After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  “They always play war games,” she said earnestly. “Nobody wants to play the Nigerians. Sometimes the play is violent. It is the strain.” She became very cheerful about the new Biafran songs that mix local languages. “The crisis has mixed the country up,” she said. “You find refugees shouting when they hear their language, then other refugees in the same camp shouting when they hear their own.” Her youth group has brought back some traditional dances that were beginning to die off. “Before the crisis, you know, some of us were very worried,” she said. “We knew how to dance the waltz.” I asked her whether women had always had much influence in the Eastern Region, and she became quite grimly militant. She described the Ibo women’s part in the 1929 riots, and a more recent protest. “A committee went to His Excellency,” she said, referring to Ojukwu. “And they told him, ‘We are the ones who have lost children. We are the ones who have lost husbands. We are the ones who lost our homes. Some of us are too old to have children again. Ojukwu, give us guns!’ When the women start these things, the men know they are not joking. But they were very adamant. They said it had not come to that.” A friend tried to distract her with a joke about soups from the Ibibio area of Biafra, and she laughingly told him that, since the population mix-up, Ibos would have to acknowledge that Ibibio soups were the best.

  At lunchtime, Miss Etuk and her friend having refused to stay, I cooked some canned soup over a kerosene stove in my bungalow in Owerri and then went to a building called the Overseas Press Service, where it turned out two French journalists, who were about to leave Biafra, had run out of food. They ate in the press cafeteria. The menu, headed “Progress Hotel Umuahia” (Umuahia was captured in April by Nigeria) and restamped “Owerri”: Boiled Yam, Mixed Vegetables (apparently a kind of grass), Sliced Pineapple (a quarter of a single slice per guest).

  Sunday afternoon, at the Victoria Palace Hotel, a palm-wine bar (Biafra is full of palm-wine bars called, and sometimes serving as, hotels: Hotel de Gabon, Hotel de Tanzania, Hotel de Haiti, Hotel DeGaulle, Hotel Tranquillity), the palm wine, a mildly alcoholic drink with the taste of oiled lemonade, had run out. There was still Biafra Gin, Biafra Sherry, and Biafra Stout Beer (one-half bottle, seven pounds). The place was filled with soldiers, in uniform and armed with pistols made in France. There were also a few civilian women and some artillery cases, who swarmed around the soldiers without shrieking and yet seemed to embarrass them. The aging proprietor of the Victoria Palace said that he had begun, in pre-crisis times, by trading salt, soap, and shoes to accumulate money to buy his hotel but that the “vandals” had looted his hotel when Owerri was disrupted. “Vandals” is the almost universal word in Biafra for Nigerians.

  Just after dark on Sunday, in the house of N. U. Akpan, who is Chief Secretary to the Military Government, head of the Biafran civil service, a Presbyterian elder, and a member of the minority Ibibio tribe, the lights went out. The water in Owerri had been shut off some time before. Kerosene lamps were brought in. It was cold, and the rain outside looked bleak. I asked Mr. Akpan whether anyone in Biafra advocated simply giving up. (These questions always seemed to me awful, but Biafrans seemed to mind if they were not asked. Women at markets looked worried if notes were not made of every answer; and one is asked everywhere in Biafra to sign a guestbook, as though simply writing things down—names, comments—would someday give evidence that there had been a Biafra at all.) “If you said that,” Mr. Akpan said quietly about giving in, “you would be beaten up. If I said it, I would be lynched.”

  I asked what the politics of Biafra, whose enemy had been armed after all by both the Russians and the British, might be after the war. Mr. Akpan said it would be unaligned in terms of ideology. “Only let us be unaligned,” he said. “Let us look inward.” He paused a long time in the near darkness. “The West brought us good tidings, but it wouldn’t let us expand on them. Now we are suffering this strange mercy killing at the hands of the British, and it has brought out qualities we did not know we had. Nigeria, you see, has mortgaged its future to the Soviet Union, but we would wish after the crisis that they would be stable. We wouldn’t wish a confused and unstable neighbor.” He paused again. “Mark you,” he said, “when Nixon was campaigning, Nigeria became jittery.”

