There Was a Country: A Memoir

by Chinua Achebe

  REFUGEE MOTHER AND CHILD (A MOTHER IN A REFUGEE CAMP)

  No Madonna and Child could touch

  Her tenderness for a son

  She soon would have to forget. . . .

  The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,

  Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs

  And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps

  Behind blown-empty bellies. Most mothers there

  Had long ceased to care, but not this one;

  She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,

  And in her eyes the memory

  Of a mother’s pride. . . . She had bathed him

  And rubbed him down with bare palms.

  She took from the bundle of their possessions

  A broken comb and combed

  The rust-colored hair left on his skull

  And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.

  In their former life this was perhaps

  A little daily act of no consequence

  Before his breakfast and school; now she did it

  Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.1

  Life in Biafra

  The Nigeria-Biafra conflict created a humanitarian emergency of epic proportions. Millions of civilians—grandparents, mothers, fathers, children, and soldiers alike—flooded the main highway arteries between towns and villages fleeing the chaos and conflict. They traveled by foot, by truck, by car, barefoot, with slippers, in wheelbarrows, many in worn-out shoes. Some had walked so long their soles were blistered and bleeding. As hunger and thirst grew, so did despair, confusion, and desperation. Most were heading in whatever direction the other was headed, propelled by the latest rumors of food and shelter spreading through the multitude like a virus. Refugees were on the move in no specific direction, anywhere, just away from the fighting. As they fled the war zones they became targets of the Nigerian air force. The refugees learned to travel nights and hide in the forests by day.

  The international relief agencies started responding to the growing humanitarian challenge quite early in the conflict by establishing food distribution centers and refugee camps. There were many Biafran refugee camps dotting the landscape, from Enugu in the north to Owerri in the south, during the thirty-month conflict. Many held between a few hundred and a few thousand people. At the height of the war there were well over three thousand such centers and camps, a great number but woefully inadequate to the actual need.1

  These camps were often hastily constructed tent villages set up beside bombed-out churches, in football or sports arenas, or in open fields in the forest. They uniformly lacked electricity, running water, or other comforts. Occasionally, the more established camps had sturdier shelters on the premises of abandoned schools or colleges, or built near freshwater streams or little rivers. Those were few and far between. Most had rows of mud huts and palm raffia roofs built hastily by the inhabitants themselves. They were occasionally fenced in by the international agencies, which placed guards on the camp perimeter to monitor movement in and out of the area. The relief agencies often hoisted their flags to indicate to the Nigerian officers that they were in neutral zones that should be protected from assault. That did not always keep the Nigerian troops from raiding these “safe havens,” or even from bombing them.

  Life in the camps varied in quality. Some of the better organized camps provided water, shelter, food, basic health care—mainly vaccinations for children against the most prevalent diseases, and treatment of common bacterial infections—and education. Other camps could only be described as deplorable, epidemic-ridden graveyards. In these camps the combination of poor sanitation, high population density, and shortages of supplies created a bitter cocktail of despair, giving rise to social pathologies and psychological traumas of all kinds—violence, extortion, and physical and sexual abuse.

  —

  My siblings and their families returned to my father’s house in Ogidi from various parts of the country. My family did too: Christie and my children at the time, Chinelo and Ike, left Port Harcourt for my family’s ancestral home.

  My village is about six miles from Onitsha, the commercial hub of Eastern Nigeria and the location of the largest market in West Africa. Onitsha is also where the famous Niger Bridge is located, and so it serves as the entry point for all travelers entering the East from points west. The close proximity of Ogidi to Onitsha meant that we were in the eye of the storm, as it were, right at the border of the conflict. We were so close to the war zone we could hear the sounds of war—heavy artillery fire, bombs, and machine-gun fights.2

  By the time I left Lagos to join my family in Ogidi, there were rumors that the Nigerian army was not that far behind. Casting my mind back, I am surprised at how little pandemonium there was during the early stages of the conflict. Families casually began to move deeper into the countryside to prepare for the inevitability of war.

  Food was short, meat was very short, and drugs were short. Thousands—no, millions by then—had been uprooted from their homes and brought into safer areas, but where they really had no relatives, no property; many of them lived in school buildings and camps. The Committee for Biafran Refugees, understandably overwhelmed, did what it could. I found it really quite amazing how much people were ready to give.

  Beyond the understandable trepidation associated with a looming war, one found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not know existed, a determination, in fact. The spirit was that of a people ready to put in their best and fight for their freedom. Biafran churches made links to the persecution of the early Christians, others on radio to the Inquisition and the persecution of the Jewish people. The prevalent mantra of the time was “Ojukwu nye anyi egbe ka anyi nuo agha”—“Ojukwu give us guns to fight a war.” It was an energetic, infectious duty song, one sung to a well-known melody and used effectively to recruit young men into the People’s Army (the army of the Republic of Biafra). But in the early stages of the war, when the Biafran army grew quite rapidly, sadly Ojukwu had no guns to give to those brave souls.

