“We have to leave here,” Oba said to his family. “We have to flee.”
The soldiers were making their way south. On July 6, 1967, the federal government in the then capital city of Lagos had launched a full-scale invasion into Biafra. The Nigerian army came in tanks and bombarded the area with artillery. The air force sent bombers and the navy sent missiles and established a sea blockade that denied Biafra food and supplies. The strategy was to slaughter all the Igbo they could and starve the rest. They claimed rivers and roads and bridges, and the flow of food to Igboland stopped altogether.
Oba and his family loaded the car with yams and water and ran from town to town as the Nigerian army came closer.
We went thirty miles to my grandmother’s town, but the soldiers were already there. Rationing food, parents yelling. We moved again. There was nowhere else to move to. We settled there in that town, Nnokwa, where we were for almost two years. Wartime. The teachers had left. We were going to some school, I don’t know what it was or who paid. Food had changed. Now we’re dependent on food supplies dropping from the sky. Egg yolk, corned beef, powdered milk from airplanes, but sometimes the aircraft dropped bombs, one, then the other, you had to tell the difference. You see them. They stick out their heads with their guns and then they bomb residential areas. That was horrible. You don’t wear colorful dress. You don’t wear colorful clothes. You learn where to run and hide. Horrible horrible. We were seeing these men. They come so low! You see them and they drop bombs.
The Igbo were vastly outnumbered and they had no army and they had few weapons and now they were starving—as many as five thousand people a day dying from starvation.
The world took notice, but not, at first, because of the genocide. Because of oil. By claiming an independent Biafra, the Igbo were also claiming the vast oil reserves pooled beneath the ground in the south of the country. British companies had claims on that oil. So the British helped the Nigerian army fight the Igbo; they sent more airplanes and guns, and then the Russians sent arms, and then the United States did—although the United States officially declared itself neutral. Israel, France, Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa helped Biafra.
The Nigerian-Biafran War became famous around the world because of what the Igbo did as their last resort and only fighting chance. Outgunned, outmaneuvered, facing starvation, they waged a public relations war. They sent photos of dying babies to international newspapers: pictures of starving children, their bellies distended and their faces covered with flies. This was something new. Forty percent of the casualties of World War I were civilians, fifty percent in World War II. But now here was a war of one hundred percent civilian casualties, an outright genocide with pictures to personalize it, and soon the world responded. The French charity Doctors Without Borders was created in response to Biafra’s appeal. The Red Cross and churches around the world raised money for Biafran relief. American children took boxes distributed by UNICEF on collection drives sponsored by schools. “Trick or treat for UNICEF!” became a cry in suburban America, the images of the Biafra babies now a symbol of a humanitarian crisis to which citizens of the world would respond if individual governments would not. Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie took up the cause, John Lennon gave back his Member of the Order of the British Empire medal to the Queen of England in symbolic support, Kurt Vonnegut wrote screeds, Martin Luther King Jr. gave speeches, as more and more planes flew over the Igbo people delivering dried milk and rice and blocks of dried fish. Food was the main issue. As many as two million Igbo lost their lives, fewer than ten percent of them killed by military gunfire. The rest starved to death.
—
And so it was in the midst of this that Bennet came. My daddy was gone for food. We were all waiting. We knew a baby was coming. Exciting. A baby! And we were all waiting for Daddy to come with our food. The air raid came about 2 P.M. These aircraft. So my father was coming out of the town building where they were distributing food, he was running and he fell. He was blown up, explosions everywhere, and while he was lying down there, he couldn’t move, he didn’t realize why he couldn’t move. He looked up and saw his car—that car. That car was everything. Next thing he saw he was in hospital. Somebody rescued him and drove him in that car. My mom didn’t believe.
Bennet was born in September 1968 in Nnokwa. One child among the seven million Igbo refugees boxed into the Biafran enclave.