  When I asked whether de Gaulle’s expression of sympathy might have been a case of enlightened self-interest, he denied it vigorously. “France spoke for us when we had lost the oil, when we were nearly finished,” he said. “Some of us, you see, thought last September was the end. But here we are.”

  At the dinner hour on Sunday, I again saw Elizabeth Etuk, with Austin Ogwumba (head of Biafran Security), Dr. Pius Okigbo (a Biafran economist, and former representative of Nigeria to the European Common Market), and some other guests, at the home of Godwin A. Onyegbula, the former Nigerian chargé d’affaires in Washington, now permanent secretary of the Biafran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Relations. (The word “Commonwealth” in the title of Mr. Onyegbula, who is essentially the Biafran foreign minister, dates from a time when Biafrans still had hopes for the British, but it now refers only to “the commonwealth of nations.”) I asked whether Biafrans felt comfortable with recognition by, of all nations, Haiti. François Duvalier went to school with several young Ibos in Michigan, long before he became Papa Doc, when he was still a young liberal medical student. Mr. Onyegbula laughed, averted his eyes, and entered that tangle of reasoning with which Biafrans express their loyalty to any of the strange partners with whom they now find themselves.

  “Well, you know, when Haiti recognized us, I began to doubt all the things I had ever heard about it,” he said. “I have never been there myself, but, you see, Haiti was, after all, the world’s first black republic. Perhaps when your brother is suffering you have a telepathic experience.” Mr. Onyegbula seemed relieved to let the subject drop. Conversation turned to the failure of Biafra to capture the imagination of black Americans. “Yes, yes,” Dr. Okigbo said. “How can we get to them?” The guests began a very informed discussion about American black leadership, and whether it might be better to have the support of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and Jesse Jackson or to enlist the “crisis mentality” of black radicals, who now seem to seek their identity with the descendants of Muslim slave traders—most recently at the Pan-African cultural conference in Algiers.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Okigbo said, laughing. “After all, we are all on the same train without a ticket.”

  Late Sunday night, a Biafran rock group called the Fractions, who had brought their own generator for their guitars and against the darkness, were playing to a very crowded dance floor in the hall of the Advanced Teachers’ Training College. Most of the young people were dancing Western style, some were doing the Highlife, and a few were discussing the news of Dr. Azikiwe’s defection in Lagos. “In war, you always have Lord Hawhaw,” a bearded young man said. “It doesn’t reflect the core, the generality of opinion.” Many of the dancers were soldiers. Two were solemn workers from Caritas. After the dance, in a rain that seemed almost total, on the Owerri-Orlu road, among the trekkers, almost all of whom were barefoot and shivering, and many of whom were naked children carrying basins or articles of furniture on their heads, a little boy put a large machete on top of his head to free his hands to rub his eyes. The driver of a State House car, who had already nearly hit a goat and a chicken, almost ran him down.

  On Monday, at 9 A.M., in Owerri, the High Court of Biafra was in session in what was once a school, under Chief Justice Sir Louis Mbanefo, a former judge of the World Court, who as an Ibo justice in Nigeria in 1962 had reduced the sentence, for treason, of Chief Anthony Enahoro, whom he faced again last year in unsuccessful negotiations for peace in Biafra. All the judges and attorneys wore black robes and curled, yellowing wigs. On the table nearest the attorneys was a gray volume, Reports of the High Court of the Federal Territory of Lagos. The steps by which messengers climbed to the justices’ bench consisted of rusted mortar containers, still marked �
�Explosives/UK.” On the docket was an appeal of a sentence of murder (Chief Amagwara Achonye v. the State), but the case under discussion was a complicated one, which had already passed through native and higher courts, concerning the right of a man to build on the communal land of his family. The appellant had been in possession of the land since 1921, planted fruit trees and constructed a fence, but there were legal issues that entailed a distinction between “possession” and “ownership,” and also issues of tribal law, which elicited phrases like “By native custom, My Lord, a man may not build on the ruins of his father’s house unless the line has become extinct” and “If a man should have a house, My Lord, and what is commonly called a yard . . . .” The appellant and members of his family were in attendance, but silent. At one point, Justice Mbanefo asked one of the attorneys, a bearded young man with a severe cold and with thumbprints on his glasses, whether the case might be adjourned until Wednesday. “I don’t know, My Lord,” he replied. “I have to come all the way from Ihiala for these appeals. The problem of transportation will be—that is, unless my learned friend can . . .” Finally, the court did adjourn. An usher cried, “Court!” Everyone rose, and the justices left the room.

