After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  The former Eastern Region of Nigeria, which since May 30, 1967, has called itself Biafra, has always been the most densely populated region in all of Africa—and, in recent times, the most highly developed and educated black country there is. Its present population is about ten million; present size, ten thousand square miles; war dead in two years, one and a half million civilians by air raids and starvation, half a million more soldiers and civilians killed in actual combat zones. There are several hundred thousand refugees in Biafran refugee camps, millions more living with distant relatives in the traditional Ibo stress claim of the “extended family,” seven or even twenty persons to a room. Biafran roads, before the bombings the best roads in Nigeria, are pitted now, interrupted by checkpoints and occasional rows of tree stumps to impede enemy landings, eroded further by the intense rains, sometimes hollowed under the tarmac to stop heavy-armored vehicles, but crowded in the late and early hours of darkness by lines of people—trekking, with burdens on their heads, to relatives, to markets, to shelter or hospitals. Kwashiorkor, the ugly, mortal protein-deficiency disease, which had almost been stopped when Red Cross flights were running at strength, is afflicting children again, and the people on the roads include a high proportion of adults damaged, bandaged, or in pain. Because the Biafran government is not recognized by any major country, Biafra is denied legal access on the international market to, among other things, morphine. In terms of statistics, loss of life, displacement of persons, the war has already taken a greater toll than Vietnam; and yet people on the road inevitably return smiles, and life in this enormous ghetto under siege seems determined to proceed almost normally.

  As always in war, unless one happens to be at the front and be shot at, or caught in an air raid, there is nothing but a set of symptoms—distortions of peace—to give one a sense of war and its losses. Premature or simply inaccurate Nigerian claims of areas captured have often sent observers to battle zones to find that they are not simply at the front—they are it; and four journalists have already been killed while reporting from the Nigerian side. But the strange image-consciousness of Biafrans makes them highly scrupulous about not sending reporters where Biafran soldiers have not arrived. Biafran information officials will try reporters with the strangest evasions, from subjects as knowable and precise as whether there is or is not a Biafran Telex (there is not), or whether there are in fact flights from Libreville, to subjects as hard to know in wartime as the exact population and casualty rate. But they are deeply concerned for the safety of foreigners. “Why do you choose to fly into this volcano?” an Ibo doctor, exhausted with work, asked a foreign visitor. “You have no right or obligation to die here.” When the foreigner replied, “I think it is a shared right,” the doctor said, “Thank you.” There is everywhere this crazed, articulate, sometimes even irritable courtesy, in the face of an absolute desolation closing in.

  Foreigners flying into Biafra now bring their own food and, if the pilot permits it, their own gasoline in jerry cans. What fuel there is in Biafra is made in little roadside refineries, which consist of a thatched hut over firewood and an arrangement of pipes and steel drums beside a brook, like a still. A loss of fuel can be as dire in Biafra now as the shortage of food, since the army must be mobile to reach any stress point on the completely encircling front. The symptoms of war are evident in everything from the sound of mortars miles from the front to the fact that all markets have moved under camouflage in the bush and that children at feeding centers can get only one meal a day. Yet one subject Biafrans hardly ever talk about is the front, the actual progress of the war. Asked about this strange reticence, Biafrans will say the front is “irrelevant,” or “We have no place to go. They take Owerri, we retake Umuahia. If we lose it all, we will fight without towns, from the bush.” Another subject hardly mentioned in ordinary conversation, without laughter, is food, or even the starving of the children. If pressed, a Biafran will say he finds the subject “painful.” Genocide, however, comes up again and again, and Biafrans will talk about a friend, a relative, a town, a personal flight from a mob before or in the war with a precise attention to dates and the most gruesome detail. Bombing raids on markets, churches, orphanages, and hospitals are recounted by families and in palm-wine bars with a kind of awe of their modern European quality, as though by dying on purely ethnic grounds Biafrans had established their place in modern history. One thing one hardly sees in Biafra is cemeteries. The dead are buried all over the third of the country that remains.