  But the most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was that they were finally in a safe place . . . at home. This was the first and most important thing, and one could see this sense of exhilaration in the effort that the people were putting into the war. Young girls, for example, had taken over the job of controlling traffic. They were really doing it by themselves—no one asked them to. That this kind of spirit existed made us feel tremendously hopeful. Clearly something had happened to the psyche of an entire people to bring this about.

  Richard West, a British journalist, was so captivated by the meticulous nature with which Biafrans conducted the affairs of state that he wrote a widely cited article in which he lamented: “Biafra is more than a human tragedy. Its defeat, I believe, would mark the end of African independence. Biafra was the first place I had been to in Africa where the Africans themselves were truly in charge.”3

  —

  Soon after I arrived in Ogidi we were told that Nigerian soldiers, led by Murtala Muhammed, were trying to cross the Niger Bridge from Asaba into Onitsha, and were being kept at bay by the Biafran colonel Achuzia (aka “Air Raid” Achuzia). Shuwa’s troops were marching into Igbo land across the Benue River in the north at the same time. There was quite an overwhelming sense of anxiety in the air.

  We had all gone to bed on one particular night—my family, Augustine and his family, and Frank and his family. We did not realize that Biafran soldiers had set up their armory outside my father’s house, on the veranda, the porch, and outside in the yard. The house was in a choice location, atop a small hill, and was clearly chosen by the army as a perfect site from which to shell the advancing Nigerian army and to surprise them with sniper fire.

  By this time in the war we—at least some of us—had gotten used to sleeping with the
sound of shelling and explosions, and occasional howls of pain and what some villagers called “the stench of death.” Others would recount that they did not sleep a wink through the war, an exaggeration of course, but a valid point nonetheless; sleeplessness was endemic. On this particular night we were oblivious to what was going on outside our father’s house. While we were sleeping the Biafran army was turning our ancestral home into a military base of sorts. No one asked us for permission. They did not knock to ask or to inform. In hindsight, what happened next was enough to have caused sudden cardiac arrest in some people. We all were awakened violently from sleep by a loud ka-boom!, followed by the rattling of the house foundation and walls, indeed of the entire house. A number of people who were asleep fell off their beds, violently ushered back into reality by the vibrations, the shock, and the noise of the artillery fire outside. It was awful.

  The men in the house went outside to find out what was going on. A colonel who was in charge of this exercise explained that they had decided to use our home as a tactical base because it provided them a logistical and strategic advantage as they shelled the encroaching federal troops. Surely it was time for us to leave.

  The Abagana Ambush

  On March 25, 1968, the Second Division of the Nigerian army finally broke through the Biafran resistance and entered Onitsha. (The federal troops had failed the first attempt to cross the Niger, suffering great casualties at the hands of Achuzia’s guerrilla army; this was the second attempt.) Their plan following this development was to link up these federal troops with the forces of the First Division, led by Colonel Shuwa, that were penetrating the Igbo heartland from the north. The amalgamation of these two forces, the Nigerian army hoped, would then serve as a formidable force that would “smash the Biafrans.”1 Colonel Murtala Muhammed hastily deployed a convoy of ninety-six vehicles and four armored cars to facilitate this plan on March 31, 1968.

  Biafran intelligence was swift to respond, and it informed Major Johnathan Uchendu, who formulated an elaborate plan. He arranged a seven-hundred-man-strong counterattack that essentially sealed off the Abagana Road. He commanded his troops to lie in ambush in the forest near Abagana, waiting patiently for the advancing Nigerians and their reinforcements. Major Uchendu’s strategy proved to be highly successful. His troops destroyed Muhammed’s entire convoy within one and a half hours. All told the Nigerians suffered about five hundred casualties. There was minimal loss of life on the Biafran side.

  Very few federal soldiers survived this ambush, and those who did were found walking dazed and aimless in the bush. There were widespread reports of atrocities perpetrated by angry Igbo villagers who captured these wandering soldiers. One particularly harrowing report claimed that a mob of villagers cut their capture into pieces. I was an eyewitness to one such angry blood frenzy of retaliation after a particularly tall and lanky soldier—clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali—wandered into an ambush of young men with machetes. His lifeless body was found mutilated on the roadside in a matter of seconds. “Gifts” of poisoned water–filled calabashes were left in strategic places throughout the deserted villages to “welcome” the thirsty federal troops.

  My elder sister’s family took refuge in Nnobi during all this commotion, the town where I was born. My father had settled there as a catechist and a teacher half a century earlier. The hosts of my sister and her family began to tell them that it was from my father that the people of that village learned to eat rice about fifty years before his children returned to this bucolic town as refugees. The host, a man of great consideration and taste, proclaimed that he was, therefore, going to cook rice for my sister’s family to salute my father. There were attempts to humanize our existence despite the horrors that surrounded us all. Life went on as much as the people could manage it.

