology would solve the foreign problem.”

  I asked him about his book, and he said it was based on “speeches, random thoughts, random subjects, and a frantic period trying to find the underlying thoughts.” I asked him what stake the world had in Biafra, and he said, “This is the worst system—this colonial, this neocolonial fraud. It can only yield short-term results. There is no logical case against Biafra. There is no properly argued case against Biafra. There is only fear, and the nuisance of having to reevaluate. They do not know what this phenomenon is.” General Ojukwu’s stenographer, as in all the general’s negotiations and interviews, was writing down each word. When I left, the chiefs who had been talking in the corridor were gone.