  Later, in his office, in what had once been a little classroom, the chief justice remarked that the case should have been tried in 1967, “but the land in question, you see, was disturbed until now. So the matter of ownership was for some time academic.” I asked Justice Mbanefo about the accommodation of British and native law. “We are still in the process of sorting it out,” he said. “Mark you, the native courts consist of local men of impeccable integrity. We would not reverse the ruling of the customary courts unless it was patently against good conscience, equity, and justice.” I asked Justice Mbanefo about the strange history of his two encounters with Chief Enahoro of Nigeria. “Ah, you see, under other circumstances it might have been different,” he said, and he pointed out that a brother of Chief Enahoro is now in exile in Norway, where he makes fervent speeches on behalf of Biafra. “Mind you,” he said, “only yesterday one of my own nephews, who was commanding a company, found some supplies left by Nigerian forces in retreat. Some of the company drank the beer left behind, and it was full of arsenic. Four men are dead. It is tragic, the loss of life. I don’t think the British are acting in this out of a desire to see Biafrans killed. They are like all good imperialists. Human lives don’t matter. Political expediency—this, I think, is really behind it.”

  Mr. Onyegbula came in to ask Justice Mbanefo, who is also an official of the Biafran Petroleum Commission, for an allotment of fuel for the Foreign Ministry. Justice Mbanefo could only give him half of what he asked. “I believe the Nigerian soldiers are fighting for the spoils,” the justice said quietly. “You see, our refugees leave everything behind. We are fighting for our homes. With us, oil was never an issue. But now, of course”—he paused and nodded to himself several times—“you cannot ignore it.”

  On Monday afternoon, Chinua Achebe, the Biafran novelist (author of Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease), arrived in Owerri several hours late for an appointment because of a broken axle on the road from Oguta, where, having been five times a refugee from a series of disturbed areas, he now lives. Mr. Achebe is chairman of the Biafra National Guidance Committee, a group of Biafran intellectuals who go out and interview the people in the countryside to keep the government in touch with what the people are saying. Ordinary Biafrans speak freely of the Guidance Committee, and freely register their grievances at its meetings, but the government (presumably for fear the committee might acquire an image of repressive interrogation) is extremely reticent about it. The sun was out briefly in Owerri. I asked Mr. Achebe, whose novels are preoccupied with problems of the modern breakdown in Ibo tradition, about Ibo relations with the minority tribes—the Efiks, Ibibios, Ijaws, Annangs, Ogojas, and Cross River people (most of them Christians)—who comprise a bit less than half of Biafra’s population and about half of the Consultative Assembly of Chiefs and Elders. The assembly consists of ten men, six elected and four appointed by the government, from each of the more than thirty districts of pre-crisis Biafra, and it includes, among representatives of labor, business, professional, and women’s groups, such local elders as the Amanyanagbo of Kalabari, the Amanyanagbo of Bonny, Chief J. Mpi of Ikwerre, Douglas Colonel Jaja of Opobo, the Obi of Onitsha, Uyo Clan Head of Okwu Itu-Itam, the Onyiba Enyi of Ohaozara in Abakaliki, and the ninth Eze Dara of Uli. Members of Eastern minority tribes have often been killed along with Ibos, and many of the minorities who once chose to remain in disturbed areas and risk Nigerian occupation have since taken refuge in Biafra. General Ojukwu has frequently asked for a plebiscite, under international supervision, to determine the minority tribes’ view of Biafran independence. “The crisis has now thrown everyone together,” Mr. Achebe said. “It seems a very curious way to forge a nation.”

