After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  I asked Dr. Eke whether much was known about the history of the Biafran region before modern times, and he said that there was material for research in European libraries but that no one had had time to get at it yet. “I lost all my own manuscripts when Enugu was disrupted,” he said. “But Port Harcourt was the saddest fall. People were weeping that they should leave a town they had so long defended. At the last minute, the roads were full, miles of nothing but people trekking.”

  I asked whether Biafrans heard much of the news outside Biafra, and he said that people listened anxiously to any available transistor radio, that it made them feel they belonged to the world. “Ask a small boy about the moon,” Dr. Eke said. “He will rattle off everything.” He spoke of the front. “In many places, the mud comes to your waist in the rainy season, so everybody stays where he is.” I asked about Biafran guerrilla activity in disrupted areas, and he laughed. “Call it infiltration,” he said. “But whatever it is, we are there.”

  I had been told by several Ibos that Dr. Eke’s time in America had not been happy, but he did not speak of it. He only spoke rather skeptically of the Red Cross and starvation (“They always overestimate or underestimate,” he said. “When they needed two million dollars, they said two million children would die by February”) and of the general indifference of the world. “You know how it is with any tragedy,” he said. “After the first two floods, contributions will decline. People will simply say, ‘Why don’t they move?’ ”

  Before dawn on Tuesday morning, a State House car, which had already nearly run over several hitchhikers who tried, with a kind of limp-wristed motion, to flag it down on the road to Mbano, picked up A. Kalada Hart, the young Biafran secretary of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Supplies. “I don’t seem to have any now,” he said. The day was hot and not rainy for a change, and at Angara Junction, of the Okigwe, Owerri, Umuahia, and Orlu roads, there were trekkers who looked particularly desolate. The driver looked rigidly at the road. “Sympathy is such a silly sentiment,” he said. At a compound in Mbano, Dr. Bede Okigbo, who was once dean of agriculture at the University of Nsukka, who studied at Washington State University and Cornell, and who is now coordinator of a farming directorate called the Land Army, discussed the problem of raising poultry in the part of Biafra that is left. “First, we have to see how much maize there is,” he said. “We must minimize the competition between human beings and poultry for the maize.”

  Each community in Biafra must now donate a piece of land for farming by the Land Army, and each member of the community must spend a day each week on the Land Army farm. Half the produce remains with the community; the other half must be sold to the government. Land under dispute in the courts is frozen until after the crisis and planted. “Food scarcity here is not new,” Dr. Okigbo said. “Before the war, there was often near famine. It is the soil, storage problems, and the insects.”

  I asked Dr. Okigbo how Biafran farmers reacted to the Land Army.

  “The people are very individualistic,” he said. “Each little farm used to grow a little of everything—twenty farms for twenty families. It is very hard to mechanize. First, we sent in boys to teach the local people, but the people were not much impressed. Now we are hoping to get them to ask for the experts.” All the agriculture experts from Dr. Okigbo’s faculty at Nsukka are now in the regular army, except the wounded or people with administrative jobs, who now work on the land. Dr. Okigbo looked at a government memo datelined “Enugu/Mbano.” “We are studying plants which will not tempt people to eat the seedlings,” he said. “We are studying the wild local vegetables for identification.” A member of Dr. Okigbo’s staff mentioned a soldier of the Madonna Commandos, who had volunteered to serve as a guinea pig for any vegetation the soldiers were afraid to try. (Biafran commandos, who are among the most respected Biafran soldiers at the front, travel along the roads in trucks with gray skull and crossbones on the windshields, quite unlike the more cheerfully decorated trucks other units travel in.) “We have learned we cannot establish targets for our farms,” Dr. Okigbo said. “We have found our local pullets thrive better on less, on kitchen refuse, than imported pullets. But each time we plant, the enemy comes in. No matter how much target you establish, you see, you may not attain it.”

  On Tuesday afternoon, Moses Iloh, National Secretary of the Biafra Red Cross, sat in his headquarters in the bush at Abba, in a trailer with a broken wheel. “We have been disturbed so often,” he said. “I don’t see how we can move again.” He spoke of people who had died from trekking, mothers who had miscarried, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, orphans too young to know their names found with people moving in the bush. “And so many have lost their minds,” he said. “The worst time was last year—May, June, July, August, September. Now the kwashiorkor is beginning again. A child who has had this thing twice shrinks. There is the brain damage. We have lost a hundred thousand people over fifty-five from shortage of bulk carbohydrates. You cannot fly in bulk carbohydrates. What will happen when there is nobody to tell us of the past, nobody to inherit the future?”