  Through it all, there was a great deal of humor. I remember one occasion after an air raid—and these are really horrible things—somebody saw two vultures flying very high up, and he said, “That is a fighter and a bomber,” and everybody burst into laughter. It was a very poor joke, I know, but laughter helped everyone there keep their sanity . . . that is, if you wanted to survive.

  I did not realize how I was being affected by living under those circumstances until I traveled out of Biafra on a mission to England. I heard planes taking off and landing at Heathrow Airport, and my first instinct was to duck under safe cover.2

  AIR RAID

  It comes so quickly

  the bird of death

  from evil forests of Soviet technology

  A man crossing the road

  to greet a friend

  is much too slow.

  His friend cut in halves

  has other worries now

  than a friendly handshake

  at noon1

  The Citadel Press

  News filtered in that life approached some semblance of normalcy far away from the immediate arenas of war. A few weeks after my arrival in Ogidi I was informed that there was a job opening in Enugu, so I packed up my family at my father’s house and headed farther east into Igbo land, and, we hoped, away from the war zone.

  Christopher Okigbo left his work at Cambridge University Press in Ibadan, where he served as Cambridge’s West Africa manager. He suddenly appeared in Enugu a few weeks after I arrived from Lagos. By the time we all arrived back in Eastern Nigeria, after escaping the massacres across the rest of the country, it became clear to me that it would be beneficial to the cause of Biafra if intellectuals worked together to support the war effort. Christopher came to me and requested that we establish a publishing house. It immediately seemed to me to be a very good idea, for we believed it was necessary at this time to publish books, especially children’s books, that would have relevance to our society.

  This was something we felt very strongly about. We felt we wanted to develop literature for children based on local thought, and we set up a firm called The Citadel Press. Biafra declared its independence while we were developing our plans, and we were more confident than ever that what we were doing was good for the cause. Christopher proceeded to get a plot of land in a key area of Enugu off one of the city’s major thoroughfares—today’s Michael Okpara Avenue.

  It was a very strategic piece of land at the commercial nerve center of the future capital of Biafra, Enugu. The building that was erected had a few rooms—one for Christopher, one for me, one for our secretary, one area for printing and publishing machinery, and a smaller one was a toilet. Christopher made all the arrangements himself. That was his nature: He would get the work done before even broaching the subject, so that when you eventually agreed to his idea (something he was sure you would), he would then release a torrent of information, in this case about the office location, its design, and what the building would cost us.

  The first book we worked on was called How the Leopard Got Its Claws. John Iroaganachi, a talented author, submitted a manuscript of a version of the African myth “How the Dog Became a Domesticated Animal,” which Professor Ernest Emenyonu relates “abounds in various versions in many African cultures.”1 Christopher and I realized immediately that we wanted a different story, more or less, and decided to spend some time on it. Iroaganachi’s story transformed into something entirely different as I worked on it, and began to take and find avenues and openings in a way that the original narrative hadn’t. Christopher in particular was put off by the subservient character of the dog in the original version and was delighted to see the next incarnation of the story. To be certain that everyone was on the same page, Christopher asked Iroaganachi if he was ready to see his original story transformed. Iroaganachi had no problem with the changes we had suggested, and we settled on a joint authorship for our first book, between me, John Iroaganachi, and Okigbo, who wrote a powerful poem, “Lament of the Deer,” on my invitation.

  Christopher was seen less often as the war intensified.
I kept on working at the office, and he came back whenever he had some time, and we discussed a number of matters.2 The war clearly influenced the crafting of the new story. In the second version the leopard is the king of animals and is a peaceful and wise king. One day he is cast out by tyrants, led by the dog, into the cold, wet wilderness. The leopard seeks help from the blacksmith, who makes teeth and claws of steel for him, Thunder and Lightning, that grant him his roar and strength. Then he returns to his kingdom to retake his throne, punish the usurpers, and banish the dog to the services of man in perpetuity. In the end the new story not only turned the ancient African fable on its head but also clearly had manifestations of the Biafran story embedded in it.

  The Ifeajuna Manuscript

  Christopher and I encountered a wide variety of projects during our time at Citadel Press. Emmanuel Ifeajuna, one of the so-called five majors who executed the January 15, 1966, coup d’état, presented a manuscript to Christopher, and he excitedly brought it to me. I too was excited to receive it; I opened the package it came in and began to read it. It was the story of the military coup. I read the treatise through quickly and became more and more disappointed as I went along.

  Ifeajuna’s account showcased a writer trying to pass himself off as something that he wasn’t. For one, the manuscript claimed that the entire coup d’état was his show, that he was the chief strategist, complete mastermind, and executer, not just one of several. He recognized the presence of his coconspirators but did not elevate their involvement to any level of importance.

  The other problem I noted was the inconsistencies in the narrative. For instance, the group of coup plotters are said to have met in a chalet at a catering guest house in Enugu at night, and because what they were doing was very dangerous, there was no light in the room, and they all sat in pitch darkness. Despite the darkness, Ifeajuna, our narrator, goes on to say: “I stood up and addressed them while watching their faces and noting their reactions.” The whole account was replete with exaggerations that did not ring true.