Oba’s body was filled with shrapnel and he was patched up in the same hospital where Bennet had just been born. The doctor who had delivered Bennet tended to Oba. His name was Ifeakandu, which means “life is the greatest gift of all.” He brought the baby to Oba. “Ifeakandu,” Oba said. “That will be his name.” This middle name would memorialize Oba’s miraculous survival from the air raids. Bennet was said to be the angel who bore the miracle. Bennet, meaning “blessed,” would be the child’s first name.
In its entirety, then, the newborn’s full name carried a specific and ominous weight:
Blessed.
Life is the greatest gift of all.
If you know, come forth and speak.
Biafra surrendered in 1970. The food falling from the sky had only prolonged the inevitable. Oba was reabsorbed into the Nigerian Department of Mineral Resources but at a much lower rank; the family’s privileged economic and social status was no longer. They came back to reclaim the compound in Enugwu-Ukwu, but it had been destroyed in the war, all their belongings gone. So they began rebuilding.
Nobody said “Biafra” anymore. Igbo graveyards were bulldozed by a Nigerian army that was trying to erase physical reminders of the war. The Bight of Biafra was renamed the Bight of Bonny. Biafra Light, the oil pumped from Igboland, got renamed Bonny Light.
When Bennet grew up they didn’t mention Biafra in schools and they didn’t teach the war. It was something that sat in your history, like the shrapnel still in Oba’s body. Your people had been persecuted. It was a wound that was supposed to heal.
—
Bennet started school at age three instead of five like most kids. It had nothing to do with being smart. It was because of the anxiety that overtook him when his brother Chizoba started school.
All of the Omalu children were protected behind the gates of the compound after the war—they were not permitted to leave unless it was in a car and with an adult escort—but Bennet, with his delicate constitution and aversion to physical exertion, was especially pampered. At that time his big brother was his world. His mother was occupied with infant Mie-Mie, and the older siblings were big kids concerned with big-kid matters. Without Chizoba in the house, Bennet was overcome with sorrow. Inconsolable. So they packed him a lunch and sent him to school with Chizoba. And if they were surprised that a boy so much younger could keep up academically with his older peers, they explained it by declaring him a genius. In truth Bennet was simply desperate to be with his brother. If he made himself as smart as the older kids he could remain by Chizoba’s side. Intelligence, he came to understand, was a matter of will.
The plan backfired when it was time to go to secondary school, the equivalent of high school in Nigeria, and Bennet earned entrance into the boarding school for super-smart kids, Federal Government College. That was special. That brought honor to the whole family. It would be a place for Bennet’s mind to grow and soar.
But Chizoba didn’t get into the smart-kid school. He was sent to the regular school across town.
So now Bennet was alone. Twelve years old, starting high school, living in a dorm with thirty strange, loud boys.
The first months did not go well. His mom came every other weekend with home-cooked yam porridge, ogbonu soup, and other delicacies for him, hoping to ease the transition. One Saturday, when she didn’t come, Bennet paced in the bathroom like a prisoner. He panicked. He needed Chizoba. He needed his mom. There was a window overlooking the avocado trees and he plotted his escape. He rationalized his decision to bust loose by saying, hey, the cool kids are always sneaking out, hitching rides into town, sm
oking cigarettes, or doing other crazy things. He was sneaking out more as a lifesaving mission.
Still in his uniform shirt and tie, he climbed out the first-floor window, scooted out the school gates, and ran toward the main road. A car was approaching and so he dived at once into the culvert, the deep, dank gutter. It was horrifying and exhilarating all at the same time, a secret, forbidden adventure. He kept running and when he got to town he stopped to catch his breath and walked. He realized, in that moment, that he had never walked down a street by himself. Twelve years old and this was the first time.
Fear overcame him with a thunderous clap on his chest and up his spine. He was not allowed to do this. There must have been a reason he was not allowed to do this. Surely something bad was going to happen.
