In a very profound sense, it is us who still live –
especially all here on the internet – that bear the brunt of the Nigerian Civil
War. Thomas Carlyle said, “The crash of
the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once”. The many
dead of Biafra, be they stabbed, or shot, their skulls smashed, or their bodies
mangled, have died once, and now enjoy the impregnable convalescence of the
afterlife. But for us who live, it might be a more gradual death as, every now
and then, a grotesque black and white picture of a kwashikored child surfaces
online (it could be from any Black nation on earth but Nigeria), it deals us
fresh Biafra blows and breaks our hearts all over again. As we recover from it,
we know not when another is coming. In this bafflingly insensitive world,
another is always coming.
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This sentiment is expressed more vividly in Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April when Idris Elba’s
character tried to soothe an old man’s despair after the war in Rwanda. The man
seemed to imply, ‘Oh c’mon! Don’t feel
sorry for me. You have longer to live with it.’ That’s damn right. Thomas
Mann observed and I agree, that “a man’s
dying is more the survivor’s affair than his own”. On this score, grief is
ours, and until we decide otherwise, it always will be. Kurt Vonnegut’s densely
sorrowful account (Biafra: A People
Betrayed) of the last months of the war might help us decide sooner. After the
tears the piece might evoke, some quietude could follow, then some musings, and
then some genuine sense of pride. Then maybe a smile… at the marvelous thought
of the quality of human beings that lived and fought and died in and for Biafra.
With the crudest of arms against the bombardment of a Nigerian government
spuriously backed by the weaponry of Britain and Russia, the Biafrans, in
Martin Luther King Jr.’s terms, were
never pulled down enough by the enemy to hate them.
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When thus you smile, know it that you would have switched
fortunes with some aged man somewhere who has lived seventy or eighty years with
the stench of his wickedness. Whenever the old actually start making excuses,
then they really have none. They look back on their lives and say it was worth
it, that they kept the country together, and that it is still together. Together
doing what?! And at what cost? Together crawling; a 57 year old baby with Down’s
syndrome, still pandering to vested western interests.
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To a very great extent, it was war, so both sides were
justified in their quest for victory; never mind genocide. In one of Vonnegut’s
exchanges on Biafra he writes, "It's
hard to prove genocide," said Hall. "If some Biafrans survive, then
genocide hasn't been committed. If no Biafrans survive, who will complain?"
Elechi Amadi, in his Sunset in Biafra,
acknowledged it was but a war. When he quit the Nigerian Army and showed his
concern for the sufferings of non-combatant Biafrans, a lot of them found their
voices. A gaggle of women besieged him, complaining about serial molestations,
starvation, and rape. He was sympathetic, but urged them none the less to
remember that a war was afoot. People who are killing your men and starving
your children would almost certainly also rape you. Tragic as it may be, it won’t
be the most significant dark spots of the struggle. But it was only as far as killing
and getting killed went that the war was honorable. The Nigerian government eventually
lost the inborn dignity of men, and thought it an allowable part of the
strategies of warfare to starve women and children to death. It was a shameful
affront on humanity. That was Nigeria’s second goof. The first was resisting
the secession in the first place trying to protect a political territory they
neither created nor ran well; trying to hold together a marriage in which the
parties’ interests are so perennially divergent. A marriage they didn’t preside
over, from a courtship they were never in.
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But of all goofs, the most pervasive has been the silence
thence. Nigeria’s Gettysburg, for forty-seven years, has had no one show up on
it to read an address. Save for a National Anthem that many have never sung nor
know how to sing, this country called Nigeria has no rallying cry, no beacon to
mark where our journey began, no compass to point where it leads. What we call
constitution has been serially abused by military incursions and ethnic and
religious precedence. These realities point to a purposeless war on the part of
the Nigerian government who seem content with blaming the deaths of over 2
million supposed Nigerian citizens on one man’s (Ojukwu) ill decision. In place
of one address, one acknowledgment, one motion for redress, what we have are
mischievous pick-aways at our history by many who are intent on distorting the
narrative for heinous reasons.
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Like an amoeba, circumstances between then and now have
continued to assume many shapes. These circumstances have given vent to many
differing emotions and sentiments. Nowhere is it more evident than in the
multiple Biafra movements we’ve been seeing, some even calling out and damning others.