  Mr. Iloh and I went to a Red Cross orphanage near Abba, where about twenty children were sitting quietly on their beds, which consisted of metal frames and bamboo pallets, some covered with blankets, some not. The children were led outside under a frangipani tree, a baby was placed on the ground in the center, a nine-year-old girl put her hands together in an attitude of prayer, a five-year-old clung to the hand of a matron, and the children began to sing, to the tune of “O Du Lieber Augustin,” “When we are together, together, together, when we are together, the happier we will be. On your face, on my face, on your face, on my face . . .” Suddenly, the children switched to a song in Ibo, and I asked what the words meant. “They are asking Gowon to stop killing them,” Mr. Iloh said. The children switched to English again:

  “Solomon the king.

  Solomon the judge.

  Solomon the peacemaker.”

  And then, very deliberately and grimly:

  “Solomon passes sentence.”

  Most of the children would stay at the orphanage. A few would be sent to Gabon for the duration of the crisis. Some would be sent to São Tomé, to be fed properly for a while, and then returned to Biafra. And Mr. Iloh, who had already adopted one in addition to his own two children, was about to adopt another. “It is wonderful, wonderful,” he said. “You can’t tell the difference.”

  We went on to a World Council of Churches sick bay at Isu. A naked child hunkered outside, with the swollen stomach and utter lassitude of kwashiorkor. Mr. Iloh gently pulled down its lower eyelid. The interior was dead white. “Almost a hundred-percent anemia,” Mr. Iloh said. I asked him whether kwashiorkor children were in pain, and he said, “Not unless the liver is affected.”

  There were victims of kwashiorkor and scabies, all with somehow intensely old-looking faces, on the beds and mats inside. The “severe” cases were separated by a raffia partition from the less severe, although I could not tell the difference. Some were coughing; some did not seem to have the energy. The matron, a young midwife, apologized that some beds had only one occupant. “We used to admit two in a bed,” she said, “when we could feed them.”

  On the road to the Red Cross sick bay at Ezeoke, we passed St. Paul’s parsonage of the Church Missionary Society, a thatched shop called the Live and Let Live Volkswagen House (empty), and another shop, which displayed one small wooden coffin. A notice was posted on the hospital wall: “On admission, girls on duty should find out the following facts: (1) If the child is an orphan; (2) If the child is motherless; (3) If the child is fatherless . . .” It was nap time, but the children, all of whom were dressed in clothes of the same material, were lying, sometimes two or three to a bed for companionship (there was a bed for every child), silent and wide awake.

  A refugee camp nearby, in what had been the Holy Rosary School and Church Hall, had few occupants, although there were hundreds of pallets and bundles of personal belongings on the flo
or of a single room, with rain coming in through windows without panes. Most of the adult refugees were out looking for food. The ones who remained seemed to come from everywhere in Biafra. Some had moved more times than they could remember. On the wall, in chalk, there were still attendance figures for the last day of school, in 1967. Nobody seemed to know where the nearest children’s feeding center was, except a girl from the local Red Cross detachment, her hair neatly tied in the nine longish pigtails one often sees in Biafra. “We gave out food yesterday,” she said. “So there won’t be any tomorrow.”

  On Tuesday evening, in his car on the road to Emekuku, Dr. R. N. Onyemelukwe, who is Biafra’s chief health officer, spoke of his problems when the Biafrans retook Owerri. “Sanitation was a very formidable problem,” he said. “It was all littered with corpses and night soil. The water supply, you may have noticed, was disrupted. All equipment was broken. All wires were cut. I think they were at war with books.” He said that the bush and the snakes had begun to close in, although he himself had not yet seen a cobra. “Before the crisis, we were developing sanitation-consciousness in our people,” he said. “We even anticipated problems of air pollution.” He laughed. “Although, of course, the crisis has now reduced the number of vehicles.” He spoke of burials, sewage, mass immunization. “There was not a single civilian living in Owerri when it was disrupted,” he said. “I had one hundred workers, cleaning up. Of course, there was no market, so I had, ha-ha, to feed them. I imagine the population of night snails was depleted. In two weeks, Owerri was ready for the return of our civilians. Two white Red Cross workers, you know, were shot when Okigwe was disrupted. Every home has lost someone in this war.”