He began to sweat and he did not like the wet feeling. He began to pant, his chest heaving. He felt he was discovering the real world for the first time that day and he did not like it. There was…trash. It was disgusting. People were loud, yelling about the price of milk. There were cows curled up in the beds of pickup trucks, legs tied to horns, live cows curled up for sale and transport. The goats bleated vomit sounds and were smelly and people stepped in the excrement of those goats. People without shoes. Where were their shoes? In his family everyone wore shoes. Girls carrying plates of kola nuts on their heads came after him begging for money. Well, this was a horrible place! He ran, and he ran; he ran five miles home, and when he arrived at the gate his mother saw him and dropped her bag of onions. She scooped him up. “What is wrong? What happened? What have you done?”
He was dirty, sweating, crying about those horrible streets and all those strangers and one man picking his teeth. He sobbed in her arms about the horribleness of the real world. She stripped him naked and put him in the tub to scrub the filth of Nigeria off him. “I’m sorry, my baby boy. My precious baby boy.”
—
“He can’t take the real world,” Bennet’s mother said to Winny one day, recalling the events of Bennet’s terrifying journey out on the streets alone. Two years had passed and stud-ious Bennet seemed emotionally equipped for little beyond his life of books. “He is too fragile,” his mom said to Winny. A pampered angel. What happens to the angel when he grows up?
“We will take care of him,” Winny said. “We will find him a place where he will never know sorrow or ugliness.” Winny was already in college when Bennet was off trying to survive secondary school. Like everyone else in the family, she adored her baby brother. “But right now we have to support him, Mommy. We have to go watch.”
“I don’t think I can,” her mother said.
It was spring, Bennet was fourteen, and word had come back from the headmaster at school that he had joined the track team.
“Track,” her mother said. “That is…running.”
“I know, Mommy,” Winny said.
“But why would he volunteer for something that involves perspiration? He hates sweat.”
“I don’t know,” Winny said. The important thing was that today was his first track meet and they would need to go support him, she said.
They drove through town and worried together if Bennet had the constitution to do an athletic event. Perhaps the fresh air would make him keel over, they joked. They sat on the bleachers and popped open an umbrella to shield the sun. Bennet came out in his running shorts and Winny reached for her mother’s hand as if to say, “Do not laugh.” He was tiny compared to the other kids. Square, and short. Holding his hands on his hips, studying the posture of the tall boys and trying to assume it, kicking at the dirt like the tall boys.
They watched Bennet stretching his skinny chicken legs and prepared themselves for his humiliation. Why in the world was he running track? Perhaps this represented some newfound courage or maturity. They worked on optimism but mustered little. Bennet was running the 4 x 100-meter relay, and he was positioned to be the last runner on his team to pick up the baton and run with it to the finish line.
“Oh, Mommy—” Winny said.
“Oh, Winny—” her mom said, and she wrapped her arm around her.
—
The gun goes off. The ground beneath his thin track shoes is soft. It’s kind of bouncy, he thinks. He would like sunglasses but it seems kids here don’t wear sunglasses. He can see that his mom and his big sister Winny have come to watch. They probably think he actually wants to run track. They probably think this is a sign of something good.
The reason Bennet has decided to run track has nothing to do with running. Mainly he wants to look at Christy’s thighs. He has discovered one good thing about school and it is Christy. He goes to bed each night thinking about her. He would like to speak to her someday. But that is a long way off. People who run track wear shorts and when he heard Christy saying she was going to run track he knew he would get to see her in shorts. He had been imagining her thighs for some time. The first time he saw them, firm, arching like palm trees, he felt so much excitement it was like a drug and he wanted more. After he runs this relay he will get to watch Christy run, watch her thighs move through the air like missiles.
Four runners, four more waiting for the baton. It’s kind of boring waiting. He has figured out what he wants to do with his life when he grows up and a lot of it has to do with Christy. He loves girls. He loves girls so much. Nobody prepared him for this feeling of loving girls and it has come on with such a wallop. What he wants to do with his life is talk to girls. Some day he will do it. He has not once spoken to a girl who isn’t a relative. When he grows up he will talk to so many girls, girls in every city of the world. He will be an airline pilot and he will have girls in every city he flies into, and he will talk to them and hold them. He will buy them condominiums and they will wait for him in the condominiums, wait for him to fly in. Then he will fly to the next one. And then the next. It will be his own airplane and he will have to keep it running on time. He will treat the girls with respect and he will never be late and he will buy them presents.