  Nigeria, in what was originally described by the Nigerian government as a “quick surgical police action” that would last forty-eight hours and that has already lasted more than two years and cost more than two million lives, was armed for the war with highly sophisticated equipment by the British, who wanted, as did nearly everyone else at one time, a strong and unified Nigeria. Reporters like Frederick Forsyth in his book The Biafra Story, one of the few cogent accounts of what took place, attribute the subsequent disaster to the Labour Government of Harold Wilson, who took the advice of civil servants that it would all be over quickly, that it was all a question of Ibo intransigence. Most of Nigeria’s oil fields are in the Biafran region, and the oil companies had their doubts. They had personnel in the field who knew the people and who had witnessed the events of the preceding years. But the civil servants prevailed, and when it was not all over quickly, the Labour Government vastly increased its shipments of arms to Nigeria, and covered up at home.

  When, in August 1968, after thirteen months of war, the extent of the British commitment became clear, there were expressions of outrage in Parliament and in the press. The Government, no longer able to conceal the size of its arms shipments, began to argue that it was more merciful in the long run to let Biafrans starve and be bombed into submission than to remain neutral, that the alternative was a tribal “Balkanization” of all Africa, that the Ibo leaders were, in any case, exaggerating and prolonging the misery of their people in order to nationalize and abscond with the oil and consolidate their own leadership. In 1967, the Russians began sending heavy arms to Nigeria, and it was argued that it was important to compete with Russia in arming Nigeria for the sake of Nigeria’s goodwill. It is now likely that Nigeria’s debt to Russia is such that if Nigeria wins, the oil will go at least in part to Russia, and Russia will have its first important ally in black Africa. Biafrans claim their own guerrillas will see to it that, in the event of their defeat, no oil will flow at all. It is not clear what will happen to the oil if Biafra wins, although Biafran loyalty to anyone who gives them any help or recognition just now is strong. President Nixon expressed sympathy for Biafra in a campaign speech on September 9, 1968, but nothing as strong since. The only official expression of support from any Western power came last year, from President Charles de Gaulle.

  In 1960, when Nigeria became independent, it was the Northern Region that kept threatening secession, and the Eastern Region, now Biafra, that most strongly wanted unity. The North, inhabited by the Muslim Hausa-Furlani, had been ruled by the British through local emirs, who kept the region feudal and underdeveloped. The Western Region, inhabited by the less militantly Muslim Yorubas, was ruled through local tribal chieftains and remained underdeveloped, too. (The Yorubas, traditionally a peaceful people, are now being recruited by the Hausas for the war, which solves some of the internal problems in what remains of Federal Nigeria.) The Eastern Region, traditionally governed under chiefs by tribal consultation, with chiefdoms often shifting among ruling families by popular agreement, was far more egalitarian and more difficult to rule. The British imposed “warrant chiefs” on the region, but after riots at Aba in 1929, which protested the imposition of rulers, they left the area to the missionaries—mainly the Anglican Church Missionary Society and the Roman Catholics. England’s role in the war, as opposed to the support of Catholics in Caritas, has created a crisis of faith among Biafran Protestants, many of whom now attend predawn Mass in Owerri, in an uncompleted Catholic cathedral camouflaged
by palm fronds, in the rain. The Ibos, who traditionally believed in one god, and worshipped him through idols, took to Christianity easily, and to Christian education. Communities sent bright children to schools abroad. By secession in 1967, Biafra had more doctors, lawyers, and engineers than any other country in black Africa. Of six hundred Nigerian doctors before the war began, five hundred were Biafrans. The crowded conditions in the Eastern Region, and their own education, sent Ibos all over the rest of Nigeria. They took part in all Nigerian institutions, but their living quarters were segregated, in ghettos called sabon garis. As early as 1953 at Kano, they faced pogroms.

