This week is witnessing national celebrations, commemorating the lives of the members of our Armed forces that were lost during all the wars they have fought. Among all the major wars the Nigerian Armed Forces participated, the First and Second World Wars and the Congo campaigns, it was the Nigerian Civil War that was most involving because it was fought within the territorial boundaries of the country with a large number of casualties on both sides of the protagonists. The mid of January dates were probably selected to celebrate our fallen heroes by our leaders because they were closer to the exact date the Biafran misadventure was foreclosed.
I have vivid memories of the day, 10th January 1970, the Nigerian civil war ended. I was, then, getting into the fourth form in the college. The previous day I had completed the hazardous journey from Maiduguri, my home town, to Keffi, where my college was situated, travelling over mostly untarred, single lane road, and stuffed in a rickety vehicle then referred to as Bolekaja. The buses we see today on our roads – luxurious or not – were not available then. The hazards of travelling aside, coming to school that year was special for me. I had a prized possession – a transistor radio – which my father had bought for me. It was from that radio that I heard that the war had ended. When the news filtered out there was a quiet jubilation around the college because in many ways as students we had suffered deprivations that were a consequence of the war.
The civil war came upon us when I was barely in form one, in 1967, and I guess many of my mates didn’t know anything about wars, besides what they read in history books or watched in the cinemas. However, those of us from Borno knew about wars, because at that time we had living witnesses who suffered under the yoke of the Rabeh invasion. When I was a kid in Maiduguri in the early 1960s I knew old people who were also kids in the closing years of the 19th Century when that infamous adventurer Rabeh Fadl Allah invaded the Kanem-Borno Empire, sacked Kukawa the capital, and killed the Shehu of Borno who stood his grounds not to be taken prisoner. Rabeh ruled from his capital in Dikwa and kept Borno under his iron grip for seven years, terrorizing and stripping the countryside of its wealth and its able population, till he was dislodged by both the British and French forces at the turn of the century. I had an old great-aunt who even in the 1960s could still recall her agony of how she was separated from her parents by the marauding Rabeh forces. Their village Magumeri, now north of Maiduguri, had just been sacked by the Rabeh forces and she was running at the heels of her parents when they unwisely stopped to feed her, when she complained of hunger. They were brutally set upon by the rampaging forces and taken away separately. She never saw her parents again.
As war kids in colleges we suffered deprivations and noticed lack of infrastructural development because in that period all government resources were channelled to the war efforts. However those of us on this side of the divide were spared witnessing the real horror of the war, the killings, the hunger, the mass movement of families and the destruction of cities and villages, as it happened in the east. We only got some first-hand knowledge of the ravages of war when the survivors from the other side of the war started trickling back at the end of the war.
In the early 1970s we had class mates in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, who had the raw experience of the war, but whatever they told us did not prepare me for what I saw when I travelled to Benin through Onitsha in 1975. That year I attended the annual convention of the National Union of National Students (NUNS) in Benin among the delegates representing Kongo Campus, ABU and we travelled in the University bus from Zaria to Benin. It was the first time I travelled to the southern part of the country and what I witnessed in terms of the war destruction in the east would stick in my mind for a very long time. As soon as we crossed River Benue into the east, we found that the roads were in a terrible condition, just as they were when the war stopped, and even worse. Towns and villages were teeming with people but many buildings pockmarked by heavy guns still stood as a sad reminder of the brutality of war.
A year later when I was on the National Service in Lagos I had occasion to visit my friends in the east, Zakar Chawai then serving in Port Harcourt, and Bello Abdullahi in Ogidi, very close to Onitsha. During my travels in the east I was always horrified by what I saw. Port Harcourt, which was known as the Garden City, because of its beauty, before the war, had by the end of the war become the very antithesis of its earlier tag. When I saw it in the late 1976 it was still in that condition. One could say the same thing for Enugu and Owerri, equally ravaged cities that I saw on the way to Port Harcourt.
The civil war was kept firmly in our sensibilities over the years by the stream of books that came forth from the main actors of the battles and those who were at the receiving end. The books that really interested me and held my attention were those that told the human story of how the average family endured during the war. There are many of such books but the one that held my attention recently was, Last Train to Biafra: Memoirs of a Biafran Child by Diliorah Chukwurah. The book published in 2014 tells a gripping story of suffering and endurance by a war kid, also about my age, whose family life was shattered through no fault of theirs.
They happened to be living in Jos in 1966 and going about their normal affairs of life; children going to school, the father in his workshop where he attended to clients for sign posting, technical drawing and related matters, while the mother bustled about at home as a fulltime housewife. Unknown to them and millions of their compatriots, a group of young military officers mostly from the east had staged a coup to overthrow the government of the day which had led to gruesome death of prominent politicians and army officers mostly from the northern and western parts of the country. One thing led to another and communal violence inevitably ensued and there was a mass movement of people from virtually all over the country to the east. The Chukwurah family were in the thick of this unfortunate event and this book chronicles in harrowing details their movement from Jos to the east, where they lived for most of the war period in refugee camps under very degrading conditions.
It is fitting that we celebrate our war heroes particularly those that fought to keep this country together and our today’s heroes who are in the warfront helping to keep insurgents away. In the same breath we should also give a thought to the suffering of those in the refugee camps just as the Chukwurahs were during the civil war.
Dori wrote this piece from Abuja.