The third runner has the baton and soon it will be Bennet’s turn. His team is keeping up. Where is Christy? He can’t see her in the crowd but she will be here, he knows it, as soon as he finishes running this race it will be her turn. He’s thinking about speeding up the plane to get to Paris because he will not be a man who makes a girl in Paris wait. It will take a lot of determination. If he isn’t on time he could lose the girl in Paris and then the girl in Rome and the girl in Dubai. He will send them flowers and jewelry but that won’t be enough. He has to hurry, has to put his foot on the gas or whatever a pilot does to an airplane to make it go supersonic. His future depends on it and he will just have to do it.
The third runner on his team is approaching, his face tight with resolve, mouth stretched and cheeks bouncing and eyes like coyote eyes. But then, with no warning, that boy trips. Down on the ground, a roll and then a scramble. Bennet can see his mother and Winny standing up as if saying, “Oh, no!” because now Bennet won’t even get a chance with the baton and his team will lose. Right now losing is not an option. “Get up! Get up! Get up!” Bennet screams to the boy on the ground. And Bennet runs, runs back to the boy who fell, runs like a crazy child for the baton when it is clearly so hopeless and then he grabs it, and like fire turns toward the finish line and he knows what he has to do.
Doing what he has to do! He is violating some important international airspace law, and a few principles of physics probably. And he can go faster still. Rocket scientists will turn to their calculators to come up with new laws of orbital mechanics because of how fast he can go.
Winny has both her arms wrapped tight around her mom’s waist as she watches Bennet run toward the finish line that day. Oh, Bennet, run! And it isn’t that Bennet begins to sprint so fast, legs a blur of circles inside circles, running toward the finish faster, faster, from so far behind overtaking the other kids, one, then the next, then the next, in the most uncharacteristic burst of athleticism—that is not the most remarkable part. The most remarkab
le part is the sound coming out of Bennet’s mouth, a guttural explosion, agghghgh! as he runs, AGGHGHGH! loud like a full-throttle fighter jet blasting over the hills of Enugu.
Impossibly, Bennet wins the race that day, despite the boy on his team who fell; Bennet grabbed that baton and carried it triumphantly over the finish line, and Winny and her mother flopped back on the bench with exhaustion and wonderment.
What was that noise coming out of him? Who was this boy?
—
After family brunch in the village compound on a warm Sunday when Bennet was fifteen, his father called him into the obu, the receiving room with the big velvet chair, to talk to him about what he would do with his life. His mother sat in the corner, stitching a hem.
“I will become an airline pilot and travel around the world,” Bennet said. He was excited about the plan, had been dreaming about it all year.
Oba grinned, picked up a bottle of cognac, popped out the cork, and poured. “Oh, Bennet,” he said. His voice was a deep baritone, and he was a very large, fleshy man; the overall effect was of a tuba. “My silly boy.”
One thing about being the angel who represented everything good that ever happened to your family is you didn’t have a lot of movement in terms of identity. That was pretty much already solidified the day you were born. From that point on, your main job was to fulfill expectations.
Bennet felt stupid for saying he wanted to be an airline pilot and he reached for the drawer on the long table and he opened it. He was relieved to see that his bottle caps were still there. The Fanta team, the Sprite team, the Ginger Ale team, and the Heineken team. Table soccer, his private game, just him and his bottle caps all those summers when Chizoba was out in the compound, playing real soccer with real people. Each team comprised ten players and a goalkeeper, and in the off-season they lived in paper boxes that fit neatly inside the drawer and kept everyone organized. The boxes doubled as goals. The thick caps of brandy were the coaches and the wine corks were refs. He used the caps of BIC pens to move the players. The balls were pellets of squished aluminum foil. He loved those teams. He loved that game. He built Ginger Ale a big trophy from the foils of cigarette packets—a bigger trophy than he ever built for Coke. Just because it was truly remarkable the way Ginger Ale pulled out that victory and he wanted to do something special for them.
Concussion Page 3
