“Biafra,” I replied. “That’s where I’m from.”
“Biafra,” he repeated, “and pondered awhile. I’m sure I’ve heard of that nation before.”
“It’s not a nation sir, ” I corrected. “only a notion in the imagination.”
“Well,” he replied. “After much thought there are no nations only the imagination.”
“The mirror is a window. It offers a glimpse of where we’re from but cannot return.”
“We’re all travellers on this endless road condemned to roam without repose.”
This week on the Chronic, we remember Biafra.
In Remembering Biafra, Olu Oguibe attempts to locate himself in a place that never exists.
“Such was Nigeria’s gift to me as a child. Such was the fate of my mother and of countless others who watched their suckling die at their breasts, whose husbands and teenage sons were taken to the war fronts never to return, who were violated and saw their children violated. Such was the fate of mothers in Biafra. Several years later, as an artist and a man, I returned to Biafra and the traumas of my childhood, but the memory was still too weighted and the wound too fresh to open. What became of my mother’s wound, I would never know.”
- Read Remembering Biafra
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu visits the sprawling city of his childhood in the former secessionist Biafra, home to the largest market in West Africa for everything from fake guns and drugs to the literature of self-help and love, cash-awash banks, not to mention the most famous address in Nollywood.
“Fact and fiction are Siamese twins, well-nigh inseparable, in Onitsha, the bustling Nigerian market town on the eastern bank of the River Niger. Onitsha is a dangerous place to go to on a good day, so getting into the city at about 10pm takes the cake. One has to make do with staying the night at the Upper Iweka bus park where ill-assorted passengers huddle together in a collective protective shield against the attacks of armed robbers, kidnappers and sundry night marauders. A squat, muscular middle-aged man with multiform scars on his face and bare, broad chest holds court, telling stories perpetually. He is only interrupted in moments when the gathered throng hails his name: Emeka Nwamama.”
- Read Onitsha Republic
In Wrestling With a Warlord, Louis Chude-Sokei narrates a story of Nigeria, of splintered identity, of exile, and of the Biafran War and its godfather – his godfather – the military strategist, strongman and celebrated hero, General Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu
” I was staring into a face that I’d seen on numerous book and magazine covers, not to mention the avalanche of photos my mother kept of the Biafra war, of her time lost in its midst and of our time shuttling between refugee camps. Perhaps it was just arrogance that caused me to see a resemblance to someone that famous. There was, certainly, awe. This was, after all, the man who had led the secession that officially started the Biafra war in 1967, the year I was born. He told me it was my father who had suggested Biafra as a name for the Igbo nation that they had rapidly invented in response to brutal pogroms in Nigeria’s Muslim north. That secession had led to a four-year civil war in which the much more numerous and far better equipped Britishbacked Federal Government laid siege to the Igbo lands of the East.”
Head to the Chronic for more