Why I Talk About Biafra (for those who think that Biafra is a thing of the past)
- Isaac Aju
- 1 day ago
- 12 min read
By Isaac Aju:
I am so particularly interested in the Biafran history because what happened in Biafra has happened in other parts of the world where there was a genocide, almost exterminating a particular race or tribe of people, and the world still moved on. It makes me think of the Igbo adage that says, “No matter how horrible or devastating a situation is, the eyes can only cry out tears, and not blood.”
O nweghi ihe anya hụrụ gbaa ọbara!
Over centuries, European colonizers killed and displaced the Native American populations of the place we now call the United States of America, yet, the world moved on. The Herero and Namaqua genocide happened in 1904. The Armenian genocide happened in 1915. The Holocaust happened in the 1930s and 1940s. The Rwandan genocide happened in 1994.
I am curious about why a people would wake up one day and go after the lives of another people, and yet the world would still move on, as though nothing had happened. The sun never stopped shining, nights never stopped breaking into days. Snow never stopped falling. The seas and the oceans of the world never stopped their movement. I’m curious about the silence of the world while its members die in large numbers, unsung and unseen.
Maybe the world needs people to die in this way so that other people could get comfortable. Maybe it’s a normal thing. When talking about the hardship in Nigeria, my father would always say that the Nigerian politicians are not interested in the people’s well-being. Actually, if you have to die for them to gain more money, then glory be to God. I know that conflicts would arise in the world where human beings exist; but then, must we take lives away by force? Or maybe it’s just a normal thing that some people would have to die so that others would live. Maybe I would have to accept this phenomenon. Maybe it’s like Jesus dying on the cross so that anyone who believes in him would live forever, because I have wondered many times why Jesus needed to die before mankind could be saved. Even as a child, I asked myself why God did not just go ahead and save his creation without hanging poor Jesus on the cross. Maybe it’s like a saying in my Abiriba tongue: "A beast who has not fed itself on other beasts cannot grow fat." Maybe this saying sums everything up—that the wellbeing of a beast depends on how well it feeds on other beasts. Forgive my use of the word beasts. That’s the exact English translation of the original word as it is used in my Abiriba dialect:
Anụ erighi ibe ya adịghị agba ebuba!
If I’m not Igbo, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed. If the Biafran war did not happen, perhaps I wouldn’t have found out about these other places where genocide also happened. If my father wasn’t a child in Biafra, then anyone could tell me to shut up, and I would be glad to shut my mouth. If he doesn’t always talk about Biafra and how the Nigerian government keeps declining in its leadership quality, I wouldn’t be writing this. But because all these things have happened, I have every right to talk about Biafra. Because my father always talks about Biafra and is always angry whenever Biafrans are maligned, it has given me the right to talk about Biafra. Because I live in Aba, a place where there are so many lovers of Biafra, I can write this. Because there is a man who is now held in prison because he demanded a referendum that would set the Biafrans free, I’m writing this. Because we live in a world of political interests, I can talk about this. Because the world would have still moved on even if all the Igbos were killed and the Nigerian government took over the place that is now called the Southeastern part of Nigeria, I can as well write this in order to gain some peace in my soul. The world does not care; the world would never care. So writing about this—Biafra—is my own I-don’t-care response to the world. The apartheid regime lasted for many years in South Africa before Nelson Mandela was elected as the first Black president of South Africa. Several lives were lost, and maybe we can take the lives of the thousands of people who died in the harsh apartheid regime as Jesus dying on the cross so that anyone who believes in His name would live forever, maybe they were used as sacrifice to secure the freedom that Black South Africans have today, freedom from all permutations of Whites-only policies. Ife kwulu, ife akwudobe ya, as we say in Igbo—"when you want to obtain favor from the gods, you go with sacrifices." Maybe the lives lost in the apartheid regime were the sacrifices. The gods were the white rulers, and the favor was the end of apartheid rule.
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A view of Aba from the Aba-Owerri road. Photo by: By Oyibo Ugbo - OU Travels and Tours
Every May 30th in Southeastern Nigeria, there’s an unrecognized public holiday that honors the death of the millions of people who died in the Biafran war. The Nigerian government doesn’t recognize this public holiday on their own calendar; only the Southeasterners do. The refusal of the Nigerian government to honor this public holiday is not even my problem.
My problem and question is: Are they really being honored and respected? All those lives that were lost during the war, does the world really care?
On Facebook, every May 30th, I would see many Igbos posting photos of people who died of bombing and kwashiorkor during the war, and they would write as caption: God bless their souls. They died so that we can live. They died so that we can have the freedom we have today. And then I would ask myself, “Are we really living? Are we really free?”
