1966, the year before the Biafran War became a real thing, my father moved the family from Enugu to Sapele, leaving behind my mother, who refused to travel to Delta without her father. Her father, my grandfather, had insisted on not abandoning Okutu, the village in Enugu where he grew up. ‘When Biafra wins,’ he used to say, ‘I am going to offer drinks to my Chi on this earth, on a ground we are familiar with.’ For a while, in Sapele, we went about our normal lives: children danced and played games outside; the sky was not burning; the streets were not flooded with blood.
We had no knowledge of the War, besides what we picked up from the streets or heard on the radio. This was until Mama brought the War home to us. She told us how she and her father were buying food items in the market when the sound of death sent everyone scampering—it was an air raid. At first, Mama and her father ran in the same direction. Suddenly, Mama noticed he wasn’t running anymore. She saw him stop, blown apart, and she kept running.
After the raids had stopped, Mama went back to the market to claim her father’s body. She found only his upper torso; there were too many body parts to choose from, so many that she said if it were possible she could have remade him. But my grandfather’s death was only the beginning of our loss. Every month or so, we took stock of the names that no longer belonged to the living, and of people who could no longer be found. My father lost all his landed properties in the North, a house in Port Harcourt and another in Delta. And at the end of the War, the government said ‘Come and collect 20 pounds’. What could 20 pounds buy? How many could it feed? How many people could it resurrect? Till this day, the 20 pounds has not gotten to our hands. Many families were vanquished during the War, and they remained that way. We have not forgotten, and we are still taking stock.’
This is my mother, Flora Illikanu, on her family’s experience of the Biafran War.
The Biafran War, which took place between 1967 and 1970, represents a very dark time in Nigerian history. It was a tragedy that exceeded conceivable imagination—a country went to war with itself and lost. Despite the casualties and the debilitating impacts of the War on the country, there remains a dearth of information about it. It is a part of Nigerian history that has been repressed by both the government and individuals for widely disparate reasons. Due to this, in place of facts, there is a plethora of speculation about the events that led to the War, the manner in which it was fought, and the factors that necessitated its end. It is now impossible to pinpoint the exact moment the seeds of the Biafran War were sown, or trace, exactly, when the War sprouted its first fruits and left a harvest of terror that people would know as intimately as the outlines of their own palms.
The coup of January 1966 overthrew the civilian government and resulted in the death of 22 people. They included prominent politicians such as the Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa. And while it is convenient to ascribe the Biafran War to the coup alone, it is also misleading to do so. In order to understand the specific causes of the War, we must not only look at Nigeria’s political and colonial history, but also regard the broader contexts within which violence in Africa operates.
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