  Later that night, at the residence of Dr. Fabian Udekwu, head surgeon of the Teaching Hospital at Emekuku, a game of draughts, on a homemade board, was going on. A chair was littered with cartridge tapes—Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky. Dr. Udekwu, who studied at Johns Hopkins and did his residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, had worked for a time in a hospital in Ibadan, in Western Nigeria, fled through the bush when a friend of his, another Ibo surgeon, nearly lost his hands in a massacre in 1965, returned for some months to Ibadan, and, after another outbreak of killings, returned at last to Biafra. Since then, he has moved several times, as areas were disrupted. “It is terrible, you know,” he said, “to come home and keep on running.” I asked a friend of Dr. Udekwu’s how the mobs had recognized Ibos in the massacres, and the friend replied that they were better dressed and that there was a distinctive Ibo facial structure (Ibos, to me, looked very different from one another). Their names were also characteristically Ibo; to find Ibos in cars, Hausa colleagues often kept checklists of license numbers.

  Dr. Udekwu took me on a quick tour of the Emekuku hospital, where six hundred patients, mostly wounded soldiers, lay in kerosene-lamp-lighted wards, on beds and on pallets on the floor. They greeted the doctor cheerfully as he pointed out the results of operations; a Steinmann pin, consisting of a sterilized nail through an injured limb, with a bag of pebbles for traction at the foot of the bed; a splint made of scrap metal and screws for bad fractures. “We are born to improvise,” he said. Most of the patients at Emekuku arrive at night. It takes them about forty-six hours’ travel from the farthest front. The hospital’s four senior surgeons and twenty doctors perform between fifty and a hundred operations a day.

  “We need plastic surgeons, orthopedists, neurosurgeons, pediatricians,” Dr. Udekwu said. “Then, of course, there’s no sense operating on them if we can’t feed them. And storage and malnutrition of donors creates a problem with blood donations. But the worst are the victims of the white phosphorus bombs. Have you seen one? Some of them are still smoking on the operating table.” He said that he was able to treat them with hydrogen peroxide, and that he hoped never to see war again.

  At Dr. Udekwu’s dinner table, with several guests—including Dr. Onyemelukwe; Dr. Anezi Okoro, a dermatologist turned surgeon; and Mrs. Bede Okigbo, wife of the head of the Land Army (Mrs. Okigbo is in charge of food at Emekuku)—Dr. Udekwu said, “Let us pray.” Dinner consisted of vegetable ukwa soup (rich, somebody said, in sulfur-bearing amino acids), a paté called moi-moi (“Why do we call it moi-moi?” Dr. Okoro said. “That is the Yoruba word. The Ibo is mai-mai”), and chicken, the bones of which, even in the half-light, were picked clean. Dr. Udekwu was worried about Biafran medical students whose education had been interrupted by the crisis. He favored rotating them for study abroad, in crash programs. “There are already eighty Biafran doctors abroad,” he said. “But one must consider the overall situation. Forty-five percent of our population is under fifteen. We don’t want to run the risk of losing our students. If we die, they can carry on.” Dr. Udekwu began to talk about the work of the Biafra Relief Services, of New York, in resettling two Biafran leper colonies whose area had been disturbed. “The lepers are like the prisoners,” he said cheerfully. “When an area is disrupted, they will flee and report to the next prison along the line.”

  After dinner, over glasses of palm wine, a young guest told a story of trying to get a job with Shell BP, the major oil company in the Eastern Region, before the war. He had been selected, out of hundreds of candidates, for one final interview. They asked him what he thought of Shell BP. He told them he thought the company was taking more out than it was putting into Nigeria. They did not hire him. (It seemed somehow characteristically Biafran to find this funny and surprising.) Dr. Udekwu began to talk about recent studies of starvation. “We used to think that people lived for a while off their fatty tissue,” he said. “But now we realize it attacks the vital organs. Brain damage, of course, is irreversible. Mercifully, the worst cases will pass on.”