I’m thinking about my father as I write this. My father was a child in Biafra. My father ran into the bush when the first bombs of the Nigerian soldiers kissed the Abiriba Kingdom. Odumegwu Ojukwu had already declared that they had become Biafrans, and they were happy, but the unintended consequence was the visitation of bombs and Nigerian soldiers in every Biafran community in Eastern Nigerian. Abiriba was already popular as the Small London after Nnamdi Azikiwe declared it so during his visit in the early 1930s, and so the Nigerian soldiers were eager to visit the Small London. My father’s mother looked for him for some days before she found him with a stranger who would have taken him as her own child if his parents did not come for him or if his parents died as a result of the bombing. A child and a trauma co-existed. My father was eight years old when the war started. His mother was at her faraway farm, and he was supposed to join her at the farm after school, and then something he could not understand began to happen. People began to flee their homes, and he had to flee too.
I have every right to talk about Biafra because my father was once a Biafran. My father could have died from starvation or bombing, and I wouldn’t be here in existence. If there was a total annihilation of the Igbos and other ethnic groups in Biafra, it would mean that some of us wouldn’t be here to even argue whether talking about Biafra is still important or not, and nobody would have raised us from the dead. Maybe the tribe called Igbo would be a closed case, and any remnants from the Igbo tribe would quickly deny being Igbo, just like Peter denied knowing who Jesus was after he discovered that his own life was also at risk. Just like some tiny Igbo communities who could quickly deny being Igbo so they could be saved and let live by the Nigerian soldiers. Just like the family of the Nigerian actress Stella Damascus removed Ojukwu from their surname during the war and replaced it with Damascus because it had become very dangerous to bear the Ojukwu name. Even today, Ojukwu has not returned as their original surname. The war claimed their family name. They wanted to survive, they wanted to live, but they lived at the cost of denying who they were. And the consequence of this denial is still affecting the oneness of the Igbo people of Nigeria, as some Igbo people are changing their names and claiming not to be Igbos just to get political favor from the federal government of Nigeria.
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A family portrait of an Igbo family in traditional attire. Photo by: Jerry Emeka Obi
Because of the stigma that came with the war, the less Igbo you are today, the easier it would be for you to gain favor from the federal government of Nigeria, especially if you have political ambitions. Some Igbo communities in the Delta State and Rivers State of Nigeria are denying to be Igbos despite speaking a language that is clearly and dialectically Igbo. They have Igbo names and surnames, and yet, they wouldn’t want to be called Igbos. This is one of the things that started from the late 1960s when the war began to spread. This denial of being Igbo is still a very heated topic of debate in Nigeria. The Nigerian government carved some Igbo communities into non-Igbo states, where they became minorities and less-influenced by the bigger Igbo states. This has caused people to ask Nnamdi Kanu where the borders of Biafra would start and where they would end because some Igbo communities have been deliberately carved into non-Igbo states in Nigeria.
Being alive today is a good reason why we should talk about what could have taken our lives and flung us into extinction. Fellow young Nigerians who are the descendants of the survivors of the Biafran war who think that Biafra doesn’t matter anymore are too daft, because we wouldn’t be here if they had succeeded to wipe us out. Historians would have just said a few things about us, or document what happened in a book for future purposes. Journalists would report the stories, and the Nigerian government would have taken over our land, just like they forcefully abducted the Igbo properties in Port Harcourt after a law was made to render abandoned Igbo properties in Port Harcourt null and void after the war.
Nobody said anything.
The Nigerian government seized all the money saved by Biafrans in their different bank accounts before the war.
Nobody said anything.
Later, after the war, the Biafrans were allowed to only withdraw 20 pounds and forfeit the rest of their money. The world did not shake a hair on their head. When Biafrans returned to their properties in Port Harcourt and some cities in Northern Nigeria where they had properties, they were told that their properties were no longer theirs.
Imagine surviving a war, coming back from starvation, and then you find out that the world was just moving on while you were starving.
While your children’s stomachs were swelling up because of kwashiorkor, the rest of the children in the world were still going to school, feeding on milk and other proteinous foods while you queued up in line in Biafra to receive relief food sent by unknown sympathetic people. And then you return after the war to find out that your house has been seized by the government—your government.
I laugh at the new generation of Nigerians who do not read to find out why we are where we are today as Nigerians, why we aren’t moving forward.
It’s not enough to rant about the poor leadership. Read books, get inquisitive, ask questions, and stop being too shallow with your life.
Growing up in Nigeria in the early 2000s, people referred to the Biafran war, especially how horribly it was, but I did not know anything about the war: what led to the war, why the war lingered, and why the Nigerian government couldn’t let the Biafrans go. So I would be content with the shallowness of my knowledge until I began to read books. I would be shocked by the things that I would discover, things that nobody had ever mentioned to me. I would be shocked because those things would have continued to be hidden if I didn’t read books, if I didn’t get into the market one day and bought Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngọzi Adichie, if I didn’t discover the violence of the military government in the 1980s and 1990s after I read Purple Hibiscus, if I hadn’t read that soldiers hunted down journalists who spoke the truth, closed down newspapers who wrote the truth, manhandled ordinary civilians who had no voice and power, and still dared to challenge authorities.
