A stubborn past 

In every way possible, we must ensure peace, not peace of the graveyard but genuine peace built on equality, justice and sense of belonging. The alternative is war and war is something we shouldn’t wish even our enemies because the scars never fully heal.

 

The Nigerian-Biafran war is in our past; it is also in our present. We ran from it; we flee from it, but we are stuck in it. Months after it, several novels and non-fictional books were published on it. Decades after, books are still being published on it and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop any time soon.

Aside the novels written a few years after the war ended, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returned us to this subject decades later with ‘Half Of A Yellow Sun’, which years after was adapted into a movie of the same title by Biyi Bandele, now an ancestor.

Sam Omatseye’s ‘My Name Is Okoro’ came out later, x-raying the war from a minority’s perspective. It didn’t take too long after Omatseye’s that Uwem Akpan came out with ‘New York My Village’, another minority take on the war. While Omatseye’s novel uses a Delta minority angle, Akpan takes his perspective from the people of the old Cross River State, who are yet to forget the ‘saboteur’ treatment they received from Biafran soldiers.

Akpan tells his tales with brutal honesty, and shows that the sufferings of the minorities were because Biafra and Nigeria were after crude oil on their soil. He also draws attention to how the war continues to shape the lives of the children of the victims of the war. He examines their trauma, their festering wound, and many more.

Omatseye’s minority perspective to the Biafran story begins with blood, dust, sweat and all the violent imagery they often conjure. And there is the promise of a saucy story, whose end could be complicated. There are also hints of pain and death. With these images, he lures the reader into the world of Okoro. This Okoro is not Igbo. He is Urhobo. The novel’s tone is protestant in nature. Instances abound in it of efforts to properly situate the feelings of the minorities of the south. At a point in the story, Okoro asks: “Why do the newspapers keep writing about Igbo pogrom when they killed everyone who was southerner except the Yorubas?”

In Omatseye’s novel, a woman from the South has come to the North in search of her son. She is married to an Ukwani man and narrowly escapes being wasted because she has Yoruba tribal marks.

“Ukwanis are not Igbos,” she says. “The animals are killing everyone… Ukwanis can understand Igbo language but they can distinguish who is speaking Ukwani and who is speaking Igbo. The Igbos know who is speaking Ukwani as distinct from who is speaking Igbo.”

Okoro, at a point, wondered: “But is it not worse when the language is not even close but seems to sound the same but is not Yoruba or Hausa? For instance, the Anang and Ibibio.”

Now, we have a new novel on the war. It takes a different angle to examine this past that refuses to stay in the past. Written by two-time Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma, ‘The Road To The Country’ employs Ifa (divination) as a mirror to tell difficult truths.

The novel follows two men battling guilt, with their guilt making them take decisions with far-reaching implications. One of the men is a seer, Igbala Oludamisi who sees the death of his wife coming but is unable to stop it. After his wife’s death, Igbala feels guilty for her death.

His quest to have a sense of his wife’s fate in the afterlife leads him into a ritual which allows him to see the life of the second man in the loop, Kunle Aromire, unfold right from when his mother is about to be delivered of him in 1947. Igbala also follows Kunle’s relationship with his younger brother, Tunde, and how he blames himself for the misfortune that befalls Tunde. He follows him as he plunges into Eastern Nigeria in the heat of the Biafra War from 1967 to 1970.

Kunle, a 19-year-old undergraduate of the University of Lagos, is convinced that the best way to assuage the guilt wracking him is to go after his brother who has gone to the East. With the help of the Red Cross, he gets into Biafra and he finds out that the road to the country and the roads within the country are littered with un-envisaged things. Before he knows it, he finds himself reciting: “I pledge to Biafra, my country,” “to fight as part of the Biafran Armed Forces with all my strength” and “knowing that the cost of desertion will be with my life.”

Igbala’s mirror is riveted on Kunle as he forges a friendship with a female soldier, Agnes. Igbala doesn’t lose sight of Kunle as he falls in love with his female colleague and discovers that even in a time of war, love and friendship can birth redemption.

The book brings back the history we try to run away from: the bloody chaos of 1953 in Kano, which saw southerners (Igbos in particular) being killed and their properties destroyed, a gang of largely Igbo officers killing top politicians in the country in 1966, the reprisal in which Northerners ambushed and killed all Igbos they found, the murder of Head of State Aguiyi Ironsi and the civil war of thousands of atrocities that the crises birthed. We see how tribalism is a challenge we face as a people, we see how lying becomes a defence mechanism in times of trouble, we see how the rain has beaten us as a people and if juxtaposed with what still happens in our country now, we see that we’ve learnt little to nothing from our yesterday.

Obioma brings to life the ugly nature of war, but despite the heaviness of the topic, his soothing language pours balm on the wounds being inflicted.

 

My final take: In every way possible, we must ensure peace, not peace of the graveyard but genuine peace built on equality, justice and sense of belonging. The alternative is war and war is something we shouldn’t wish even our enemies because the scars never fully heal.