  Northern animosity toward Easterners, and suspicion of them, was so great well before independence that the North continually threatened secession unless it could dominate the Nigerian legislature. As early as 1947, Mallam Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a Northerner who was later to become prime minister of Nigeria (and whom the Sardauna of Sokoto, a Hausa ruler, used to refer to as his “lieutenant” in Lagos), opposed unity and independence with the statement “I should like to make it clear to you that if the British quitted Nigeria now at this stage, the Northern people would continue their uninterrupted conquest to the sea.”

  In the years after independence, there was a series of rigged censuses, rigged elections, and murders of members of the major political party of the Eastern Region by members of the major party of the North. On January 14, 1966, there was a military coup, which killed Prime Minister Balewa and the Sardauna of Sokoto, and which is sometimes described as the Ibo move for domination that started it all. The coup did end with General Johnson Thomas Umunakwe Aguyi-Ironsi, an Ibo, in power. But it killed only twelve officers, three of whom were Ibos; it was joined by Hausa and Yoruba factions of the army; and it was opposed by, among other Ibos, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, now the head of state of Biafra, and General Ironsi himself.

  Six months later, the Northerners staged their coup. In view of the present Nigerian claims for a unified Nigeria, the code word that set off the operation is key: araba, the Hausa word for “secession.” In his first broadcast after the coup, Lieutenant Colonel Yakuba Gowon, the Northerner who is now head of state of Nigeria, said that Nigerian unity could not stand the test of time, that “the base for unity is not there.” Three weeks later Gowon was still flying the flag not of Federal Nigeria but of the Northern Region at his headquarters in the garrison at Ikeja. At a constitutional convention in Lagos in September 1966, the Northern delegates insisted on a clause reading “Any member state of the Union should reserve the right to secede completely and unilaterally from the Union.”

  But the world, including, at that point, the Biafrans, still believed in one Nigeria, and the Northerners who were then in power began to see the advantages of it. The army became uncontrollable. There followed a series of massacres of Ibos and broken agreements with the Eastern Region. Gowon’s announcement to the press, for example, of accords between the Eastern and Northern Regions reached in Aburi, Ghana, in January 1967, differs in almost every detail from tape recordings of those accords subsequently released by Ojukwu. The Northerners had agreed to protect Easterners in the other regions on their passage home, to make financial provisions for the homeless refugees, and to give the Eastern Region a degree of autonomy. Gowon did not mention the refugee agreements, and denied the accord on autonomy. Over a million Ibos had already fled for their lives to the Eastern Region. In early May 1967, Gowon blockaded all communications to the East. On May 26, the Consultative Assembly of Chiefs and Elders gave Ojukwu, who had been for about a year and a half the military governor of the Eastern Region, a mandate to withdraw from Nigeria. The next day, Gowon published a decree that, among other measures, divided the Eastern Region into three small states, with Port Harcourt and the Eastern oil fields to be excised from the Ibo region. (Port Harcourt had been built by Ibos and was inhabited almost entirely by them. The oil fields, which had only begun producing just before Nigerian independence, had not been a factor in the dispute before.) On May 30, Ojukwu issued a Biafran Declaration of Independence. On July 6, 1967, with the slogan “One Nigeria!” Nigerian forces invaded Biafra, and soon afterward entered the Ibo town of Nsukka, where they set fire to the university and destroyed all its books.

  Surprisingly—since most Ibo members of the Nigerian Army had been technical and administrative personnel, and since Biafra was very lightly armed—the Biafrans nearly won their independence in the first three months. Then the heavy British equipment came in. The Biafrans lost the coast and their major towns, although they had considerable success against the heavy equipment with homemade booby traps manufactured in Professor Nwosu’s Research and Production Directorate. By April 1968, their agricultural and river areas were cut off, and people began to die of starvation in numbers that, at their peak, were estimated at ten thousand a day. Caritas, the World Council of Churches, and the Red Cross began sending in small amounts of food on Biafran mercenary arms flights. On October 12, Dr. Herman Middelkoop, of the World Council of Churches, sent a telegram to Secretary-General U Thant of the United Nations requesting UN humanitarian aid for Biafra. On October 19, the Secretary-General told the press that the telegram had not arrived and that the war was, in any case, an internal affair, in which the United Nations could not become involved.