MASSOB, IPOB, BLC, BIM, BZM, ADM, etc… somewhere in this crowd, the golden idea
may be lost. It paints an all too familiar picture, of when the heaven was said
to touch earth, and from the radius where that contact was made distinct
religions that are eternally at loggerheads with each other were born. In our
case, opportunistic tendencies have been threatening to alter the genes of
people whose forebears stood and fell for something noble, activated by the
Ahiara Declaration. Somewhere between Ojukwu and Kanu, the plot may have been
twisted, but it cannot disappear. Water may lure blood to a doomed race, but
the latter being thicker would be saved by its tardiness.
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The ideal Biafran is not vulgar, insolent, or of trivial
character. He will not cajole, coerce, or blackmail anyone into sharing his 30th
May sentiments – especially not from the Nigerian divide – just as Arsenal fans
cannot now subject Chelsea fans to an English FA Cup celebration. That the FA
Cup trophy is one proves that whoever wants it is ready to undo his neighbor to
clinch it. Hence, nothing Chelsea does to Arsenal can amount to a desecration,
instead, only Arsenal can ridicule themselves. Desecration is the abuse of
something revered; people who do not revere a thing therefore do not have the
capacity to desecrate it. If anybody needs to carefully gauge their Biafra rhetoric
it is the Biafrans themselves.
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Anyone who receives a new insight on a path the Biafra
struggle should take could do well to find another nomenclature for it. Biafra is
exclusively a product of the Ahiara Declaration, a sublime 48 page document
that mentions the word Igbo only once – and in a demurrable context: “…From this derives our deep conviction that
the Biafran Revolution is NOT just a movement of Igbo, Ibibio, Ijaw and Ogoja.
It is a movement of true and PATRIOTIC AFRICANS. It is African nationalism
conscious of itself and fully aware of the powers with which it is contending.
From this derives our belief that history and humanity are on our side, and
that the Biafran Revolution is INDESTRUCTIBLE and ETERNAL.”
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Are the Igbos having an unfair deal in Nigeria? Yes. Should they
do something about it? Absolutely! But whatever the Igbos do for themselves to
gain politico-economic relevance is no more a Biafran cause than Lionel Messi
is Spanish. The right to self-determination is also theirs; they can ask to
secede. But if it ain’t Biafra, it ain’t. The real Biafra is 50 today; in
another 50 years, nothing would have distorted and discolored history more than
if we put layers and layers of embarrassing epochs between the innocence of our
children to come and the nobility of our fathers gone.
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All the foregoing depend on known circumstances, chiefly,
that the struggle for the actualization of a sovereign state of Biafra is the
Biafrans’ to win or lose. But there is the remote possibility that, the Nigerian
state, out of mischief or rare humaneness, would either grant Biafra leave or wholesomely
restructure Nigeria to comfortably accommodate all. If the former results,
well, when the Wembley showpiece was done and dusted and Arsenal won the trophy,
they cared less about the brash tackles from Chelsea while the game was on;
those were written in as part of the costs of a sweet victory as everyone
departed for their various destinations. In the case of the latter, a question
of forgiveness would be thrown up. It will then bring us face to face with Wole
Soyinka’s dilemma in The Burden of
Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness as dissected by Kirkus Reviews. One question
begs for a non-existent answer:
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How do we tuck away the bitter memories of our bloodied past?
Forgiveness, a salve on the wounds to promote healing, would seem to be the
morally superior option. But is excusing morally outrageous behavior moral or
simply foolish? Perhaps healing requires revenge, an excising of the cancer.
Are we to imagine, for example, a repentant Pol Pot walking the streets like
any other man, freed by the forgiveness of those whom he did not manage to
kill? Soyinka identifies forgiveness as “a value far more humanly exacting than
vengeance” yet cannot swallow the proposition that it will, by itself, suffice.
Something is missing from a process which absolves the perpetrators of tyranny
so completely that they assume the same moral or civil status as those whose
conduct is crime-free. Soyinka’s answer is reparations, a paying back from
victimizer to victim, but even this sits somewhat uneasily. Alas, it is part of
the cost of despicable acts: once committed, there are no longer answers with
which we can be completely comfortable.
Wow!
ReplyDeleteWow!
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