If I didn’t know about these things, then at some point they would become as good as things that never happened. That is the condition of many young people in Nigeria today. They know little about their history. They know little about where they came from, and why they are where they are today.
I worked on a particular short story for three years, a story which I called Even the Birds Stayed at Home—now published by The Kalahari Review. The story is about the present agitation for Biafra in Eastern Nigeria. I wrote the story on May 30, 2021, during the sit-at-home while I was thinking about the reverence that people in Aba still gave to Biafra despite the fact that Biafra only existed for three years. On that particular day, nobody went to work. Everywhere was quiet, and people were talking about Biafra and Nnamdi Kanu, and I was listening to birdsongs when the short fiction came to me. It was a very short story, first posted on Facebook. Over the years, whenever I had time I would rewrite the story, until 2024 when I learned how to send out short stories to literary journals and publications. I thought nobody would like the story. I remember sending it out half-heartedly because, of course, the topic was about the present atmosphere of Biafra, which I couldn’t deny. The atmosphere was very real and present, and I felt Biafra in my spirit. And, of course, it was a very risky thing in Nigeria to say you could feel Biafra in the air, to say you could feel the pain of your people who were squashed in the war. The Nigerian literary journals I sent the story to all rejected it, and I almost gave up on the story.
It is absurd for anyone to think that Biafra is now a thing of the past, something that nobody should talk about. I’m angry with the new generation of Nigerians who do not read, who do not know that they have to connect their past to the present in order to make meaning of their future; who do not realize that Biafra is still very much alive.
Nnamdi Kanu gained popularity because of his fierce broadcasts on Radio Biafra, where he critiqued the Nigerian government and taught people about the history of Biafra, the history of Nigeria, and the history of Africa at large. He dreamt of a free Africa. He dreamt of a true Africa, and not a pretentious Africa, not an Africa that would be ashamed of itself. He wanted a violence-free Africa. He called upon the Nigerian government to stop the killings and the burning down of villages happening in Northern Nigeria. The Borno State alone in Nigeria has been attacked so much by the Fulani Herdsmen, as the terrorists are called. Everyday on the news, you hear of people being killed, villages and churches being burned down, women raped in their farms. He told the Nigerian government to do something about it, to stop them from killing the Christians in the North, to conduct a referendum and free the Biafrans, or make Nigeria a more habitable place for the Biafrans, where there will be equal economic, social, and political opportunities for everybody. In response, the Nigerian government got him arrested and sent him to prison. His family house in Umuahia was attacked in 2017 by Nigerian soldiers when they sought his life, or to arrest him, but he escaped.
I’ve stopped listening to Nigerian radio stations because they are so annoying and directionless, especially the private radio stations springing up everywhere. The radio should be a great tool or avenue where the truth prevails, but the Nigerian radio stations are not bent to be an active tool in the restoration of dignity to the violence-ridden Nigeria. Many times they don’t want to have an opinion; they just want to be safe and do their radio business in peace.
What many young Nigerians do not know is that the past is still affecting the present. Because of what happened in Biafra and the way the war ended, Biafra would always inhabit a body to tell the world, “See, I’m still here.”
It has inhabited Nnamdi Kanu’s body, and he’s now held captive. It is not a new pattern in the world. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated a few years after his Emancipation Proclamation. Malcom X saw his untimely death in 1965, and then Martin Luther King, Jr. in the late 1960s. Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian military regime in 1995. We know the patterns. We are not ignorant of the patterns. The Nigerian government abolished history as a standalone subject in Nigeria in 1982. Isn’t the reason so obvious?
Instead of making baseless arguments on social media, young Nigerians should read books and discover the truth by themselves.
I talk about Biafra because Biafra is still here, because Biafra hasn’t been properly addressed. My poem "No Victor, No Vanquished" was recently published by Steel Jackdaw Magazine based in Stroud, United Kingdom, and the poem is about the lie that the Nigerian government told the whole world after the war in 1970. You can have a look at their 17th edition at steeljackdaw.com where my work appeared.
A Nigerian Facebook follower asked me why I write about Biafra, and I had to take my time in writing this essay because it is troubling to me that young people in Nigeria are very reluctant to engage with history. I'm not a politician (at least not yet), but still, I have the right and power to talk about Biafra. Biafra is my story, my history, the history of my people, and I strongly believe that it is very important for people, regardless of their social status, to engage with history.
Isaac Aju is a Nigerian writer deeply interested in history and the need to engage with history. He's been published by Flapper Press, Poetry X Hunger, Steel Jackdaw Magazine, The Kalahari Review, Synchronized Chaos Magazine, and he's also coming forth in Asemana Magazine (Canada). He lives in Nigeria, where he works as a fashion designer. He writes poetry and stories and essays because he feels most alive when he is writing.
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