  In July 1968, the Red Cross asked General Gowon for permission to fly specially marked relief planes into Biafra. Gowon replied that Nigeria would shoot them down. They flew anyway, and the churches, having obtained the code for landing at Uli Airport, flew in, too. In June of this year, after endless negotiations over relief routes, with Nigeria arguing alternately that all relief must pass through Lagos and that there could be no relief, since total siege is a legitimate instrument of war (although the idea of total siege has traditionally been applied to cities and not to an entire ethnic population of ten million), the Red Cross plane was shot down. Since the shooting, it has been argued with increasing insistence that the situation has changed entirely, and that it is only the Biafran leadership that is making impossible, at great cost to its own people, the dream of a peaceful and unified Nigeria. Biafrans have come to argue that there never was a Nigeria, except as defined by the British colonial presence; that if the colonial “nations” of Africa were in fact to break up along tribal lines, not much would be lost except some unstable, colonial boundaries; and that a new force—local, indigenous, tribal, unaligned—may yet be brought forth into the world. As for defectors and the charge that the Biafrans are exaggerating their own danger of genocide, Biafrans reply that every ethnic group marked for extinction has had sincere and misguided collaborators with the enemy. Their own experience of tribal slaughters and world indifference or unconsummated sympathy has made them determined not to rely to the last man on Nigeria’s new good faith.

  On Sunday, at Owerri market, which is now a little cluster of wooden tables and benches, reached by a thin track of red earth marked by the imprint of sandals and bare feet, in the bush, a five-year-old girl sat on the ground meticulously gathering and blowing sand off each seed of breadfruit she had dropped on the ground. The price of a scruffy, dazed, and twitching hen was eight pounds (nearly twenty dollars); a leg of goat, fifteen pounds; a two-inch bony river fish, a bush snail, or a cigarette, nearly half a pound; a third of a cup of salt, or a cup of garri (ground cassava, the only food most Biafrans can get), one pound. The salary of a soldier or a beginning civil servant is fifteen pounds a month. A woman was preoccupied with keeping her entire wares, four minuscule bush snails, from crawling away. No one was buying anything but garri, and very little of that.

  Suddenly, a shrieking, giggling band of eleven young men and three boys passed through the market, as though carried away by some enervating, mocking joke. These were some of the “artillery cases” one sees all over Biafra—people claiming some local variant of shell shock and traveling always in packs. They were treated by other citizens with a kind of care. Three at Owerri market were given a melon
seed or a nut, which sent them into screams of laughter again. Medical comments about them vary. Dr. Fabian Udekwu, head surgeon at a hospital in Emekuku, insists that their disorder is genuine. “The reason their voices are so shrill is that their hearing is impaired,” he said. A young military matron at the Armed Forces Hospital in Nkwerri was less sympathetic. “They are putting it on,” she said. Most of the artillery cases are treated at a psychiatric hospital in Ekwereazu. It takes about two months to cure the symptoms.

  At nine-thirty Sunday morning, in a bullet-scarred bungalow of what was once the Advanced Teachers’ Training College in Owerri (Owerri, fifteen miles from the front, was taken by Nigerian forces last September, retaken by Biafra in April; it is now Biafra’s provisional capital), I asked Elizabeth Etuk, who is in her twenties, chairman of the Biafra Youth Front, and a member of the Ibibio, a minority tribe, how many times she had been a refugee since she fled from Lagos just before the war. She began to count.

  “Mark you,” she said, “I’m now in a village I never heard of before.” Miss Etuk, who received her doctorate in child psychology from Columbia University in 1967, gave up her study of “the intellectual development of our children” (almost all Biafran schools have been closed since the crisis) to form the Youth Front, which so far consists of a few thousand young people in about fifty villages, who administer feedings (“lunch, when there was a lunch”), catch lizards, sausage flies, and snails by night for their protein content, process cassava into garri, allot the little salt that is brought in by relief flights, perform and compose songs for the refugee camps, and organize play groups for the children who are not too weak with misery or kwashiorkor.