  On Monday evening, Patience Nwokedi, a twenty-two-year-old nurse in the Red Cross hospital at Awomama, hitchhiked the fifteen miles to Owerri to spend her one day off a week with her husband, Ralph, a twenty-eight-year-old civil servant, to whom she has been married for six months. They were going to wait until after the crisis to marry, but after two years decided not to wait. Mr. Nwokedi, who was educated at the Ibo university at Nsukka, used to write advertising for Federal Nigeria, which appeared in newspaper supplements abroad. In Biafra now, he supports his wife’s mother, who was recently caught for some days in the bush behind enemy lines (“We are recuperating her,” he said), his own mother, his own sixty-six-year-old father and his stepmother and their five children, who live in Nimo, two miles from the front, and a friend and five brothers and sisters who now all live in Mr. Nwokedi’s two-room house with him. In good times, he can afford about a cup of garri per person per meal. He has four brothers in the army who help. “For a young man not to have served in the army, even if he is on essential services, is very painful to him,” he said. “But without me my poor old dad would starve.”

  Ralph and Patience Nwokedi, who are Protestants, found a car for a visit to an old friend, Father Michael Conniff, at the Caritas mission for the Owerri diocese. Father Conniff, like most white men who have served in Biafra since the crisis, has a frantic, nearly crazed look about his bloodshot eyes. There are thirty-one parishes in the Owerri diocese. With the reduced relief flights, Caritas receives a shipment of food only every other night. “We don’t know what we are getting,” Father Conniff said. “Often we have to wonder, Is this worth dividing into thirty-one places? We cater for seven hospitals. The Red Cross used to cater for sixty-four. West German relief has fallen off ninety percent since the Biafran Air Force bombed an oil installation in the Midwest. All day long we are worried by wounded soldiers. Now they have nothing to eat. What are we to do?”

  I asked him whether the diocese feeds only Catholic children.

  “We take every child that comes,” he said. “The only distinction is a special diet for the sicker ones.” Three children had died in one of his sick bays the night before. Father Conniff patted a mongrel dog named Buster, fed on whatever leaks out of the burlap sacks of fish. “This is not a place everybody would want to come to,” he said, in a voice that was by now cracking. “There are a lot of things to kind of scare a fellow from living here. When the area was retaken, there were a lot of bodies smelling. We buried them. Some of them were not pushed down too far. There’s two in the yard, six under my window, one officer in the flower garden. The bush closed in. That brought mosquitoes bigger than fowl, rats, snakes. A lot of corpses are in this place.”

  I asked him what his prayers were like.

  “More planes,” he said vaguely. “More planes. Bigger planes. More planes.” Not far from the mission, there was still a billboard reading, “Pepsi, the Big One.”

  Ralph Nwokedi’s father had trekked all the way from Nimo for a three-week visit to his son. He would also visit Ralph’s mother, twenty miles farther on. Although Christian, the elder Nwokedi is a poly
gamist. The elder Nwokedi, a tall, distinguished man, with long bare feet and a long maroon robe over a faded collarless shirt, ceremoniously broke a kola nut for his family and guests, in their dark living room. Kola nuts are full of caffeine, and are supposed to make water drunk after them taste very sweet. The kola nut, about three inches long, broke into six natural pieces, and the elder Nwokedi sliced these into halves and passed them around. He said a prayer, and then everyone chewed, and drank water from the house’s only glass.

  “When the first refugees come,” the elder Nwokedi said, “we begin to harbor them, begin petting them, say, ‘Be quiet, be quiet, peace will come.’ Now we have to break off, finished. If I am young, I should go inside the battlefield and fight. Now I see how I try to keep my household together. We take cover each time, and our hearts run each time. I was a big man, but now I shall never weigh ten stone again.” He was silent for a very long time. “When I become a Christian as a boy, I get a small book, and when I have children they should learn to read and write. The war breaks in and it turns my heart. It should be college now. Of all the time of my life, this is the misery.”

  Later, at the dinner hour, in the house of Dr. Ifegwu Eke, commissioner of information, who studied at McGill and at Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in economics, with a dissertation entitled “Study of the Productivity of Water,” few of the guests showed up, because of the intensity of the rains. The conversation turned again to the defection of Dr. Azikiwe. “He was with us,” Dr. Eke said. “But when Aba, Owerri, and Okigwe fell in rapid succession, he didn’t want to come back.”