  Dr. Onyemelukwe and Dr. Udekwu bantered a bit about peptic ulcers, and Dr. Okoro shyly brought out a sheaf of poems. The first line of the first poem was “It was high tide in casualty.” Later, as his guests left, Dr. Udekwu said, “I hope you don’t think we eat like this every night. I am embarrassed.” His guests thanked him and said they were embarrassed, too.

  On the drive back to Owerri, Dr. Onyemelukwe initiated a discussion of the new government recommendations for cooking cassava leaves. Plucking the leaves kills the tubers, which creates problems for the survival of cassava. Boiling the leaves, which are hairy, for only fifteen minutes, as recommended, conserves their vitamin content but does not quite eliminate the cyanide they contain. A dilemma. “Just watch a goat,” Dr. Onyemelukwe said, as we passed one. “And whatever a goat eats, you won’t die. Pluck it and eat it.” Before going to his own home, the chief health officer spent some time pushing a young man’s stalled car through the rain.

  I spent the rest of Tuesday night, with a flashlight, rereading Frederick Forsyth, and a report by some British anthropologists and diplomats familiar with the Eastern Region very quietly asking that the West reconsider its position on Biafra. I was scared in the dark, not of violence (I had not really seen any) or of disease (I had only a kind of muzzy cold from the rain) but of not being able to get out. I was convinced that there would be no planes, or no room for me on them. I became obsessed, like other journalists and Biafrans, with the question of the Telex. Biafra does have a radio connection with Gabon, and finally access to a real Telex in Geneva, but the insistence that there was one right there, in Biafra, was quite comprehensible in the dark, and seemed by its own logic to explain more serious questions: for example, censorship. There is, in effect, no censorship in Biafra, but Biafrans have to give some reason why journalists cannot take their cables directly to the Telex office. They claim they must censor the cables, and then they simply radio them, altering perhaps a word or two, to Gabon. They prefer the idea of censorship to the idea that there is no wire, no solid link to the world outside. So did I. One of the two other reporters left in Biafra that night (two weeks later, there were none), imagining that he heard a snake or a person rustling in his food, had thrown his jackknife, frightening himself more with the sound.

  Just before d
awn on Wednesday, a small congregation was attending a Mass at St. Paul’s in the village of Isu. After Mass, an elderly woman pressed something into the hands of Father Gerard Gogan, a white priest, with the characteristic vagueness and despair about his eyes. “What is this?” he said, apparently startled by being approached or spoken to at all. “It is a letter for you,” she replied. “I will read it,” he said, more calmly, and put it in his cassock. In a black kettle, over a very smoky fire in a little thatched hut, some workers were boiling ten stockfish to feed over a hundred children. A kettle of medicinal leaves was being boiled for an eighteen-year-old malaria victim who stood nearby.

  A little later, in the office of Major General Philip Effiong, an Efik, who is Chief of the General Staff, at Defense Headquarters (a camouflaged location in the bush), a copy of The Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War lay on the table. On the walls were pictures of the mangled victims of Nigerian bombing raids. A young government worker was talking intensely about the problems Biafra might face after independence. “It will be freedom won through blood,” he said. “There will be this background of sorrow, violence, and hatred. What will be the expectations? There will be a second struggle, for order and the fundamental freedoms. Will the people say, ‘Where is it, the goal?’ Will they have the energy?”

  General Effiong walked in, a humorous, most unmilitary-looking man. He went to a wall map stuck with pins and wood slivers (round or square, orange, red, blue, pink) and gave a short briefing about the front. “Onitsha, active. Okigwe, off and on. Ikot Ekpene, changed hands half a dozen times. Umuahia, static, lots of raids by our guerrillas. At Onitsha, they are trying to break through to Nnewi, His Excellency’s hometown, but we are almost inside Onitsha to the Savoy Hotel. Port Harcourt, all these areas must begin to feel the pressure. Many of our men at the front are without boots, but when there are gaps we do go through. At the beginning, we had no artillery and no mortars, not a single piece. We had a few helicopters and our famous B-26 [an old plane, from which a mercenary pilot used to kick bombs through a door]. Mark you, between August and October last year we had our most precarious moment. The fall of Umuahia was very depressing. I think we revived very well. There is optimism, and not without reason. You know, they lost three thousand men on the road to Onitsha. I know they have suffered terribly. It is a colossal war,” he said. “It is a very, very colossal war.”