Sometime ago, I fell in love with a man whose father had been a child soldier during the Biafran War. Just like my father had been. But second-generation war survivors are still casualties of war. Even in love.
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War displaces people. Not just physically, but emotionally, too; and many of us are not aware of this until we try to make homes with other people only to realize that we are still fragile from the experience of having our homes so easily taken away. I am a generation removed from the Nigerian Civil War and embedded in the story of my life is a knowing of how wars destroy people, relationships and communities in real-time as well as for years to come.
Also known as the Biafran War, the Nigerian Civil War happened from 1967 to 1970. There is still no official death toll. But the loss was staggering. The celebrated ‘father of African literature’, Chinua Achebe, who was born nearly a century ago in the Igbo town of Ogidi, once wrote that ‘…at the end of the 30-month war, Biafra was a vast smouldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 per cent of the entire population.’
It had only been a few months into the war when my father, barely nine years old, watched Nigerian army troops raid his village. They beheaded his own father in front of him, then kidnapped him. My father does not recall much about that time except that he was traded around and later found himself conscripted by Biafran forces to be a child soldier. He spent part of adolescence in war camps, coming of age in the midst of men in battle. Later, he was transferred to working as a domestic help for one of the men in Biafran leader, Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu’s cabinet and served him until Biafra surrendered in January 1970.
The war ended, but the story continues.
Half a century, a generation and several military regimes later, 8,000 miles west of Nigeria, across the Atlantic Ocean, a new story was unfolding.
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