By Donu Kogbara, The Africa Report, May 30, 2024
Despite the Biafra war being one of the deadliest in African history, Nigeria has done nothing to commemorate the millions of innocent lives lost.
I returned from Kigali a few days ago. The highlight of my trip was a harrowing visit to a museum commemorating the million or so Rwandese people who were slaughtered during a genocide that shocked the world in 1994.
250,000 victims of that vicious Tutsi/Hutu conflict are buried on the premises, so it’s a cemetery as well as a place of remembrance and learning.
In my 20s, I toured Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, in appalled silence. Situated on a 45-acre campus and comprising museums, exhibitions, monuments, sculptures and memorial sites, it is an impressive tribute to the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Nazi era.
On 30 May 1967, the secessionist Republic of Biafra was declared by Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the then governor of Nigeria’s Eastern region, following deadly tensions between Northerners and members of the Igbo ethnic group.
The Igbos were joined by some minorities from the region that is known as the Niger Delta today.
‘Clear memories of the civil war’
Examples of senior non-Igbos who supported Biafra as a matter of principle include Ojukwu’s Ibibio Deputy, Major General Philip Asuquo Effiong, and my father Ignatius Suage Kogbara, the Biafran ambassador to the United Kingdom and an Ogoni from Rivers State.
I have very clear memories of the civil war. I was 7 years old when it started and 10 when it ended on January l5th 1970.
I will never forget my totally stressed mother, Anne, driving my three siblings and me out of Port Harcourt in the family’s grey Ford Cortina as Federal troops (the enemy!) advanced on the city we called home.
I recall an enraged Biafran army officer shooting, one-by-one, panicking policemen who had hopped onto their bicycles and joined the exodus from Port Harcourt, alongside fleeing women and children, instead of staying behind to help our soldiers and able-bodied male civilians fight the invaders to the finish.
By then, my father was in London, representing the rebel government; and I recall being stuck in a long queue of escaping vehicles, taking refuge a Southeastern village where the natives ate lizards to survive and eventually being airlifted out of Biafra in the dead of night on a cargo plane from an airstrip in a town called Uli.
By 1968, we were safely ensconced in Daddy’s residence in a salubrious part of London; and I still feel guilty about the fact that we got out at the height of a massive humanitarian crisis, leaving so many friends, relatives and strangers to suffer the horrors of a war that wasn’t their fault.
‘Singular reason for the creation of Doctors Without Borders’
Biafra was the world’s first fully televised war and a very big deal. Between one and three million Biafrans died, mostly from starvation.
Images of hollow-eyed youngsters with distended bellies filled TV screens across the globe. Many of us heard, for the first time, about kwashiokor – a form of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency.
According to the distinguished US-based Igbo writer and academic, Chigozie Obioma: “The Biafran War of Independence was an internecine war the scale of which Africa had never seen when it took place. Most of those who died were non-combatants.
“It was the singular reason for the creation of Doctors Without Borders and it is believed that more small weapons (hand grenades, rifles, etc) were used in it than in World War II.”
Where is the Biafran memorial?
So why have the Nigerian authorities never erected a memorial to those who lost their lives and endured unspeakable agonies?
Yes, we lost the war – another vivid memory that will never leave me is of my father waking me and my sister up to tell us that the war was over and consoling us as we wept inconsolably.
If we were a serious nation, nobody would have to ask this question! It is a measure of Nigeria’s small-mindedness that Biafra has not been properly remembered. There should be a place of genuine record that acknowledges victims on both sides of the war.
But General Yakubu Gowon, the then Nigerian President, promised that there would be “no victors and no vanquished.”
And one would have thought that as time went by, the victims of this traumatic phase in our history would have been officially acknowledged.
Those who have led Nigeria since 1970 (there hasn’t been a single Igbo head of state in the past 54 years, by the way despite Igbos being one of the three main ethnic groups) clearly regard reconciliation as a dish that is best served in miserly portions.
The vindictive branch of the Nigerian establishment goes out of its way to punish Igbos for daring to rebel half a century ago, while the more benign elements just want to brush Biafra under the carpet and label it as an unfortunate episode that is best forgotten.
But it cannot and will not be forgotten. Scars remain.
‘When a war begins it never truly ends’
“As my new novel (The Road To The Country) shows, when a war begins it never truly ends. It continues over generations in small and invisible ways. This is a reason why Nigeria needs to create a monument to commemorate Biafra, not to point to a war that has ended, but one that continues in a subterranean form,” says Obioma.
Major General Effiong wound up brokering a ceasefire and peace deal on Ojukwu’s behalf.
His son, Philip Effiong, a Professor of Drama and Humanities at Michigan State University who also exited Biafra with his mother and siblings via Uli, thinks that a memorial is long overdue.
“There were so many innocent young and elderly casualties and Igbos should be passionately leading the way and demanding that these people be remembered in a befitting central location.”
Matthew Hassan Kukah is a Northerner who had no personal stake in Biafra and comes from an area that was anti-Biafra. He is now the bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Sokoto; and when I asked him whether he thought a memorial would be appropriate, he said: “If we were a serious nation, nobody would have to ask this question! It is a measure of Nigeria’s small-mindedness that Biafra has not been properly remembered. There should be a place of genuine record that acknowledges victims on both sides of the war.”
@The Africa Report, https://www.theafricareport.com/350388/opinion-why-is-there-no-biafra-memorial/